Chapter 47
Months Later
The waiting, like an endless search where I always end up slamming my face against a concrete wall, is driving me insane.
Beau is nicknamed the Ghost, since despite all the power he holds, he rarely shows himself in public. But the son of a bitch who wants to send me to hell is outdoing him.
No one, not Ruslan’s men, mine, Beau’s, nor the mercenaries I’ve hired, can find him.
The trip to Egypt for the contract, which was supposedly connected to him, turned up nothing.
What’s so fucking strange is that since Jackie’s attempted kidnapping, he hasn’t made another move.
Through our investigation, we managed to capture an image of the woman my wife described as the one who confronted her at the association. The day she went after Jackie, she fled the building and got into a black, unidentified sedan. We couldn’t find out anything more about the car.
Ruslan, through his contacts at the DMV, got images of the vehicle leaving Manhattan, but from there, the trail went cold.
An ordinary man, someone not used to death the way I am, might think the son of a bitch had given up.
I’m not an ordinary man.
I can see inside the mind of someone like me. I’d never give up on revenge.
Because there’s no doubt left now that that’s what he wants: revenge.
A hired gun doing this for money wouldn’t have bothered to forge images of me in some fake relationship with another woman and a child. Whoever sent that woman after Jackie didn’t just want to take her; they wanted her to hate me. And now I need to know why.
I look at my mentor, sitting in a leather armchair in my office at Hazard in New York.
I’ve already taken over the clubs with Roman, but legally speaking, we’re just Beau’s contractors, since we still can’t justify the acquisition of the chain to the IRS.
This is the third time Beau has come to New York this month alone so we could talk about this fucked-up game of cat and mouse.
What my enemy may not realize is that I’ll never be the prey.
“We have to find a way to think like him,” Beau says.
“I’ve been doing nothing else, but there’s no fucking starting point.
Jackie’s getting impatient, too. She’s not my prisoner.
She’s my wife. She accepts all the restrictions of our life, but there are situations I can’t stop her from taking part in, like the birth of William and Taylor’s daughter, for example. ”
“The redhead friend?”
“Yeah.”
“Send an army to escort her.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing every time she leaves the house.”
I bought a residence on the outskirts of Connecticut. No ocean, but it’s lakeside. I’m also negotiating for an island.
Still, I know I could drop treasure chests at her feet and it wouldn’t be enough. Jackie wants to live too, and having a sword constantly hanging over our heads runs counter to that idea.
“We need to figure out his motivation.”
“Revenge.”
“Yeah, we know that. But revenge for what?”
I shrug. “Once I became an adult, almost all my jobs were contracts,” I say, recalling the only exception, and he nods, knowing exactly what I mean.
“And as a child?”
“I hurt some adults, but the only one I killed was the fucking jailer of the pedophiles who kidnapped me.”
“I don’t think it’s about that,” Beau says. “Too long for someone to wait for payback.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ll keep my eyes open and pray I don’t go insane in the process, because not knowing why he’s coming after me is driving me mad.”