Chapter 31 Hawk
HAWK
I wake to sunlight slicing across the bed
Mmm. Dani…
I turn, reach for her.
And then I jerk upward.
Dani.
She’s gone.
“Baby?” I rise and walk to the bathroom.
She’s not there.
I walk around the house, stark naked, my pulse pounding. Where the hell is she? I head back to the bedroom to put some clothes on so I can go outside.
That’s when I see it.
The note. I grab it and sit down on the bed.
The handwriting is small, hurried. Three lines. The ink is smeared where a tear fell.
God. Her tears break me.
Don’t worry about me.
I will be fine.
I meant it when I said I love you.
The room tilts. My pulse stutters. I fold the note into my fist until the paper creases. I don’t read it again. I don’t need to. Those three sentences are burned into my brain for life.
God, what have you done, Dani?
I grab my phone and call her. The line goes straight to voicemail.
I try a text.
No dots.
My hands jitter as if I’ve been holding a rattlesnake, and I dial Vinnie before I can think better of it.
He answers on the second ring. “Yeah? Where’s Dani? She’s with you, right?” His voice is hurried.
“No,” I say frantically. “I mean, she was. We were together last night. We fell asleep…” I stop to inhale, inhale, inhale…
“Stop it,” he says. “You’re hyperventilating.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” I try to calm myself. Right. Like that’s possible.
“Check your security feeds,” Vinnie says. “I’ll check mine.”
I nod, knowing full well he can’t see me.
“Okay.”
“In a minute,” Vinnie says. “Slow the hell down. Sit down. Don’t drive anywhere yet.” He inhales. “Fuck. She wouldn’t have…”
“Wouldn’t have what?” I demand. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“She promised she wouldn’t go…”
“Go where?” I clamp my hands into fists. “Go where, Vinnie?”
“I don’t know.” He gulps audibly. “Yesterday we found another message on Belinda’s computer. It said, ‘If you want your starter back, give me dessert.’”
I close my eyes. The words fall into place so quickly my head reels. Starter means Belinda. Dessert means Dani. It’s clear as fucking day. My throat goes dry. “No,” I say. “That can’t be right. She wouldn’t…”
Vinnie sighs. “She would. She’d do anything for Belinda. Damn it!” I hear his fist crack through something. “I told her. No trades. No fucking trades!”
Silence on the phone. Until—
“We have to stay calm,” Vinnie says. “Otherwise we’ll be no good to her.”
My mouth is dry. I picture Dani, the way she looked at me last night as if I was her world, the way she curled into me and said she loved me. I imagine that same woman walking into a trap. My hands close into fists until the knuckles whiten.
“Where is she?” I ask again, and now the demand swallows the fear.
“Check your footage,” he says again. “I’ll check ours. Get over here. This will be command central. I’ve got access to the dark web. Download everything you’ve got and get over here. Now.”
I end the call without saying goodbye and race, still naked, into my office where I fire up my system and check all the security footage, beginning at midnight last night.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Then—
Out the front door around three a.m.
My Dani.
My sweet Daniela.
She walks west, toward the dirt road until she disappears from view.
My heart nearly stops.
“Why, Dani? Why?” I slam my fists down on the keyboard. “We would have protected you. We would have gotten Belinda back and protected you too. I swear it!”
My voice doesn’t sound like my own. It’s fraught with fear and anguish.
And it hits me.
I’ve never been this scared in my life.
Not when my father shot me. Not when he killed Ted.
Not in the barn eight years ago when Eagle shot Diego Vega.
Not when I thought Eagle OD’d because of my negligence.
And not when I woke up in Reyes’s house tied to a fucking chair.
Never.
Because the thing I fear the most in my life is losing the woman who’s come to mean so much to me. The woman I love.
Daniela Agudelo.
I download the footage and send it to Vinnie. Then I throw on my jeans, shirt, and boots, lurch out of the house, grab my keys, climb into my truck, hands on the wheel so tight they ache.
“I will not lose her,” I say out loud. “I will not.”
* * *
When I arrive at Vinnie’s, Raven is in tears and Vinnie’s camped out in his office, typing on his keyboard like a maniac.
“Anything?” I ask.
He shakes his head slowly, his eyelids twitching.
“She came home last night after she left your place. She must have had her gate clicker in her purse because I didn’t get a security call.
A rideshare dropped her off, and she came in through her private entrance out back. Then she took her Mustang.”
“Don’t you have a tracker on her car?” I ask.
He looks at me, dumbfounded. “No. She deserves her privacy, Hawk.” Then he drags his hands through his hair. “Though now… Damn it. I wish I’d done it. I thought about it. Especially after…” He shakes his head.
“Fuck you!” I yell. “You should have done it. You should have—”
“Stop it, Hawk,” Raven says through her tears. “Just stop it. Vinnie and I… We’ve been trying to live a normal life. We were trying to give Daniela and Belinda a normal life. We…” She breaks down into sobs.
Vinnie rises from his desk, walks to her, and takes her into his arms, kissing the top of her head where her hair is now growing in nicely. “Easy, baby. We’ll find her. We’ll find them both.”
I inhale. “I’m sorry, Ray. I’m sorry.”
Vinnie meets my gaze over Raven’s head. “It’s okay. We’re all on edge. But we have to keep our heads if we’re going to get through this.”
I simply nod.
Vinnie kisses Raven again. “You okay?”
She sniffles. “I won’t be okay until Dani and Belinda are safely back at home.”
“I know, baby.” Vinnie releases her and returns to his system. “I’m going to do my damnedest to get them both home where they belong.”
“There must have been something in that pink envelope,” Raven says through sniffles. “She wouldn’t let me see the note. Said it was disgusting. I should have pushed harder. I should have grabbed it out of her hand.”
“Don’t,” Vinnie says. “This isn’t on any one of us. It’s on Gordon Brown and only Gordon Brown.”
Raven sniffles again, blows her nose harshly into a tissue, and then touches my arm. “Let’s sit,” she says.
We take two chairs in front of Vinnie’s desk.
Vinnie’s breath catches. “I’ve got her phone signal. She moved her phone to airplane mode but I got a last-known location about three hours ago. It’s several hours out of town. I’m pulling it up right now.”
“Wherever it is, I’m going.” I grab the arms of my chair. “I’m going after her.”
“No,” Vinnie says. “You listen to me. You do exactly what I tell you.”
Rage surges through me “I don’t take orders from—”
“You do here.” The finality in Vinnie’s voice is absolute.
“Because I’ve done the things you haven’t had to do.
I’ve killed, Hawk. I’ve paid debts with blood.
I know how men like this operate. Sometimes they keep their word because it’s in their interest to.
Sometimes they don’t. If we go in hot and wrong, we might lose both.
Dani went alone to protect Belinda. That’s the best-case scenario we can imagine.
If we rush in guns blazing, if we show force, we might push this man to do something horrible.
We might get both of them killed.” He breathes out.
“So you stay. You wait. You let me move.”
I laugh, a sound that scares me. “No. You don’t get to tell me to wait while she—” The sentence breaks.
I’m not a kid crying. I’m not that twelve-year-old boy in my father’s office watching a friend get executed.
I’m a man with a gun and a brain. I don’t wait. I fix. I move. That’s what I do.
“You don’t get it.” Vinnie’s voice goes soft.
“You’re not the only one who loves her, Hawk.
We do too. We won’t—” He swallows. “We won’t throw her life away.
I know what I’m doing. I’m on the lead. I can try to preserve both of them without doing something stupid.
I need you right here. I need you to be stable. I need you to be useful.”
“You’re asking me to hand you my heart on a string,” I say.
“Yeah,” he answers. “But I’m not cutting it off. I’m holding it for you.”
I think about Dani’s note again.
Don’t worry about me. I will be fine. I meant it when I said I love you.
Of course she loved me. Of course she would risk everything for that little girl. She is that woman. She’s brave. Broken but brave. Everyone knows the strongest are the ones who’ve been the most broken. Broken bones knit back together and become stronger.
That’s my Daniela.
I want to smash something until it’s dust. I want to drive until my tires melt. I want to set the world on fire.
Vinnie continues. “The last ping is out by Old Mill Road, past the river, in the old county. There’s an access road. It’s two hours if you drive like the devil’s chasing you. But Hawk, there’s a catch. The chef knows we can track her, so it might be a red herring.”
My jaw tightens. “So we wait for him to make a call? For him to reveal his hand?”
“We listen,” Vinnie says. “He wants Daniela, not Belinda. This isn’t a ransom situation. We have to watch. If you go, you’ll do something you’ll regret.”
“You’re asking me to trust you,” I say finally.
“You trust me with Raven,” he says without hesitation. “Aren’t we family?”
Family.
Daniela is my family now too.
Memory claws at my ribs—Dani’s laugh last night, the way she curled into me and fell asleep. The image of her writing those three lines and walking away. The knowledge of what she’s willing to give up for that little girl tightens in my chest.
I leave the office and pace the kitchen island like a man on death row.
I want to go. I want to burn the world down and rebuild it only if she’s in it.
But Vinnie’s voice echoes in my head.
I know how men like this operate. Sometimes they keep their word because it’s in their interest to. Sometimes they don’t. If we go in hot and wrong, we might lose both.
That is not an option.