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Faster than I could blink, Greyson had a gun trained on my uncle’s forehead. “Let her go, or you die right here, right now.”
There was a pregnant pause before Rafael dropped my wrist and stepped back. He looked chagrined, but I no longer believed his face. He used it too often, offering up pretty lies for my grief-stricken mind, and I’d let him. I’d been too focused on seeing my brother that I’d let Rafael manipulate me. Another mistake.
No more. Antoni was dead. End of story.
Rafael took a step back, then another. “I wasn’t going to hurt you, tesorita.”
“What were you doing?”
Rafael sighed, then stood to his full height, taking up more space than I’d ever seen him do. “I was told to give you a message. Prepare yourself. The Wolf is coming to Seattle.”
Had it been any other day, I probably would’ve been scared. Emmanuel “The Wolf” Osorio had a reputation for a reason. But nothing could penetrate the numbness in my chest. “When?”
“Three days.” Rafael looked like he wanted to say something else, but I didn’t care to wait.
“Noted.” I jerked my head toward the elevator, and Greyson followed, covering my back in case Rafael wanted to take a shot. He didn’t.
He was gone before the doors closed.
Back upstairs, we found Dominic in the exact same position next to a still-sleeping Nate. “Did you get it?”
“We got more than just the file.” As Grey shut the door and locked it, I took my place at Nate’s side again but didn’t touch him. I was too wound up, and he needed calm. Peace. Healing.
I settled for watching him.
We’d settled into a routine of checking the room and everything brought into it for bugs, so I knew we were okay to speak freely. “The Wolf is coming in three days.”
Dominic’s eyes jerked to mine, and something flitted through them. Fear? Anxiety? I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t trust my mind. “What do you want to do?”
I didn’t know. I was too focused on the now to care about tomorrow.
“We’ll deal with the cartel later,” Greyson suggested. “What’s the file say?”
“Let’s find out.”
The three of us huddled together at the side of Nate’s bed as I read the first page out loud.
“Cassius Ace Beckstrom, age forty-six. Seattle native. According to the file, he’s the sole living son of a Katherine Beckstrom—waitress at some diner down south—no father in the picture. Younger brother died by drowning at age five. Supposedly an accident, but the investigator wrote in his private notes that all signs pointed to Cash doing it, though they never found enough evidence to arrest him.”
Something prickled in the back of my mind, something I needed to remember. I almost had it when Dominic’s voice shattered my focus. “Christ. What a fucking psycho.”
Shaking off the sense I was missing something, I flipped through more pages. There was some background on Katherine, who was as blue-collar as it came. Grew up poor, was still poor. No ties to the underworld at all and, by all accounts, a good mother.
There was a vague timeline of Cash’s life up until he joined my father’s empire. High school, where he’d run track and played football until he injured his shoulder and was forced to drop out. There was speculation from his teachers—how the fuck had Rafael gotten those notes? —that he’d become addicted to pain pills. Those rumors grew when he dropped out to get his GED and joined the Marcosas a month later.
That was the end, though. No information on what he did for the family or where he went when he left. The last twenty-five years were just…blank. How had he been off the grid for so long?
Moving on, we found a list of known Aces and accomplices, including a few he’d kept long-term. One of them, a man who had been around since Cash was in school, was listed as a weapons specialist. The bomb maker, no doubt.
There was a special place in hell I was dying to send him.
The more I read, the more holes I found, and the more certain I was that Cash had been home for far longer than I’d thought. If he’d left at all.
Pointing to the list of known addresses, I frowned. “Look at these places. Seymour’s Deli, Wayward School, Sevenroe Hospital, The Mine. Do those sound familiar to you?”
Dominic and Greyson shared matching frowns, but Grey was the one who figured it out first. “Weren’t those hideouts that Mario used?”
“Yeah.” I kept reading, confirming the theory with the pictures Rafael had included. Cash was using Mario’s hideouts as his own.
