25. Drake
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
There was no death gruesome enough for the fuckers who took Helen.
Not even my own if I failed to get her back, because if she didn’t return to safety, there was no life worth living for me.
William Graham might have called my feelings a weakness, but there was nothing fragile about the wild-eyed frenzy rushing through my insides.
I felt like a god of war, ready to rage and tear the world apart for his goddess of brilliance and beauty.
Montgomery reinforcements reached her house first, having been alerted to the attack by Banjo before his untimely death. Charlotte Montgomery was a force to be reckoned with as she swept onto the property minutes after I pulled Gizmo into the house.
“Where is my daughter?” Her eyes were sharp, if only to hide the depths of concern swarming in the deep blues. Antoine burst through the door on her heels, speaking rapid French, likely echoing his wife’s sentiment.
Gizmo, propped against the wall in the entryway, wheezed. He lifted a hand, catching Charlotte’s attention from me. The man had several broken ribs and a bullet wound on his thigh. I’d been in the process of questioning him before the screeching of tires down the street forced me into action.
“Taken,” I answered.
“How the fuck did you let this happen?” she hissed at me. Her heel clicked loudly on the floor when she stepped toward me. Antoine caught her elbow, reeling her in. Her anchor in the storm.
Rising to my feet, I tried to brush off the guilt. Part of me agreed with her. I should have been there with Helen. If I had been at her side where I belonged, this wouldn’t have happened. Before my thoughts spiraled any deeper, any darker, I shook myself internally.
“I was at a quarterly conference for William.”
“You should have been here!” Charlotte’s poised fa?ade cracked as she screamed at me. I flinched back, but remained in place, ready to take the beating if need be. Each tear spilling from her eyes punched me in the gut.
“Yes,” I agreed.
Antoine rubbed a hand up and down her back, whispering softly in her ears. Charlotte sniffed once, the only outward sign she was pulling herself together. She didn’t brush her tears away as she faced me again.
“What do we know?”
“I was about to question Gizmo. He’s the only survivor.
” I scrubbed a hand over my face. The erratic thump of my heart begged me to skip all of this, to leap straight out the door and rush for Helen wherever she was.
Panicking would only get me so far. I couldn’t focus on finding her if I was wild-eyed and losing control.
“Who was on duty?” Charlotte asked him. In all my time with Helen, I’d never heard her two personal guards speak a single word. I wasn’t expecting the deep, reverberating baritone that escaped the man.
“Me, Banjo, and five others from the security team.” He swallowed thickly. A heavy sweat covered his brow, and he struggled to breathe through the pain in his chest.
“Who took her?” I blurted. My heart pounded in the back of my throat, threatening to choke me. A haunting chorus of where is she, where is she, where is she rattled the confines of my skull.
Gizmo looked at me then. Something akin to pity and regret in his eyes made my chest squeeze my lungs. Things took an unfortunate turn with his next words. “The groomsman from the wedding. The red-haired fella.”
Charlotte gasped, covering her mouth with a dainty hand. Antoine gripped her shoulders, pulling his wife against his chest both to soothe and cage her.
Nothing whatsoever could have prepared me for the onslaught that crashed over me. In a split second of time, I floated adrift in a sea of agony, rage, and betrayal. Each feeling bowled over me in a wave powerful enough to drown me from within.
A sound frighteningly similar to a growl breached my chest. “What. Happened?”
Gizmo told us through ragged breaths and wheezed stutters.
He took an almost clinical, practical tone while running through the events and for that, I was grateful.
Anything else, any show of emotion and my already destabilized reserve might have crumbled apart.
The guard explained that fucking Douglas Miller, of all people, had shown up at the house, stating he had news about me.
No one had any reason to doubt him, and the fox wormed his way into the henhouse with such a simple lie just because of who he was to me.
The guards outside thought nothing of it at first. Not until the crashing and screaming inside started.
Following that, masked men had crawled out of Dougie’s car like some fucking Trojan Horse bullshit.
With Helen overpowered and the security team decimated, Douglas walked right out of the house with my wife.
I couldn’t even crack a smile when Gizmo explained that the blood on walls was from what Helen did to Douglas.
She’d fought back hard, and that flicker of pride in my chest girded my resolve.
The thought of that being her blood had rattled something usually unshakable within me.
I had assassinated rivals in foreign countries, thwarted attacks on my family, survived an explosion, jumped out of airplanes, yet Helen being taken was the worst thing that had ever happened in my life.
During his pragmatic rundown of events, Julian had answered my hurried text about an emergency. With him en route to her house, I knew Graham forces would shortly follow. If it truly was Douglas, one of our own, who had taken my wife, then we needed all the resources we could get.
Gizmo provided the passwords to the security footage for the few cameras around the house before he was carted away for medical assistance.
Montgomery cleaners arrived to systematically and efficiently handle the bodies in the yard.
Charlotte called Arthur to let him know his sister’s fate, not that anything would come of telling the useless fuck.
Antoine approaching me amid the chaos almost caught me off guard. He joined me where I stood on the front porch, overseeing the cleaners in white swarming the property under a pitch-black sky. The man shoved his hands in his pockets, silent and appraising.
“You are ze best at what you do,” he said without looking up. We resolutely continued watching the workers as if we weren’t conversing at all. “I didn’t want to trust my daughter to your family, but I see ze way you look at her.”
I swallowed thickly over the painful lump in my chest.
“You are a killer, most would say. Ze Dragon of New York.” I felt the pressure of his gaze even from the corner of his eyes. “But she was taken by your friend.”
Turning to face him, I poured all my animosity and determination into that stare. “If I’m the dragon, she is my treasure. Nothing and no one gets to take her from me. It doesn’t matter who took her. It could have been my own father, and I’d still kill him to get Helen back.”
Antoine’s brow arched with mild surprise as he assessed me.
Pleased with whatever he saw, the man nodded.
He clapped a hand on my shoulder, a gesture of confidence and good will.
“Zen I trust you to do what is necessary to get my little girl back. Because if you do not find her and bring her home safe, there will be war.”
My father-in-law walked off to join his wife, overseeing the cleaners and arriving security reinforcements.
I mulled over his words, noting that he hadn’t fully trusted me with Helen in the first place.
It seemed now that others were realizing how much I adored her, not that I tried hiding it once we reunited.
But if I never got the chance to tell her, I’d burn the entire world to ash.
Antoine was right that there would be war if Helen wasn’t recovered.
He meant between our families, sure, but I’d set myself loose on everyone who ever hurt my wife, including myself.
The winds of war were brewing around us even now.
A confrontation hovered on the horizon where I’d carry every ounce of hostility and savagery within me to the forefront.
The brunt of betrayal from one I considered as close as a brother only stressed the discord in my blood, in my bones.
Several times in the following half hour, I turned over the confrontation with Douglas. Brick by brick pieces slammed into me, uncovering hints I had been blind to all along. What a fool I was, and the shame of it laid siege to my foundation.
Douglas mentioned what had happened to his father and that stood out to me as the seed of his vendetta. Then that night where he had shot the bastard I was questioning for intel. He played the part of a simpleton, to our detriment.
“Tell me it isn’t true.” Julian’s arrival snapped me out of my spiraling thoughts. “Douglas wouldn’t—” he cut himself off when he saw the resolute confirmation in my stony stare. “Fuck.”
“Is William coming?” I asked while pulling Julian into the entryway where two cleaners were collecting evidence and sweeping up the glass from the broken vase.
“Yes. He’s pissed that Helen was taken.”
“Only because he sees her as an asset,” I gritted out.
“True, and I’m sorry.” He placed a hand on my shoulder and for the first time in the hour since I’d come to Helen being captured, I relaxed a fraction of the tension in my shoulders. “I can’t believe Dougie would do this, that it was him all along.”
“I didn’t think he was smart enough.”
“You know, me either.” His chuckle morphed into a sigh. “We’ll get her back, Drake. I promise.”
“I waited as long as I could for your arrival, Julian, but I refuse to sit back and wait another minute while my wife is out there. I don’t even know if she’s still al—” the word choked me, and I stuttered on a sound resembling a gasping sob.
“Hey, she’ll be alright. Helen is tough, she’s so tough.” Julian blew out a breath. “And she’s a lot fucking smarter than we are. God, honestly, it would have been easier if Douglas had kidnapped you. She would have found your dumb ass by now.”