Chapter 27 Mateo
MATEO
On borrowed bikes, we rode almost twice as fast as the speed limit all the way to Cove City.
Ethan’s call let me know a good amount of our men were dead, but since they came from the roof our guys from below flooded the thirteenth floor before they could get any further down.
My heart was pounding a fierce beat at the thought of what I would find when we got up there, even though I knew most of it was likely already cleaned up.
Ronan and I parked the bikes right in front of the High-rise doorway. I tossed the keys to Nate, barely giving him enough time to react and catch them. The lobby floor was covered in reinforcements, but if you asked me those idiots should have been perched on the rooftop instead.
“Get these bikes back to the Diablos Locos in Grimm’s Reach,” I said to Nate, who gave me a brief nod.
“And get me one just like it before you get back here.” I hadn’t been on anything with two wheels since our deployment, and the freedom and rush that came with the rumble of an engine between your legs was almost as good as the right pussy.
Almost.
“Fletcher, Senior, meet me in tech,” Ronan barked out directions to the room with a sure voice. “Where’s Fletcher?” He doubled back. Ethan’s brow furrowed in the middle before he spoke.
“He’s at St. Murphy’s, in critical care. There was nothing the doc could do for him here. By the time we got to him, I didn’t think there would be any blood left in him. I don’t know how she got out, but she kept him alive.”
“Who?” I questioned, trying to figure out what happened here when we didn’t have enough details.
We were going to need every surveillance video pulled so we could piece the puzzle together.
“The Japanese girl, she was out of the kennel, keeping pressure on his gunshot wound and screaming some crazy shit by the time we got to him.”
“And where were you?” Ronan pushed him in the chest with a single finger but the strength in it alone knocked him off his balance.
“I was in tech, getting information for Santos, boss.” Ethan hung his head.
I could see the remorse in his expression. He wasn’t where he had been instructed to stay while we were gone, and now he was carrying the consequences on his shoulders.
If this was a full-fledged attack there was no way he alone would have made enough of a difference. Zerkos needed to reign his temper in and out his focus where it mattered.
“You need to chill. No one is to blame here, and if you want to point fingers, point them towards ourselves. We’re the ones who left them here, unguarded.” I put myself between the two of them, Ronan’s nostrils flaring hard with each exhale.
“Tech Lab. Now!” he gritted out through his teeth again, and the two of us followed him.
Dezmond Archer Senior was the oldest member of our gang, not only that but his history as a gang banger dated more than four decades now.
He was born into it, hell, he had his own side of this town and he ruled it for a long time.
When we came around, he saw the opportunity to be swallowed like a mom-and-pop shop bought out by Walmart, and he didn’t miss his chance.
He was happy to join our ranks and merge his men with ours for a fat cut and an early retirement without the guaranteed early grave that came with being a boss.
It was just too sweet a deal to pass up.
He had no real voice when it came to decisions, but Ronan respected the hell out of him and tried to include him in anything that meant anything around here. Sometimes this gave him the impression he still had power, when the reality was that he wasn’t even a henchman anymore.
When I saw him talking to Cecilia during the party, I didn’t get a chance to ask him what he was doing, but it pissed me off to see him try to get so close to her.
Ronan would have probably shot his aged kneecaps off if he had even known the old bastard was coming onto his girl.
But old perv-like habits aside, the guy was harmless, and one look was enough to steer him away from her, so I figured I’d keep this secret for him.
For now.
Tech was on the sixth floor, and those guys were as protected as it got.
They alerted everyone they could as fast as possible to the attack but had any of our enemies made our way down here, we would have been fucked.
We had the best technical team money can buy, our hackers were as good as Anonymous and could get us intel on nearly anything we wanted.
There hadn’t been a challenge we’d sent their way that we’d been given disappointing results for yet.
The doors opened up but there wasn’t anything but a steel, safe door once you stepped outside the elevator.
Ronan entered the code, 356937, it was a phone word that spelled out flower and for some fucking reason that was the first code to enter.
Once the code was accepted, a slot opened to receive his thumb print followed by a laser that would take his retinal scan.
Aside from Myself, Santos, and Ronan the only other fuckers with access to this room were the guys who worked past the heavy steel doors. There were only a few of them, but they all lived on this floor in their own separate apartments past the tech HQ.
“I want two men in each elevator at all times now. Send the command down,” I instructed Ethan.
The locks slowly undid themselves one at a time as Ronan continued to enter different passcodes for each additional manual lock that came after the retinal scan.
Fifteen in total, and to be honest I didn’t come down here often because I couldn’t face letting him know I didn’t have them memorized.
How could I? The expectation was insane, a few of them changed every six months, and the other half changed even faster than that.
The only code that stayed the same was 356937.
The door opened with a loud hiss that reminded me of an airplane depressurizing, and before the door was fully wide, Taylor was standing there ready to guide us through what happened.
Taylor Constance was an epic hacker; she was almost six feet tall and what she lacked in decorum she made up for in intelligence.
She kept her hair in a G.I. Jane buzz cut that reminded me of our time served together.
The three of us went through basic training together nearly twelve years ago and even though we went our separate ways once Ronan and I got into Seals, we never lost touch.
Once we were out, she came to find us, and we were better for it too. A shady operation, with unlimited technical resources and the money to back it up? It was a wet dream for her, perfectly packaged as a powerful syndicate and she immediately signed up.
“The whole thing was wild boss,” she started out, leading us to the array of monitors covering the walls of the technical lab.
“They were here for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes total? Whatever they wanted was either in the kennels, or they ran out of time before they could get down any further. I think they didn’t expect they would need to get any further down. ”
“You suspect they knew where the girls were? So, they came here for them?” I asked her, and she twisted her face in an unsure way before responding.
“That’s my best bet. We’re still translating some of the audio grabbed from the surveillance, but I can play the video back to you from the moment their helicopter landed on the rooftop.
They didn’t bring enough men to get further than a few floors, and the fact they didn’t come up from the bottom makes me think they either came for the kennels, or for you boys, and just your luck you weren’t there.
” She stated in a matter-of-fact kind of way, but Ronan scoffed.
“Or lucky for them,” he corrected, she shrugged her shoulders.
“Alright, let’s start from the top shall we; here’s when the helicopter lands and they take out the four guys guarding the rooftop.” She looked at Ronan disapprovingly, like she couldn’t believe we didn’t have more men at the top.
How were we supposed to expect something like this though? We didn’t even have a landing pad out there, that motherfucker ruined our rooftop bar, and it was going to take weeks to clean the debris from the infinity pool.
Taylor continued walking us through the attack, making sure to thoroughly reprimand us anytime she saw a flaw in our security as the reason for the whole thing progressing or whenever they got through another layer of our defenses.
There were thirteen of them total that came out of the chopper and they made quick work of our unsuspecting guys.
A few tore through our penthouse shooting their automatic rifles into our furniture before they ransacked through our things.
My heart broke as a guy with a face like a goddamn dog tore into my room and released dozens of rounds into my most precious instruments.
My Cello splintered into thousands of shards of wood right in front of my very eyes, and the piano collapsed after enough bullets hit the legs hard enough to break them.
I felt Ronan’s heavy hand on my shoulder, as if to say he knew what I was feeling at this very moment.
I etched that ugly bastard’s face to my memory because no matter who he was, he was going to choke on breathing his last breath with my knife in his throat.
It was a promise.
Once they got past the penthouse our men were already starting to flood up the stairs and take on these fuckers.
They were big though, each one of them towering over our guys, and they were well trained.
Not just with the guns they were using but with sheer brute force.
Dogface was easily twisting heads off of necks like little Barbie dolls.
And a few of the guys around him had been shot multiple times but weren’t going down so easily.
What the fuck were they on?