40. Ares
Ares
Ican’t fucking sleep. Haven’t slept. The fatigue feels tight beneath my skin, threatening to snap if anyone so much as breathes wrong in my presence.
My security control room is dark except for the wash of monitors. Camera feeds, traffic cams, airport manifests, satellite overlays make up every digital eye I turned upside down to find one woman since she boarded a commercial flight she thought I couldn’t track.
Daria stands at my right, nerves humming off her, like she should have suspected Lourdes would run and put more controls in place.
We’ve been here since yesterday, when I watched in horrifying clarity on the largest screen, Lourdes stepping through O’Hare Airport with her chin lifted. Her eyes were pinched behind the shades as she occasionally glanced nervously around, looking for signs that she’d been caught.
I’d sent Wrath to Chicago alone on my jet late yesterday, instructing him to keep his distance, to shadow her without being seen, but to intervene if even the wrong set of eyes became a threat.
“Status of her phone?” I asked Daria yesterday.
“Turned off.”
“When?”
“I can’t give you an exact time.”
“Activity?” I knew exactly where she was, but I wanted to know if she had called anyone during this very tense time for her. Who could she have confided in and not me?
“No calls out.” Daria’s fingers stilled on the screen.
“What?” I asked when she went silent.
“There was one incoming call,” she said. “Unknown number. She didn’t answer it. No voicemail. It called her twice.”
“Trace it,” I barked, even though I knew she probably had.
“I tried.” The stress in her voice turned her around. “It’s masked, Ares. It was routed through a Chicago exchange.”
“Bratva.”
“Perhaps she contacted them. I suspect she’ll go to a storage facility,” Daria said. “Somewhere her father stashed documents.”
I had agreed because it made sense. She must have been going to Chicago to find out what her father had on the Bratva.
That’s what I believed. And I allowed Daria to talk me into letting her go, if it meant Lourdes would find information we could possibly use against the Volkovs. Even though it killed me.
However, when her taxi stopped at a state-run psychiatric facility, the room went still. Daria and I looked at each other, and in that brief exchange, we were both shocked to get it all wrong.
“Run the patient list there,” I murmured.
“It’s a home for adults with disabilities,” she said, swiping at her tablet.
“Jesus fucking Christ, is her father not dead?” My mind rearranged the board with ruthless speed to consider what that twist meant.
Perhaps he staged his murder, and Lourdes is meeting him in the one place no one would think to look.
Daria typed fast, her fingers moving with clinical precision. “No De la Vega listed in residency or employment,” she said, eyes flicking to me. “Not current. Not historical.”
I watched as Lourdes walked through the front doors at that facility as if she’d been there before. For a brief moment, she paused, her hand hovering over her throat, and even through pixels and compression, I recognized the tremor she tried to swallow.
“Deeper,” I ordered through clenched teeth. “Aliases. Cash transfers. Guardianship records. Give me a profile on every resident admitted in the last ten years.”
That brings us to now.
Daria’s team is drilling into databases. “New camera feeds are live,” she announces.
In the span of three phone calls, hallway footage from this place is now streaming into my command center. We didn’t have this access yesterday.
It’s morning, and I watch Lourdes once again enter that building with a softness and ease that I’ve never seen in her.
She should not be there alone. Not in a city where the Bratva may have killed her father. Every instinct in me howls to yell at Wrath to pull her out, to put her on a jet back to New York with him. Back to me.
“She’s too exposed.” I drag a hand down my face, forcing breath into lungs that seem to have forgotten their function.
“She’s protected,” Daria counters with reassurance to keep me from detonating. “Wrath is in position to intercept.”
At the facility, Lourdes steps inside a small room where a young woman sits by a window, her hair…is the same champagne blonde as my Lourdes. It catches the light like a pale halo. The camera angle shifts, and I see the way Lourdes gathers the girl into her arms.
My throat tightens.
“She’s not looking for documents,” I say softly. “Link facial recognition to the facility’s database. Who is that woman?”
“Five minutes,” Daria answers.
Two minutes later, her screen fills with a name that means nothing to me at first.
“Jessica Parker,” she reads. “Admitted four years ago, transferred from a private hospital. Traumatic brain injury. Retrograde amnesia. That’s total memory loss, by the way. Long-term placement. No guardian. Ward of the state.”
Traumatic brain injury. Amnesia. Four years ago.
Parker. Not De la Vega.
On the monitor, Lourdes whispers something, and the smile is something I recognize. The way siblings smile at each other. The way I vaguely remember how Alexander smiled at me.
“She didn’t run to escape me,” I say, the admission a weight off my soul. “She ran to protect someone.”
A sister…
That should change nothing. But it changes everything.
“I told myself I could marry her and keep my heart out of it,” I whisper.
Daria finally looks up at me. “How’s that working out for you?”
I don’t look away from the screen, because if I do, she’ll see in my eyes how I’m crumbling.
“It’s not,” I answer slowly, feeling the truth harden in my veins.
“What happened, Ares?”
“I fell for her,” I say simply, undeniably and irreversibly.
My eyes sting, seeing Lourdes brush the girl’s hair into a soft braid at the back of her head that she twists into a beautiful bun. After that they eat pastries.
The room stays silent. Daria looks to be recalibrating the parameters of a mission that has just acquired a heartbeat.
“Have Wrath maintain a strict perimeter,” I say, already walking away from the monitors. “Continue pulling everything on Jessica Parker. I want medical reports, attending physicians, anyone who so much as signed a form.”
“Where are you going?” Daria asks, though I think she already knows.
I pause at the doorway of the control room, the hum of servers and screens at my back.
“Whatever she’s doing there, I’m not letting her do it alone,” I reply.
“Ares, I need you here.”
Ignoring Daria, I pull out my phone and issue the order that I should have issued yesterday. “Ready my jet.”