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The phone was in Dornan’s suitcase now, locked inside his gun case with his Beretta – his other piece, the one he wasn’t currently hiding in the waistband of his jeans. He had a smaller handgun for everyday concealed carry. A Beretta was too fucking heavy to carry around all day, and it made him itch.
The phone. The phone. The phone.
Now, if fucking Murphy hadn’t disappeared, he could have checked the official call records for it, subpoenaed information, gotten answers. But Murphy was nowhere to be found, and perhaps that was because he was the one she was calling from this goddamn phone in the first place. Dornan’s other investigative contacts didn’t have FBI clearance, so they had to do some shady shit to get answers. Shady shit took time.
Fucking Murphy.
If he was still alive when they found him, Dornan was going to murder him.
If she was going to double-cross the cartel, it made sense that Ana would work with Murphy. He was a DEA agent. He was shady as fuck. And Dornan hated him.
But Ana hated Murphy, too. So if the phone had come from him, then he was either blackmailing her somehow, or giving her something she wanted.
But what?
Her family? The people who thought she was long dead?
What was he missing?
Was it somehow tied to Guillermo, the man Dornan had entrusted with Mariana’s security detail? He’d been loyal to Dornan always, but everybody had a weakness. He’d put the hot-headed Mexican in Mariana’s apartment for protection, but was he sticking his dick in Dornan’s girlfriend – wait, his wife – behind his back? If that was the case, he’d chop the fucking thing off and barbecue it, and force Guillermo to eat it.
‘Nice ring,’ Mariana said, peering at the rock on her hand. ‘Who’d you steal it from?’
Dornan grinned, but inside he felt cold. This wasn’t the future he’d imagined for them. This wasn’t how he’d pictured their wedding.
He hadn’t even asked her to marry him, he’d forced her.
If she’s betrayed us, I will fucking kill her. I will rip her fucking head off, and Murphy’s too.
‘It was my grandmother’s,’ he said, a hollow ache inside his chest. He’d had that ring since his mother’s mother died and he was a young man, unwed and sowing his wild oats. He’d intended to give it to Stephanie, but then she left him. He’d never felt Celia was worthy of it. And somewhere in the depths of his black soul, he imagined Mariana would be buried in the ground wearing it, very soon.
‘Oh,’ Mariana said quietly.
Dornan got the driver to take a detour on the way back to the hotel: Franco’s ink shop, right on Freemont. He knew Franco well. He’d been tattooing Gypsies for years, until he moved out to Nevada and started making bank by tattooing tramp stamps on drunken brides instead.
Mariana glanced at the store’s sign warily as Dornan pressed his hand into the small of her back, directing her into the front of Franco’s studio. Needles whirred noisily, the air-conditioning so cold it was like being in the fucking Arctic.
Better than sweating, Dornan thought. He pulled Mariana right up to the counter and knocked his fist against the glass display case once, twice, three times. A young punk girl wandered out, and Dornan couldn’t help but stare at the stretcher earrings that had turned her earlobes into giant holes.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked, clearly unimpressed by him. That’s right, he wasn’t in LA. Nobody knew him here, at least not by sight, and definitely not when he was in civilian clothing, nary a Gypsy Brothers patch to be seen.
He looked the punk bitch up and down. ‘Tell Franco that Dornan Ross is here,’ he said, the smile he flashed her more like a wolf baring teeth. The girl’s eyes went wide and she nodded, scurrying away.
‘Wow,’ Mariana said, leaning back against the glass counter. ‘The place where everybody knows your name.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘They got Cheers on TV in Colombia, wife?’ He liked the sound of that word when he said it. She was his wife. And she’d come around to embrace her new position. Eventually. Probably.
She didn’t really have a choice.
She frowned. ‘I haven’t been in Colombia in ten years, husband.’
She said the word like she was talking about stepping in dog shit. It brought that rage out of him, that cloying, violent need for blood.
‘Where’d you watch Cheers?’ he asked, not really caring, but needing to fill the silence until Franco got his ass out here.
‘In the apartment,’ she replied. ‘Guillermo and I watch reruns.’
‘He rub your back and fix you tea, too?’ Dornan asked. That fucker better not have laid a hand on her.
