Chapter 33 Hawk
HAWK
Vinnie is crouched in front of the main screen, rewinding the footage from his exterior cameras frame by frame. He’s made sure everything has been running clean since Belinda was taken. If a leaf moves wrong on this property, he’ll know about it.
He clicks again, and the screen jumps to life.
Daniela.
She moves quietly and heads around back to enter her suite. Then she disappears into the house.
“Christ,” I mutter, stepping closer to the monitor.
“Wait,” Vinnie says, holding up a hand.
We fast-forward fifteen minutes. The feed flickers back on. Daniela reappears, coming down the front steps. She’s holding a garment bag and something small, looped over her hand—looks like a belt—and another object wrapped in white tissue paper. The shape is narrow, oblong. My stomach twists.
“What the hell is that?” I ask.
Vinnie zooms in, but the footage pixelates too much to make out any detail. “No idea. She took it from her suite.”
“She didn’t leave anything?” I ask. “A note, a clue, anything we can work with?” I drum my fingers against the desk.
“If she doesn’t want to be followed,” Vinnie says, “then no. She wouldn’t.”
I drag my hand through my hair, hard enough that it stings my scalp. He’s right, of course. Daniela is too smart for any of that.
She thinks Belinda’s life is in danger. That if Gordon Brown even gets a whiff of a sting operation, that he’ll kill that little girl right then and there. Dani loves Belinda so much—like a mother loves her own daughter—and she wouldn’t leave anything to chance. No breadcrumbs for us to follow.
She’s given herself up, plain and simple. A life for a life.
And it’s like a fucking dagger is twisting through my heart.
I hate this. I hate the waiting. I hate not knowing where she is or what she’s walking into.
Vinnie rewinds the feed again. “She was steady,” he mutters. “No hesitation. She knew exactly what she was doing.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s what scares me.”
He exhales through his nose. “She’s probably made contact by now. We wait for the Chef’s next move.”
I turn to him, disbelief curdling in my chest. “You seriously expect me to just sit here?”
“Yeah,” he says flatly. “I do. Because if she went to him, it’s under his rules. If we rush in, he’ll know. And if he knows, Belinda’s dead before we even get there. Dani too.”
I hate that he’s right. And I hate how calm he is, how he’s able to deal with this rationally. Of course, he’s used to crime. He was brought up in it.
So was Daniela, and I know she would agree with him on all of this.
She doesn’t want to be found. She doesn’t want anything to happen that would put Belinda’s life in danger.
I hate that the only thing worse than doing nothing is doing the wrong thing too soon.
I pace the room. The walls feel too close, the air too still.
In an ideal world, these bastards would already be locked up. Every man who ever hurt a woman, every man who ever thought pain was power, would never get to make another move. They’d never get to breathe another free breath.
But this isn’t an ideal world. I’ve known that ever since that fateful day in my father’s office.
Beneath a polished exterior, tiny termites gnaw at the world’s foundation. They do their dirty business while the rest of us look the other way, pretending it isn’t happening. Right and wrong are relative concepts from their vantage point, and everything is viewed in shades of gray.
And I fucking hate it. I hate having to live in a world like that.
But I don’t have any other choice. The only thing I can control is what I do when an injustice faces me. Regulate my emotions, handle the situation as best as I can. Do the maximum possible amount of good.
Right now, all I care about is getting Daniela home safely. I can work on the planet’s other cruelties once I have that squared away.
Vinnie leaves the office to refill his mug. I sit down at his desk and stare at the piles of papers scattered across it. Printouts, screenshots, scrawled notes in his messy handwriting.
Half of it looks like research on the chef’s international culinary associations, travel itineraries, personnel lists from the Agudelo estate.
I move without thinking, riffling through one of the folders.
I shouldn’t. But I can’t just sit here while the world keeps turning and Dani’s out there alone.
A ripped sheet from a yellow legal pad catches my eye.
Jacinto Agudelo, oldest child of Jacinto Sr. and Luisa Agudelo. Married to Rosa Agudelo, née de Costa, deceased.
Brothers, Carlos (deceased) and Jesus Agudelo. Sister Juanita Guzman, née Agudelo. Married to Paco Guzman.
Half-brother, Franco Agudelo, Jacinto Sr.’s son with children’s nanny, Manuelita Sanchez.
Franco Agudelo aka Francisco Sanchez aka—
I gulp.
Aka Gordon Brown.
For a second, I can’t breathe. I just stare at it.
The paper rustles in my hands, and for the first time in a long time, I feel sick. A real, deep sickness that starts in my gut and climbs up my throat.
Her uncle. Half-uncle, but still an uncle. Still related by blood.
The man who raped her. The man who made her crawl and beg and bleed. He was family.
Family.
I don’t even hear Vinnie come back in until his voice cuts through the air behind me. “I see you’ve found my notes.”
I spin around, holding the sheet. “Is this true?” My voice cracks around the words. “Tell me this is some sick joke her father cooked up to mess with her. Tell me you made a mistake.”
Vinnie doesn’t answer right away. He takes a slow sip of coffee, sets the mug down, and walks over. His eyes are bloodshot, dark shadows under them. When he finally meets my gaze, the look on his face tells me everything.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “It’s true.”
I stare at him. “You’ve known?”
“I wasn’t sure until last night.” He rubs at his forehead. “I needed to confirm it before I told you anything.”
My voice turns sharp. “And you didn’t think maybe Dani had the right to know? That she might want to be told the man who helped to destroy her life shares her blood?”
Vinnie’s jaw tightens. “You think she’d want that? You think it would help her now?”
“She deserves the truth.”
He exhales, long and low. “Maybe. But sometimes the truth doesn’t save people. It just breaks them faster.”
I press my palms to my face, trying to push down the fury boiling in my chest. “Jesus Christ, Vinnie. Her uncle.”
He nods. “Makes a twisted kind of sense, doesn’t it? He would’ve had access to her. To the house. To Jacinto’s empire. No one would’ve questioned him. He probably cooked for the bastards who paid to hurt her.”
The words make my stomach turn. “So that’s it,” I say hoarsely. “It’s all in the family.”
“Yeah.” Vinnie’s voice is quiet. “Rot runs deep in that one. And that’s coming from me, a man whose family has skeletons in the closet that you can’t even imagine.”
I sink into the chair, staring at the notes without really seeing them anymore. I feel the walls closing in again, the whole picture shifting into something darker. It’s never just one evil man. It’s always a chain of them, each one passing the sickness down like some kind of perverted inheritance.
And Daniela’s out there right now, facing him.
Her uncle. And she doesn’t even know he’s her uncle.
The rage that rises in me is cold and clean this time—no shouting, no pacing, just an iron weight settling in my chest.
I look up at Vinnie. “You still think we should wait?”
His mouth opens, then closes. He looks away. “Yes,” he says finally, though his voice wavers. “Until Belinda’s safe. After that…we go.”
I nod slowly, even though every nerve in my body screams to move. To act.
Because if Daniela is with him, and he lays one hand on her—uncle or not—I’ll burn the world down to embers.