Chapter 9
Chapter
Nine
GRACE
Sinclair fell apart faster than I expected.
The moment he realized I wasn’t bluffing—that I wasn’t trembling or panicking or begging—his whole being seemed to liquefy with terror.
He folded into himself, shoulders curling, breath hitching in frantic little gasps that sounded almost childlike. Sweat slicked his face. Tears and snot smeared together. He looked like a man unraveling one thread at a time, helpless to stop his own disintegration.
And still I felt… nothing.
Not satisfaction. Not triumph. Not relief.
Just cold, steady purpose.
Behind him, Voodoo checked the second shock collar AB was pulling together.
It was a job Legend usually did, but Legend was handling this side of things.
AB was a miracle worker and a menace in equal measure, he’d barely blinked when Voodoo told him to prep another unit.
He’d just nodded, rummaged, and started fiddling with wires like he was assembling a toy instead of a torture device.
Legend swung the rope again.
The sound it made cutting the air always came a second before the thud. Always just long enough to let Sinclair anticipate the pain.
He screamed. Or tried to. It came out broken.
Legend didn’t look at me, but he didn’t have to. I felt him beside me—solid, grounded, radiating this strange mix of fury on my behalf and discipline I hadn’t known he possessed. He wasn’t doing this because he enjoyed it.
He was doing it because I wanted answers.
And he trusted me to decide when we stopped.
Another swing. Another impact I didn’t need to see.
Sinclair sobbed harder, his whole body buckling in the chair, his bare skin blotching red and white with shock. His feet kicked uselessly against the floor. The zip-ties around his ankles held.
Voodoo snapped the fully charged collar in place around Sinclair’s throat, the click sharp enough that Sinclair jerked like he’d been hit again.
“No,” he sobbed, voice shredded. “No, no, please, please—”
Legend lifted the rope again.
Sinclair broke.
“It’s—” he gasped, coughing on the words, “it’s not one group—please—stop—”
Legend didn’t lower the rope.
He waited.
We all waited.
Sinclair’s chest heaved. His eyes squeezed shut in agony or shame—I wasn’t sure which.
“It’s a cabal,” he spat, the word choking him. “South America. Not— not just one cartel.”
Voodoo’s expression sharpened. Bones went still as stone. AB laser focused.
Sinclair swallowed hard, shaking violently. “Three. Three cartels. They hired me—independently. Not supposed to pool resources. Product. People.” He gagged, swallowed again. “But it’s how I made my best money—by combining shipments. Higher value. Less oversight. Bigger cut.”
Each word dropped like another stone in the pit of my stomach.
A cabal. Not a single monster. A hydra—with more heads than we could count.
“Your sister—” Sinclair wheezed, “—she was going to ruin everything. She wouldn’t stop digging. Goddamn idealist, but she was going to make my life hell. The deeper she went, she got too close. I had to make her stop, make it go away. Or they would have erased me.”
A coldness crept through my chest, but this one wasn’t the controlled, purposeful kind.
This one hurt.
Legend stepped closer to me, not touching, not speaking—just there. A shadow at my side, an anchor I didn’t know I needed.
I kept my voice steady. Steadier than the rest of me. “Who did you call?”
Sinclair shook his head violently, as far as the collar allowed. “I don’t know their names. I never meet them. I only— only pass along the instructions. Cash. Coordinates. Pickup times. I swear to God, Grace, I don’t know their identities. Except…”
Legend’s fist clenched around the rope. Bones muttered something that sounded like a promise of murder. Voodoo’s jaw locked.
I didn’t flinch.
“Except?” I prodded him.
But inside—inside I felt something sharp and old and familiar tear open.
Tears and sweat seemed to drip off his face as he hung there then he raised his gaze to mine. “She is called Infanta. It’s not her name, I know that much. It’s just her code, a way for me to know it’s her. She—found out about my operation.”
“And used it to blackmail you?” That seemed to fit everything else we’d been dealing with.
“Yes, I would just tell her what was coming or what was ordered. It was all happening anyway.” He tried to shrug it off like it didn’t matter, but he couldn’t stop his grimace or the way his muscles jerked and danced.
“So I got paid twice. They didn’t know about the European connection, and if there was ever an issue with payment, I could just shift the cargo to a different cartel. ”
“How nice for you.” Thankfully, he didn’t act like I was serious. I wasn’t sure if I could deal with that.
“She paid for information, sometimes for me to slip other things in. I didn’t have to acquire it. I was always just the broker, the money manager, that was it.” Defeat hung around him. Not enough.
Nowhere near enough.
“So you contacted this Infanta?” Bones asked, his cold tone a snap that landed another blow on Sinclair.
Sinclair looked at him then at me, misery in his eyes. “Yes.”
“What did you tell her?” I wanted the words. “And is she still alive?”
“I don’t know about the second,” he said and his eyes went wide. “I really don’t know. She disappeared. One day she was there, the next she was gone. We took care of any questions at the office and then let it go. It was so much easier than I thought it would be.”
The son of a bitch had the audacity to sound amazed by the simplicity of it all. He made my sister disappear and he was impressed by how easy it was.
I hated him so much.
“So no, I don’t know. I assume she went out with one of our shipments. We had three that week.”
Three.
That week.
Three shipments. Three cartels. A cabal moving human lives around like cargo and this whimpering disgrace of a man who traded those lives like they were just numbers on a board.
And Amorette had stumbled into their spotlight. Her grit and determination had put her into this man’s crosshairs and he turned that spotlight onto her to stop her. He couldn’t even fight his own battles cause my sister would have kicked his ass.
But no, she hadn’t stood a chance.
But I wasn’t letting that be the end of her story. Not when I had the truth in front of me. Not when Sinclair still had more to give.
I stepped closer.
“We’re not done,” I told him.
The way Sinclair whimpered at those three simple words gave me no joy.
“How did you contact her?” I asked. “Infanta.” The name scraped out of my throat like broken glass. “How did you reach her?”
Sinclair jolted, shaking his head before the words even formed. “I—I didn’t! Not directly. It was always different—different phones, different couriers, burner emails, coded drops—never the same twice. They didn’t trust anyone to have a pattern.”
“Remember,” I said.
His panic spiked, eyes rolling white. “I can’t—I’m telling you, I can’t—there were too many—”
“Every single one,” I told him. “Start listing them.”
Before he could wheeze out another plea, a sharp buzz broke through the room.
Ignacio convulsed in his chair, strangled on a curse as both shock collars fired. The jolt ripped through him hard enough that his heels scraped against the floor.
I didn’t look away from Sinclair, but I saw it in the corner of my eye—Voodoo lowering the remote, face unreadable.
“Don’t move,” he told Ignacio, voice almost bored. “It would be better for you not to draw our attention.”
Ignacio froze, panting shallowly, sweat running in rivulets down his temple.
Sinclair watched the whole thing. Watched Ignacio thrash. Watched him go limp against the restraints. And Sinclair started to sweat harder—thick beads rolling down his face like he was melting from the inside out.
Legend stepped forward, rope still dangling from his hand, and nodded once at AB.
“Go,” Legend said.
AB didn’t need more. He launched into questioning like a surgeon dissecting a corpse—precise, merciless.
“What method first?” AB asked. “Earliest point of contact. How did they recruit you?”
“I wasn’t—I didn’t— they approached my firm, not me personally—”
“Bullshit,” Legend snapped. “You just admitted you were already working with them when Grace’s sister started digging.”
Sinclair flinched. “I—fine—fine—there was a drop box in Miami. At first. Cash-in, instructions-out. Happy?”
“Next,” AB demanded. “Phones. Codes. Names. Every intermediary. Every hotel. Every flight. No skipping.”
They tore him apart. Piece by piece. Contradiction by contradiction.
Sinclair answered too fast sometimes—too defensive other times. Legend called him out, AB dissected every excuse, Voodoo watched for lies like weighing each answer as if he needed to test it for veracity. Maybe he was.
Bones left them to it, he’d moved to stand with me and when he slid an arm around me and rested a hand on my hip, I leaned back into him.
The shaking was still there, inside my skin.
I shivered and trembled below the ice. Like a rock, steady and true, Bones stayed with me.
He didn’t take over or redirect. If anything, he seemed to be waiting for a word whether it was from the guys or from me, I wasn’t sure.
But it wasn’t until Legend asked, “When was the last time you heard from them?” that something in Sinclair shifted.
“A month ago,” he whispered. “Before… before everything with my wife.”
The mention of her hit me like a gut punch. His wife.
His wife who’d disappeared, leaving bloody sheets and a story no one believed.
Legend’s eyes narrowed. AB paused mid-scroll.
Sinclair hugged himself, chest shaking. “They said— they said she’d gotten too curious. That she’d asked questions about my travel schedule. My clients. My—my files. They said she needed to be removed for her own good.”
He said it like he expected sympathy. Like he was the one who’d been wronged.
And suddenly something ugly and sharp twisted through me.
How many people had he sacrificed? How many lives had he fed into this machine because it was easier for him? More profitable?
And if he’d let them erase his wife—
The realization hit me like the floor dropped out beneath my feet.
“Wait,” I said, the word cracking through the room.
All four men froze.
I straightened, leaving the shelter of Bones’ embrace to move closer to Sinclair. Everything inside me just burned. We’d thought they took his wife to punish him, but it sounded more like they were cleaning up his mess.
“Was Amorette the first time you asked them to clean up something for you?”
Sinclair didn’t hesitate. Didn’t even think. “No.”
The instant the word left his mouth, he knew—he knew—he’d damned himself.
Because all that earlier shock, all the surprise, all the denial. Lies. He’d done this before. More than once. My nails bit into my palms.
Legend’s rope went taut in his hand. Bones lifted his chin slowly. Voodoo’s eyes went cold enough to frost steel. So, it didn’t surprise me that he’d lied.
“I am so tired of being lied to,” I said, and blew out a breath as I turned away from Sinclair, away from Ignacio, away from all of it.
Bones was right there, his gray eyes fierce as he met my gaze. I saw the question right there, what did I want? How could they fix this for me? They all wanted to do it. It was there in Voodoo’s questioning, in Legend collecting Sinclair and torturing him, in AB tearing it all apart.
“Can you handle getting the rest of what they know out of them?”
I was just tired. So tired.
Soft fingers cupping my chin. “Don’t leave the house?” It was a quiet request from Bones. I nodded once.
“Just going up to sit with Goblin.” We’d made him stay upstairs for all of this. He’d let us know if a threat was coming, and he also didn’t need to be down here in this mess.
“You want one of us with you?” The fact he even asked made me smile.
I wanted all of them with me, but… “I need a few,” I admitted. I needed to get the smell of burnt hair out of my nose, the memory of groping fingers, and the filthy lies perpetuated by Sinclair.
A soft stroke of his fingers down my cheek.
“Alphabet will come up as soon as we have the last data point.” It was a decision and Bones was making it.
I’d handed the control back to him and he picked up the baton easily.
He brushed a kiss to my lips, soft like a butterfly's wings branding itself to my soul.
“Sounds like a plan. If you need me…”
He nodded, not dismissing my offer in the slightest. One by one, I passed the guys, a brush of my fingers to Voodoo’s arm, a pat of Legend’s ass—that earned me a swift grin—and a squeeze of AB’s hand.
Mouthing, “I’ll be there in a few,” AB returned my grip, and then I headed up the stairs.
“Wait!” A shock cry came from Ignacio and another from Sinclair. My leaving seemed to have jolted something in them. Maybe they realized that without me there, the guys would not keep anything resembling gloves on. They’d been holding back, letting me make the decisions.
As I stepped out of the basement and into the light, their shrieks followed me before the door closed and cut them off.
Goblin glanced up from where he waited, tail thumping and I went straight over to sink on the floor next to him.
When he wiggled into my arms, I hugged him, careful not to squeeze too tight.
“We’re going to find her,” I whispered against him. “We have to.”
We hadn’t come this far to lose now.