Chapter Eleven
A Soul Without
Rafe
S he’s not in the country .
The same thought roils around the inside of my skull while Dom and Diego snarl at each other across my dining room table like feral alley cats.
Their volume is enough to raise the roof.
Regina we know is safe, if only for now, but my wife.
.. I want her back and I’ll raise hell to see her safe at my side.
I’ll ruin myself and my family to have her back.
Some part of me knows that my father would approve of my line of thought. Armand Gallo doted on his daughter-in-law almost as much as the old man perved on her. It might seem disrespectful to think ill of the dead, but my father was no saint, and neither am I.
“Bribe everyone in sight. But it’ll be Konnor it leads back to. He’s got his hand in this, mark my words.” Diego plants a fist on my dining table.
Dom looks across at him in disgust. “Konnor has his eye on a different prize,” he says quietly as pride slices through my chest at his reserved demeanor.
“He wants Rafe’s attention, and he’s got it.
We start at the docks and work our way through the men.
Someone saw something. If they aren’t talking then we aren’t pushing hard enough. ”
“Bullshit. It’s a distraction technique.”
“Desperation and lack of fucks are not good bedfellows,” Dom counters.
Red suffuses Diego’s face, but it’s Roman who presses a hand to my wife’s lieutenant’s shoulder and taps once. Diego closes his mouth, thinks, and opens it again. “Hit Konnor’s compound. The enemy of our enemy and all...” he throws out unconvincingly.
It’s not a good play, and we all know it, but it’s not my impatience that’s worn through. Hell, I even understand Deigo’s need to rain hell on the Hennies. They have a lot to answer for, but Konnor is not the main problem right now. His retribution can come at a later date.
“Are you half as dense as you actually look? This is a man not to be underestimated. He won’t work with the enemies of our or his friends.” Dom glares at Diego, one hand already resting on the matching American Joe mirror pistols at his back.
Thalia stands behind his chair, watching the entire scene play out with a sense of serenity that leaves my chest aching for the significant absence behind my own chair.
A void with my wife’s name on it is etched across the air where she should stand, the hollow space in my arms where they should wrap around her warmth. I want to scream her name to the universe and beg for her back but none if it means anything if I don’t find a way to claim her again.
Unfortunately, that same thought hasn’t made it through the wall of testosterone building across my dining room table.
“I promise you—” Deigo starts, half-rising from his seat.
“Enough,” I speak into the French polished tabletop. “He’s blindsided us because we’ve forgotten to consider our friends when we count our enemies.”
But neither of them are listening to me.
“You don’t promise me anything,” hisses Dom, not heeding my warning.
I growl low in my throat, channeling the energy of the late father I summoned a moment before.
“I said enough ,” I bellow, my roar echoing along the mansion’s halls.
“If we can’t stop bitch slapping each other, we will lose more than a little face.
Do you understand me?” I glare at them in turn, starting with Diego.
“Grow up,” I snap at the man who should be protecting my brother-in-law.
“Or I will remove you personally. And you,” I turn to Dom.
“My father would be ashamed.” I pause to let that sink in. “Don’t let me join him.”
These tempered halls are bereft without Willow’s life force to fill them, or my sister’s infectious giggles and scheming.
Our lives are emptied and meaningless without the women who define our purpose.
I refuse to fail them by bickering like toddlers in their absence.
Willow and Konnor may have forged a friendship I don’t understand.
That might save her life, or my sister’s.
It doesn’t mean it will save his in the long run.
Dom grinds his teeth while Diego freezes in place. But it’s Thalia who moves, sweeping in gracefully to place her hands on Dom’s shoulders, resting them lightly there.
“Listen to Rafe. He understands the stakes and the territory. He brought me life when I thought I was dead,” she says simply, and falls silent, though she doesn’t break contact with Dom.
He raises one hand to cover hers, resting his larger paw over her slim, scarred hand that has healed so many in my charge. My chest pangs again at her presence, her intervention.
“She’s right.” The words rasp from my chest, and I’m shocked it releases any sound at all for the ache there that spreads to my heart and across my back.
I’m sorry, Willow, for not being there. So fucking sorry. They will not survive for taking you.
I don’t let the thought travel any further. Right now I have to act. The time for planning is done.
“We need to give Singleton what he wants most.” I let the offer hang in the air between the man who is my wife’s brother’s keeper, and her first lieutenant.
Dom answers for them both.
“What’s that?”
I let the corners of my mouth tilt up into a smile I don’t feel.
“Me.”
****
I stand at the end of the docks before daybreak, my fingers numbed from the familiar predawn coldness and sticky with the air that retains a degree of mugginess regardless of the hour.
It was on a night like this one that we found Thalia, and the symmetry of what we’re about to do doesn’t sit poorly with me.
Perhaps it’s an omen of things to come.
“This is a shit idea.” Dom huffs at my side. His hands are tucked into the pockets of the same leather jacket he wore the night we first found her, though Thalia opted to remain back at the compound where they live now.
To any bystander we might look like two friends standing at the end of a dock, talking.
In a disreputable area, before the sun has risen.
When all the things that go bump in the night are still out at play.
But it’s been a long time since I believed in the boogeyman, and almost as long since I became the thing that most children fear that lingers in the darkest of places.
“It is a shit idea,” I agree, scanning the black waters beyond, but my line of sight is obscured by a faint line of mist rolling in. “But it’s my shit idea and until I’m gone, you’ll go with it.”
“Gone as in dead, or gone as in traded? Because if I do the latter, your wife will kill me before I propose to the woman I love, and if it’s the former, I’d like to throw in my chance to kill you first,” Dom grumbles, but there’s no heat in his words, only irritation.
It’s almost enough to cover the fear laced there, and it’s not for himself.
“If my wife returns, I’m sure she’ll have something to say for herself.” I smile and this time, it’s a real one.
“Fucking love-drunk cunt,” Dom mutters to the water. He spits into it and curses some more.
“What now?” I glance sideways at him and frown.
A small boat glides soundlessly out of the encroaching mist, the oars tucked into the sleek sides, one man at the helm, one at the back.
And in the middle stands the enemy I’m ready to skin the way I showed Willow how to do on her first art project in the basement of my house when Luca explained how to use her first knife.
Doing the job without her seems a waste but I’ll do it—after she’s back in my arms.
I only intend to let myself be traded if I can’t get her back ... and I don’t see my wife anywhere.
“Thank you for coming,” I call to the man with the shortest life span in the area. “You’re a hard man to get a hold of.”
Finding someone who knew him was hard enough and cost me a pretty penny.
In the end, both Diego and Dom were right.
Many bribes at the docks passed from hand to hand, and blood stained the cement floors a dozen times over, but we got the answers we sought within a handful of hours, each constricting my chest until I could barely breathe.
Everything that led to this moment.
And now she’s not here. Only the man I hate, and a few lackeys who don’t matter enough to harm.
Singleton doesn’t so much as flinch. “Rafael Gallo. I’d say it’s a pleasure but...” He doesn’t laugh when the boat stops well out of my reach but not outside of Sonja’s sniper range.
Roman is undoubtedly nestled away with her in some high place. I can’t keep Willow’s brother safe no matter how hard I try.
“It’s most definitely someone’s pleasure,” I murmur, though my voice and Dom’s muttered undertones carry across the water despite our best efforts.
Tendrils of fog wrap around the boat, drawing the vessel and its occupants into an impenetrable curtain. I strain to see through the bank just feet from me in the darkness that carries the chill of impending death.
Singleton’s laugh reaches me. “You’re too late, you know. I don’t have what you seek. I just wanted to remind you of something.”
I bare my teeth. “What’s that?” You fucking asshole, I add mentally, scanning the area that’s closed in around us in seconds, the temperature plummeting. But Willow isn’t anywhere.
“That you’re an arrogant son of a bitch.”
I laugh. “That’s not a nice way to talk about your mother.”
“Always so glib.” He pauses. “You don’t get it, do you? It’s not about you, Rafe.”
His use of my given name shatters some semblance of hope I clung to, that I needed all this time for my plan to work. Dom’s words earlier to Diego about desperation float back to me, and I know my original assessment was right all along.
“I already sold her.”
The enemy we both sought for so long drifts away into the mist like it’s a weapon he called to heel, cloaked in its arms and leaving us with less than what we started with.
I don’t realize my knees have hit the planks beneath my shoes until Dom’s hand grips my shoulder painfully, and he’s barking orders into his phone. Nor that my cheeks are coated with more salt than the muggy sea air can provide.
Because none of it matters. Willow’s not here.
And I have no idea how to get her back.