Chapter 42
forty-two
. . .
FINN
“Finn.”
Why was that name so familiar?
The earth beneath me quaked, but I couldn’t see anything to figure out why.
“Finn.”
My name, I realized, and spoken more insistently now.
I blinked my eyes open to find West and Owen hovering over me, Owen gently shaking me.
“What the fuck?” I said softly. “What happened?”
“You had a panic attack,” Owen said. “And kind of passed out.”
“There’s no ‘kind of’ about it,” West said, grimacing. “Your eyes rolled back in your head, and you went limp. Fucking scary. I’m going to have nightmares about it for the rest of my life.”
Pushing them both away to get some brother-free air, I sat up, rubbing my temples.
“Sitting around like this isn’t good for me,” I admitted.
“PTSD is a bitch,” West agreed.
“I have panic attacks too, you know,” Owen murmured.
“Great,” I muttered. “So we’re all fucked in the head.”
“Mental health struggles are perfectly normal and nothing to be ashamed of,” Owen said diplomatically.
“You sound like a shrink.”
“He definitely sounds like my old therapist,” I agreed with West.
During our time in the service, I’d heard too many horror stories of guys who let their internal issues—the shit they’d seen in war—eat them alive when they left active duty and returned home.
Neither West nor I wanted to be another statistic.
I worked incredibly hard that first year to confront and banish my demons. Since then, I’d been doing well.
But Reagan going missing? It brought all of that old shit, that same helplessness I’d experienced when some guys had been taken as prisoners of war.
No. I shook that thought off. I hadn’t been helpless then, and I sure as fuck wasn’t now.
But sitting here on my fucking hands was not helping matters.
I leapt to my feet and stalked to the other side of the house, where Trey’s command center was, and burst through the door.
“Anything yet?”
“We’re working on it,” Lane replied. Trey’s focus remained on the screens in front of him.
“Well work faster!” I shouted. “My girl is out there somewhere!”
I wanted to shake them both, to demand Trey’s stupid little fingers worked quicker, but an arm hooked around my shoulders and dragged me backward, out of the room.
When I faced him, Owen was chuckling and shaking his head.
“Nothing about this is funny.”
He held his hands up in surrender. “It’s not that.” He nodded toward Trey and Lane. “Dad always said when one of us went down, the rest of us would fall like dominoes.”
I frowned. “The fuck are you talking about?”
“You’re down so bad, brother.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Trust me, I know the feeling. And it’s the scariest goddamn thing in the world. If I was in your shoes, and Delia was out there somewhere, I’d be tearing the fucking world apart.”
All I could do was stare at him blankly. “What’s scary?” I asked dumbly.
“Being in love. You do love Reagan, right?”
“More than anything,” I agreed, throat clogging with emotion.
Fuck, I didn’t know what I’d do if we didn’t find her in time, if this sick fuck harmed her and Lainey in ways they couldn’t come back from.
“They’ll find her,” Owen said, gesturing to the war room. “It’s what they do. What you do.”
Owen was nothing if not a master of the pep talk, and his reminder that all of my brothers except him had trained for situations exactly like this put me a bit more at ease.
I knew Trey was working as quickly as he could, but standing around like a dumbass waiting for that big break was slowly sapping the remaining vestiges of my sanity.
I had to do something.
“West.”
“Yeah?”
“Let’s take a ride.”
My twin’s brow curved upward. “Wheels or wings?”
I grinned. “Wings.”
“I’m coming.”
None of us had heard the door off the garage open, nor had we clocked the footsteps as they approached.
I was shocked to find Crew and Aspen standing there.
“What the fuck are you two doing here?” Lane asked, emerging from Trey’s bat cave, tone echoing my own surprise.
“Aria called,” Aspen said. “The real question is, why the fuck didn’t one of you tell us what was going on?”
“Because it’s your wedding night,” I said. “And finding Reagan is not your problem.”
Crew snorted, and Aspen rolled her eyes.
“Please, Finny,” she said, breaking out the nickname she knew I hated. The only ones who got away with using it were Mama and Aria. “She’s your girlfriend. And as your sister-in-law, that basically makes her my sister. Of course she’s our problem.”
There was no sense arguing with her. Aspen McKay—no, Lawless—put our own stubbornness to shame.
Sensing I wasn’t going to fight her further, she stepped up and rose onto her tip toes to give me a hug, though she was so short I had to bend to greet her. When she let go, she said, “We’ll find her.”
“How can you be sure?”
She hooked a thumb over her shoulder at her new husband. “We got him back, didn’t we?”
Fair point.
She strutted into the war room like she owned it. Trey didn’t look away from the screens, but Lane handed her a sheaf of papers, which Aspen greedily accepted, settling at the small, square table at the side of the room and instantly going to work.
“What are those?” I asked.
“Property records,” Lane supplied.
“We’ll find this fucker, Finny,” Aspen said, attention on the top sheet. “Promise.” Then she raised her hand to shoo us. “Now leave us alone.”
“You caught yourself a live one with her,” Owen said to Crew with a chuckle.
“Takes one to know one,” Crew grinned, looking like the happiest motherfucker on the planet.
Annoyed, I growled, “Are we going to do this or what?”
“Do you want to change first or something?” Crew asked, brow curved as he took in my and West’s clothes—the creamy linen pants and button up shirts we’d been wearing all day. I’d shed the bowtie and unbuttoned the top few hours ago, but changing would waste time we didn’t have.
“No.”
And that was that.
Crew and West followed me out of the house, and we took off for the airfield.
On the way, we called the air traffic controller from Boise, and to say he was pissed would’ve been an understatement. But when I explained the situation in the barest details possible, he agreed to get out of bed and head to the airport.
“Any idea how long you’ll be up?”
“As long as it takes.”
“Noted.”
“You’re being an asshole,” Crew said when I disconnected.
Before I could chew him out, West told him, “If someone took Aspen, you’d be doing the same fucking thing, baby brother. Cut him some slack.”
Wisely, Crew shut up, and we passed the rest of the drive in silence.
I’d parked when my phone rang with a call from Lane.
“What?” I answered.
“We’ve got something. Get your asses back.”
Though West and Crew were halfway out, I shifted into drive and peeled out of the lot, and they barely threw themselves back inside in time.
“Warn a guy next time,” our little brother grumbled. “I almost pissed myself.”
“You run into fires for a living,” I said with an eye roll. “Grow a pair.”
I drove too fast back to Trey’s house, barely remembering to put the truck in park before flying out from behind the wheel and racing inside.
“What’s this news?” I asked without preamble when I stalked into the war room.
For a moment, Trey, Lane, and Owen shared an unreadable look, as though having the same sort of wordless conversation West and I often had.
I looked to Aspen for answers. If anyone in this fucking room would shoot me straight, it would be her. But my tough-as-nails new sister-in-law was curled in on herself in the chair we’d left her in, face white as a sheet.
“Little phoenix?” Crew asked softly as he approached, kneeling in front of her and putting his hands on her thighs.
“Hotshot,” she rasped out, immediately shaking her head, as if whatever they’d found after we left was unbelievable. “Fuck.”
“Someone tell us what the fuck is going on,” West demanded.
“I finally managed to isolate the footage from that night,” Trey explained. “Aspen confirmed it with the property records, and a call to the station told us he has a vehicle matching the description of the one that ran Reagan off the road registered to him.
“We found who took them.”
“Who the fuck is it?”
Lane scrubbed his hand over his face. “Come see for yourself.”
Annoyed as fuck that they wouldn’t simply tell me, I stalked over until I stood behind Trey and studied the screens, all paused on the same face.
At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Him? There was no fucking way.
But there was no denying it.
The face in the image was none other than Lyle Tucker.
Known to his friends simply as Tuck.