Chapter 24 Shelby
Shelby
“That can’t be right.”
The words leave my mouth before I’ve finished processing them, before the logical part of my brain has caught up with what my gut has always known. My brothers exchange a look, but I’m already reaching for my phone, pulling up Serena’s number.
It rings once. Twice. Goes to voicemail.
“Something must’ve happened to her.”
Dave leans back in the seat beside me, Nikolai’s folder now clutched in his hands. “Shelby, the message was pretty clear. Maybe she just needs space.”
“Space?” I almost laugh at the absurdity.
“Forty-eight hours ago, we were in Brazil planning our real wedding. She told me she was falling in love with me. She said she’d never leave.
And now a text message says she’s done exactly that?
She dumps me in a text? No. That’s not Serena.
” I shake my head. “Believe me, if she has something to tell me, she’ll do it to my face. ”
Tommy catches my eye in the rearview mirror. The twin bond between us means he doesn’t need me to explain further. He’s already pulling over, easing the SUV to the curb on Atlantic Avenue.
“What do you need?” he asks, shifting into park.
“I need to call Mrs. Patterson.” My housekeeper has been with the Boyle family for twenty years.
She’s been managing my house since I moved out of Dad’s place.
And she runs a tight ship. Fuck, I had drill instructors in boot camp who were softer than her.
“She would know what’s going on with Serena. ”
I scroll down to her contact, push call, and put it on speaker. No point wasting time retelling the conversation to the others in Dave’s SUV.
The older woman picks up on the second ring. “Mr. Boyle. Is everything all right?”
“Mrs. Patterson, did you see my wife leave this morning?”
A pause filled only by the soft clink of dishes in the background. “Yes, sir. Around eleven. She said she was going to Copley Place for some shoe shopping. Seemed in good spirits. Actually, she was humming,” she comments. Her familiar Dubliner lilt comforts me even as fear claws at my chest.
Humming. My heart aches. I knew something was off about that text message! The Serena I know, the one who was planning our future mere hours ago, wouldn’t leave like that.
“Did she take the town car?”
“Yes, sir. She wanted to drive herself, but I wouldn’t allow that. She took the armored sedan, and Marcus drove her, of course.”
“Marcus is with her.” Relief flickers through me, but it’s quickly extinguished by dread. Marcus is ex-military, trained for precisely this kind of protection detail. If something went wrong, he’d have reached out.
Unless he couldn’t.
Glancing about me, I read the same worry on the men’s expressions.
Fuck!
“Thank you, Mrs. Patterson.”
I end the call and immediately dial Ray Flanagan. He picks up before the first ring finishes.
“Shelby.” His voice is all business, which tells me he already knows something’s wrong.
“What do you know about Serena’s movements today?”
Ray, the head of our security, runs our West Coast operations from San Francisco, but his reach extends across the country.
When I married Serena, I put protocols in place.
Surveillance. CCTV monitoring. Drone coverage, whenever needed.
A security team is always within five minutes of her location, ready to move at a moment’s notice.
Serena doesn’t know about any of it.
Tommy’s voice cuts through my thoughts. “She’ll kill you when she finds out you’ve been tracking her.”
“Good thing I have, wouldn’t you say?”
Nobody argues with that.
Ray’s silence stretches for a beat too long, straining my already scattered thoughts. When he speaks, his voice is grim. “There was an incident. About half an hour ago. Her car was ambushed near the South End.”
The blood in my veins turns to ice.
“What kind of ambush?” I growl.
“T-bone collision on Pembroke Street in the South End. Two SUVs boxed her in. Our team was monitoring via traffic cameras, but by the time they got there—” He breaks off.
“Ray.” My voice is steel wrapped in barely controlled fury. “What happened to my wife?”
“They took her, Shelby. Black SUVs, no plates. Professional job. Our guys arrived maybe ninety seconds after the grab, but they were already gone. We have drone footage of the vehicles heading toward the Mass Pike, then we lost them in the tunnel system.”
My hands are steady. They have to be even if I’m not. Even if my mind is running multiple hellish scenarios. Even if my heart is shattering so hard I can barely breathe.
“And Marcus?” I manage to ask, after swallowing hard a couple of times.
“He took a round to the shoulder, where the new vest doesn’t cover.
The other three to his center mass didn’t leave a scratch.
Maeve’s a fucking genius.” He’s talking about the nanotech fabric Tommy’s wife has developed.
“The collision triggered the airbags and knocked him down. He never saw Serena being taken away.” Ray pauses.
“My team extracted him. He’s with Doctor Martinez now.
Stable, but he’s gonna be out of commission for a couple of days. ”
Tommy holds my stare in the mirror as the engine idles and Boston traffic flows around us. Dave and Nikolai are watching me with expressions that range from concern to grim understanding.
“The text message,” I say slowly. “The one from Serena saying she was leaving me. It came in a few minutes ago, not long after the ambush.”
“Which means whoever took her has her phone,” Ray confirms. “They wanted you to think she left voluntarily. Buy themselves time.”
Giovanni Motherfucker DiLorenzo.
The name surfaces in my mind like a shark in dark water. The folder Nikolai put together, full of evidence linking Serena’s father to the trafficking operation. The confirmation that the man who helped found the Syndicate has been breaking our code for a decade. And now this.
“Giovanni knows we’re onto him. He knows Serena has been helping us gather evidence against him,” I mutter through gritted teeth.
“So, he took his own daughter.” Tommy’s rage rings in the tense air inside the car.
“Track everything, Ray,” I order. “Every traffic camera, every toll booth, every satellite image you can get your hands on. I want to know where those vehicles went. And I want it yesterday.”
“Already on it.” Ray’s voice is tight with the same fury burning in my gut. “I’ve got every resource we have pivoting to this. We’ll find her. I’ll brief you guys in thirty.”
I end the call and meet Dave’s eyes. My older brother has gone completely still, the way he does when he’s processing tactical information, when he’s shifting from concerned family member to Syndicate leader.
“How does Giovanni know about the investigations?” he asks.
“He’s many things, but not stupid.” Nikolai’s pale eyes are cold.
“And he’s been operating in the shadows of the Syndicate, the Camorra, and God knows who else for too long.
He certainly has connections everywhere, higher-ups backing him.
It’s a short leap from that to learning about Serena’s involvement in our investigation. This is damage control.”
“This is a declaration of war,” Tommy corrects, his hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. “He took a Boyle’s wife. He hurt one of our men, clearly intending to kill him. Whatever alliance the DiLorenzos had with this family is over.”
I hear them through the static of my fractured mind.
My focus is somewhere else entirely. Back in a Russian warehouse, watching a bullet find a little girl before my hands could reach her.
Back in Syria, feeling Abeera’s fingers slip from my grasp as the secondary explosion buried her.
Back to every moment in my life when I failed to protect someone who mattered.
I knew this would happen.
The thought slithers through my consciousness like poison.
Every fear I’ve carried since that Syrian building collapse, every nightmare that’s haunted me for ten years, every reason I built walls around my heart to begin with.
They all come flooding back, tumbling down on top of one another like fucking debris dragged by the surge.
This is why I don’t let people in. This is why caring is a liability.
I told myself I was protecting Serena by keeping my distance. By maintaining the facade of a fake marriage. By refusing to let her see how much she was starting to mean to me.
But then Brazil happened. The beach and the ocean and the stars and the promises we made to each other in the dark. I let my guard down. I let myself believe that I deserved something real. Something worth fighting for.
And now she’s been taken under my watch.
The self-fulfilling prophecy comes to pass with devastating accuracy. I knew better than to believe in possibilities. I knew that everyone I care about ends up hurt or dead.
Abeera’s hand reaching through rubble.
Children in a Russian warehouse.
And now Serena, taken because I let myself get close to her.
“Shelby.” Dave’s voice pulls me back. His hand is on my shoulder, grounding me back to the present even as the world tilts beneath my feet. “We’ll find her.”
I want to believe him. I want to hold onto the certainty that we can bring her back, that this story doesn’t end the way all my stories end.
But the doubts have already taken root, spreading through me like crooked limbs covered in thorns.
I let myself hope for a future. And now she’s paying the price for my weakness.
The Marine I used to be wouldn’t have made this mistake. He would have kept his distance. Would have maintained the tactical clarity. Would have recognized that attachment is a vulnerability that enemies can exploit.
But that Marine died in Syria. And the ghost wearing his face has been stumbling through life ever since, pretending he’s still capable of protecting anyone.
Tommy pulls the SUV back into traffic, heading back to our business headquarters. There’s planning to be done. Resources to mobilize. A war to wage against a man who has spent decades building power and influence.
But as the Boston skyline slides past the tinted windows, all I can think about is the way Serena looked at me in Brazil. The trust in her amber eyes when she said she was falling for me. The certainty in her voice when she promised she’d never walk away.
Wherever she is right now—bound, frightened, alone in some dungeon her own father created—she’s holding onto the belief that I’ll find her. That I’ll come to save her. I’m sure of that as much as I am of my next breath.
But what if I freeze again?
What if in the split second between salvation and tragedy, my body refuses to obey? What if the ghosts rise and steal my ability to think, to act?
The thought is unbearable. But I can’t shake it. It wraps around my chest like bands of steel, pulling me down, drowning me in the same paralysis that has cost so many lives.
“I did this.” The words escape before I can stop them, rough and raw in the silence of the vehicle. “I put her in this position.”
“Bullshit.” Tommy’s voice cuts through my spiral. “Giovanni did this. You’re not responsible for the actions of that monster.”
He’s right. I can control only the actions of this monster, the one inside me.
“I’m responsible for letting my guard down.” I press my palm against the cold glass of the window. “She trusted me to protect her. And I was too busy falling in love to see the threat coming.”
“Love isn’t an anchor dragging you down, Shelby.” Dave’s voice is steady and confident. “It’s what gives us a reason to fight.”
But I’m not sure I believe him anymore.
All I know is that somewhere out there, my woman is waiting for me to save her. And the man I’ve become isn’t sure he’s capable of saving anyone.
The SUV speeds through traffic, carrying me toward a war I might not be able to win. Toward a woman I’m terrified of failing. Toward the moment of truth that will either prove I’m still capable of being the man she believes I am or confirm every fear that has haunted me for a decade.
My phone buzzes with an incoming text from Ray.
Got a lead on the SUVs. They headed south toward the old meatpacking plants in Widett Circle. Property records show one building owned by a shell company. Shell company traces back to Varese Inc.
Giovanni’s company.
He’s holding his own daughter in a facility he owns through his legitimate business empire. The arrogance of it makes my blood boil.
“Widett Circle,” I announce.
Dave is already on his phone, reaching out to our contacts in the area. The Boyle family has resources, connections, and an army of men ready to move at his command.
But as we race toward our headquarters to plan our attack, I can’t silence the voice in my head that whispers the truth I’ve been running from my entire life.
Everyone you love dies.
Everyone you try to protect ends up hurt.
And this time won’t be any different.
I close my eyes and see Serena’s face, illuminated by starlight on a Brazilian beach, whispering promises of forever.
Then I see Abeera’s hand, covered in dust, reaching through rubble, fingers going still.
The two images blur together until I can’t tell which nightmare is which.
And somewhere in the darkness behind my eyelids, my wife is waiting for me to choose.
Save her.
Or prove, once and for all, that I was never meant to save anyone at all.