Chapter 47 Mateo
MATEO
Nothing like waking up at two in the morning to a phone call from Taylor in the tech lab to tell us something weird was happening in the parking garage. She’d always been pretty damn good under pressure, so to hear that kind of panic was alarming.
I rolled down to the tech lab, realizing too late that I couldn’t get in on my own without my list of passcodes, which I handily kept inside Santos’ or Ronan’s brain. I pulled out my phone and dialed Taylor.
“Hey, I’m out here. Let me in.” Just a few minutes later the pressurized door hissed open, and I pushed my way in. “What’s going on? It’s a bit early for a wakeup call.”
“Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I figured one of you would want to see what I saw. Since Ronan didn’t answer I’ll take second best.” She spit out the insult nonchalantly like she gave no fucks.
“Ouch,” I said moving in next to her as she pulled up the feed from the camera in the elevators showing Santos directing Cecilia at gunpoint, her hands bound, and her mouth gagged. Hot as fuck, but concerning, nonetheless.
“When did this happen?” I asked, watching the two of them go inside the parking garage.
“Maybe forty minutes ago. It was hard to wake you assholes up. Normally Fletcher is around to handle this kind of bullshit,” she sighed, we all missed the guy, but he was finally on the mend and would be coming home soon.
“It’s always something with you guys and this girl, isn’t it?
” She raised an eyebrow at me, knowing how much I loved the drama.
“I’m an addict, what can I say?” I smirked until the recording showed Dezmond Archer Senior appear. They talked a bit, but it didn’t take more than a few minutes before Santos planted a bullet in his throat.
I watched the whole video before deciding to move into action, hoping at some point my brother would have regained clarity and backed out of whatever the fuck he thought he was doing here.
I was raging, and not from watching Santos fuck Cecilia with a gun, but from the fact our brother was up to something sinister.
His deceit was so clear from his behavior since he’d been back from Ocean Valley.
“Hey, uh… delete that shit,” I told Taylor.
“What?” She asked in a confused type of outrage.
“You heard me. Don’t let Ronan see that shit,” I said with a stern voice as I turned back to leave the tech lab.
I called Santos about sixteen times before I made it back to the penthouse and gave up trying to get through to him, knowing he was on his own mission clouded by whatever was compelling him to betray us all.
I burst into Ronan’s room and gave it my best to shake the bastard awake. Seeing his phone out and the dozens of missed calls from Taylor let me know she wasn’t lying about having tried him first and failing.
“Wake up asshole!” I yelled out and almost like he’d been conditioned, his eyes jarred open wide with a scowl that carved into his features.
“Santos took Celia.” I didn’t wait for him to fully sink into conscious mode before dropping the news on him, we needed to move into action.
We already wasted too much time just by being asleep.
Zerkos slid into clothes faster than I thought possible, pulling out his phone to dial the bastard we’d called brother. “Argh!” He screamed out after the fifth time of going straight to voicemail.
“I’ve got Taylor setting up her tracker location to get sent to our phones. Let’s go.” I instructed him and he nodded before we made our way downstairs.
“Did you see anything?” Ronan asked Nate, who sat in a chair calmly behind the lobby desk.
“You mean, like Santos taking the girl?” He asked with a frown, like he didn’t realize that was something out of the norm.
“Yeah, like that. Asshole.” Zerkos seethed and our doorman shrugged. It wasn’t his fault and it certainly wasn’t his problem, but Ronan was going to find anyone to blame that he could until we had Celia back again.
As soon as he shoved through the doors to the garage, the black SUV screeched to a halt right in front of Zerkos without finding a parking spot. Santos’ eyes were wide with surprise and full of fear at seeing the both of us, anger clearly present in both of our faces.
I only lingered back a few seconds behind Zerkos, but he didn’t wait for álvarez to get out.
He pulled him out of the driver's seat and threw him onto the floor, practically on top of the corpse of Archer Senior.
The brute percussion of his fists cascaded loudly in the concrete chamber of the garage and as I walked closer, I could make out Ronan hitting his face repeatedly, no efforts coming from Santos to stop it.
“Hey, he’s not even blocking you,” I called out, trying to calm down the rage bellowing through Zerkos but immediately remembered him in my room just a couple hours ago.
“He’s shitfaced. Did you drive this drunk?
” I yelled, my own fury knowing no bounds as I counted all the ways he might have risked her life.
“Is this what you’ve been plotting you sneaky little shit?” He spit out as he pulled our brother up by the collar and socked him in the face one more time.
“Where is she?” I asked Santos as I crossed my arms over my chest, raising an eyebrow at him questioningly, still unwilling to accept he would have put her through any situation that could hurt her.
He spit a wad of blood out just before Zerkos let go of his grip on his collar, dropping him down to the puddle of blood spread over the ground.
“I don’t know.”
“Probably not the best answer,” I shrugged my shoulders at Ronan, and he hit him again and I flinched at the sound his fist made connecting to bone.
“What do you mean you don’t know? What the fuck were you thinking?” Zerkos yelled out as he kicked Archer Senior’s body over.
“I had to get rid of her,” Santos said quietly, the smallest slur still in his speech.
I blinked back widely at his confession, but I didn’t need Ronan to dish out this one. I took the satisfaction of feeling his face crunch under my knuckles.
“Where did you take her?” I barked out at him, hating the way the anger poured over me, hating the way it connected me to my piece of shit old man.
“The Bratvas. Guillermo put a hit on her,” he looked down as he said the words, “I needed to get her out of here.”
“And you didn’t think we could handle this as a team?
” Zerkos was practically foaming at the mouth, and I didn’t blame him one bit.
We didn’t keep these kinds of secrets and it was concerning that Santos was in a headspace where he thought he was making the right decision by doing so. “You’re fucking pathetic.”
“What the hell happened here?” I narrowed my eyes at him as I gestured to Senior’s corpse, but he refused to look at either of us.
“You either tell me or we’re going up to the lab where we can all watch it, together.” Zerkos sneered at him, and Santos’ eyes widened, neither of them knowing I already prepared for this exact situation, but I let álvarez make his choice anyway.
“Okay! Okay! I don’t know man, I had a feeling he was our rat, I told him I needed help getting rid of someone, so we met down here. Then the old creep starts saying some shit about sampling the merchandise and I kind of lost it.”
“Why do you care what he was gonna do to her if you were so desperate to get her out of here?” I asked him, even though I already knew the answer.
All these secrets needed to end, and it started with him admitting to the one he’d been keeping for nearly fifteen years.
“You think wherever she is, they aren’t hurting her right now? ” I yelled.
Santos dropped his head to his hands, and though part of it had to be from how hammered he was, I was almost positive he was crying.
“That bad huh?” I asked the poor fool.
“What’s that bad?” Ronan asked as if he was really just that daft when it came to perceiving other people’s emotions.
Such an only child.
“You don’t understand. None of you fucking understand! It’s fucking torture!” His face was still buried in his hands, and even though I was livid, my heart hurt for my brother. Fifteen years of pretending that your heart didn’t belong to someone was a special kind of hell in itself.
“So, what, you just get rid of her and move on?” I asked the stupid bastard, but he shook his head.
“No,” he took a long time to finally look at me, the gloss in his hazel eyes telling me exactly what he was planning to do when he got home, but we’d interfered.
“You’re a stupid fucking idiot,” I reached my hand down to pull him up from the spilt blood, but Ronan slapped my arm out of the way.
“What don’t I understand?” He asked him, his nostrils flaring like he already knew the answer but needed to hear it for himself.
Santos looked at me, but I raised my hands up, this wasn’t my fight.
Zerkos and I were still on unsteady ground when it came to Cecilia, but it looked like the fucker was gonna need to learn how to stand on a wobbly bridge if he was gonna survive.
“It’s not my fault! I can’t help it! She’s fucking everything,” Santos screamed at Ronan, slightly startling him with the outburst.
“So, you’ve just been playing me for a fool all these years?” He pushed our brother until he was practically laying back in the blood.
“No! I- I never crossed that line. I would have never,” Santos crawled backwards as Zerkos prowled towards him, realizing how far Santos’ betrayal really went.
But could we be held responsible for the person we fell for?
Santos looked like a broken disheveled version of the man I used to know, haunted by his own feelings for a woman he never meant to desire.
His behavior was obvious now that I could see it for what it really was.
We were alike in that way, but I refused to believe she wasn’t meant for me.
She wouldn’t have wound up here if that were the case.