Chapter 21
DEAN
The office still smelled like bleach, but bleach didn’t drown out the metallic scent of blood.
Dean paused at the threshold. Streaks, finger-width runnels were dragged across the stone from the door to the far corner behind the desk. It was as if someone had been dragged and then abruptly lifted off the ground.
The rug had been rolled and propped against a bookcase that now leaned at a new angle, books crammed back with the spines facing wrong. The grandfather clock ticked too loud, smug in the silence that screamed death.
Matteo stood alone at the small bar with a towel in one hand and an empty glass in the other, polishing the same spot over and over again. His sleeves were pushed up, the skin at his wrists were spattered with dots of red.
Dean stepped inside and closed the door. “Who?”
Matteo didn’t look up. “I don’t ask questions you can’t unhear. No idea. Some girl. Could’ve been a servant, or someone he had dragged in from town.”
Dean’s gaze tracked the blood to the corner.
There, a chair sat crooked, one leg snapped, the jagged end blackened by something hot.
He cataloged the room like he cataloged a kill site.
What was broken on purpose, what was broken by accident, what was left where it fell, and what had caused so much blood?
Dean was sure that if he used a blacklight in this room, it would show the work of a sadistic killer.
“He snapped,” Matteo said finally, setting the glass down. “He expected you to come running when you heard that he had hit Ava and threatened Yasmine. It either offended or annoyed him that you stayed away so long and didn’t take the bait.”
“I knew what he was trying to do,” Dean replied, his voice flat. “Yasmine made sure to remind me what we are fighting for and insisted that I take a break. I saw the wisdom in her words.”
“You’re a lucky man,” Matteo murmured.
On the balcony beyond the open doors, the curtains billowed like they were breathing. Inward with the evening heat and then back out. Dean cocked his head, listening. Somewhere distant but closing in—a chuff-whump, rhythmic. Rotor blades beating air.
“Is that Keene or should we be preparing for another attack?” he asked.
“Keene,” Matteo answered, and Dean could already see the penny-bright glee he wore whenever money was on the menu.
Dean moved to the desk, he righted the blotter and turned a ledger that had been thrown upside down. He capped and uncapped a pen so his hands had something to do that felt somewhat useful. This place…it was getting to him.
He was stronger now, more than before, more determined than ever and yet…all he longed for was to lay in his bed in Kansas, with his wife in his arms, and their kids sleeping soundly in their beds. He longed for simple and safe. None of them were safe here, unless he finished this.
The helicopter settled on the far pad with a final shudder that rattled the compound’s old bones. It didn’t take long for boots to hammer along the corridors. Voices rose…Spanish, English, the clipped arrogance of men who thought they were in a friendly house.
The door handle turned without a knock and swung inward.
Two Righteous members entered first, square-shouldered, eyes hidden behind mirrored shades they used to help hide their identity as much as block out the sun. Dean didn’t recognize either of them.
Between them, shoved forward so hard she stumbled, was a woman with violet streaks bleeding through dark hair, dust ground into the knees of her jeans and top, and dried blood smeared along one temple and down her side. A leather necklace rested at her throat, a feather charm dark against skin.
With a guttural growl, she looked up, and Dean’s heart stopped.
Maeve.
It wasn’t her name in his head. Not at first. For a split breath it was Isabella, who he’d named his own daughter after.
The girl that had been only six, small, bony, with a pretty dress, and a missing front tooth.
He could clearly remember the weight of her hand in his as they ran.
A night of hiding and quiet prayers. The days they’d spent together, the nights she’d wept and then…
the firehouse and him walking away as she called for him to come back.
That moment broke him and galvanized him more than all the abuse at his father’s hand and every death he had witnessed while he served.
He thought about her every day and prayed the same thing over and over. Live. Live and I’ll keep them from finding you. Fourteen years crushed into one heartbeat, and it was all turning to dust right before his eyes.
“No,” he said under his breath. “No, this can’t be happening.”
Maeve glared at him. Her eyes were not the eyes of the child he’d dragged out of hell. They were a woman’s eyes. Fierce, ringed with grit and fury. Maeve lunged forward but was caught by the soldiers.
“You,” she snarled, voice raw with road dust and grief. “You did this to me?”
The men holding her tightened their grips, expecting her to try again, but she didn’t. She just stared at Dean like he was a disease, like he was the answer to a question that had ruined her life.
Dean’s mouth opened and closed, his pulse racing. There were a thousand things he wanted to say…
I wanted to save you. I ran because he would have bred you or made us marry. I left you because I thought it was safer. I watched from the edge like a ghost. I tried to warn you, to save you.
But, he knew there was no sentence that made any of this better.
He took one step toward her, hands open, palms empty. “Isabella…”
“Don’t,” she snapped, flinching like the name was a slap. “Don’t call me that. I’m not that little girl anymore.” She rolled out her shoulders and pride filled him. She was strong…good, she was going to need it.
“Maeve,” he said, forcing the syllable through a throat that wanted to close. “I—”
A clap cut him off. It wasn’t a polite applause, but something theatrical.
“Oh, this is good. I loved every second of watching that. What do the American’s say…priceless.”
Carlos swept in with the flourish of a man walking onto a stage he’d been building for years.
He wore a crisp, clean suit with a fresh white bandage around his palm that flashed like a priest’s cuff.
He filled the doorway with a peacock’s certainty, eyes bright, mouth already curving for the applause he would give himself.
“Qué maravilla!” He sang, spreading his arms like an impresario unveiling a masterpiece. “At last. Family night, we have been reunited at last.”
Carlos crossed the room in three long strides and circled Maeve like a curator admiring a stolen painting. He didn’t touch her. He let the almost-touch be threat enough.
“Isn’t this great?” he asked the room. His joy wasn’t sane. It fizzed like a live wire sparking. “Stop glaring at me Mercurio, this is how things were always supposed to be. My son. My future. My past. My property. Mine, mine, mine. All mine.”
Maeve’s lip curled. “I’m not your anything.”
Carlos’s eyes shone with an insanity honed to a knife’s edge. “You have always been mine, pequena. Even when you were lost. Lost dogs always come home when they hear the right whistle.”
Dean stepped forward, and the men holding Maeve tensed. Did they know who he was, what he was capable of? He didn’t know them, but assumed they’d be prepared for his skill.
Matteo’s hand slid to his belt then stopped, a deliberate choice not to reach for what wasn’t going to save anyone. Carlos would think it was to save him, but Dean knew better.
Dean purposely put himself between his father and Maeve.
“Back away,” Dean said quietly to Carlos
Carlos laughed and leaned around Dean’s shoulder as if to better admire the prize. “Hear him, nina? So gallant. So…righteous.” He tilted his head, not taking his eyes off Maeve. “Yet, you look at him like you want to eat his heart.”
“She looks at me exactly as she should,” Dean said.
Maeve’s chin lifted, defiance spilling through the tremble in her jaw. “I remember enough to know that I don’t trust either of you.”
“Oh, good,” Carlos purred. “Then you will remember that I keep what I take. I also don’t take kindly to those that take what is mine.”
Dean’s voice cut like wire. “She was never yours. You stole her from her family. Feud or no feud, that is low, even for you. I couldn’t let that stand. And if you had any honor, you wouldn’t keep anything you didn’t bleed for yourself.”
Carlos turned his head at last, slowly the way a cat savors the second mouse.
“Oh, Mercurio…always with the moral compass trying to ruin my fun.” He lifted his bandaged hand and waggled the fingers.
“Don’t worry. I have decided that this one will no longer be for you, but for me instead.
Not like the girl last night…no, that one was to quiet the noise in my head.
” He smiled, and Dean ground his teeth together.
A cold, steady sound started in Dean’s head. Not a roar, a tone. The one that always came right before he crossed a line he could never come back from.
He kept his hands at his sides as he said, “there are better ways to quiet the noise in your skull.”
Carlos’s smile turned into a laugh.
“Maybe, but you won’t get to do that.” He flicked two fingers at the soldiers, and they jerked Maeve around Dean. She stumbled, caught herself and straightened without looking at anyone for help.
Dean moved to intercept them and glared. “Stand down soldier,” he ordered. The two men looked at one another unsure what to do. He squared his shoulders. “I out rank you, now stand down.”
A man slid around Carlos’s shoulder at that moment. He was all tidy beard and neatly pressed casual…Mr. Keene. “Actually, I out rank all of you. Keep doing what Carlos orders. Mercurio is no longer part of our organization.”
Maeve looked at Dean as the soldiers moved as a unit, pulling her around him.
Fuck.