by Sheri Landry
“We heard an explosion earlier. You don’t think this was an accident.” I fill in the piece she hasn’t voiced yet, and she takes a deep breath. The muscles in her jaw tighten as she clenches her teeth together.
“No, we don’t.” Her response is forced, and she shifts her weight from side to side. It pains her to be here, which tells me they need us, and that fact is distressing to her.
“You need our help.” I’m not offering anything; I’m voicing what she doesn’t want to admit. Something is happening, and they can’t handle the situation on their own any longer.
She stares me down.
“How do we know this isn’t a setup?” Logan asks from over my shoulder. It’s a legitimate question, so when she meets my eyes, I shrug and raise my eyebrows, telling her to answer or we’re done here.
“You don’t. But I’ll remind you, we finished a contract for”—she decides against using Jessa’s name—“her. A successful contract that took out one of your main adversaries and left every one of you alive.” There is an interesting confidence in the way she stands up to us, and the fact she’s chosen to protect Jessa by keeping her name private is commendable.
“Why should we help you? We could hold you until your team gives us what we want,” Logan counters.
“No, you can’t,” she deadpans with one hundred percent certainty. “Your entire remote team is here. The only weapons you have are what you’re carrying, and, in the off chance you have any comms devices, we’re jamming everything in this barn so you can’t call for backup. It’s an observation, not a threat.”
“Why are you here?” I straighten my posture and cross my arms, hoping my standoffish tone will force her to get to the point.
Her eyes jump to each of us before settling back on me, and her manner has changed. Swallowing hard, she looks more than at me this time—she looks into me as she speaks.
“We think this was a trap.”
“The hit on Maxwell?” I clarify.
“No. The first hit. The one on—” Her eyes land on Dana.
“I don’t understand. Maxwell is dead. If the first hit was a trap, it failed.”
“Did it though?” she counters in a conspiratorial tone. “We all heard Maxwell say he didn’t fund the contract. What if the party who did had a different objective in mind?”
“He said his father financed the hit. You’re telling me Matteo’s objective was to kill his own son?” I ask incredulously, and she is already shaking her head.
“No. Maxwell was a means to an end. There is something Matteo values more than his son’s life.”
“And what is that?”
“His own.”
28
Dana
“We should be looking for her.” I tug on Michael’s sleeve, my voice pitched in panic. I’m not about to try to reason with Logan, and Jack’s main priority will be Jessa.
Jessa and I are well aware of how dangerous Maxwell was. We had collected enough evidence of his destruction to know we needed to stay far away from him. But his father was a more heinous abomination altogether. We rarely spoke about him, instead choosing the one we thought we had a better chance of taking down.
If Maxwell was the devil, Matteo is the boogeyman.
“We already have people heading toward their last known location. We don’t know what’s out there yet.” The woman looks at me. “It would only put more of us in danger. Please, let us recover what we can.”
I’m ready to plead my case when I meet Jessa’s eyes. She knows better than any of us how relentless and monomaniacal Maxwell could be when there was something he wanted. His father is worse.
Instead, I ask for something I have a chance of getting.
“Can we get some water over to that table?” Pointing to the larger table in front of the one we just sat at, I look at Dale and he nods. “Maybe we can all sit down,” I suggest to the group, then look between Michael and the woman. Both nod their approval without looking at each other.
As everyone follows Michael away from the bar, Dale catches my attention as he hands me a few bottles of water.
“You look rough, Dana. Have you eaten today?”
“Actually, I haven’t. It hasn’t seemed important.”
“I’ll be right over with more water. I’m going to get Harry to toss something on the grill for you guys.”
“Thanks, Dale. I appreciate everything you’ve done. I’m just—I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep anything down right now.” The sting of tears rims my eyes. Guilt twists my stomach into a painful knot. “I let Kaley down. I should have kept her with us. I should have been on the helicopter with her.”
“Hey. We’ll find her.” Dale’s attempt at comfort falls short. He’s unable to hide the disappointment in this tone.
My fears have formed a lump in my throat. I can’t respond without breaking down, so I nod and carry the bottles over to the table. Michael slides a chair out beside him, showing me where to sit.
Passing the water around, I glance across the room to watch Dale at the table in the back. Harry stands and walks into the kitchen, and the rest of the guys turn back to their beers as Dale makes his way to us. We sit in an awkward silence before the woman clears her throat.
“You can call me Dyani.” I test out her name in my mind. It’s pretty. “How much do you know about the criminal activities of the Sparr family?” She tosses her question out to us as a group, and Logan sits back in his seat, crossing his arms.
Michael is the one who answers her. I sip away at my water as we all sit in rapt attention while he goes into the information they know: prostitution, trafficking, drugs, and money laundering top the list of charges. Dyani listens intently, nodding to confirm everything Michael is sharing. Then he finishes speaking, and she sits in silence for a few seconds before speaking.
“That pretty much covers Maxwell. What do you know about his father’s dealings?”
Michael, Logan, and Jack exchange hesitant looks as Jessa, Dale, and I wait.
“That’s what we know.” Michael shrugs.
“That’s what we thought.” Dyani frowns to herself.
“Mind sharing what you know?” Logan’s impatience is evident.
“Everything you described here is what Matteo has put Maxwell in charge of. As far as his father is concerned, it is the dirtier side of the business. It is also less lucrative and more…acceptable among criminals.” As she speaks, she lifts her hands off the table in a show of surrender before slowly moving them to her bag. The men around me tense as we watch her open the flap.
An old newspaper clipping rests between her fingers, and she spreads it flat, taking extra care not to tear it before sliding it from the head of the table into the middle. Michael lifts it, and I glance over his shoulder.
The first thing I notice is the date on the browned newsprint; it’s from over fourteen years ago. There are three articles on the page.
“What am I looking at?” Michael holds the paper up.
Reaching across the table, Dyani takes the print from him and gingerly flattens it on the surface, running her finger down the page to the shortest story at the bottom. Everyone leans in to get a look.
The article is an announcement about a charitable initiative on a reservation in Arizona.
“I’m looking at a story about a mass immunization drive?” Michael doesn’t mask his confusion.
“No, you’re looking at a front for the darkest kind of human trafficking,” Dyani counters, prompting Logan and Jack to lean forward and take a closer look.
“And what is the darkest kind?” Michael sounds like he already knows he doesn’t want an answer to his question.
“The kind no one lives through.”
Everyone sits in rapt silence as Dyani looks at each of our faces. As I notice Jessa’s mouth hanging open in shock, I realize I need to snap my own jaw shut.
“We’re listening.” This time it’s Logan who speaks, and I look over at him. His attention is on Dyani, and he
is back in control of himself and the world around him. He’s giving her the floor to plead her case, and she nods, reaching into her bag to produce another piece of paper. It is also worn, and her fingers point to another article, except this time I see a shake in her hand.
“A few months after this project rolled through, a farmer went missing.” Her story matches the tiny print, complete with a grainy picture of a middle-aged American Indian. “It was reported as a missing person. The news died quickly, people moved on, and no one questioned local law enforcement when it was closed as unsolved, despite the one remaining family member who tried to keep it open.”
“And what makes you think it was anything but that?” Jack plays devil’s advocate, drawing her eyes to him.
“Because that”—she taps her forefinger once on the picture and answers with a faint quiver in her chin—“was my father.”
The men around the table adjust their positions slightly. Gone are the aloof and suspicious looks. Humbled, Michael nods at her to continue.
“They didn’t just take my father. They took my sister too. She was at home with our dad getting ready to go to sleep. I had gone out to deliver some dinner to shimá sání, my grandmother. I got a call from my sister; she was hiding in a closet upstairs, and she was hysterical. There was a scream, and I heard them through the phone yelling at each other to take her too before the line went dead.” Dyani uses air quotes to emphasize the words they spoke. “By the time I got home, the house was a mess, and they were gone.” She reaches for her bottle of water and takes a big gulp. “I tried everything to find them. As soon as someone offered to help me, they either changed their minds or they disappeared. I knew if I kept pushing it I would be the next to go missing. But I kept searching, and that’s when Mena found me.
“Almost a year after I met Mena, I found my sister when a group of us broke into a black market sex club. She had been handed off to Maxwell to prostitute out. She was malnourished, abused. She was alive, but that wasn’t the worst of it.”
The entire table is silent. I’m not sure I’ve taken a breath since she started speaking, and a pressure builds behind my eyes as I imagine what it must have been like to find someone I loved in that condition. Then I think about Kaley, and I swallow a sob as Dyani keeps talking.
“The worst part was when she told me she knew our father was dead. She overheard the guards talking when they first took them and they thought she was passed out. They called him the unluckiest bastard in the world and joked about how he was some kind of DNA match for some rich bitch mafia wife in Manhattan who needed a new kidney, and that is when it all clicked, and we figured it out.”
“Figured what out?” Jack asks with interest.
“What they were really doing. They never wanted to take my sister and force her into the sex trade; my father was never in the wrong place. My sister was. They had come for my father that night. He came up as a match in some database, and they took him with the intent of cutting him open, taking what they needed, and throwing him away like garbage.” A tear escapes down her face as she keeps talking. “From there, we traced it back to this.” She points at the original article, and now Logan picks up the flimsy piece of paper and starts reading with a fire in him I haven’t seen before.
“We lived a quiet life. My father kept to himself. He was healthy and never needed a hospital or any medical help for as far back as I can remember. There would have been no reason for anyone to find out if he was a match for anything—except.” She taps the article again. “My father participated in this immunization drive months before he was taken. It took a couple of years of digging, but we have enough to know the Sparrs have been using programs like these to map, categorize, and target people all over the world, and they are cashing in on our blood—literally. We’re like one giant vending machine. If someone has enough money, all they have to do is pull up the database, locate a match, then find a way to make that person disappear. Whether they pay off someone who wants their spouse gone or kidnap someone off the street. Think about it. How many people vanish without a trace? The more underprivileged the person, the easier it is. And this goes all the way up to the most powerful people you can imagine. Lawmakers, doctors.” She pauses for a moment, as if to consider her next words, then looks at the men around the table. “Senators.”
Logan slams his hands flat on the table. “Are you saying you think—”
Dyani raises her hands in supplication, cutting Logan off. “I’m saying I know, without a doubt and with proof. Mena was right when she said we had different information than you did when we neutralized the senator you were hired to protect. I was there with her team that day. The files she confiscated from him saved hundreds of lives and freed a lot of people. It was a huge dent in their operation.”
“I want to see your proof.” Logan clenches his hands into fists on the table. I look at Michael, whose expression has turned solemn.
“I don’t have it here, but I can get it. I’m just asking you to suspend what you think you know about us, for now.”
I look to Logan, and I feel the need to ask about his sister. I want Dyani to clear the air and tell us it must be a misunderstanding. As if reading my thoughts, Logan settles his heavy eyes onto mine and slowly shakes his head. I slouch into my seat as the outside door opens and a second woman sticks her head in. Her curly flaxen hair flows out from under a knit hat.
Inadvertently, I lift my hand to my own hair. I’ve missed my blond strands. I’ve felt out of place ever since I changed myself.
Calloused fingers wrap around my own, drawing my attention to Michael as he lowers our hands together, placing my palm on my thigh, and a momentary tinge of embarrassment hits me. I shouldn’t be thinking about my own vanity with everything going on around us, but he settles me with a small tap of comfort before taking his hand away.
“Yes?” Dyani brings my attention back to the woman at the door.
“We’ve got them on satellite comms. There’s one survivor from the helicopter. They’re bringing her in, but it’ll be a while. They’re making their way off the mountain in radio silence.”
“Who is it?” Everyone turns to listen to the answer, and my stomach knots in guilt because I hope it’s Kaley.
“Shaz.”
Dyani waves her off, and the door rattles shut as I watch her process everything in her mind. For the first time tonight, she looks distressed. She looks like I feel, knowing Kaley is still out there somewhere.
I don’t know about everyone else at the table, but Jessa and I knew none of this information. Our focus was always to gather evidence on Maxwell’s connections and criminal activity, and we never came across anything like this.
There’s no way Maxwell had any connection to something this horrific. I would bet he didn’t have any knowledge of it either. If he did, Jessa would have uncovered it, so either they were protecting Maxwell from their crimes, or they were protecting their crimes from Maxwell. Judging by the knowledge that the Sparrs most likely sent Maxwell to his death today, they had no real love for their son. They used him like a pawn, but to what end?
“Is this why they wanted Jessa? To use Zane on their DNA database?” All eyes fall on me at my question, and I look around the table. “How did they know she was alive?”
I meet Dyani’s eyes, and she leans into her seat as everyone returns their attention to her.
“They didn’t. Jessa was never their target.”
29
Philomena
The moment Max said it was Dad who funded the hit, voices in my earpiece picked up from all over.
Everyone knew what it meant, and everyone chimed in, telling me to get the hell out of there.
This hit was never about recovering files or killing Dana to get revenge for what Jessa managed to do to Maxwell last year.
This was my father’s final play, and he threw away his son to do it.
Dropping my eyes to Max’s lifeless body one last time, I make my peace, finally freeing my br
other from Matteo’s talons like I promised him I would all those years ago.
“Mena, I mean it. Get your ass out of there now, or we’re all coming in for you.” The dire concern in Dyani’s tone sends goosebumps up my arms.
Jessa and the men with her are arguing, and I scan the room, my eyes landing on the young girl my team had to pick up with everyone else earlier today.
I hate this. I hate this part so much. Her eyes are wide, she’s trying hard not to cry, and I see by the lines in her scrunched forehead she’s in a lot of pain. She’s an innocent bystander. She never signed up for any of this, and she reminds me of—
“I’ll take her myself in the helicopter.” The words are out of my mouth before I come to my senses, and the voices in my ear start up all over again.
You can’t save everyone, a voice from deep inside my own head provokes me.
Dana looks like she’s going to argue with me before she turns her attention to the young girl, and I nod to my people standing in the shadows. Hicks and Kai head straight for Kaley and help her to the helicopter when Dana asks me if I know where Dale’s is, and I nod.
We came into this town knowing where everything is, and that is why there is an air of urgency around us now. The fact we didn’t know it was Matteo who set everything in play changes everything. We built our offense on information we were sure of. Like a house of cards, we were confident in every step we would need to take to get here. Everything was perfect—everything except that first card we set down, and if we don’t move quickly, our plans could collapse because of it.
I’m almost out the door when one of the men yells in my direction.
“I will find you. This changes nothing.” I don’t have time to argue with him, to tell him my side of the situation with the senator he was hired to protect years ago.