32. BONES
32
BONES
I take a drive to the cemetery. I’m not sure why I thought coming here would be a good idea. I’ve not even made it past the gates. I'm sitting in my car, staring at them like they hold all the answers.
All I want is to go back home. To make Wynter want me again. But I don’t know how. An apology isn’t enough. Tying her up and fucking her until she loves me again doesn’t feel right either. I’m lost in the unknown. Untethered from the world now that my anchor has gone.
My phone rings and I snatch it up, answering it without checking the caller ID.
“Wynter.”
“Sorry, dude,” Dean says. “You lose your girl or something? You sound stressed.”
Knowing that it's not her, I slouch back into my seat and hang my arm out of the window. “It’s complicated. What do you want?” I don’t mean to be short with him, but it’s been one hell of a fucking day.
“Just checking in after the funeral.” I asked Dean not to come, he knew it wasn’t a veiled invite to a pity party and respected my wishes. To be honest, I didn’t expect him to check in at all.
“It was a funeral. How do you think it went?”
“I’ve never actually been to one. Maybe I’ll crash one, see what they’re like. Hold on a sec—Willow! Little kitten!” I hear her answer in the background. “Want to go to a funeral with me?”
“Has someone died?” she gasps.
“No. Just thought it might be fun.”
“Didn’t Bones bury his dad today? Are you on the phone with him! Dean!”
“Shit sorry, man. Didn’t mean to offend you,” he says to me.
“It’s no sweat. I’m used to your dumbass mouth.” Talking to him has actually made me feel slightly less morose.
“Oh, I forgot to say. Kai couldn’t get hold of you so he messaged me, told me you should check your spam.”
“Check my fucking spam? I’m not waiting for a newsletter.”
“He encrypts his messages with all sorts of shit so sometimes they get sent to spam.”
The guy really needs a better system.
“That sounds dumber than you,” I mumble.
“He’s just a kid. You know he likes to mess around with shit like that.”
“Right. I’ll look now. Thanks for checking in. Does this mean Wynter and Willow will get to meet soon?”
As soon as the words leave my mouth my heart drops. For a moment I’d forgotten what happened between us.
“I’ll think about it,” Dean grumbles before hanging up.
I’ve got nothing better to do so I open my emails on my phone. There might be something we missed about Dmitri that Kai was able to find out. Lo and behold amongst all the porn and dick enhancement spam is an email that is just code in the subject heading.
There’s a load of attachments with it. None of them make any sense to me. Medical records from Switzerland. Nothing about Dmitri.
Something doesn’t sit right. Why would he send me the wrong files?
I decide to call him.
“You finally opened it,” Kai says as he answers.
“I don’t know what it is. Why are you sending me medical records when I asked you to tell me who put the hit out on Abato?”
“I’m hardly going to spell it out in bold for anyone to see now, am I? The info in those documents is enough for you to go off. Like I said before it’s real soap opera shit.” I'm still not sure what he's talking about.
“Well, it doesn’t matter now anyway. Dmitri Volkov’s dead."
My face is throbbing and I need some pain relief so I put the call on speaker and toss the device onto the passenger seat.
“Who’s Dmitri Volkov?” Kai asks while I’m deep in the glovebox trying to find some medication.
I pause for a second before saying, “He put the hit out on Tommaso Abato.”
“No, he didn’t. His wife did.”
I'm not sure if I've heard him right. Daniella ? She’s been putting on one hell of a show if it was her.
“You’ve gotta be wrong,” I say, abandoning my search for painkillers and snatching the phone back up.
Kai makes a noise like I’ve offended him. “I’m never wrong with this. Don’t expect me to do you any more favors if you’re going to disrespect my work like that. I’m looking at it right now. Jax’s files took me a while to find and I had to clean up a load of crap before I could find everything he deleted. Nothing was labeled properly so I had to—”
“Get on with it already,” I snap.
“Alright, alright. Turns out Daniella isn’t as stable as she wants people to think she is. She spent a few years in an institution in Switzerland when she lost her baby forty-odd years ago. She snapped and kidnapped her sister's kid, thinking it was her own baby. They had her locked up and forced a load of pills and therapy on her. It all got filed away by her husband. He paid a lot of money to keep it out of the public eye.”
“But why would she want him dead?”
“That I can’t tell you. It’s not like she left a diary entry when she put the hit out. It was all done online and she used a fake name, but I traced the money back to her account.”
Something still doesn’t feel right about the whole thing. Dmitri never actually confessed to putting the contract out. I just fucking assumed he did. Shit. I remember Daniella at the office. How I rubbed the lie in her face that Wynter was pregnant.
“Fuck.” Instinct tells me to get the tracking app up.
“What’s wrong?” Kai asks.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I scream as I see Wynter’s location.
I can’t breathe, can’t fucking see anything.
“What’s happened?”
A sudden sense of calm washes over me and my anger disappears as quickly as it came. This I’m good at. I can break the entire world apart to get her back.
“Daniella Abato has my girl," I say calmly.
“How do you know?”
Looking back at the app, I see Wynter’s location on the Abato estate hasn’t changed. “I put a tracker in her,” I say smugly. It might be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
“Ah, smart move. Just so you know, Daniella was taking a pharmacy load of drugs, but stopped about a year back.”
So she’s highly fucking unstable. Unfortunately for her, my little viper is one hell of a force to be reckoned with. And so am I. I'm going to break every single bone in the old hags body when I get my hands on her. Then Wynter will want me again. I'll show her how she still needs the violence. How she still needs me.