60. Chapter 60
Chapter 60
DECLAN
“ A lright, everyone, thank you for making time for us while we are in town,” Slade says to the room of executives in the boardroom around us. We had decided to do a last-minute meeting while we were in town for the stupid fucking gala, and these poor fuckers around us probably hadn’t slept since we had announced it yesterday morning.
We acquired this company in the last six months, bought from a trust fund baby who has a penchant for hookers and a severe gambling problem. He’d needed cash quickly before he ended up dead. My dad had been so right. Being on the “right” side of the law didn’t make people better; it just made them better sometimes at hiding their vices.
This one wasn’t.
He was all over the news and needed some fast cash to pay for his lawyers. His assets were sold like old toys at a yard sale that people just wanted gone. The majority had been scooped up by Falco Enterprises, swooping in like Robin Hood. In the time since the paperwork had been signed, we hadn’t had time to explore the company, since it is too far away from our headquarters. But being in town for the event we sponsored has provided the perfect opportunity to see what it is this company does and how people are faring.
Slade does the majority of the speaking, allowing me to just sit and assess the people in the room, and to not have to juggle my hangover headache and speaking. Slade likes to talk, always has, and he is good at putting people at ease. Axel, who is also in the room, says nothing.
I stand and feel every eye land on me as I move. “We are pleased with the progress you all have made in a small amount of time,” I say honestly. “You should be proud of yourselves and your staff. Effective immediately, we will be implementing an across-the-board raise for everyone here.”
Visible relief floods everyone’s face around us, and then smiles and applause break out. Giving people money generally has the effect of happiness. I could have done without the applause, however.
With my announcement, my brothers and I close out the meeting. The employees around us stand, each coming over to shake our hands and thank us. They make their departure quickly after speaking to us, and soon it is just the three of us alone in the room.
“You still pissed at me?” Slade asks, sitting himself on the boardroom table, swinging his legs like a child.
I stack and straighten some papers on the table before me, ignoring my brother. The real answer is yes. I am still pissed, plus I haven’t been able to think of anything else except for his crazy appraisal of the worst thing in my life.
And during the hours since he’d said it, I’d realized that it is the truth.
“Come on, Dec,” Slade says, leaning sideways so now he’s lying in front of me on the table, “you know I love you.”
I took a deep breath and roll my eyes. “You are an annoying fuck.”
“Well, that’s about as much of an I love you as I expect from you.” Slade springs himself up from the table. “You can only be annoyed by the ones you love,” he says and looks over at Axel. “Right, Ax?”
We both look at Axel, and he gives a quick nod.
“See.”
“Let’s go home, you asshole,” I tell Slade, slapping him on his back and effectively ending our fight.
“Yes, please, I am dying for some malasadas,” Slade says, and Axel groans in agreement.
We turn to the door when we hear some commotion outside, and then shouting. All three of us exchange a look. Axel already has his gun out, and Slade and I quickly follow suit.
The door bursts open and we aim.
Kent, Vivian’s date from the gala, stands there, his face bruised and bloodied, his white shirt and tie a mess.
“They took her,” Kent says hoarsely, ignoring the guns pointed at him, and his sights zero in on me. “They came and they took her,” he declares to me through his split lips.
He takes a step forward and Axel is on him, taking him down and pulling his arms behind him.
Kent calls out, but he doesn’t fight back.
“Took who?” Slade asks him, training his gun on Kent’s head while Axel stays on top of him.
I am, however, paralyzed. The second I saw him come through the door, I feared what he was going to say, and I don’t want to hear him say what it is I am terrified he will.
“Vivian,” he groans out.
Axel and Slade immediately look at me and then retrain their stares onto Kent. Our security team, whose fucking response time is a huge fucking problem that I am sure Axel will deal with later, comes bursting in the door.
“Go and fucking get the cars ready,” I shout at them, their appearance pulling me from my trance. I crouch down to Kent. “Who has Vivian?” I demand.
Kent gasps and I exchange a look with Axel who interprets it and pulls Kent back up to his feet, keeping his arms restrained behind him.
“Who?” I bark out again.
“Matthews,” he says.
I search my thoughts and look at my brothers. Slade shrugs, and Axel shakes his head minutely. “Who the fuck is that?” I shout into Kent’s face, watching him recoil from me.
“He took her,” he repeats.
I look up and see the entire office staring into the boardroom. I cross over to the doorway. “The work day is over,” I announce, impressed by how steady my voice is right now. “Thank you all for your continued persistence in this hectic transition. Please enjoy the rest of the day,” I say, and then slam the door shut.
I pull Kent from my brother by his shirt front, surprising both of them, and throw him into one of the chairs next to us.
“You better fucking give me some useful information, or I am going to tear your fucking dick from your body and stuff it in your mouth.”
Kent swallows. “I went home this morning from the hotel, and Matthews and his thugs were waiting for me there. They roughed me up and then Vivian came by while they were there, and they took her,” he whines.
I slap Kent so hard, Will Smith would be proud, and then I grab him by the collar again and pull him up to my face. “Stop your fucking whining and tell me who the fuck this Matthews is,” I growl in his face before I throw him back into the chair. The gaping holes in his stories are costing me time that could be vital.
He’s startled, but he recovers enough to speak again. “He’s a weapons dealer here on the East Coast.”
“Why the fuck would a weapons dealer take Vivian?” I ask. This is making less sense the more fucking Kent speaks.
“Because I didn’t deliver my end of the deal,” he says sorrowfully, appearing disappointed in himself. “He approached me last week and offered to fund my entire campaign for senate.”
“In exchange for what?” There is no way an arms dealer did this out of the goodness of his heart.
Kent meets my eyes. “For you.”
“For Declan?” Slade chimes in, his tone much darker.
“Yes,” Kent says. “He offered to fund the entirety of my campaign if I could find a way to deliver you to him by today.”
I look at Slade and then at Axel. “You know about this fucking guy?” I ask them. “Have either of you heard anything about a Matthews?”
Slade shakes his head, never taking his eyes or his gun off Kent. “Nope, but I have a feeling there is more to this story,” he muses, tilting his head as he watches Kent.
Kent now looks even more terrified if it is possible. “I don’t know any more,” he stammers out quickly. “He offered me money and he knew you were going to be at the Feed the Nation Gala and so was I. He said if I could get you to him by today, he would give me the money. No strings attached.”
“No strings attached. How very unlike an illegal gun dealer,” Slade points out.
Slade’s right. “You couldn’t deliver, so they fucked you up?” I ask Kent, and he nods feverishly in response. “Yeah, but see, I don’t know too many weapons dealers who are going to just leave someone alive who can run their mouth,” I tell him. I watch Kent’s pupils dilate before my eyes.
“So something tells me you were getting a beating and you offered them something else,” I say, studying Kent closely. He stiffens. “What did you say to them, Kent? Hmm? What did you tell them to stop them from killing you?” I ask, my voice soft, and it’s an effort to keep it that way. I have a rage thundering in my chest like a freight train, like a lion roar, ready to blast open with the force of a tornado all over Kent. But I need answers, and if I do that I don’t get them and can’t find Vivian.
But Kent doesn’t say anything.
So Axel gets in front of him. “My brother asked you a question,” he says just above a whisper. “And I know you have an answer, but I also know we aren’t going to like it. So you can either just tell us now, or we can fucking torture you until you tell us.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“I’m closer to a yes with every second you evade me,” Axel whispers.
“Please don’t—”
Axel moves so fast, I don’t even see him reach for the gun, but a shot cuts off whatever Kent is going to say, and then he fucking is screaming like the bitch he is. Axel grabs him by the hair and pulls his face up. “That was your fucking baby toe. I’ll keep working my way up if you don’t start telling us something fucking useful.”
“I told him you were obsessed with Vivian!” Kent shouts as he rocks and grabs at his foot.
“And then what?”
“I-I called her! I told her I needed her to come over.”
I think back to all those years ago when Vivian asked me if I had ever killed anyone. I hadn’t, and I told her as much, and while I have hurt a lot more people, and a lot of them were close to death when I was done with them, I still have never directly killed anyone.
But I have a feeling Kent will be the first.
I feel my nostrils flare.
“What did he tell you to do?” I demand through my teeth. This fucker Matthews has a plan for sure. He didn’t just take Vivian and leave, and Kent is no actor.
Kent looks at me and now the fear is gone. Instead he’s glaring at me. “She says your name in her sleep, you know,” he tells me, sounding angry. “Do you know what that’s like to have a woman you worship, that you’d do anything for and want nothing more than for her to have even a glimmer of affection for you, and when she is the most relaxed, when she is at the will of her own subconscious, she says another man’s name?”
I punch his face and am positive I fracture his cheekbone. Blood goes flying out of his mouth. Since that bone isn’t already broken, I wonder how little torture this fucker endured before he served Vivian up on a platter to a fucking arms dealer. I push Axel away from him and grab him up by his neck, and I squeeze.
“Where is she?” I growl through my teeth.
Kent claws at my hand, as he wheezes to try and get air in. I know he can’t answer me while I am cutting off his airway, but I want to kill this man so much in this moment.
“Declan,” Slade says, bringing me back. And I instantly drop Kent, allowing him to fall to the floor in a heap, coughing and clutching his throat.
I kick him over to his back and put my foot to his chest. “Where is she?”
“He said for me to call him,” Kent wheezes out. “He said then he will let you know when to come to him—” I kick Kent in the head, like I am kicking the winning field goal for the Superbowl, and he goes unconscious. I reach in his pocket for his phone and toss it to Axel.
“Find her.”
Slade is patting down the now unconscious Kent while I pace the room. Meanwhile, Axel has Kent’s phone and is connecting it to his laptop, going through it with a fine-tooth comb.
“We’ll get her back, Declan,” Slade assures me. “But first we have to check the validity of what he is saying. We can’t go—”
“I need air,” I say, ignoring him. I am still a little pissed at him for saying that Vivian leaving me is the best thing that ever happened to me. What the fuck kind of fucked-up shit is that? And now someone has her, some fucker has taken her. This is the thing I had always worried about for her, and it has happened.
I move through the now empty building and go outside, taking a deep breath. I close my eyes, and a sharp pain in my side sends me to the ground, and then a punch knocks me out.
I wake up some time later and my shoulders fucking burn. I roll my head up and find out it’s because I am chained up to a fucking wall, my arms out straight and a little above me, like I’m being crucified.
“Oh good, you’re awake,” a voice says, and I roll my head to the side. It’s still too heavy for me to actively hold up. They must have given me something. I see a man in a suit eating an apple as he sits on an overturned bucket, staring at me. I try to move myself against the chains and get myself up, but it’s impossible. “Gotta chain up animals when they get too full of themselves, Falco.”
This guy is baiting me. I don’t know who the fuck he is for sure, but I have a feeling. I don’t ask though. Sometimes it’s better to not know things while you get your bearings. That is something my dad taught us, really drilled it in. So I ignore the wiseass in front of me and instead assess the room I’m in. There are bars in front of me, but I can’t tell if they are closed, and it is cement everywhere else, so I am most likely in a basement of some sort.
“Nothing to say?” the man asks. He’s feigning indifference, and he sucks at it. His face looks passive, but I can see his breathing has picked up, and his nostrils flare a little at my defiance. “Maybe we can encourage you,” he says and nods to someone in the shadows.
A big lump of a man comes sauntering over to me, cracking his knuckles and working his head back and forth on his neck. The lump is amping up his tough guy image way too hard. I know his type, and I can’t wait for him to get close to me to show him how well I know it.
“You gonna talk?” the thug asks me, still coming closer. He’s about a foot from me, and I whisper something unintelligible from my lips. The stupid fucker comes closer, and when he is where I want him, I wrap my legs around him and pull him off his feet, sending his head smacking to the floor near my feet, and then I kick his head, hard.
Commotion comes all around me as two more goons appear, taking the guy away from me, and another punches my face. The suited man stays seated and just watches.
“You piece of shit,” the guy that hit me says, pulling my head up and getting into my face. “Who the fuck do you— Ah!” he screams out as I headbutt him right into his nose, blood hitting my face as he drops to his knees. I land a kick right in his gut, sending his head smacking to the floor like his buddy’s.
“Get him out of there,” the suited guy now snarls, showing his first real emotion and giving me a gauge for how much embarrassment he can take. Because that’s what is happening to him. He’s embarrassed that his team couldn’t handle me. And I like knowing that they couldn’t. It just shows me what kind of a fucking amateur show this is.
I’m still fighting whatever they gave me to put me out, so my head continues to hang. But I listen as there is a hushed discussion between the thugs and then the room is cleared out. Then footsteps, and some fancy fucking shoes come into my view, but far enough away to be just out of my reach. This guy is a quick study.
“You think you’re so fucking smart, don’t you, Falco?” the suited guy spits at me. “Worth billions, your fingers in every industry, acquiring more and more, but when it comes down to it, you’re just a fucking thug. Just like my father told you that you were, you son of a cunt.”