Chapter 19
BASH
He took her to the Titan without speaking to me. Not that I expected him to ask permission, but now it feels like he deliberately staked his claim first and waved a flag for all to see as evidence that he was there first.
I hate myself for looking at it this way.
Remy Jones is not an object to be owned and paraded around the city like a prize.
But he should’ve told me. This relationship is complicated enough without the added pressure of going public before we’ve had a chance to figure it out. Instead, I had to find out from Kyle.
I down a brandy shot and rub the cold glass across my forehead. There’s probably a perfectly reasonable explanation, only I’m not aware of it yet.
Then I get a call from Terry that changes everything.
“Remy is missing.”
I don’t speak. The call ends, and I’m in the elevator heading down to my underground parking bay without any conscious effort on my behalf. Muscle memory kicks in. The car is waiting for me, engine idling. Outwardly, I’m calm.
Inwardly, I’m a seething fucking pile of poisonous snakes all fighting for victory.
They’re waiting for me in the Titan’s boardroom when I walk in.
Cash. Caleb. Kyle. Terry.
Mom isn’t present; thank fuck for small mercies.
“What happened?” The door hasn’t even closed behind me.
Terry stands up, providing a barrier between me and my twin. “Before you start throwing a few fucks into your brother, you’d better hear me out.”
“I’m listening.” It’s half true. I know he’s there, but my brain is already imagining how it will feel to pulverize my brother if we don’t find Remy in time.
We’ve been here before. We know how this works.
Our enemies find the chink in our armor.
They target said chink. Then they threaten to kill them unless we a) part with billions of bucks, b) hand over our successful family business, c) clear the fuck out of New York City and hand it over the lazy fucking cowards who think they can come along and steal it from us.
“There was a security breach. Our tech guys are still working to contain it, but meanwhile, we had to deal with the cops on the premises.”
I don’t look away. “Which part of this has anything to do with Remy going missing?”
I hear myself speaking from a distance like this is happening to someone else in an alternate universe. I wait for Terry’s response. When Emily was abducted in Ireland, he reacted in true Terry Keegan style by firing a bullet into her husband’s shoulder before finding out if he was involved.
Terry and I are nothing alike.
When I fire a bullet, it won’t be aimed at anyone’s shoulder.
“All of it.” Terry isn’t losing his shit. Yet. But that’s because he doesn’t know Remy. “They were here to arrest Cash. I had to get him involved.”
“For?”
Something he didn’t do. It wouldn’t be the first time my brother has been framed for crimes set up by our enemies. For some bizarre reason, they view Cash as the Murray with the biggest target on his back.
Terry raises his hands. That’s when I get the first inkling that this is worse than I thought.
“Attempted murder.”
“Sit down, Bash.” This comes from Caleb.
I sidestep around Terry and approach the table. “Do you know where Remy is?”
“No, but Cash—”
“I’ll sit down when I’ve found her. I’ll sit down and talk about my brother beating the crap out of some fuckwit when I know that she and our unborn babies are safe and well.”
Terry’s eyes flicker, but he keeps quiet. He would do the same for any one of us even though he isn’t our biological father.
Cash stands up next. “Isabella Leone is behind this.”
“No fucking shit, Sherlock.” The red is starting to cloud the cool mist inside my head preventing me from exploding until now. “Do we know where she is?”
His eyes slide back and forth between me and Terry before he speaks. “She’s right here in the Titan, eating dinner with her fiancé, and her parents.”
I shake my head, a joyless smile twisting my lips upward. “Well, if you don’t have the balls to do anything about it, I will.”
Terry places one hand on my chest, the other on the holster slung around his waist. “You will sit down and discuss this the way we always do. As a family.”
I don’t back down. “My brother brought her here without my knowledge, and now you want me to sit and listen to what he has to say.”
“That’s exactly what I want.”
“And if I don’t agree?”
“You’ll destroy any fucking chance we have of finding Remy before Ms. Leone makes her move.”
He’s right. Terry has been an enforcer practically all his adult life. No one knows more about how the mafia works than he does. But still…
“Sit.” I’ve only heard him use that tone on a couple of occasions, and the last time was when he threatened to kill Emily’s husband if he fucked up her rescue mission.
I take my seat at the table. Cash’s eyes meet mine, and my heart is sliced open with the tip of a knife when I’d thought that I could keep it together until this was over. He looks broken. Not beaten-up-and-bloody broken, but the kind of damage that only comes from within.
“I should’ve stayed with her, but this is my fucking casino.” Even his voice is sore, like he needs one of Mom’s honey and menthol shots. “She was in my fucking booth.”
I don’t offer him comfort. Remy first.
“Talk to me.”
Caleb takes over. Kyle hasn’t said a word yet. Eyes down, he’s typing on his tablet keypad, while still managing to give us a hundred percent of his attention.
“The cops arrived with a warrant for Cash’s arrest,” Caleb begins, “and video footage to back it up.”
I glance at Cash whose eyes are somewhere far away.
“Here, watch this.” Kyle turns the tablet around so that I can see the screen.
On it, I watch Cash enter a gym on W 54th Street.
Shortly after, a young woman exits the building, closely followed by several visitors clad in fitness gear.
Kyle leans across to fast forward the footage to Cash leaving the gym alone, head down, barely acknowledging the small group waiting to get back inside.
“Is that it?” I ask.
“There’s more.” Kyle gestures at the screen.
I watch paramedics arrive, blue lights flashing in the street and drawing a crowd of onlookers. Fast forward again, and the medics exit carrying a stretcher, the patient’s face covered with sterile dressings, a thermal blanket shielding his body from the gathered rubberneckers.
“He had it coming.” I sit back in my seat. I’m not entirely sure if they expect me to sympathize with the victim. I don’t.
“Agreed.” Cash sits forward. “Only I didn’t do that.” He slides the tablet towards him, the screen freeze-framed on the stretcher. “I’d fucking own it if I did. I’d hold my hands up and do my time because I know he had something to do with Remy’s disappearance.”
“So, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying I pulled him off the treadmill and threatened him to stay the fuck away from Remy, but I didn’t touch his face.”
Kyle reclaims the tablet, taps the screen, and passes it back to me.
Now, I’m looking at real-time camera footage from inside the Titan’s restaurant, Glamor.
I zoom in to the table directly in the camera’s viewpoint.
I already know what I’m going to find. George Quinn is seated beside his fiancée Isabella Leone.
Two other people are sitting across from them, but I’m only interested in his mashed-up face, the black eye, swollen cheekbone, the bruising covering one half of his face and the busted lip.
“You think he got someone else to do this so that he could frame you?”
“Potentially.”
It’s a long shot. From what we know of George Quinn he’s a grifter, a chancer who struck it lucky with his arranged marriage to the Leone heiress.
But grifters are not known for their courage, and having met the guy, I can’t imagine him shutting his eyes and keeping his mouth shut while someone beats him to a pulp.
“Is there an alternative scenario?” I address Kyle.
“I’m working on it.”
This doesn’t add up though. “Where was he when Remy disappeared?”
“With his fiancée in their loft apartment on the Upper West Side,” Terry says. “I’ve had guys on him twenty-four-seven.”
“When did they arrive?”
“About twenty minutes ago,” Cash says.
“When did Remy go missing?”
He inhales deeply. “It’s been over an hour.”
“Fuck! If you weren’t my brother—”
“You’d do to me what I should’ve done to George Quinn when I had the chance. I know.”
I face Terry. “Talk me through what happened. I want to know where the security team was when she disappeared. Then I want the name of every person in the building, starting with the staff.”
“We’re already one step ahead of you.”
Terry explains that while Cash was being interviewed by the police, and Kyle was calling in connections to keep our brother out of jail, a young woman was seen talking to Remy in Cash’s private booth.
“Who was she?” I ask. They’re all sitting around a boardroom table while our biggest lead is out there somewhere.
“We haven’t yet been able to locate her,” Terry says, “and the concierge has no recollection of greeting her in the foyer.”
“People don’t just vanish into thin air. Where was the rest of your team? Where was every other fucker on the mezzanine floor? The bartenders? The steward?”
Terry raises an eyebrow and I stop talking.
“Remy was seen leaving the booth shortly after the conversation took place,” he continues. “The bartender tried to stop her, but she didn’t listen. He said she looked upset.”
I stand up and start pacing. “Upset? What the fuck does that mean? Was she crying? Was she hurt?” My brain is hurtling through every worst-case scenario base without dropping the bat, and I’m afraid of what I’ll find at the finish line.
“We need to find this woman. Someone knows who she is. Someone is protecting her, and when I find out who they are…”
“Bash.” Terry jolts me back to reality. “You want to do my job now?”
“No. Sorry.”
He acknowledges my apology with a tilt of his head.