by Malcom, Anne
Keltan wouldn’t have believed Polly willingly tased someone—even her husband advancing on her with violence in his eyes—if he hadn’t seen the video for himself.
She was all about ‘do no harm’ and all that shit. It was comical that she was Lucy’s sister since Lucy had suggested they castrate Craig the second she learned about the divorce.
Keltan had been more than willing.
But both him and his wife and held back because of Polly. Because they loved and respected her and hurting anyone she still cared about would cause her pain. And she still cared about the fucker. Remained tight-lipped as to the reasons for the divorce and did not say one bad word against him.
Not one.
So yeah, it had hit Keltan when he saw the video.
“He’s a man scorned,” Keltan said. “He saw Polly on a date. He was drunk. You’re telling me that was an accident?” He nodded toward Heath’s knuckles.
“No way it was an accident,” Heath clipped. “It was violence directed nowhere near Polly. I don’t have a good feeling about this guy, Keltan. Haven’t since the start.”
Keltan raised his brow. “Haven’t since you found out he was marrying the woman you loved?”
Heath didn’t reply.
Of course he wasn’t going to reply to that shit.
But he also agreed with him. Keltan hadn’t liked him either. He was too polished. Too charismatic. Too all over Polly. And not in a way that he didn’t want to stop touching her because he loved her. No, because he wanted to communicate possession. Ownership.
You couldn’t own sunshine. Keltan knew the fucker would get educated on that. He just hadn’t expected it to go as far as the wedding. Granted he’d been distracted leading up to the wedding since his wife had been recovering from the stab wound that almost killed her.
In fact, there was no almost about it.
It had killed her. Twice.
She’d come back.
And he thanked the Lord every fucking day. Thanked her. Since it wasn’t a lord that brought her back to him. It was her.
So he was distracted when Polly had brought Craig into the fold.
Not distracted enough not to do his job—protect Lucy. And he’d failed on a sidewalk weeks before. He didn’t plan on doing that again. Protecting Lucy meant protecting Polly.
“We did a background on him. Found nothing two years ago,” he reminded Heath.
“I don’t care. She needs a team.”
“Okay, I’ll put Duke on it,” Keltan relented. He would admit he’d be at ease knowing someone was keeping an eye on Polly.
He worried for her.
“No fuckin’ way. I’m on it,” Heath clipped.
Keltan raised his brow. “Didn’t think you’d want to be anywhere near her.”
Heath gave him a hard look. “You want to be near Lucy?”
“Every fuckin’ second.”
“Then I’m on her.”
And that was it.
He kept it quiet when Polly assumed he was responsible for the detail. Better to let things happen organically.
And they had happened, last night, if this morning’s conversation was anything to go by.
And the timing could not have been fucking worse.
“We found something on Craig.”
Heath froze.
He didn’t speak since he knew Keltan wasn’t done.
“Still waitin’ for more info, but there’s intel to tell us he’s been seen with The Sixth Street Gang. Who had been low-level assholes until recently. Now, they’re connected to Fernandez.”
Heath’s eyes turned to granite. “The human trafficker Rosie tried to bring down?”
Keltan nodded. “The one that we’re working with the Sons to end. Smartly.”
Smartly meant patiently. Meant they had to play a long fucking game. Which frustrated the fuck out of them, Luke most of all, since the fucker had kidnapped his wife. And it fucked with all of them since the fucker was responsible for trafficking women all over the world.
Taking him down was on top of their list.
But he was smart. He knew that people would want to end him. He had all sorts of fail-safes in place in order to destroy anyone who tried. So they couldn’t try. They had to succeed.
They would.
But while they were playing their game, Fernandez was playing his.
“How in the fuck did we not catch this earlier?” Heath demanded.
“’Cause we thought that he was clean, and we looked deep. But didn’t know to look for this kind of shit,” Keltan said. “Encrypted shit that Wire is only now trying to decipher. Craig never did face to face shit. All his money came legal.” He clenched his fists. “Or places that appeared legal. Convincingly so. Enough to hold up against an FBI investigation. Didn’t think to look in places Wire is finding now he knows where to look. And by chance I had a man on him, he snapped the photo. Caught the connection.”
Heath’s fists were clenched against his sides. The only sign of him losing control. But that sign meant a fuck of a lot. Keltan knew this because it was the last point before he stopped clenching his fists and started using them. “Okay, we’ll end him, make sure Polly doesn’t find out, of course,” he said evenly. “But I don’t think this qualifies as a reason to take me away from the one good morning I’ve had in years.”
Keltan sucked in a breath. “There’s more.”
Luke and Duke took now as the moment to enter the room. Good thing too, since they might need all three of them to lock him down.
Heath’s eyes didn’t move from Keltan’s. “More enough to think you need Luke and Duke to lock me down,” he said, reading Keltan like he always did. Fucker noticed everything. Came to every conclusion.
“They’re here because we need the team on this,” Keltan said. They hadn’t been briefed yet, but both of them looked grim. Keltan focused on Heath. “Need you to make sure you handle this. First, I’m guessing Polly is at your place?”
Heath nodded once.
Keltan exhaled. “I’ll get Lance over there.”
Heath stiffened further. He knew what it meant if Keltan was sending Lance right now. Lance was relatively new, but he was good. Quiet. Ruthless. And would protect any of their women with his life. Mostly because he didn’t seem to value it that much.
They’d all been through shit.
But Lance had been through shit.
“You need to tell me what’s goin’ on right now so I can get my ass over there,” Heath clipped.
“My man didn’t just see Craig talking to this guy,” Keltan said, speaking slowly, carefully. But then how careful could you be when you were tearing through a man’s world? “Saw him handing him something. And it just so happens he’s got a good camera and was curious why he was handing him something physical when everything is done virtually now.” Keltan sucked in a breath hoping that Heath didn’t break the furniture. Not that he blamed him. “It was a photo of Polly.”
Duke sucked in a harsh breath.
Luke swore.
Heath had no response whatsoever.
“You’re tellin’ me that Polly’s ex-husband—who you fuckin’ told me wasn’t a threat—handed over a photo of Polly to someone connected to the biggest human trafficker in the world?” Heath asked, voice mild.
“Brother—”
“Where is he now?” he asked, voice still mild.
“Got my man on him,” Keltan replied, the rest of his response drowned out by the ringing of his phone he glanced down. “That’s him.”
“Well get him to give me an exact location,” Heath demanded. He glanced to Luke. “Also get in contact with the man Rosie uses to cremate her bodies. He’ll have a job soon.”
Luke nodded once, getting up to do so.
It would’ve been funny, the prior police chief organizing a body disposal. The fact he did it semiregularly with his wife. It would’ve been had it not been for the dread that had settled in Keltan’s bones since he found out about the photo.
It
only increased when the man on the other end of the phone spoke. “What the fuck do you mean, lost him?” he demanded.
“I don’t know, man,” Ron said. “I had him. Thought he was too fucking dumb to even notice he had a tail let alone lose one.”
This fucker had them all fooled. And Keltan hoped it wasn’t a fatal mistake. “Where did you lose him?” he demanded. The fact he lost Ron was big. He was one of the best. Ex Secret Service. It was no small feat to shake his tail.
“Beverly Hills,” Ron said. “But I just got signal in the tracker I installed. He’s nowhere near there.”
“Where is he?”
Keltan’s blood went cold the second he told him.
And it turned to fucking ice when he hung up and saw the message Lucy had sent him that he’d somehow missed.
Snow: I’ve thrown up three times. Yes, this is too much information but you put the baby in me and you don’t have to experience this first hand so you at least have to know what you’re doing to me. Plus you left before morning sex. That’s cruel and unusual punishment.
I’m at Polly’s. I think she got laid last night. Hopefully she’ll distract me from wanting to barf.
Get home quick so you can distract me with sex.
I promise I won’t barf.
Not until after.
Kisses
xxx
.
Keltan’s chair smashed against the wall with the force he’d pushed out of it.
Duke and Heath were on alert. But he didn’t even spare a second to talk to them. He was too busy running out the door. Because the place they had Craig’s signal was where his pregnant wife was.
Polly’s apartment.
Lucy
“I didn’t have my gun,” I said woodenly.
Keltan’s hand was on my belly, eyes on mine. Neither his eyes nor his hand had moved since I woke up in his arms on Polly’s floor.
The expression on his face was only slightly less dire than it had been then. Now we were in a hospital and both me and the baby had been cleared, the only injury the bruise I’d have on my face from the punch and the lump on the back of my head from where I’d hit the ground.
I didn’t even have a concussion.
I’d had much worse. But because I was pregnant everyone treated it like the end of the world. When really the end of the world was the fact the last time I’d seen my sister she was bleeding from the fucking head.
“What?” Keltan asked, obviously confused at my words.
I blinked against the pain in my head. It was manageable. The fear running through my veins was not. “I didn’t have my gun because you took it off me so I couldn’t shoot the man who made my sister bleed from the head and who has her now. A man that is obviously not afraid to hurt women. Pregnant women.”
Keltan flinched at this, but I didn’t have it in me to care. Or at least to show that I cared. All my caring was taken up for my sister.
I stared at my husband coldly. “Now, someone has to be really fucked up to hit a pregnant woman.”
Another flinch.
I continued. “But to hit a creature like Polly...” I trailed off, unable to get that image of her lying unconscious out of my mind, “that’s like shooting a fucking dove. Someone that does stuff like that is capable of a lot of things, Keltan.”
Now pregnancy had nothing to do with my sudden urge to vomit.
“Things that Polly should never even hear about let alone experience,” I choked out. “And he has her now, this monster with a stupid fucking name because I didn’t have my gun because you took it off me because apparently being pregnant makes me more volatile. When volatile was exactly what I needed to be to save my little sister. But I couldn’t. Because of you.”
“Lucy,” Keltan said softly, not even blinking at the cruel misplaced blame I was hurling at his feet. His hand moved up to lightly cup my bruised face. “We’re gonna find her. We’re gonna kill him. I’m gonna kill him with my bare fuckin’ hands for layin’ a hand on my family. Riskin’ my whole fucking world.”
He paused abruptly, his eyes going to the heartbeat monitor as if he needed to make sure it was real, that the baby was okay before he kept going.
“We’ll kill him then we’ll find Polly. In one piece. Because she’s Polly. And you know she’s one of the strongest people you know. In a way that’s different than anyone around us. If anyone can survive a monster, it’s Polly.” He laid his lips to my temple. “But right now, I want you to control what you can control. And that’s taking care of our baby. Because you know how much Polly loves it already. You know how protective of it she is. And when we find her, you know she’ll be more worried about you and that baby than she will be about herself.”
A tear ran down my cheek. “You’ll find her? In one piece?”
He kissed my tear away. “I promise,” he said, even though we both knew it was a promise he couldn’t keep.
“You’ll kill that fucker, Craig?” I prompted, knowing there was no way he’d let me do it myself.
“Yes, babe,” he all but hissed.
And that was a promise he could keep.
I just prayed to every single god out there that they found him before he killed that beautiful innocence that was inside of Polly.
Heath
Three Hours Missing
The elastic on his wrist snapped at a steady rhythm that was designed to calm him. Or more accurately, the demons inside him.
It was some shit that the military shrink had suggested to him. All of the other stuff she spouted was bullshit, but this one thing seemed to work for him when he was about to go dark side.
The elastic snapped.
It was safe to say it wasn’t working for him now.
“We got anything?” he demanded the second Keltan closed the door.
He didn’t school his tone. It was savage, rough and aggressive. Just like his fuckin’ soul.
He should’ve taken the effort, taking in Keltan as he sat at his desk. The fucker was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Considering his woman was his world and her sister was a big part of hers, it was a load. Especially considering what he’d gone through to make her his wife. Especially since they’d rushed into Polly’s apartment to find his pregnant fucking wife unconscious on the floor next to a pool of blood.
What they’d found out later was Polly’s blood.
He saw it on his friend’s face as he dropped to his knees, cradled his pregnant and unconscious wife in his arms, murmuring to her about breathing, about staying still. It was remnant of when he almost lost her on a sidewalk two years ago.
And now there was this shit.
Keltan was one of his closest friends.
They’d gone through shit together.
Shit you never talked about once you got home, once you stood on soil that wasn’t stained with the blood of your brothers, of those you’d killed. Because if you talked about it, you had to really question the reasons your brothers in arms were killed, why their wives were widowed and the children fatherless. Then you had to question those people you’d killed, someone else’s brothers, fathers, husbands. Then you might have to face the terrifying fucking reality that they were all savages, killing each other for no reason other then the orders of the men above them.
So they didn’t talk about it.
And it was in their silence that they found solidarity. As much peace as they could.
Which was why Heath had jumped at the chance to work in his security firm. He was doing shit he wasn’t proud of before. Chasing violence because that’s all his soul knew. All his soul craved.
No, that was a lie.
His soul craved a blonde haired, peace-loving, chaos-bringing girl who’d turned into a woman with his dick inside her.
Yeah, he fucking craved her.
If he was honest with himself, it was her words that managed to roar over the gunshots coming from his piece when he was ending the lives of other human beings. It was her face he held on
to when he was presented with the charred remains of one of the first men he’d met upon arriving in the fucking desert.
It was her touch he remembered when a bullet tore through his side, when he had to continue even though his side was on fire, blood was pouring from the wound, as he was certain he’d fucking die if he kept running. Kept fighting.
But there was a starker truth that he’d die when he stopped running. Stopped fighting. So he held onto the image of the woman who told him she fought for peace when he fought for war.
And it was that woman’s face he held onto to stop him from ripping the skin from his fucking arms, because he had to hold onto that smile, that peace that she told him she lived by. He had to fucking kid himself thinking it wouldn’t be that penchant for peace that would kill her.
He almost fucking threw up his breakfast on that thought. Would’ve if his breakfast was anything more than black coffee. As it was, it came up enough to burn the back of his throat.
Because he’d been planning on having breakfast with her. Even eating that healthy shit. He’d been planning on having her pussy for breakfast first. He’d been planning on having her all fucking day.
And the day after.
He could still smell her on his fucking skin she was that close.
But he also couldn’t get the vision of the small pool of her blood on the floor out of his mind. Best case scenario, that was all the blood that was spilled. But it was hers. Even in the best case, she was hurt. She bled.
Worst case...Heath didn’t even have the strength to think about.
So he focused on Keltan and Keltan’s answer on what the fuck they were doing to find Craig since he’d disappeared into thin fucking air. With Polly. He’d left the ride they had the tracker in the parking lot. Left it like he left that little puddle of blood and a bruised, unconscious, pregnant Lucy.
Fucker was taunting them.
“Got the Sons on it too,” Keltan said, his very words a sigh, but every inch of him was held tight. Taut.
Heath was one of the few who knew just how dangerous, how fucking ruthless this fucker was. Of course, you had to look at him to know that. His muscles weren’t for the gym. Weren’t pumped up with fucking chemicals.