Fire & Dark (The Night Horde SoCal Book 3)

by Susan Fanetti

  And he began to cry.

  Stunned at his naked vulnerability, her heart aching, Pilar slid her fingers into his dark hair and held him. After a long moment, she whispered, “I’m here. I’ll always be here. I love you, Connor. I’m so sorry.”

  He heaved a breath, quelling his tears. “Are you okay?” Looking up at her then, his eyes narrowed, and he took hold of her chin. “What happened to your face?”

  She didn’t want to get into anything about Hugo or what had happened between them. Hugo was irrelevant. So she refocused on the more crucial matter at hand. “I’m fine. Fire’s contained. Their house, though, it—”

  “I don’t care about that.” He turned and looked at his mother. Then he stood and leaned over the bedrail, pressing a kiss to her pale forehead. “Let’s step away. I want to know everything, but she needs to sleep.”

  He took Pilar by the hand, but before he moved toward the other side of the room, he pulled her close and kissed her—a fierce, desperate clash of his mouth with hers. His fingers tightened hard around the hand he still held, and his other hand clasped her neck hard enough to make her blood pound in her ears. Then he broke away with a heavy gasp. “I love you so fucking much. Don’t leave.”

  The scope and intensity of his words overwhelmed her as much as his kiss had. Gasping herself, she reached up and brushed his wet lips. “I’m here.”

  “You smell like fire.”

  She smiled. “I barely took the time to get my turnout off. I didn’t even grab my keys or anything. Moore drove me here.”

  At Moore’s name, Connor winced a little, but Pilar decided to ignore that. She’d enjoyed his jealousy at first, but now she was tired of that carousel, and this wasn’t the time for their boring round-and-round about it.

  He said nothing about it, though, and pulled her to the other side of the unoccupied bed. “What can you tell me? What happened?”

  Her report mode kicked in, and the first thing she thought to say was that the fire had gone to seven alarms. But that wasn’t what he wanted to know. She turned her hand in his so that she was leading him, and pushed him to sit on the bed. Then she sat at his side. “Their house was the origin point. That was obvious. We were the third unit in, and it was fully involved. The wind was bad, though, and the fire was not in control. No one had been able to get inside yet, but they were finally getting it knocked back enough that Moore and I could get in.” She took a breath and closed her eyes, seeing the scene again. “Your dad was in the hallway, back from the front door, near the kitchen. Your mom was in a bedroom—theirs, I guess. A wall had collapsed, but it wasn’t fully engaged. Her arm was pinned.”

  “Her hair is burnt off on one side. And—they said she was burned.”

  “When we got to her, the fire was close, but hadn’t reached her. Sparks caught her hair. But otherwise I think heat, not flame, burned her. The air itself gets hot enough to burn.”

  “My dad…”

  “He was in the heaviest part of the fire.” Pilar recalled the track the flames had followed, remembered the sense she had that the path had been drawn from one point of egress to another, as if it had been meant to block all means of escape. What had saved Hoosier, she thought, if he had in fact been saved, was that he’d fallen on ceramic tile. The heat of the tile had burned him badly, but the fire had chased an easier path. If there had been accelerant near him, it had evaporated. Isopropyl alcohol evaporated quickly. “His head was bleeding heavily.” Had been torn open and dented, in fact. “I don’t know why. He was clear of debris.”

  Connor stared at her and then looked away, over his shoulder at his mother. “He was supposed to be with us in Vegas. He got sick, and I convinced him to stay back. My mom would have been alone.” She laid her hand on his thigh, and he turned back to her. “Did somebody do this?”

  “Connor, I’m not an investigator.”

  “But you told me you knew about that fire before. The Bridges house. You said you could tell by the way it acted that somebody set it. Could you tell?”

  Yeah, she could. And it was the same. But something kept her from saying so; she didn’t know why, but it felt wrong—dangerous—to say it. That anxiety she felt, that thing that was just out of her reach. “I don’t know, Connor. I’m sorry.”

  He nodded and then simply sagged. Pilar pulled him close, bringing his head to her shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I wish somebody would fucking tell me about Dad.”

  “You want me to see if I can find somebody?”

  His arms came around her. “No. Stay with me.”

  Feeling sick with sadness and love, she held him and kissed his cheek. “Te amo mucho.”

  After a few minutes of that quiet, the door opened, and Bart came in. Not seeing them near Bibi’s bed, he frowned and then turned their way. “Hey. Sherlock’s here. We need you out here. We got something you need to see.” Pilar thought the look he turned on her then was odd, guarded or suspicious, but he didn’t say anything.

  Not seeming to have noticed that, Connor stood and took Pilar’s hand. He cast a long look back at his sleeping mother, and then they followed Bart out and down the corridor to the waiting room.

  More people were giving her that strange look—not hostile, but wary. It made her neck prickle. Something was wrong, and Pilar began to get the sense that, somehow, all the wrong things prickling her neck and teasing her brain were connected.

  Still, Connor didn’t seem to notice. He went right for Sherlock, who’d set up a little computer station in the corner.

  “What’ve you got?”

  Sherlock motioned him around to see the screen, and Connor kept her hand, so she went, too. Sherlock met her eyes and stuck there for an extra second, like he was evaluating her or trying to tell her something. What the fuck?

  “I’ve been combing the security logs and recordings, looking for anything. I think I found something. I stitched some grabs together. First, there’s this. Starting four days ago.”

  He tapped the screen and a digital, night vision image showing Nutmeg Ridge Drive and the Elliotts’ front yard came up. A grey pickup drove slowly up, pulled over and stayed there, then drove off. Pilar’s heart picked up an extra beat.

  “Three days ago.”

  Day, this time. The grey pickup, now in color, was faded red. Odd blossoms of rust covered the side panels, and the hood was oxidized. Pilar began to feel truly sick. Connor turned to her, his brow furrowed and his grey eyes dark. He said nothing.

  Sherlock said, “Two days.”

  The same truck. Pilar understood the suspicious stares now, and the fragments of worry and wariness she’d been feeling began to come together and find their fit. She lifted her eyes from the screen and sought out Moore, who was standing back. He cocked his head and mouthed, You okay?

  She shook her head, and Moore took a step toward her.

  “No truck on this feed last night. But I patched into the camera at the entrance to the development. At eleven-forty-three, there’s this.”

  Hugo’s truck, turning into Connor’s parents’ subdivision on the night that their house was burned to the ground and they were almost killed. The night that their whole street had been destroyed and four people had been killed. Her brother, recently wearing Assassins colors. Her brother, for whom Connor and the Horde had started a beef with the Assassins.

  No, not for him. For her.

  Sherlock tapped the screen, and the image froze, showing the front of the truck. A driver and a passenger. Pilar recognized only the driver. Sherlock directed his attention to her when he said, “Good shot of the plates from this angle. I ran ‘em. Hugo Velasquez. Some of us have met Hugo.”

  Connor let go of her hand. “Pilar?”

  From the corner of her eye, she could sense Moore approaching, and she knew he was getting ready to have her back. But they were surrounded by outlaw bikers, men who were angry and hurt, worried for loved ones. Loved ones her brother had been involved in hurting. Had he? Had he really? Could
Hugo have done something as horrific as this?

  She kept her eyes on Connor. The man she loved. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? That’s him. Right?”

  “Yeah, it’s him. But…Connor, I…” She didn’t know what to say. She wanted to say that Hugo would never do something like this, that he wasn’t that far gone, that he was a fuckup, not a killer. But she didn’t know if that was true. She remember his fevered, fervent apologies, half-incoherent, when she’d found him passed out in the same truck. She’d thought he’d been sorry for joining the Assassins. But maybe he’d been sorry for something he’d known he was about to do.

  She reached up to Connor, wanting to touch him, but he knocked her hand away with a feral shout. Then he dragged his own hands over his face. “The fucking Aztecs did this? To my parents? My mother? This is all because we helped that little asshole. Because we helped you.”

  He turned away from her and back to Sherlock. “Get his 20. Then call me.” He shoved past her, through his brothers, and stormed toward the elevators. Several Horde, including Trick and Demon, followed right behind. She ran after him—if he found Hugo, he’d kill him, and Nana couldn’t handle that. Not another funeral. Pilar didn’t think she herself could handle that, either.

  They had to be wrong—those images looked bad, but there had to be some other explanation. There had to be. Hugo hadn’t fallen so far as this. Not this.

  She circumvented the men and came around to get in front of Connor and grab his arm. “Connor, wait!”

  “GET OFF ME!” He shoved her hard, knocking her back. She would have landed on the floor, except that Moore was there and caught her. Connor saw them both, Pilar in Moore’s arms, and his face twisted into a nasty, terrifying sneer, and then he and the Horde turned the corner toward the elevators.

  Moore set her on her feet. “What the fuck happened? Hugo set that fire?”

  “I don’t know. Looks that way.” She turned to her friend. All around them were Horde family, those who hadn’t joined Connor on what she knew was his murderous mission. She dropped her voice. “I have to find him before they do. It’ll kill Nana if they get him.”

  There was another question looming in Pilar’s mind, bigger and darker than her grandmother’s pain: Could she love a man who’d killed her brother? The enormity of that question was too much, so she pushed it aside. The answer was not to have to confront the question.

  “I’m in. Do you know where he is?”

  “I know where to look. Moore, it could be fucked up. He’s inside the Assassins now. I don’t know what I’ll find. You should stay back.”

  “I’m. In. Jesus, Cordero, you can’t go alone. I’m in. Let’s go.”

  She turned and looked back at Connor’s family. There hadn’t even been any word yet about his father. But Connor was gone. After her brother. The rest of them were watching her, the expressions on their faces ranging from angry to worried to, maybe, sympathetic. But they didn’t matter. They weren’t her family.

  Maybe they never would be.

  ~oOo~

  “There’s his truck. Pull over.”

  Moore did, but he didn’t kill the engine. He ducked his head and scanned the area. “Where the hell are we?”

  “My old block. We used to live in that building.” She pointed at the sad, stucco building that housed six apartments and probably at least thirty people. Her memories of the life she’d lived there were warped and faded. Mostly, when she’d been a child, she’d been happy—that was how she remembered it, anyway. But the understanding of hindsight had pulled childhood recollections into more menacing shapes. Her childhood had been immersed in a manic breed of violence.

  Her brother’s, though, had not. They’d moved before he was old enough for many memories to set and last. His childhood had been safer and quieter. This was not his home, their parents had not been his family. Their grandmother was his family. Pilar was his family. They were his home.

  If he was here, they had truly failed him.

  “Hugo came back home?”

  At her friend’s question, Pilar sighed. “No. He doesn’t remember this place. But Raul lived next door. He had his man cave above the bar, but I’d heard he’d kept his old apartment, too. Friend of Nana’s complained about it a couple of times. He uses it like a safe house or something.”

  “So your plan is to go up to the angry drug dealer’s safe house door and knock?”

  It was just as likely—maybe more—that she’d end up tortured and killed as that she’d pull Hugo clear, but she had no other ideas. “You got a better one? I have to get Hugo out of there. Connor’s gonna kill him—and I’m not exaggerating for effect. I can’t let that happen.”

  “I know. But…are you gonna give Connor up? Tell Hugo and whoever they’re coming?”

  “No! What—” Pilar sat back. She hadn’t thought about what she’d tell Hugo to get him moving, or how she’d get Raul to let him go. It had to have been Raul who’d ordered the fire; it was Raul Connor should direct his anger toward. Even if Hugo had set it, he’d had no choice.

  But he’d had a choice. He’d had lots of choices, lots of chances not to get involved with the Assassins.

  Still, she had to save her brother. Not for him, not for her. For her grandmother. She was innocent in all of this, and she would suffer most. And Hugo didn’t deserve to die. He was a fuckup, maybe a lost cause. But not a murderer. He wasn’t. The boy Nana and she had raised was not a fucking murderer.

  She slammed her fists on the dash of Moore’s truck. “Fuck! I just have to go and figure it out. Connor’s gonna find him any minute. You stay put, though. I don’t want you dragged into this shit.”

  “Fuck you. We’re a team. Always been a team. You go, I go. So let’s just go.” He opened his door and stepped onto the street.

  Pilar got out, too, and they headed toward one of the many dilapidated buildings on this dilapidated street in the heart of Assassins turf.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Connor rolled the door of the storage locker up. Before he stepped in, Muse grabbed his arm. “Brother, what are we doing?”

  He shrugged Muse’s hand away and walked into the locker. “I’m gonna kill that fucker and every fucking Aztec in the state.”

  “Okay. But we got no word from Sherlock yet. We don’t know where he is, what we’ll face, nothing. You need to take a beat.”

  Connor turned on the older man. “Don’t pull that ‘count beats’ shit with me. I’m not Demon. I’m not losing my shit.” Demon was standing right there, but Connor didn’t give a fuck if he offended anybody.

  Muse shook his head. “Yeah, you are.”

  He hauled off, but Muse caught his arm in mid-swing. He said no more, just lased his blue eyes at Connor. Finally, Connor relaxed, and Muse let go of his hand.

  “I gotta pay this back.” He didn’t give a shit that Hugo was Pilar’s brother. If that waste of oxygen was still drawing breath by the end of this day, then Connor would lose his shit.

  This was all his own fault, and he had to do what he could to make it right. He’d gotten wrapped up in Pilar. He’d been pleased and flattered that she’d come to him for help, and he’d taken her Hugo problem to his father and gotten the whole club involved. And now his father might be dying. And his mother, who’d already been horribly hurt once because of the life her men led, had been hurt again. All because he was involved with Pilar.

  Had been involved with her. No more.

  His fault.

  Muse was talking, responding to the last thing Connor had said aloud. “No question. But we don’t know yet what we need. Give Sherlock a minute to get the intel.”

  He was right. Connor wheeled around and kicked a box. “Fuck!” He looked around at the men who’d come with him: Muse, Demon, Trick, Lakota, and Diaz. They were six men. Enough to wage a battle, if they needed to. But not without some idea what lay ahead. “Okay. We wait.”

  They waited maybe ten, fifteen minutes, and t
hen Connor’s phone buzzed. It was Bart. He answered. “Bart—word on my dad?”

  He didn’t answer right away, and Connor’s head began to throb with desolate anxiety.

  “Bart! Fuck!”

  “Sorry.” Bart cleared his throat. “He’s out of surgery and in the ICU. He alive. But it’s not good, Con. You should get back here.”

  Connor squeezed his eyes shut and made himself focus and breathe. “I can’t. Not yet. I need to pay this back. You got anything on that?”

  “Yeah. We got a 20. 5728 Mission Street. Deep in Aztec turf. It’s a freestanding apartment building. Six units. We can’t put you closer than the building, Connor. But one of those units is rented to a Carlita Hernandez d’Esposito. I’m thinking she’s blood family to Raul. Unit 1B. Be careful, Con. The whole fucking crew could be in that building. Ready for you.”