Chapter 38
38
Valentine
M y eyes track Layne as she races through the store, still laughing at something Dante said. The door shuts, cutting off the sound of her laughter, but the effect of her happiness lingers. The look on my brother's face is evidence of that. But as soon as the door closes, Dante’s mood switches and he shuffles to stand in front of the entrance, blocking it in case anyone decides to venture inside. The dogs bookend either side of him, adding their own menace to the message.
I suspect we’re not the first Alphas, nor will we be the last, to block the entrance while our Omega is inside. The security system the shop has installed matches the needs of the clientele they draw. I know she’s fine because we all checked every inch of the place before we started shopping, but I still walk back to Dante. Just in case. Plus, I already know how trapped I’ll feel if I wait in the Escalade with Matteo.
“We should have bonded her,” I say, keeping my back to the street, so I can watch out for her inside the shop.
“No chance, Valentine. In our world, the ring on her finger and whose name she’s already taken is just as important, if not more. For sure, I want to scar her throat, but I am not stealing how special that day is from her. Fuck that.” Dante bites back hard, and fast.
I swipe a hand over my face; the urge to rush inside is getting harder to ignore the longer we wait. “I know you’re right.”
“I am. Tomorrow is nothing but an excuse to have everyone in one place, so they see they are a part of the leadership change as it happens, and any survivors get to witness Pack De Luca reclaiming our right. And, with Layne, we have the paperwork signed for her to be in our pack, she is written into our wills, and she co-owns everything with us. Layne is a De Luca in every way possible.” Dante goes on, not letting me speak. “When she tells us where she wants us to take her, so we can bond her, we will be flying to anywhere she chooses, scarring her throat, and giving her a hundred dirty memories of us fucking her sideways,” he reminds me, his conviction burning through my anxiety.
I look at him, and he’s already watching me.
It’s hard to explain how our connection works, but I need my brother. He’s the balance when I’m out of alignment, the guide when I can’t find answers. I wouldn’t be where I am if he wasn’t next to me.
“Now is not the time for you to…”
His words are drowned out by screeching tires and the sound of gunfire.
Despite a van racing toward us at incredible speed, everything in me slows down, giving me the chance to see and assess. From out of nowhere, a white van appears, its engine screaming as the van hurtles toward us. Two people sit in the front, firing at us.
Dante and I react instinctively, both of us standing shoulder to shoulder, firing into the windshield. The driver is dead before he’s finished driving from one side of the road to the other. When he slumps, the van careens straight into a light pole behind our Escalade.
Through the shattered windshield, I can see the passenger is hit and dying, but he’s still firing. Dante finishes him off with a shot that lands in the center of his forehead. There’s barely any time to reload before the side door of the van opens and another group streams out, all of them shooting already.
I don’t need to tell Dante to get to Layne, he’s already racing to the store. But before he can get inside, the emergency shields slam down over the doors and windows, trapping our wife inside and locking us out.
“Jesus!” Dante shouts.
“They said the back exit is the only way in and out in an emergency. Get there now!” I yell, reloading, getting ready to cover Dante as he sprints away.
Matteo is out of the car, a semi-automatic in his hand, and he’s taking care of the next wave of assailants, who all start shooting at my brother.
I run after him, giving him the cover to get away. And the dogs manage to avoid being hit while racing alongside him.
Once they disappear behind the corner, I shift focus. Matteo and I move from man to man until only one remains alive. He’s not able to move much, but we don’t need him walking. We just need answers.
Matteo reaches him before I do, and he carries him back into the van for our questioning.
“Who sent you?”
The man laughs before spitting at Matteo. And the sound of his laughter is so guttural, he gives his ethnicity away. In case we needed any other clues, when he starts threatening Matteo in broken English, his Russian accent becomes clear as day.
But that is all we needed to know.
Matteo silences him with a shot between the eyes.
We don’t say a word. Instead, we run side by side, hoping and praying the worst of it is over.
But, deep down, I know the worst is yet to come.
As soon as we race into the back alley, toward the exit door, Dante’s face says it all. His eyes are burning bright with his fury, and his breathing is exaggerated as he struggles to hold it together and not dissolve into an Alpha rage.
“She’s gone.” He yells at me.
“How the fuck did they know we were here?” I bark back at him. “Figure it out, Dante! At least give me something to work with.”
I don’t stop to check on him, I run inside to see for myself. Not even a dozen steps inside the shop, I can feel for myself that she’s not here.
Much like I feel my brother on a cellular level, the vacuum caused by her being taken is as obvious.
While the staff are all in shock, a couple of them being treated for their injuries, I feel like I’m in an alternate universe, one that has a gaping hole a mile wide in it.
Pushing the door to the bathroom open, I’m nearly sidelined by her residual terror. Layne’s caramel scent, still distinguishable under the chemicals, is saturated with her stress. It’s hard to focus on anything other than her fear, but I have to if I want to find her.
The faucet is running. Strangely, my ears don’t pick up on the sound, the thumping of my rage drowning almost all sound out. It’s the movement I pick up on. Once I see it, I start to notice more of the scene.
One of her shoes is near the door of the stall, and I track the scene back to the counter and the sink. And there, I find more evidence of her fighting off her attacker. Smudged handprints where she tried to hold on to the sink, clumps of hair on the floor where she would have been standing.
Leaving the bathroom, I walk back through the store, now picking up on another smeared handprint on the wall, where she tried to grab on to a doorframe, and a couple of steps later, her gun pokes out from under a display rack. The back door hangs at an angle, the small scorch marks from a detonation device on either side of it showing they came prepared.
They wanted my wife.
But they also knew where to find her.
Matteo and Dante are both on their phones, calling in our people.
I dig my own phone out of my pocket. Instead of talking, I log on to the secure app Ronin, Santiago, and I use for Trinity business. I hit the emergency button, and while I wait for them to both get online, so I can explain the situation, I squat in front of Edward and Bella, who are looking bereft at the loss of our girl.
“I got a screenshot from one of the cameras. We’re looking for a blue Honda van. I’m just waiting for the image to make out the model,” Matteo says, the phone still in his hand.
Dante passes behind me, going in search of the staff. “I’ve called an ambulance. Only one person is seriously injured, another has cuts, and the rest of the staff are shaken up. The Alpha was lucky he got pistol whipped and not shot in the face.”
“I care. I really do. But right now I need answers on how they found us.”
I trail after Dante and find the Alpha sitting on his ass, stars still in his eyes. The shop assistant is fussing over him, and by her stress, I’d say they’re pack.
Dante squats in front of the Alpha, and the man talks almost immediately.
“We were running toward the front, to open the doors to let you back in. The junior shop assistant hit the emergency button, dropping the shields. Please, don’t hurt her, she is hysterical knowing she unintentionally had a big part in stopping you from getting to your wife. The man who took Mrs. De Luca had another person in the van.”
“Did you get a look at him?”
“Yeah,” he confirms, nodding his head. “He didn’t hide his features at all. Dark blond hair, styled short but not shaved. Thin lips and round nose, but he had a trimmed beard and moustache, and he had gray eyes. Same color as a shark. He wore dark-colored clothes that looked tactical. He was fucking huge. And only spoke in Russian.”
“Let the girl know we don’t hold her responsible, and make sure you send any medical bills our way. If you have any images of him or have any details, please message my phone. You have the number on the booking.”
I stand up, and he tries to follow me to standing, but his knees give out, and when the woman looking after him goes to argue, he whispers quickly, reassuring her. I leave them; there is nothing more they can do, and I’d put money on them not being involved in Layne being taken. Obviously, if we find out they were, I will return.
“Something isn’t adding up,” I mumble, but my focus shifts to a message sitting in my inbox from Santiago. It’s abrupt and along the lines of he’s got a whole lot of drama he’s dealing with on his end, and he’ll be in touch. He includes a hurried congratulatory message regarding my recent marriage, but then he gets cryptic, or nostalgic, tossing the very crux of our alliance back at Ronin and me— We formed Trinity for a reason. Trust in that or die fighting for it.
“Valentine, are you good? Are you listening?” Dante snaps after I obviously missed something.
“Give me a second,” I answer while also replying to Santiago. My message back is not as cryptic as his, just an agreement from my end that I am still committed to our cause.
Ronin hasn’t seen either message yet. We tend to keep communication to a minimum, in case the wrong people crack into our messaging app. Our secure server is a different setup, and we’ve made it impossible to log on to unless you use a laptop or a desktop. On that server, we share detailed information that would implicate or get us killed by our own family. Leaving Trinity issues for later, I log off and get back to the conversation Dante is having with Matteo just in time to see Dante following her trackers.
“Shit,” Matteo whispers, when one of the flashing spots on the map stops moving.
“It’s the ring. We knew that would happen.” Dante’s calm response is exactly what I needed to hear.
What I didn’t expect was for the spots on the screen to start moving in opposite directions.
“What the fuck?” I bark, but before I can get a locator on the dot moving back toward the city, it blinks off the screen.
Dante chuckles, and it's dark, rippling with violence. “Whoever has our wife’s engagement ring probably thinks dropping the tracker in water or soda is going to short it out. But we got the latest ones. The tracker will shut off, but as soon as they take it out of the liquid, and once it dries, the tracker will reactivate. Modern technology for the win.” He winks.
And I now get a better understanding of his laugh, because once we have Layne and everything else is resolved, I will be destroying whoever has that ring.
“Talking of trackers, it appears we picked up one between leaving the house and getting to the Omega store. I swept our vehicle earlier this morning and we were clean, but it seems we were being watched. Anyone could have walked past us when we were stopped at traffic lights, or they could have dropped the tracker on our car a hundred different ways. Since they knew where we were, and we spent a lot of time in the Omega store, it gave the people who took our wife plenty of fucking time to action the rest of their plan.” Dante is methodical and clinical, as he talks us through what he thinks happens. And it makes sense unfortunately. It’s how we would have done it if we were after someone.
None of us need to say it won’t happen again, and we’ll be extra vigilant in the future. That’s a given. We also don’t need to talk about the long, violent and painful end coming to those involved in our wife’s abduction because that too is inevitable.
A new message flashes on Dante’s phone, and we all read the text from Legos, confirming what the tracker is already telling us—the van is heading to the airport. And it seems baseless to even say out loud the destination of the people who took my wife will be the side of the airport that the smaller, private jets use, but I mutter it. “Private charter section.”
“Correct. And we might have to drive through a few obstacles, but I can get us there before the plane takes off,” Matteo says confidently. “Get Legos and Leon to meet us, and get someone to bring extra weapons.”