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It was quiet. Eerily quiet. The only noise on the other end of the phone was steady breathing.
‘What?’ Dornan asked.
‘Boss,’ Viper spoke, an urgency in his tone. ‘I found her.’
Dornan transferred the phone to his other hand; he could barely hear Viper, he was speaking so quietly. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Dee,’ Viper said.
‘What is it?’ Dornan asked, impatience growing in his gut.
‘Don’t freak the fuck out. I found Stephanie.’
Stephanie? Fuck. It had been what – sixteen, seventeen years? An anxiousness began to build inside his chest, an annoying, gnawing buzz that ate away at him.
His heart squeezed painfully.
Dead. That’s what Viper was going to say, he knew it. Knew it in his bones. The first woman he’d ever truly loved, one he could have imagined leaving this life for. Hell, once he’d even proposed the idea. He would kill everyone in the cartel, and they could leave, go someplace where nobody would ever find them.
She’d laughed.
He’d pretended he was kidding, and they had never mentioned it again. And not long after, she had vanished from the face of the earth, swallowed up no doubt by the same people who had killed Dornan’s brother back when they were still weedy teenagers on the verge of becoming men. Gunned down, left in their front yard as a message, and he just knew Stephy had ended up the same way. That knowledge had almost killed him. He’d been a zombie, then become cruel, sadistic, letting her disappearance ruin any good that had existed within him. So he embraced the dark, and he was very, very bad. He killed. He coerced. He traded in lives.
And then he met her.
Mariana.
And she blew his goddamn world to pieces.
She was different from Stephy in every way possible. Mariana was Colombian; Stephy was born-and-bred Texan. Mariana had dark hair and bronze skin; Stephy had strawberry blonde locks, the consistency of fairy floss, and pale skin thanks to her Irish-American ancestry.
Mariana was alive, and Stephy was not.
At least, that’s what Dornan had believed for the past sixteen-odd years.
He held the phone so tight, it was a wonder it didn’t shatter in his hand.
Viper seemed hesitant. Dornan could’ve reached through the phone and ripped him a new asshole for not hurrying the fuck-up and spilling what he’d discovered.
‘She dead?’ Dornan grunted, feigning indifference, but inside, he was ready to explode.
‘Dee,’ Viper said. ‘Where are you right now? I should be telling you this man to man, not on the fucking phone. Where the hell have you been, man?’
‘Keep talking,’ Dornan said. He struggled to keep his voice steady as he pushed Celia away, and she fell on her pert ass with a thud. ‘Tell me.’ He tucked his cock back into his pants and started working on the zipper – not easy with one hand.
Celia was on her feet now, staring right at him with dead eyes. She looked positively pissed and like she might want to cut his balls off and shove them down his throat.
Stephy had to be dead. After all this time, it was the only explanation. He knew someone had taken her, probably used her for their own sick pleasure and then murdered her. His chest grew uncomfortably tight as he remembered her hair, those bright eyes, that smile. The one woman he’d truly loved. The woman who’d accepted him with open arms and a laugh, even though he was married, even though he had kids, even though he was a Gypsy Brother with so much baggage it could spell death for them both. She’d started out working in the bar at the clubhouse, but she wasn’t a club whore. She was just a university student trying to supplement her income, and when Dornan had found out about Celia’s cheating, how she was pregnant and it might be with some other motherfucker’s kid, Stephy had been the one who had listened to him. He’d confided everything in her – things about Emilio, about the trafficking, about the government connections. He’d been so smitten with her, and then she’d just . . . vanished.
She’d gone and fucking disappeared on him, so abruptly it was almost as if she’d never existed. He’d gone to her apartment and everything seemed normal. Her purse was still there, all her ID, some cash, her cellphone. It was all normal – too normal. He’d called a crime-scene tech he knew and asked him to check out Stephy’s apartment with luminol, and that place had lit up like a fucking Christmas tree in Times Square. There was blood all over the apartment, invisible to the naked eye since someone had painstakingly mopped it all up, but it had been there, and nobody could lose that much blood and still be alive. He hadn’t loved another woman for many, many years. Not until Mariana.
They never found Stephanie’s body. Dornan had grown older and more bitter, refusing his wife’s half-hearted attempts at reconciling, burying himself in his work, waking up at night covered in sweat as he imagined Stephy being brutally murdered.
Imagining it was Emilio who’d been holding the knife. Because she had known too much. Dornan had been too naive, entrusting this girl with cartel information, and so he was certain his father had had a hand in her death. He pictured a bag of bones in a shallow grave, some piece of clothing or a deathbed confession the only way to truly know they were Stephy’s remains. It had been so long ago that it would be impossible to identify her. Her flesh would have rotted into the earth a long, long time ago, eaten by greedy worms and insects.
Viper cleared his throat. And he said something that would change the very fabric of Dornan Ross’s soul, extinguish the love he felt for the girl he’d long given up for dead, and replace that feeling with a rage so brutal it demanded blood. Simple words was all it took.
‘Dee, listen to me. I found her. I found Stephanie. She’s alive.’
