by Layla Reyne
Using the hand in his, Dante led him back to the table. He reached out and drew the folder to them, flipping it open.
Account records from an offshore bank Hawes recognized. Their family regularly did business there. “How did you get these?”
“Friend of a friend did a little hacking for me.” He spread out the first three sheets. “Jodie, Ray, and Lucas did get paid.”
Significant amounts, according to the highlighted records.
“By?” Given Dante’s theory, Hawes knew the answer but needed to see the evidence for himself.
It was more painful than he’d imagined.
Dante pushed the fourth sheet in front of him. “All the deposits came from this account.” Multiple entries were highlighted on the ledger. Dante drew his attention to the account holder’s box. “You recognize the name?”
Tears pricked the backs of Hawes’s eyes, and words fought to get out past the lump in his throat. “Holt’s military call sign, and our mother’s maiden name.”
Dante curled a hand over his thigh. “There were two more payments of interest.” He pointed to the most recent at the top of the page. “This one is to a trust fund for the benefit of Max Bailey’s family. Do you know who he was?”
“The name sounds familiar.” But Hawes couldn’t place him.
“He was a platoon mate of your brother’s. He’s been in and out of mental health facilities since retiring from the army. PTSD.”
That triggered the memory. “Holt was his peer support contact when Bailey returned home. What does he have to do with this?”
“Max Bailey rented a cargo van last night.” Dante withdrew a photo from the folder. It was the same van that had been rigged to blow them up today.
“Oh God.” Hawes pitched sideways, burying his face in Dante’s chest. He didn’t want to believe this. Didn’t want to believe that his calm, quiet, devoted brother had manipulated a friend, someone who’d needed his help, into sacrificing himself. Didn’t want to believe that he would sacrifice his family, his own wife, for control of the family empire.
“There’s one more thing you need to see.”
Hawes shook his head. He’d seen enough. He was coming apart at the seams—his empire, his family, his world disintegrating around him. There were no nets, just an endless free fall. He wanted it to stop.
Dante had other ideas. Hand around his neck, he drew Hawes upright, then turned over the highlighted bank account record. One line was highlighted on the back, an older transaction. “A payment was made to Zander Rowe, the day of—”
“Isabelle Costa’s murder.” Hawes recognized the date. It cut worse than the account holder’s name on the front. “But all that was before Lily.”
“And Holt’s cleaning up the mess now, because of Lily. Securing the world, the empire, for her.”
Hawes covered his face with his hands. Was it really possible? Had his own brother engineered the worst moment of his life? Put him in a situation where he’d made an impossible choice and an innocent woman had lost her life? Soaked Hawes’s hands in blood? “He wouldn’t do that to me.”
Dante’s hand landed on the knot between his shoulders. “We all have a blind spot where family is concerned.”
“No!” Hawes rocketed to his feet and shot out an arm, swiping the table clean. This wasn’t a blind spot. This was his brother, his twin. He ran from the truth, nearly falling over the bench in his hurry to escape. He caught his balance on a tumbling lunge and stumbled into the nearest pillar.
Dante was at his side the next instant, looping an arm around his front and clasping his neck. Hawes wanted none of the steadiness he offered. Spinning meant maybe he could grab on to another explanation. Anything but the truth staring him in the face. Steadiness meant standing still and accepting that the person he thought he knew best in the world was the one he knew least.
He fought out of Dante’s hold and circled the living room. “What the fuck am I supposed to do? I can’t ki—” He cut off the heinous thought. “He’s my brother.”
“You bring him back in line.”
“And my sister?” Helena had looked so stretched thin lately. Had she been helping Holt? “And Amelia? Whose side are they on?”
“We can’t be sure.”
Was that car bomb today only meant for him? Had he risked Rose’s life by riding in the same car with her? She was awake when they’d left the hospital, would go home tomorrow if she remained stable overnight, but she would’ve never been there if not for Hawes, either because he was the target or because he made the wrong call. His fault, either way.
“I should have listened to you and not gone to the funeral. I keep making the wrong decisions. Maybe I shouldn’t be in charge.”
Dante stepped in front of him, blocking his path. “That’s what he wants you to think. You are exactly the Madigan that needs to be in charge.” Dante cradled his face with both hands. “You are the one that changed the organization for the better.”
“We did it,” Hawes said, staring at Dante through the tears pooling in his eyes, willing the other man to understand. “Me, Holt, and Helena. Who am I supposed to trust now? I can’t do this alone.”
“You don’t have to.” Dante brushed his thumbs over his cheeks, wiping away the wetness there. “Trust me. I’m on your side.”
Would he stay that way once he learned the truth about Isabelle’s death? Hawes doubted it, and then he’d be well and truly alone. Without Dante and without his family. He closed his eyes and leaned his weight against Dante while he still could. “I don’t know how to do this.”
Hand under his chin, Dante forced his gaze back up. The desperate flailing in Dante’s eyes caught Hawes by surprise, but as quick as the turmoil appeared, it was gone, resolve hardening the swirling brown. “We’ll figure this out, the two of us.” Dante leaned their foreheads together. “But you have to trust me.”
Hawes had to trust someone. Dante had his own agenda that would eventually make them enemies, but for now, he’d proved himself to be on Hawes’s side. Maybe the only one left there.
“I trust you.” He tunneled his fingers into Dante’s hair and pulled him back, just enough to lock eyes. “Please don’t make me regret it.”
Dante kissed him, and regret was the furthest thing from Hawes’s mind. As steadiness rushed back in, Hawes realized what he had to do.
Chapter Sixteen
Hawes felt more than a little guilty for tossing the past three hours of planning out the window. Guiltier still about the sedative he’d slipped into Dante’s drink. Guiltiest of all about stealing his bike. But there was no way Dante would’ve let him do what he needed to otherwise, and without his bike when he came to, Dante would be further delayed. Hawes had bought himself an extra fifteen minutes, if not more. The hair-raising ride over was worth it.
“Where’s Perry?” Helena asked from her usual perch above the drive, her blonde hair and Ka-Bar glowing in the lights from the house.
Hawes finished steadying the bike, then started up the stairs, taking his chances with the truth. “My condo. Passed out on the dining table.”
Standing over Dante, chest tight, Hawes had gently pushed back the long strands of his hair and admired his handsome face, peaceful in sleep. Hawes did trust him, even if they’d only known each other a week. His heart was getting on board too, which was a dangerous first. Someone else he had to protect. But Hawes’s heart and mind also trusted his brother, no matter the abundance of evidence to the contrary. Hawes understood why Dante believed it—the bank records and other connections to Holt were damn convincing. But not enough to turn Hawes against his twin. There had to be an explanation, and here was the best place to get one.
“He’s still at your place after what Holt showed you?” Helena spun the knife in her grip. Hawes suspected it was as much a nervous tic by now as it was keeping her weapon at the ready.
Hawes sat on the ledge and lifted her bare feet into his lap. “He convinced me otherwise.”
“W
hat else has he convinced you of?”
“That someone is trying to tear apart our family.”
The knife stilled in her hand. “Could it be him?”
“I don’t think so. This started long before he came into the picture.”
“But it escalated when he showed up.”
“Or when it became clear Papa Cal was near death.”
She cast her gaze aside, and in the quiet night, her gulp was loud.
“Chicken-egg problem, Hena.”
“I don’t trust him.”
“You don’t have to.” He squeezed her ankle and waited for her eyes. “You just have to trust me.”
“Do you still trust us?” She tightened her grip on the knife, as if bracing for pain yet also ready to dole it out, if that’s what she had to do. She called him the strong one, but she was the glue that held them together, the one who asked the hard questions, and their family’s best defender.
She didn’t need to brace or defend in this instance. Never against him. “Always,” he answered.
Her grip on the knife relaxed, as did the tension in her back, braced against the column. “Good.” She lifted her feet out of his lap and swung them around to the tiled landing. “There’s something you need to see.”
He followed her inside and upstairs to Holt’s lair. As he crested the top step, he faltered. One sweeping look and he wished he could unsee it all. From his crying brother in the corner rocker, Lily clutched in his arms, to the wreckage of computer equipment strewn across the floor, to the wall of monitors displaying the truth that had been hiding in all their blind spots.
He carefully stepped around the mess on the floor and inched closer to the monitors, struggling to believe, to understand, what he was seeing. Every image, every detail, struck like a bullet, tearing his battered insides to shreds.
Amelia entering the offshore bank, the logo over the door matching the logo on the account records Dante had shown him.
Amelia in the arms of a frayed-looking man dressed in army fatigues, the patch on his camo jacket reading: BAILEY.
Amelia meeting Jodie, Ray, and Lucas outside the hotel in Big Sur.
Amelia and Bailey at the warehouse earlier in the week, the timestamp matching a gap in the surveillance footage.
It wasn’t Holt trying to pull off a coup. It was Holt’s wife.
Amelia, who’d been recruited by Papa Cal, who had an eye into everything, and who could play cards with one look at her hand because she had an eidetic memory. Who was always looking over Holt’s shoulder. The person in the best position to make it look like he was the guilty party.
“We found her print on one of the car-bomb components.” Stepping out of the front alcove, blanket in hand, Kane moved behind a shivering Holt and tucked the knitted wool around his shoulders. “We don’t know why she did it.”
“Lily,” Hawes said as he regarded his slumbering niece in her wrecked father’s arms.
Dante had the motivation right, just the culprit wrong. The traitor in their midst was the other person who would do anything to secure Lily’s future, including framing her own husband and stealing the throne.
Hawes turned away from the monitors and crossed the room to kneel in front of Holt. He brushed the fuzz on Lily’s head and looked up at his brother. “She’s safe, Holt. That’s all that matters.”
Tortured brown eyes lifted to his. “I’m sorry, Hawes. I should have—”
“This is not your fault.” He lifted his hand from Lily’s head to Holt’s arm, clasping it tightly. “She fooled all of us.”
“What’s she after?” Kane asked. “What’s her mission?”
“A seat at the table, officially. At the head of it.”
“If anyone should have seen it, it was me.” Helena tapped her nails, trying and failing to fight her own tremors. “She was so quick to come back to work, and when we’d talk, she was obsessed with the family holding power.”
Power. To hold for Lily.
“That’s what she cares about,” Helena said, reaching the same conclusion Hawes had. She aimed a pointed look at Kane. “Not alliances.” At Hawes. “Not any sort of code.” And finally her gaze landed on a heartbroken Holt, sympathy in her eyes. “Not even love.”
Twin tears raced down Holt’s cheeks as he held Lily closer. Kane readjusted the blanket around them and left his hands on the top of the chair, standing guard. Holt huddled with his daughter in the blanket, hiding from this awful new reality.
Hawes couldn’t hide. This was his kingdom to protect now. He rose and turned to Helena, who was standing by the monitors. “Where is she?”
“Approaching your condo.” She gestured at the surveillance feed showing the hallway outside Hawes’s front door.
Hawes’s earlier guilt came crashing back, a tidal wave compared to the earlier breakers. On the other side of that door was Dante, drugged and defenseless. Because Hawes had left him that way.
“Faster!” Hawes held on tight as Helena pushed the Harley harder, flying around turns and sailing over hills. For once, he didn’t care about his own potential death-by-motorcycle. He was more concerned with Dante’s potential death-by-sister-in-law.
They skidded to a stop around the corner from Hawes’s building, out of sight and hearing range. Helena killed the engine, and Hawes toggled on the comm device over his ear.
“Kane, update.”
While Holt recovered, the chief had taken over comms. “I’ve got this,” he’d said before they left. “I’ll monitor things until I have to call in the cavalry.”
Holt had spoken up then, misery in every syllable. “Don’t hurt her, please.” Gaze fixed on Lily, his Adam’s apple bobbed as he fought to get the words out. “She’s her mother.”
“Give us a twenty-minute head start,” Hawes had told Kane, then after a parting kiss to Holt’s and Lily’s heads, had raced out with Helena.
That had been fifteen minutes ago. This time of night, the streets were mostly deserted, making their ride through downtown fast.
“No movement outside the building,” Kane reported. “Or outside your door.”
But he couldn’t speak to inside, which Amelia had entered with her thumbprint and code, one of the few other people who had full access. Hawes cursed his no-cameras-inside rule. His privacy was a small price to pay for lo—
Helena saved him from having to cut off his own dangerous thought. “How are we getting in?” she asked. “We can’t just go up and knock.”
Hawes had an idea, but it required Holt’s assistance. “I need my brother,” he told the chief.
“Hold on a second.”
Muffled voices preceded a disgruntled wail from Lily. She quieted a moment later as Kane took up a horribly off-key lullaby. Hawes couldn’t help but smile, circumstances be damned.
“I’m here,” Holt said, and the flurry of keystrokes told Hawes he was in front of his computers.
Exactly where Hawes needed him. “We need your help.”
“Let me guess. You need to break into your own panic room.” Holt’s voice cracked, evidence of his earlier tears, but his deadpan sarcasm was back where it belonged.
Hawes smiled wider. “Twin powers activated.”
“Knew there was a reason we bought that upstairs unit.”
Technically owned by MCS, the condo above Hawes’s was a blank box they rented out to artists as studio space and sometimes also used for shelter activities. Unbeknownst to renters, the locked “owner’s closet” was actually a panic room for Hawes’s condo below.
Holt had them inside it in less than two minutes.
“How do you want to do this?” Helena asked as she yanked off her boots. “Where do you think she is in the unit?”
“I’d guess either end of the main space so she can see the entire length of it, plus more weapons in the kitchen, but I can’t see or detect anything through these walls. It’s a panic room for a reason.”
“Don’t need it,” Holt said. “I can use the Wi-Fi signals from you
r network and Amelia’s phone to get her location.”
“That sounds an awful lot like cameras, even if there are no pictures.”
Holt talked over impossibly fast keystrokes. “I might have loaded some beta software on your router and in your smart-home-system app. I swear I haven’t tapped it until now.”
Hawes didn’t totally believe him, but again, small price to pay in the current situation. And he’d latched on to a different, more important tactical advantage in something Holt had said. “Can you create a distraction using the app?”
Helena nodded, following his train of thought. “Kill the lights and blast the music when we drop through. I like it.” She made a slicing motion with her hand by her ear—their signal for cut it—and flipped off her comm. Once Hawes did the same, she asked, “Can we do that and get her out alive? We promised him.”
“That’s my plan.”
“Will Dante be on board with that plan?”
“Are you?”
Banked anger flashed in her eyes, but she shut it down just as quickly. “For Holt and Lily, yes,” she said, resolved. She checked to make sure her gun and knife were secure. “But if I bloody her nose, can’t be helped.”
“No one will blame you.” Hawes reactivated his comm and checked his knife and garrote were in easy reach. “Where is she, Holt?”
“Kitchen, according to the Wi-Fi.”
“I go low, you go high,” Hawes said to Helena. That had always worked well for them when dropping into blind situations.
She grinned and bounced on her bare toes. “Ready.”
Hawes put his hand on the button next to the panic room door. “Cue the music.”
“On my count,” Holt replied. “Three, two, one.”
Helena’s “Go!” was the last thing Hawes heard before he slammed his palm against the button and the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” rent the air.
Chapter Seventeen
The retractable door in the ceiling slid open, and Hawes dropped through, riding the soles of his Oxfords down the ladder rails into his living room.