by Hype, Jenn
Nothing could have prepared me for what was behind door number three.
As soon as the door was wide enough, Scarface shoved me hard enough to send me flying across the floor, landing face first at the feet of Officer Knowles.
Even with his face bloody and bruised almost beyond recognition, I'd know him anywhere.
"What? I mean...how?"
"Oh, I'll answer that question for you," Scarface answered giddily from behind me. My mom groaned, but before I could turn to her, I was yanked to my feet by my hair.
"Let her go!" Officer K's voice was muffled, his words slurred. Most likely due to his swollen lip that was sliced down the left side. Scarface laughed and yanked harder. I had to bite down on my cheek to keep from screaming out. Staying silent seemed to anger him. He gripped my hair closer to the scalp, and I half expected to fall away from him only to look up and see all my hair dangling from his fist like a wig.
"Now, now. You know I can't do that."
Officer Knowles struggled against his restraints. His wrists were already swollen and bloody, but he yanked on them as if he felt nothing. Scarface waited until he wore himself out, still holding on to my hair. Once Officer Knowles went still again, Scarface continued.
"I have to admit, dear Brooke, that I've been imagining all the ways this would go after the past week while you constantly evaded my men. At first, I simply wanted to facilitate this lovely reunion, but each time one of my men lost a life because of you, your outcome became more and more grim."
I wanted to point out that his men only died because he'd sent them to do his dirty work in the first place. I wanted to walk away with a little bit of my scalp still intact, though, so I kept my mouth shut.
"You see, I realized something that night at the bar. What I didn't know until just now was just how delicious this was going to be. I must say, I'm actually quite pleased we were able to bring you here alive."
He released his hold on my hair suddenly. My legs gave out as soon as the heels of my feet hit the ground. Next thing I knew, a gun was aimed right at my mom's head.
"One wrong move and your mom dies, Brookie."
Oh, for fuck's sake. One-I despised that nickname. Two-the safety was on. It wouldn't buy me a lot of time if I did decide to do something, but he obviously wasn't going to kill her immediately. Either he didn't know how to work a gun - which I highly doubted - or he was toying with me. I decided to test my limits.
"You know, in pretty much every story ever written, the villain reveals his grand plan at the end. He goes through this long, boring backstory that no one gives a shit about, because seriously, no one empathizes with the bad guy with the maimed face who goes around tormenting people because he has deluded himself into thinking his shit is worse than anyone else's. So, how about I cut to the chase for you. No one cares, Scarface. The longer you drone on with your boring nonsense, the more time you're giving the good guy in the scenario to get here and stop you. I mean, I'm just looking out for you, man. Solidarity, yo." I pounded my fist twice on my chest for emphasis on the sarcasm.
"Thanks, Brookie," he sneered. "You're absolutely right. Let's just get right to the point."
He shifted until his gun was pointed at me instead of my mom. Shit got real when he flipped off the safety.
"Sorry to cut this short, but your daughter has a point."
My mom was still out cold, didn't even acknowledge that he'd spoken to her. I glanced at Officer Knowles and had to do a double take when I saw his eyes brimming with tears. Officer K didn't cry. He hardly even showed emotion at all. But then, what the hell did I know? I thought the man had been dead for ten years.
"Say goodbye to your daughter," Scarface commanded. Again my mom didn't move, but Officer Knowles swallowed thickly before muttering an apology.
Then the gun went off.
Chapter Eighteen
Search Party Of Five
Grant
Everyone in the waiting room of the ER stared at me as I rushed past all the sick and injured waiting to be seen, beelining for the woman behind the desk. She was too busy clicking away on her keyboard, doing her damnedest to ignore me to realize just how little fucking patience I had. Brooke was taken and every second counted.
I slammed my hand down on her keyboard, trapping her hands against the keys. Not hard enough to hurt her, but hard enough to make my point. She jolted and yanked her hands away. Wide, angry eyes met mine as she reached for the phone. Most likely with the intent of calling security. Not happening. I yanked the receiver from her hand, then pulled on the phone base until the cable disconnected.
"Hunter Hayes. Look up his room number. Now!" I shouted when she stood frozen in place. Shaky fingers pulled up the information and I twisted the monitor so I could see, making sure she hadn't lied about the information. I only had a few minutes until security caught up with me, so instead of waiting on the elevators, I ran towards the door marked for the stairs.
Five flights of stairs and only a minute or so later, I was standing at the doorway to his room. Trent looked like he was on his way out, and Alice was sitting on the small couch next to the bed. Hunter was sitting up, arguing with a nurse. All eyes turned to me at once. The nurse looked scared. Maybe it was my chest violently heaving up and down. Or the cuts and scrapes on my face. Or maybe the dried blood on my clothes. Whatever the reason, she backed away slowly into a corner.
"You can't just leave!" She spoke up when Hunter started pulling on his pants. No words needed to be exchanged. The team knew I wouldn't be there - alone - if I didn't need them. Veering from the plan we'd set and storming into the hospital a bloody mess could only mean one thing.
Alice snickered when Hunter grunted in frustration after trying several times to button his pants with one hand. He tried to swat her hand away when she walked over to do it for him, but she punched him in his good shoulder and fastened his pants anyway. Unable to put his shirt on thanks to his arm being in a sling, Alice carried it over her arm as we filed out one by one, the nurse yelling after us.
"This way," Alice directed, leading us towards a different set of stairs than I'd come up. A sign on the door warned of an alarm, but nothing sounded when Alice pushed through. "I did a little exploring earlier, planning for an escape route just in case. These stairs lead to the mortuary in the basement. No one uses them. Can't blame them. The formaldehyde smell is disgusting. Anyway, there is a door that leads to a back entrance of the hospital that no one uses. This place has horrible security. If anyone was looking to steal dead bodies, this would be the place to go."
By the time Alice finished rambling, we were already in the parking lot.
"We need to take your car, Trent. I'll catch you guys up on the way."
"Where're we headed?" Trent asked as I slid into the passenger seat of his Tesla. It was remarkable how little damage it had sustained when driving into a house.
"Baybank."
He nodded but waited until we hit the road before asking the question I knew everyone had been itching to know the answer to.
"I was distracted. Should have been paying better attention. I would have noticed the suspicious vehicle behind us. Instead I was too focused on... whatever, it doesn't matter. It sideswiped us, rolled the SUV a few times. I was trapped by the seatbelt and couldn't keep them from taking her."
"She injured?" Hunter asked from the backseat. Alice was sitting between him and Nick, and though they were leaning towards the opposite side, presumably to give him as much space as possible, he still looked cramped. Hunter was, by far, the largest of us all. His muscles had muscles. He was not the kind of guy you wanted on your bad side.
"Yes. Had a steady stream of blood seeping from her forehead so she could possibly have a concussion. Looked like she had trouble moving her limbs. Didn't get close enough to see how bad before she was gone."
No one said anything for several minutes. Normally, I welcomed the silence. Idle chit-chat and humdrum conversations were not my thing, but I couldn't just sit
there quietly while Brooke was, well, wherever the hell she was.
"Did you think to check the road a half a mile or so down from where the collision happened? My money is on Brooke. She probably hijacked the car or annoyed them so much they changed their minds about taking her and pushed her out."
Dammit, Nick. This was not the time for me to be laughing. Though when everyone else joined in, I couldn't help but laugh even harder. He was probably right. My money was on the latter of the two scenarios.
"Jack is Brooke's dad." Trent dropped that bomb right as the laughter was starting to die down. My head whipped to the side so quickly I'm surprised I didn't give myself whiplash. When all I offered were a few mumbled and stuttered words in response, Trent kept going. "I haven't confirmed it, but I can say with a good amount of certainty that Brooke is his biological daughter."
I stared out the windshield, trying to make sense of the fact that I'd been sleeping with my boss's daughter. Why hadn't I made the connection before? Jack posed as another person for her entire life to help raise her with no real reason. Who would do that? A mental scan of her face came with the conclusion that she's gotten his eyes and sharp nose. I was a blind idiot.
"Stop beating yourself up. None of us realized. There was so much else going on, who would have had the time?"
Alice and her uncanny ability to read people. Her words meant for reassurance were ineffective. My mind was too swamped to process anything else.
"How did you figure it out?" I asked Trent once I'd regained my speech abilities.
"We all know Jack used to work for the FBI, but it was a short stint. He never really talked about why he left. That file you found in Jack's safe was left behind, but I'd already plugged the name into my computer. Turns out that really is Brooke's mom. It was her name prior to being entered into the Witness Protection program."
Trent paused to let that digest. I didn't bother asking questions. I knew he'd fill in the blanks.
"She was dating a guy who turned out to be a big mob boss. She turned him in and Jack was assigned to the case. Jack retired from the FBI after only a year as an agent. That early retirement happened to coincide with Mary entering the program. She gave birth to Brooke under her new name eight months later. She never put a father on the birth certificate, but it only made sense that Jack was the father. Why else would he put his life completely on hold for almost two decades?"
I nodded, still mulling everything over. All the missing parts of Jack's life that he refused to fill in now falling into place. He was a private person, but to keep the fact that he had a daughter hidden from us? It was like a knife in the back. We trusted each other with our lives, and yes, there were parts of those lives that we didn't share. Something about having a kid and keeping her a secret didn't sit well with me though.
"Why keep that from us? If we'd bothered to really dig into his past we probably could have figured it out sooner."
Trent shook his head. "No, we wouldn't have. Without Mary's real last name, I never would have found it. That information was buried so deep, and without knowing where to look, it would have stayed buried. It wasn't connected to Jack's name. The only reason I figured it out at all was because of the file you found in his safe. It's still possible that I'm totally wrong, it's only a theory."
That might have been true, but Trent did his job well. If he believed it to be true, then I trusted him.
"There's more," Trent said quietly as he took the Baybank exit off the interstate. "Viktor Popov. That's the name of the guy Mary and Jack took down. The FBI had been trying to nail him for some pretty serious shit for years, but every time they got close, people would wind up dead or retract their statement. Mary was the nail in his coffin. He owned most of those warehouses in Baybank. His son, Kevin, took over for him while he was behind bars."
"Was? As in past tense? Did he get out?"
Trent shook his head. "Committed suicide a few days ago."
"So you looking at his son for this? Revenge maybe?"
"Possibly. Brooke described that guy she saw in the bar that tried to drug her, but he didn't come up in any databases. Once I had that file and connected Popov to the situation, I struck gold. Kevin spent the first half of his life with his druggie mom. He didn't take on the last name Popov until his mom died and Viktor took him in at fifteen. Kevin's juvie record was sealed, which of course means shit. Every misdemeanor you can think of, he was convicted for. Seemed to clean up his act once he was with his dad, except for one arrest for drugs that was supposed to have been expunged. Guess he took after his mom. Once he was in control of the family business though, he was rumored to have used the connections to start dealing. Made a lot of enemies on the streets, taking over local business and putting dealers on the streets. Again, though, no one could nail him."
Too many holes in the story. Why didn't Jack assume the role as her actual dad? Make a life with Mary? Why going through decades of the facade just to take off and leave it all behind without a second glance? How could he be sure Mary was really safe enough for him to just turn his back?
No, there was definitely more there. We would find Brooke, Jack and Mary, and then they were going to fill in the missing pieces.
"Popov owns the buildings on the West end," Trent said as he pulled into a parking space inside a vacant lot about a mile away from said buildings.
One by one we filed out of the car, making our way to the trunk. Trent pulled up the false bottom to reveal a small arsenal. Two canvas bags full of ammo, three semi-automatic rifles, six glocks, six bulletproof tactical vests, and a whole slew of other weapons.
We each pulled on both vests, stocking them with as much as they would hold. In the middle of the day at a seemingly abandoned shipyard and dressed like we were about to invade a small village, we looked slightly ridiculous. I would have willingly traipsed around in a pink tutu if it meant putting this all behind us, so fuck if I cared.
"I don't see any snipers," Hunter said as he scanned the roofs of the nearby warehouses. "They probably don't expect a cavalry to come storming in. The element of surprise will work to our advantage if they are heavily armed inside the building."
"Maybe you should hang back and stand guard," Alice suggested, earning herself a death glare from Hunter. She didn't seem the least bit sorry. If anything, she looked a little smug, like getting under his skin had been her intention.
"Where do we start?" Nick asked, voicing the question I was about to ask myself.
Trent jerked his head towards the long line of buildings. I assumed that meant he had a plan. We all followed him along the back of the buildings, our backs pressed up against the brick walls of the massive warehouses. Taking turns, we'd check around each corner before sprinting from one building to the next, always covering for each other. It felt eerily similar to situations I'd been in overseas, and the memories were not welcome ones.
Pushing past assignments out of my head, I focused on the task at hand. After making our way past a dozen or so warehouses, Trent held up his hand, signaling for us to wait. As soon as everyone quit moving, I heard it too. Footsteps.
Nick and myself were the only ones with silencers on our weapons, so with a hand to his shoulder, I pulled Trent back and put my body in front of his. From what I could tell, there was only one set of footsteps. I didn't want to whip around the corner and aim my gun at some innocent guy just doing a hard day's work, but I also couldn't risk us being spotted in time for someone to issue out a warning. We needed to hang on to that element of surprise for as long as possible.
The footsteps halted, and when I first heard a voice a few feet away, my adrenaline spiked. When I realized he wasn't talking to us, but rather someone who must have been on the other end of an earpiece, my breathing slowed.
"Yeah, just doing a sweep of the building. Stan spotted a car at the far end of the lot when he was leaving. The plates pulled up a kid, so probably just teens sneaking off for a quick fuck or something." He started walking again, still talkin
g as he continued to near us. "The little bitch bit my hand when I nabbed her. Make sure if boss lets you get in a shot of your own that you take a swing at that pretty little face for me, will ya?"
Motherfucker.
I knew he could still be talking about someone completely unrelated, but my gut told me he was speaking about Brooke. Even if he wasn't, he was obviously an asshole if he was telling someone to hit a woman. Either way, it would be my pleasure to bring the jerk to his knees.
As soon as the toe of his boot inched past the wall I stood up against and into the light of day, I was in motion. With the entire force of my body, I slammed the heel of my shoe into the side of his knee. Before he knew what hit him, you could hear the cracking of bones as his leg buckled at an impossible angle. He tried to cry out, but I gave him a right hook to his jaw, effectively cutting off the sound at the base of his throat.
Blood sprayed from his mouth. He turned to his side, coughing and spitting the bright red liquid all over the pavement. I jammed my knee into his sternum when he rolled onto his back. He sputtered and gasped, trying unsuccessfully to fill his lungs with air. I eased off just enough to let him suck in a small breath. My intentions weren't to kill him.
At least, not until he led us to Brooke.
Chapter Nineteen
I Got Mind Control Over Deebo
Brooke
Scarface was laughing maniacally. Everything about him was such a cliche. When I told him so his laughing stopped abruptly.
"You better watch that smart mouth, little girl, or next time I'll aim the gun at you and not the wall."
Maybe it would have been smarter for me to keep my mouth shut. Just play along, even beg for my life, or try to come up with ways of stalling him. To someone outside looking in, that was probably a pretty obvious route. And it was. Obvious, that is. So when I did the exact opposite of all those things, it was definitely intentional.
"Dude need a breath mint!" I shouted to the massive man who'd walked us to the room only a few minutes earlier. Scarface growled at me, but his guard dog let a laugh slip. He tried to turn it into a cough, covering his mouth with his fist, but we all knew better. "See, Deebo thinks I'm funny." That only made the big guy crack up. No more disguising the laughter. I couldn't help but smile to myself. Making a man that massive laugh that hard made me feel all proud.