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This was the end we’d been preparing for and hadn’t prevented. I hadn’t prevented it because I’d let myself get distracted. I’d spent the night wrapped up in Willow instead of tracking down the people I knew were behind it all.
The past fifteen minutes would all be a nightmare if I’d just done my fucking job.
The car hadn’t come to a stop before I threw open the door and rushed out, sprinting for the burning skeleton of the house with Kieran directly beside me—Maverick and Dare just behind.
But I didn’t know what we were running toward...the house was gutted. There would be nothing left for us to find.
And from the soul-destroying sound fueling Dare’s yells for his wife, he knew it too.
“Fuck,” he roared against the crackling and groaning of the remains. “Lily, answer me! Fucking be here.”
Nothing.
I searched faster and faster, stumbling over debris and fighting back my own grief when a strained sob ripped from Dare.
“Lily, baby, answer me,” he shouted, voice twisting and sending a jagged blade through me as I searched under furniture and piles of bricks.
But there was no sign of the boss’s wife. No sign of the mafia’s beloved mother.
Just as sirens sounded in the distance, my phone chimed. A sound I would’ve ignored if it hadn’t immediately gone off another three times.
Hope briefly flared as I hurried to grab my phone, even as something whispered it wouldn’t have been me that Lily reached out to. And then I opened the messages from a blocked number, and that hope and my spirit shattered.
Unknown
R
S
What does that spell?
Happy hunting, Tracker.
I’d experienced death. More than I could remember. It happened in this life.
But this? Taking out two of our family in one hit? Knowing it’d been on me to find the threat, now more than ever because these fucks had wanted me to track them?
It made it hard to breathe. Made standing a struggle. Made it feel like I was slowly being destroyed from the inside.
It made me want to offer up my name on a bullet because I hadn’t just failed my family. I’d failed my boss.
“Dare,” I managed through the shards of glass gathering in my throat.
He whirled around, wild eyes looking all around where I stood as hope and devastation battled on his features.
“Where is she?” he demanded as he started toward me.
I tried swallowing again and again before slanting my head and holding out my phone for him to take. “They were the last letters.”
“No,” Dare mumbled as he came to a stop half a dozen feet away. Head violently shaking and face creasing as his grief exploded. “No! Find my fucking wife,” he shouted, pointing a trembling finger at me as his tears quickly fell.
“I can’t.”
“She isn’t—fuck.” He dragged his hands over his head, clawing at his face and his chest as another anguished sob burst from him. “I did not just lose her too,” he yelled. “I refuse to believe I am in a world where Lily isn’t. Find my goddamn wife.”
Maverick reached for Dare’s shoulder only to quickly back away, hands raised in surrender, when Dare pulled a gun on him.
“Someone killed my mom and blew up my house,” he said in a low, chilling tone, all while his expression continued displaying his grief. “Get Einstein on it. I wanna know exactly who it was because they’re gonna be the first to die.”
