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She answered the call and held the phone to her ear, not speaking, jaw clenched tight. Looked like the tornado didn’t like getting cock-blocked any more than I did.
“Greta?” I heard Deo Luciano’s voice on the other end of the line.
“Si. What’s up?”
“Get moving on the drop and get back here. We’ve got a problem.”
Chapter Nine
Greta
“What do you mean they aren’t there?” I asked, standing in the middle of Deo’s sitting room—though no one was sitting—doing my damnedest not to freak out in front of Gabe, Deo, and Brute. I really wasn’t in the mood to look like the ranting lunatic here.
The Old Dogs and I had made the drop in Charleston and gotten back in record time, but with every mile, I’d felt more agitated because I was damned certain those people were there… somewhere. So, I probably wasn’t that far off from ranting lunatic at this point.
Gabe shrugged, though, he didn’t look happy. “I mean our initial intel said the captives Domínguez had were in that warehouse. Obviously, the intel was wrong, so he must have them somewhere else, right? But at the moment, they don’t exist, Greta. There’s nothing linking the box of photos to Domínguez, and aside from that girl you talked to in the bar in Mexico, nothing else links him to the kidnappings either.”
“That bar was in Domínguez’s territory, Gabe. And I saw the bodies—hacked-up bodies being dropped into acid. Pretty sure they didn’t come that way. They had to have come from somewhere.”
Gabe scrubbed a hand over his jaw. He looked about as irritated as I felt. “Well, they might as well have fallen out of the sky because we’ve got nothing better to go on.”
“Nothing from Nacio?” Deo asked.
Gabe shook his head. “He’s still got his sources looking, but nothing so far.”
Brute cleared his throat. “I’m not expert here, but it seems to me that if you can’t find something when you look at it from a distance, the solution might be to look for it from up close?”
Deo scoffed. “Domínguez isn’t going to let us go wandering around his properties, searching for people he’s got locked up for ransom.”
Brute looked at him, both eyebrows cocked. “No shit,” he said flatly.
“Then what are you suggesting?” I asked Brute. Whatever it was, it had to be better than standing around here, doing nothing.
“Leeri—Valeria. Maybe it’s about time I paid my sister a visit, catch up and all that shit. Fifteen years apart… that’s a lot of catching up. Could take a while.”
Gabe sighed. “That’s the other problem.”
“Oh good. More problems.” They were my favorite.
“Your sister isn’t your sister—at least not in any intel we can find on her.”
“Valeria ain’t exactly a common name, and I’d be damned shocked to find a whole lot of girls with my name tattooed on their arm in old symbols.”
Really? I wouldn’t be.
Gabe shook his head. “If you say it’s her, I have no reason to doubt you,amico, but there is no record of her having any siblings,” he said, pulling out a slim stack of papers from inside his jacket.
Brute looked them over, but he was shaking his head. “The name on the birth certificate’s wrong. Her mother’s last name was Cano, but her birth certificate said Valeria Hastings. And this shit about her address is wrong—that was her grandma’s address. The old hag wanted nothing to do with Leeri’s mother or Leeri. She lived with my father and I until she disappeared.” He shrugged, but the movement was stiff. “After that, I tore the state up looking for her. Spilled a lot of blood, but never found her. I never could prove it, but I’d always figured our father had killed her.”
Gabe was silent. His fiancée had gone missing five years ago. He knew that kind of hell personally.
He shook his head after a moment, clearing it. “There’s no intel on her after that until two years ago. She showed up in Mexico, waiting tables in some bar frequented by Domínguez’s guys. A year later, she was Domínguez’s girlfriend.”
“That’s one hell of a big gap in the timeline,” Deo mused, finally sitting back in one of the cozy armchairs.
I was still too riled up to sit, and it looked like Gabe and Brute felt the same way.
“Spit it out, Deo,” I said, because Deo didn’t generally think aloud.
