Chapter 40
It’s ridiculous. Who puts a Santa hat on a dinosaur skeleton?
I sit at my desk in my home office, staring at the little clay ornament of a triceratops in a Santa hat that sits beside my laptop. Of all the ornaments out there, these are the ones Riley wanted. And I love her for it. I love her so fucking much for it.
Reluctantly, I tear my eyes away from the ornament and back to the screen in front of me. Blake’s brother, Skye, wants to know if we’re still on track for the demo of the apartment buildings I bought.
I have no answer for him. The sale of the buildings was finalized two weeks ago, and other than Jax notifying current tenants that they had sixty days to vacate, I have no idea what’s going on with them. The deal with Adam, with getting Riley to work for me, feels like a lifetime ago.
Snapping my laptop closed, I sink back into my chair, throwing my head back and staring at the ceiling. It’s been five weeks now since Riley was ripped from me. Not a trace of her left behind.
Those five weeks have felt like an eternity.
Tracy hasn’t talked to me since the night of the fire, but I know she’s dealing with her own guilt over letting Riley go back to her house that day. Blake has sent me updates on her occasionally, so I know he’s at least looking out for her.
I don’t blame Tracy for anything. I’ve texted her countless times now, telling her as much. The only person I blame is myself. Riley was mine to protect, and I failed her.
Blake’s still mad as hell at me, but we’ve put our issues on the back burner for now. He graciously took all my clients off my plate, and has been handling my open transactions for me over the last five weeks. It wasn’t much, since Jax and I have been putting most of our time into our personal ventures lately, but I was still thankful for the help.
Jax has been carrying the workload for everything else. The guy is still camped out in my guest room, but has taken a step back with the hovering. I can now safely get in the shower without him doing a wellness check after twenty minutes.
Not that I blame him for hovering. I’ve been a fucking mess, alternating between a rage so intense it devours me, and feeling like an absolute shell, gutted and left to wither.
Vin, the fucker, still hasn’t contacted me.
That hasn’t stopped me from reaching out to him. Of course, I never get a response. I even resorted to contacting Gio at one point to make sure Vin was still alive. His response was brief. ‘Yes, he’s alive. He’ll contact you when he has something’.
It did little to comfort me. At this point, while it kills me to even think about it, I’m starting to wonder whether Riley is still alive, whether there will be anything even remaining if we do find her.
Pushing back from my desk, I go to make my way to the living room and pour myself a drink, when my phone vibrates in my pocket. I pull it out to see who’s calling.
Holy fuck.
“I’m on my way up. Let me in,” Vin says, ending the call before I can even get a single word out. My hands fist at my sides as I stalk across the penthouse.
He found something. Why else would he be here? And who the fuck let him up? I need better security.
The second I open my front door, Vin brushes past me and into my living room. I follow him, stopping just short of where he stands. My muscles tense, and I’m about to introduce my fist to his face for the five weeks of utter fucking silence when he speaks.
“I found her. We leave tonight.”
My hand drops immediately, the air rushing from my lungs. “Wh-what?” I stammer, my mind not believing the words coming out of his mouth.
Vin drops down onto the couch, arms splayed out beside him across the back. “She’s about two hours away, just over the West Virginia border. We’ll go get her tonight.”
My mind finally catches up to what he’s saying, an anxious energy snaking through me. “Why tonight? We need to go now.”
My body vibrates, like it’s going to jump right out of my skin. I can’t leave her there a second longer than necessary. She’s already been there too long.
“No,” Vin says, his voice leaving no room for argument. “I already scoped the place out. We’ll be easy fucking targets if we stroll up there mid-day. We’ll use the cover of darkness to get us in without being noticed. It’s the best way to ensure Riley doesn”t get caught in any crossfire.”
I sink into the chair opposite Vin to keep myself from sprinting out the front door. “So she’s alive. You saw her?”
“No. Trevor’s been on lockdown and paranoid as fuck, otherwise I’d have taken him out already. There’s no getting a clear shot into that house without going in.” He pauses, running a hand over his head. His hair is longer now, and he tugs at the ends of it. “He’s hiding her there. That’s the only reason I can fathom that he hasn’t fled for a country with no extradition.”
“Wait,” I put my hands up, trying to put the pieces together. “You’re sure it’s Trevor?”
Vin nods. “Traffic cam picked him up the night of the fire.”
“We looked into Trevor, though. He’s still in prison. My PI and the police both checked.” How could Trevor have been the one stalking her when he’s been locked up all this time? When, by all reports, he’s still locked up.
“Calvin is a fucking nitwit,” Vin laments.
“He’s one of the best PI’s on the east coast,” I point out.
“Yeah, well, then he’s gotten fucking lazy in his old age. Remember that brother Trevor talked to while in prison? He’s a judge.”
Christ, Calvin said he looked into all of Trevor’s family, and that everything was clean. He never mentioned that his brother was a judge. I tell Vin as much.
“On paper, sure. That family is squeaky clean. Distinguished members of the community, family men, loving husbands and fiances.” He grunts at that last bit. How easy it is to deceive the public about one’s personal life. “But it only took twenty minutes of digging and one phone call to a buddy in Salt Lake City to learn that his entire family is corrupt as fuck. Turns out the Honorable Hendricks has more than a few connections with the crime families out there.”
“So his brother got him out early?” I muse.
“Not quite,” Vin explains. “It’s why no one questioned whether it was Trevor. On paper, he’s still rotting in solitary. The COs, his lawyer–hell, even his own mother–thinks he’s still locked up.”
“You talked to his mother?” I ask, though I shouldn’t be surprised at Vin’s thoroughness.
He nods. “Which is why I flew out there. And you’ll never guess what I found.” He quirks a brow at me. “The good old prison warden was college roommates with Trevor’s brother.”
I collapse back into the chair, running a hand down my face.
Jesus fuck, this entire time he was here, right beneath our noses, and no one had a fucking clue.
“Brother puts the idea out there, and his old buddy the warden, makes it happen. Anyone who looks doesn’t notice a thing.”
“He smuggled Trevor out.”
Vin lifts his hands casually, as if finding all this out was child”s play. Which he confirms with his next statement.
“Had anyone gotten off their ass and dug a little deeper, they’d have found the connection. But the paper trail ruled Trevor out, so instead they focused elsewhere. The harder part was tracking down where the fuck he took her.”
Movement from the corner of my eye catches my attention, and I look to see Jax pushing off the wall he was leaning against. I hadn’t even noticed him come in.
He sits down on the opposite end of the couch from Vin. “How’d you find her then?”
“Sheer fucking luck,” Vin admits, his eyes meeting mine and conveying that this could have ended very differently. “I sent a photo of Trevor to a contact who pulled all the traffic cam footage the night of the fire. We picked him up once. There’s only a handful of cameras around Riley’s house, so we lucked out that he happened to pass one of them that night.”
“That put him in the area, but didn’t tell us where he was going,” he goes on. “I had a buddy write some code to hack and search every fucking security system within fifty miles for images of Trevor or the vehicle he was in that night. Took for-fucking-ever, but we got a hit last week of the vehicle passing someone’s front door camera just over the border the morning after the fire.”
Goddamn. Jax and I have an incredible amount of tech at our disposal with some of the companies we’ve invested in, but apparently, so does Vin.
He crosses an ankle over his knee. “It was the only hit we got, so I started combing the area around that house. And let me tell you, those bum fucks out there in the mountains do not like to be bothered. Do you know how many times someone answered the door with a gun pointed at me?” Vin asks, an incredulous look on his face.
“That probably has less to do with not wanting to be bothered, and more with the fact that a scary motherfucker was pounding on their door,” Jax deadpans.
“Maybe,” Vin acquiesces. “Regardless, I finally found someone who told me about an abandoned house a few miles out that looked like it was being lived in again. Said he saw a car there and all the windows were suddenly closed up tight. Took a little drive out there and wouldn’t you know it, Trevor’s car was parked right there in the driveway.”
“Have you actually had eyes on him?” I ask.
“Once. He opened the front door to grab some groceries he had delivered a few days ago. I watched him for a week, and that was the only time I got a glimpse of him.” He leans forward, his face suddenly serious and a dark glint in his eye. “I thought about going in there myself to take him out, but figured you’d want to be there for Riley when we move in.”
Swallowing the lump forming in my throat, I nod.
Hold on baby, just a few more hours.
“What do you need from me?” Jax asks.
Vin looks between the two of us, considering his words carefully before finally saying to Jax, “We don’t know what kind of shape she’ll be in. Get together some emergency medical supplies, clothes, blankets, whatever you can think of, and we’ll load them into my truck. We’ll need you with her while we take care of Trevor.”
To me, he adds, “Our first priority when we get in is to subdue Trevor. We can’t help Riley if we’re looking over our shoulders, waiting for a bullet the entire time.” I nod, but he continues. “I’m serious, Emmett. If she’s in that house, she’s not going anywhere. I don’t give a fuck how you want to do it, but we handle him before searching for her.” He pauses, never breaking eye contact as he says, “I know you love her, but I won’t put my life at risk for you, your woman, or anyone else. If I tell you to do something, you fucking do it.”
My fists clench in front of me, but I rein in my rising temper. “Understood.”
Vin would sacrifice Riley, Jax, and myself to save his own skin if it ever came to that. He’s a heartless bastard with zero regard for anyone but himself. It’s why he’s so lethal.
Pisses me off to no end, but I guess I can’t blame the guy. I’m the one asking him to possibly step in the line of fire for the woman I love.
Rising from the couch, I head to my room. I need a minute to take in everything Vin said, to wrap my head around the fact that this is real, that he actually found her.
And Trevor is about to pay for every second of pain he’s ever caused her.
I take my time, focusing my mind on what I need to do as I change into dark jeans and a black shirt. I grab my gun from the nightstand, some extra ammo, and try to prepare myself for what we might find when we go into that house.
When I come back out to the kitchen, Jax is stacking supplies on the kitchen island, and Vin is casually inventorying his own guns and ammo.
“Think this will be enough?” he asks, not looking up from the spread.
A huff of air escapes my throat when I approach and survey the contents laid out on the counter. “We’re not storming fucking Normandy Beach. I’m sure it’s enough.”
“I just don’t know how good your aim is,” he says, his voice slightly elevated as he picks up a SIG Sauer.
Jax stifles a laugh before mumbling under his breath, “Never thought I’d see the day.”
Vin looks at me, the first goddamn smile I’ve ever seen on his face to accompany his terrible joke. Also, the first I’ve ever heard from him.
He slaps me on the back, shit-eating grin still in place. “If you need a quick lesson…”
Scoffing, I tell him, “Trust me, your lessons were never forgotten in the first place.”
When Jax and I first learned exactly what kind of business Gio was running, it had been Vin that gave us our first weapons and taught us how to shoot. And he was a fucking asshole the entire time, berating us to the point I was ready to use him as the target.
Nevertheless, we both became excellent marksmen, and Vin happily supplied our arsenal over the years.
“Good.” He digs in his pants pocket, pulling out his keys and sliding them down the counter to Jax. “Load that all up in the truck.” He glances at his watch. “We leave in an hour.”
When the front door closes behind Jax, Vin turns to me, his face deadly. “This goes down however you want it to go down.”
My brows draw together, and he elaborates. “Once we have Riley, if you want me to kill him, I will. But if you’d rather…”
“I’ll do it,” I say without hesitation.
A sinister look crosses his face, but he says nothing else, and instead starts packing the guns and ammo back into the duffel bag he brought in.
Vin’s a maniacal bastard. He’s tortured more people than I like to think about, and I have no doubt if I asked him, he’d do the same to Trevor.
But I want to do it. I need to do this. I won’t sleep unless I’m the one to end him.
I spend the next hour restless, my body on edge and wound up, as the clock ticks by at a painfully slow pace. Until finally, we’re piling into Vin’s truck and heading out of the city and to West Virginia.
To Riley.