Chapter 29 Maverick
Maverick
“What do you mean she’s gone?”
My voice hits the mirrored ceiling of the Wynn’s side lounge and comes back meaner. The lighting glows honey-soft over velvet and brass; the air conditioner hums like it’s been paid not to snitch. Atticus doesn’t flinch. He swirls soda over ice like he’s rehearsing a lie detector.
Storm leans back in his chair, forearms ridged with veins, that same line in his jaw he gets when he’s trying not to put a knife into feelings.
“Where’s the fucking tracker?” I demand, too loud for a Monday and not sorry. “Didn’t Conrad have her injected? Why the fuck can’t we just ping her like an iPhone?”
Atticus doesn’t look up. “Because your best friend is a paranoid control freak who kept the keys in his pocket,” he says, too calm. “The implant reports to a private endpoint I don’t have. He hardcoded the cipher offline. I can’t brute-force a frequency I don’t know exists.”
“English.”
“Only Conrad can pull her dot up on a map,” he says. “And Conrad isn’t answering our calls.”
I tip my glass and kill what’s left. Whiskey burns prettier in here. It doesn’t help. I slide the tumbler toward the middle of the round table like it’s an offering and immediately wish I had another. The lounge soaks up sound; beyond the gold lattice, the casino floor hums—a big animal breathing.
“We checked her trailer,” Storm says, reading my next thought before I finish having it. “Nothing. Place was cold.”
“Spencer’s with her,” Atticus adds. “Plus two of our new security. If she’s with him, she’s as safe as she can be without us.”
“Doesn’t change shit,” I growl. “Safe isn’t here. Safe isn’t with us.”
I rake my hands through my hair and shove back from the table, chair legs scuffing the carpet. Out past the lacework of the lounge partition, two of our guys hold the line by the lobby—Cal and Herrera. I jerk my chin at them, then at a third and fourth posted farther out.
“Look at this,” I say with a sweep of my arm, words riding the alcohol. “She’s got half our security in love with her to the point they followed her, and the rest won’t tell us where the fuck she is.”
Cal pretends not to hear. Smart man. These operators don’t have to pretend; they’re ghosts when they want to be.
A cocktail waitress glides up with a tray—honey-colored hair, quick mouth, eyes too knowing—and for a split second my heart stops because I think it’s Phoenix. It’s not. The smile is wrong. The eyes don’t cut the same way. I still lose half a beat to the punch.
She leans in. “Refills?”
“I can’t be here,” I tell the air. Then, to my brothers, “I keep seeing her. Everywhere. It’s like she’s right fucking here.”
Atticus meets the waitress’s look with a soft apology and covers my glass with his palm. “We’re good, thank you.” She floats off, hips gentle like a lullaby, and I hate the whole world for the half-second of hope she delivered.
Storm’s mouth tightens. “You’re not wrong,” he says. “Every corner, she’s there.”
Atticus finally looks up. “That’s not just you. This place wears her like a second skin.”
I put both hands flat on the table and press until the meat in my palms complains. “Fuck that noise,” I say, low. “Let’s go get our bitch of a brother and make him man up about his feelings for his supposed sister.”
Storm’s brows go up. Atticus tilts his head. I shrug, drunk on love and fury, not whiskey. “It’s not like she’s my sister,” I add, because spite helps me breathe. “And it’s not like they were raised together. Fuck this. She’s ours. Who gives a fuck what that stupid test says?”
Storm raises a finger. “Actually, about that—”
I keep going, reckless. “So they don’t have kids. That’s the main thing—”
“Maverick, God-Jesus—” Storm groans. “It’s not as simple as that. We can’t just V.C. Andrews this thing. But anyway—”
“We need to make Conrad come to his senses, or there’s no way to get her back,” Atticus cuts in, crisp now that the choice has a door to walk through.
“Good,” I say, shoving my chair back and standing. “Then what are we still doing sitting here?”
Storm is already rising, shaking his head. “Let’s go.”
We cut out of the lounge into the casino’s pulse.
The floor’s a river of light and regret; I push through it like I’ve got right of way.
At the doors, I throw a look back at Cal and point two fingers at my eyes and then toward the lobby—watch, and keep watching.
He nods once. The operators don’t nod. They adjust by half-steps in a way that still reads like disappearing.
The elevator drops us into Atticus’s office hall, then out the service corridor to the garage. My head is a hive; anger, fear, the kind of stupid hope that dresses like confidence and smells like gasoline. The car growls awake, and I peel us out into the heat.
On the way, I can’t keep my mouth shut. “We went to her trailer like idiots,” I mutter. “We looked under the bed like the monster was gonna be polite about it.”
“She’s with my dad,” Storm says. “We know this.”
“She shouldn’t have had to leave in the first place,” I fire back. “We should’ve put our bodies between her and the test and let the paper hit us first.”
Storm spins his knife. “We can’t fix yesterday. We can only decide what to do with it when we get to him. What we are.”
“I know what we are,” I say. “We’re the guys who don’t let her do this without us.”
Savannah opens up, hot and bright and full of opinion. Atticus calls three times but Conrad doesn’t pick up. He texts once with no answer. My temples hammer in sync with the lights.
“We’re taking him out of his cave,” I say. “Even if I have to go in there and drag him by his perfect collar and smash my fist into his face.”
Storm snorts. “You don’t want to break his door.”
“I want to break his face.”
“You don’t,” Atticus says lightly. “You want to fix it so he doesn’t break himself.”
He’s right and I hate it.
We stop first at the townhouse. Empty. Blinds down. The kind of tidy that means the man inside is either sleeping, dead, or gone. He’s gone.
“Gym,” Storm says, and I don’t argue because there are only a handful of places you can put a certain kind of rage where it doesn’t bounce back and kill you.
We find him in the old boxing gym that used to take our sweat when we were kids without words for any of this. The door’s rolled up halfway, and the bag’s already swinging. Conrad’s knuckles are taped and raw. He’s not looking at us because he doesn’t have to to know it’s us.
“Check your phone, asshole,” Atticus says by way of hello.
“Later,” Conrad answers without turning.
“Not later,” I snap. “Now.”
He turns then, and it ruins me a little because his eyes are too clear—the kind of clear that comes after your body makes a decision your mind hasn’t caught up to. “You want to fight me?” he asks, easy.
“I want your phone,” I say. “Everything else we can do after.”
“Fuck you,” he says, and taps the bag with two fingers like the leather owes him an apology. “I’m trying here.”
“By meditating on whether or not you can kill a bag?” I wave at it. “By ignoring your phone? By leaving her with a sentence and an empty bed?”
He peels the tape off his right hand like he’s unwrapping a bad idea.
“I told her because I won’t touch her again with that lie between us.
Then I left before I said something I couldn’t take back.
I took a walk. I hit a bag because I’d already put a bullet in my old man, and I’m not hurting anyone else.
I answered the part of me that wanted to burn the city instead of the one that wants me to destroy the world. ”
Storm’s voice is a quieter knife. “You’re not going to jail. We’ll make sure of that.”
“He came to me,” Conrad says. “He confessed things he should never have said out loud.”
Atticus doesn’t waste time judging. “Give me the tracker endpoint,” he says. “Please.”
Conrad unlocks his phone and tosses it to him. “Folder named Providence. Passcode is the date we got Phoenix off the boat.”
Atticus’s mouth quirks despite himself. Of course that’s the pass. He plugs in, patches, mutters code at a god who actually answers him sometimes.
I step closer to Conrad and take a better look. He’s steady. Sober. Held together with barbed wire and posture, but I can see the pain there.
“We’re going to get her,” I say, simpler now. “And when we do, you don’t run again. Nobody gives a fuck what test results say. You belong to her, and she belongs to all of us.”
He wants to argue. He doesn’t. He nods once.
Atticus exhales. “Damn it, Conrad. Your phone is shutting down to install a required update. So now, we have to fucking wait for ten goddamn minutes.”
“Fuck this.” Storm mutters. “I’m going to sit in the office. At least that has a couch. Guys, I’ve been trying to tell you something for the past hour if you want to follow me.”
We follow him into the other room, and I watch as he opens the fridge and pulls out a bottle of mineral water like it will absolve him. “You want the good news or the shitty news?” he asks, voice rough. He takes a swallow, winces. “Full disclosure, there’s not a lot of ‘good’ in either pile.”
Conrad’s mouth flattens. “What are you talking about?”
He’s deliberately not saying her name. I hear the work it costs him. A muscle jumps in his cheek and goes still.
“The lab called me at three,” Storm says, sliding my phone out. “We had the DNA retested. Full panels for everyone, just to be extra cautious. Different lab. We put the chain of custody under Spencer’s initials, so no opportunities for anyone to play god.”
Conrad’s eyes come to mine. That’s good. Focus is good. Rage I can work with. Fog wastes time.
He swipes to the reports, not because I need it to know what I’m going to say, but because men like us do better when there’s a screen to anchor the blow.
“First,” he says, “Maverick is definitely a Locke. No one is stealing that jawline from his father.”
“Blessed and cursed,” Maverick says, managing a tired grin.