Chapter Twenty-Eight
Damion
I exit the elevator to find Blake and Joey waiting on me, but it’s Joey that has my attention—Joey, who will be by my side today. He’s a tall man with dark, wavy hair and intelligent, alert green eyes, but what stands out the most to me is the scar across his throat, thick and raised with time. Holy shit, someone sliced his throat, and he survived it.
“Where’s Adam?” I ask.
“Interrogating the man we captured last night,” Blake states.
“Kellan arrived,” I say, referencing the man they flew in for the job.
“About an hour ago,” he confirms.
Another flash of Alana being stabbed in the neck with a needle torments me, a grimace working its way across my face. “I want to be there when he talks to him.”
“Not happening,” Blake states. “We’re turning him over to the FBI when we’re done with him. You can’t be anywhere near him to be identified. Kellan’s sly, and no one likes looking into that man’s eyes. They don’t like what they see when they do. He knows how to make asshole’s talk. Trust me, Damion. I know that’s hard for you to hear right now, but I wasn’t wrong about Alana being in the building. I’m not wrong now.”
“The one smart thing your father does,” Joey interjects, “is he removes himself from his actions. Be that smart.”
Blake shakes his head. “Joey’s right, but it’s easier for your father, I know, because he cares about no one, where you love Alana deeply, and I get that. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but there was a time when I was in your same position.”
“You keep saying that, Blake. What the fuck does that even mean?”
He lifts his chin at Joey, and Joey backs away and saunters toward the front door.
“I was engaged to another ATF agent,” he explains. “I got made, and the kingpin involved killed her to punish me. I found her bleeding out, and I went insane.”
For a moment, one brutal moment, I imagine finding Alana in that concrete room covered in blood, and bile rises in my throat. “What did you do?”
“I went after him. I wanted him dead at all costs. That’s when my wife crossed paths with me, and eventually the cost of killing him meant losing her in the bloodiest of ways. She had every reason to want him dead, for her own deeply personal reasons, but she pulled me back to sanity. She’s why I’m not dead or behind bars right now.”
My hands settle under my jacket on my hips, my lips a thin line of bitterness. “If you’re worried about me crossing the line between sanity and insanity, Alana already checked me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want him ruined and crying like a baby in a corner.”
“Then you need to think cautiously about your next move. I don’t know your relationship dynamics with your father, but logic says he’ll expect you to come at him hard and fast. He’ll be ready.”
But he doesn’t expect me to kill him, I think yet again, or he wouldn’t have touched Alana. He’s not afraid of me, and that has to change.