I started the engine and pulled away from the curb, staring in my rearview mirror at the guards outside the club. One of them was looking my way, and one was staring ahead. I took a right, turning at the end of the road and drove for about twenty minutes, making sure no one was following me.
A small diner gained my attention, so I pulled into its lot toward the back. I wouldn’t go in, but it’d be a good cover while I checked out the folder I’d been given. The engine idled as I opened the folder and looked through it. The man was a manager for a bank in the city, a forty-something guy who had gotten himself into some serious debt, and I was guessing Garza had bailed him out and loaned him the money in exchange for his services.
I took a photo on my cell, intent on sending it over to Jord, the computer guy on our team. Switching to the photo album app, I clicked on the first one I’d taken and zoomed in to read it. I hadn’t even gotten to the second line written on the first piece of paper when I knew this was why I’d had that gut feeling.
My heart beat rapidly in my chest, and I could hear the whooshing in my ears from my racing pulse. This couldn’t be right. Surely he wouldn’t have…fuck. He had. He’d investigated Belle, and it was all my fault. I’d played my hand the moment he mentioned her in front of Rory, and now he’d gotten a file on her, and I’d only managed to look at the first few pages.
I scrolled through the other photos I’d taken, but all they had was her information, where she went to college, the courses she was taking, and the jobs she was working. I don’t know why it was the latter that had my brows rising, but I couldn’t picture her working, not when her dad was paying for everything, and—
Fuck. If they knew who she was and who her dad was, did that mean he knew who I was too? Shit. Fuck. Shit.
I didn’t hesitate as I dialed the one number you only called when shit hit the fan and there was no way out but through.
“Please enter your code,” a woman’s computerized voice said.
I clicked in the eight-digit code, which would connect me to the right person, and a couple of seconds later, another voice said, “Easton.”
“Brody?” I croaked out.
“Ford?” His tone pitched higher, and I could imagine him standing up at his desk. “What’s—”
“We have a problem.” I closed my eyes and clenched my hand on my lap. “A really big fuckin’ problem.”
Chapter Four
FORD
Waiting had never been my strong suit, but the five hours it took for the team to get here nearly broke me. I was on edge, more so than ever, but I wasn’t sure if it was because the operation had just gone to shit, or because I was about to tell Brody what had happened at the club…with his daughter.
I winced as I thought about his reaction, but it wasn’t like I could lie to him—fuck, I had to lie to him, at least a little. I didn’t have a choice, not if I wanted to make it out of here alive.
The guys had found a safe house an hour away from Garza’s club, and now I was pacing the length of the living room complete with seventies furniture, waiting for them to pull up outside. I should have been looking for the banker Garza wanted, and scoping him out. Instead, I was about to blow up eight months of undercover work. I just hoped we had enough intel to take him down, because if we didn’t, those eight months had been for nothing.
An engine roared closer to the house. I stood next to the window and peeked out of the dirty pane of glass. Sure enough, another car followed, and then all of the guys piled out of the vehicles. My stomach churned with nerves, and I tried to calm myself. I kept my gaze fixated to them as they walked closer to the house, and seconds later, the door was opening, and I was seeing their faces for the first time in months.
Brody looked a little older, his hair graying, but Jord still looked like the thirty-something guy I’d met twenty years ago. No one said anything as they all piled in the house, and Jord started to set up a station for his laptop. Kyle and Ryan scoped out the house, something I’d done when I first got here, and then after what felt like hours but was actually minutes, Brody said, “Fill us in.”
I stepped away from the window and toward the back wall of the living room, my breaths sawing in and out of my body. “I…” My nostrils flared, and my hands clenched. I was never like this. I was always straight to the point, but this was different. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“Maybe with why it’s all gone to shit?” Brody said, his face carefully expressionless.
“I was meeting with Garza last weekend at his club.” I pushed my hands into the front pockets of my jeans and leaned against the wall, trying to act calm when I was anything but that. “When I got to the club, someone…ran into me.” I swallowed, looking at each of the guys in turn. Brody was watching me carefully, while Kyle and Ryan flicked their attention between me and the files full of information on Garza that I’d brought with me as Jord logged in to his laptop.
“So, your cover was blown last weekend?” Brody asked, a muscle in his jaw ticking. I knew what he was thinking—that I should have contacted him then, but I thought I had a handle on it. I’d thought… Fuck. I shouldn’t have thought, not when it came to someone else’s safety. Dammit.
“No. Not exactly.” I closed my eyes briefly, and when I opened them back up, I blurted out, “It was Belle.”
Brody blinked. “Belle?” He paused, almost as if he was playing the conversation back out in his head. “As in my Belle?”
My stomach dropped, and I managed to get out, “Yeah,” then pushed up off the wall and pulled my hands out of my pockets.
It was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop, and then Brody exploded, “What the fuck was she doing there?” He threw his hands up in the air and started to pace back and forth. “I fuckin’ knew she shouldn’t have gone to college here. I should have forbidden her.”
Jord laughed. “You know there ain’t no tellin’ that girl what to do.”
Jord was right. “I got her out of there, and I told her not to come back, but”—all of their attention was on me now—“Garza must have noticed and mentioned her to me a couple days later after I’d done a job for him.” I took a couple of steps across the room and pulled out the papers of the photos I’d printed off. “He called me into his club today to give me another job, and while he was out of his office, I had a look around.” I handed the papers to Brody. “I found these.”
Brody frowned down at them, his mouth pinched as he read what was on them, and then he slowly lifted his head. If looks could kill, I’d have been dead right now. “He’s done a background check on her.” Brody handed the papers to Jord, who read them with Kyle and Ryan looking over his shoulders. “Which means he knows who I am. And if he knows who I am—”
“Then he knows who I am,” I finished for him. It wasn’t confirmed that my cover was blown, but you only had to put a couple of pieces together to get to that conclusion.
“We need to make sure we have enough to bring him down,” Brody demanded. “No one leaves this room until we have a solid case and evidence. The faster we move, the better.”
FORD
It had been thirty-seven hours since Brody and the team had come through the door of the safe house, and now we were walking back out of it. Only this time, we were geared up and ready for a takedown.
More members of the DEA had come down to assist us. We weren’t stupid. Garza had the kind of manpower the president had, only these guys would kill you without a second thought because there were no consequences.
None of us talked as we piled into a reinforced black van. We checked our coms, made sure we could hear each other, and went over the plan one last time. We knew Garza would be at his house and in bed. It was the only time we knew he wouldn’t see us coming.
It only took us just over an hour to make it to his mansion, and the driver pulled up a couple of hundred feet away so Jord could jump out. I couldn’t make him out as he stealthily moved toward the gates, and only seconds later, they were openi
ng up slowly. The driver sped through them, pulling up outside the main doors, and we all shot out of the sliding side doors.
Jord caught up to us, and I could hear shouts and warnings from Garza’s men, but I didn’t take in what they were saying. My focus was one hundred percent on getting into his mansion and arresting him. I hadn’t told Brody everything that had happened at the club. I hadn’t mentioned that I’d kissed Belle, so he didn’t realize how close Garza thought we were. Brody’s main concern was that Garza knew who I was and that Belle shouldn’t have been there, but I knew there was a reason behind Garza looking her up. You didn’t just do a background check for no reason.
And it was all my fault.
I’d shown my hand when he’d mentioned her in front of Rory. I’d played my cards, and now he was ripping them out of my palms and laying them all on the table for everyone to see.
The front man held the battering ram to breach the house, and with one swing, the doors flung open. Several guards were in the main foyer, but they were taken down in a matter of seconds, and then I was leading the way with Brody and Kyle behind me. I’d gone over this route in my head hundreds of times in the last day, so I didn’t hesitate as I ran up the stairs and right toward Garza’s bedroom.
There was no way he hadn’t heard the shouts and gunshots, so I knew he wouldn’t be so surprised, but I also knew his safe room was on the other side of the house, and he would most likely be making his way there through a secret tunnel. Unlucky for him, he had to come out of that tunnel to open up the door, and that was exactly where we were standing, waiting for him.
Not thirty seconds later, he appeared with two women at his back, all of them looking frantic, and as soon as Garza spotted us, he froze. We were all geared up head to toe, so there was no way he could make out who I was, and I had no intention of showing him my face, not until he was safely in the back of the van.
Brody stepped forward with Kyle while I kept my rifle trained on him. One wrong move, and I wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him, and I think he realized that because his throat bobbed as he swallowed, and then he raised his hands in surrender.
Cuffs were slapped on his wrists, and Kyle led him down the hallway as the two women followed while Brody and I brought up the rear. It was almost too easy to get him out of the house, and although I wanted to tell Brody that, I kept my mouth shut. He still wasn’t happy about Belle turning up at the club, and I could understand why, but he was acting like she was a fifteen-year-old girl trying to fight for her freedom when, in reality, she was twenty. She’d be twenty-one this summer.
All the lights were on outside, making it feel like the middle of the day instead of two in the morning. Officers were still apprehending the guards on the grassed areas, but we bypassed them and piled back into the van, this time with Garza in tow. Once we were safely out of the grounds of his mansion and on the way to a black site where he could be detained until we could move him again, I pulled my mask down off my face, revealing myself to him. There was no point in pretending it wasn’t me. He already knew if the way his gaze stayed on me had anything to do with it.
Garza laughed, the sound echoing throughout the inside of the van. “I knew it.” He shook his head and waved his finger in my direction. “I knew it.”
I smirked. I could play that game too. I was a master at it, and even though I’d doubted myself several times over the last day and a half, I didn’t doubt I could rile him up. “Yeah?” I leaned forward. “How long did it take you to figure it out, huh?” I waited for his answer, but all I got in return was his nostrils flaring. He was a man who could shut down his emotions at a moment’s notice, same as me. But just as I had shown my hand with a couple of movements of my body in his office, he also had tells.
“The way I see it”—I leaned back—“I was undercover for so long, I know almost every single place you hide your drugs.” I smirked and tilted my head to the side. “Not to mention the money you like to filter into all of your forty-five businesses.” His eyes flared at that, and I knew then that I had gained access to the right amount of businesses.
I expected him to come back at me, to say something now that he knew all of his businesses were being taken down and his warehouses raided, but he stayed silent, something which was making me want to talk more and more. But I realized that was his tactic. He was trying to get all the information out of me as possible, and I wasn’t willing to give anything more away. I’d already said too much.
The warehouse was empty when we arrived, but we weren’t staying here. A secret passage ran from the back of the warehouse underground and to a black site. We had countless of them scattered all over the country, and only those who needed to know about them knew. They were the safest place you could bring someone like Garza, because not only did people not know about them, but they were almost impossible to get into unless someone from the inside let you in.
The steel-forced walls of the underground site would keep him safe, but also meant we could be sure in the knowledge he couldn’t escape until we charged him. Because we would charge him. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind he’d be put away for a long time.
Teams had been trying to take Garza down for over thirty years, and Brody had been itching to do it for at least twenty, but no one could ever get in until I was assigned the case. Garza had remembered me from my time with Hut, and with some well-placed documents and a fake prison record, I’d gotten in with barely any trouble.
Brody and I each held one of Garza’s arms as we led him through the central headquarters and toward the back hallway of cells. Only five rooms were available, but each of them was a steel square complete with a toilet and one window which looked out into the hallway at a whole lot of emptiness.
Brody unlocked the door, and I walked Garza in, intent on not saying another word to him, but then he said, “I never would have found out if it wasn’t for your little puta.”
Anger burst through me like lava exploding out of the top of a volcano. I couldn’t stop it, no matter how much I tried, and I slammed him into the steel wall, the bang reverberating around us. “The fuck did you just say?”
“Ford,” Brody ground out, but I didn’t care about his warning.
“Where is she now?” Garza asked, his voice sounding bored. “You think she’s sleeping in her sweet little apartment that she shares with her best friend? Or maybe she’s getting ready for a shift at the coffee shop?” His lips lifted into a smirk, and I wanted nothing more than to wipe it off his face. “Or do you think she’s in someone’s bed fuckin’ them nice and slow?”
I wound my fist back, ready to smash it into his face, but Brody stepped inside and stopped me. “Don’t,” Brody’s deep, commanding voice said. “That’s what he wants.”
“He’s fuckin’ pushin’ it, Brody,” I growled out, not moving my gaze off Garza’s eyes.
“Ahhh.” Garza flicked his gaze to Brody. “And you must be the girl’s father. Agent Easton. I seem to remember you from many years ago. The Emerson Hutton case if my mind remembers correctly.”
“Did you just threaten me?” Brody asked, his voice deadly calm, but I knew he was raging inside.
“Me? Make a threat?” Garza raised his brows. “I’d never do such a thing.”
My blood was boiling to the point I couldn’t control it, and I knew the only thing I could do was walk away from him. One wrong move while he was under arrest and he’d get off on a technicality. We had to play this safe. I let him go, not caring that he nearly didn’t land on his feet, and backed away a step. “I hope you enjoy looking at four walls because that’s all you’re going to see for a very long fuckin’ time.”
I spun around, feeling Brody behind me, and together we locked up the cell and then walked away. Neither of us said anything as we moved through the den and up to one of the conference rooms on the upper level. I could see Jord standing in the doorway, his attention on us, and when we finally made it into the room and closed the door behind us, Brody gritted out, “He
was threatening her.”
I nodded. “He was.”
“Who did he threaten?” Jord asked.
Brody glanced at me, something unsaid shining in his eyes, and I knew what would have to happen. I knew I wouldn’t be coming home, not yet anyway. If there was one thing more important than taking a criminal off the streets, it was keeping my family safe.
“Belle,” I croaked out. “He threatened Belle.”
BELLE
Perks of working in a coffee shop were being able to drink as much stuff as I wanted, but that was a real problem when I didn’t actually like it. I loved the smell of the fresh beans, but the taste…that was something to be desired, unless it had the lowest amount of coffee and was full of caramel syrup.
My shifts never changed, thanks to my class schedule, and today was my last shift of the week, which also meant it was Friday. I worked three hours on Mondays and Wednesdays between classes, and then six hours after my only class on a Friday.
I had less than an hour left on today’s shift, and even though Stella had messaged me saying she wanted to go out tonight, I was in the mood to order takeout and veg in front of the TV. A new series on Netflix had been added three days ago, and I was dying to watch it.
The store was getting busier the closer to the end of day classes got, and the soundtrack was a mix of groans from tired students and keys tapping from those who were trying to whizz through the assignments they’d put off until the last minute. It was either try and get it done today or attempt it when you had a monster hangover on Sunday.
Bonded Duet: Ford & Belle: Torn Bond & Tied Bond (Easton Family Duet Boxsets Book 3) Page 5