“And unless you want her to end up that way with Cam as collateral damage, you need to listen to me on this.”
“Do you have a plan?” Vaughn demanded.
“I’m starting to. I need to make some calls. If I can get the FBI out there—”
“I thought you said no cops,” Eva said, her voice rising in panic.
Marcus glanced over his shoulder at her. “That was before this all went to hell in a frilly pink hand basket.” He returned his attention to Vaughn. “Give me ten minutes.”
Vaughn shook his head and made to shoulder past him. “We don’t have ten minutes.”
Marcus grumbled something that was probably very unflattering under his breath, but then relented with a heavy sigh and stepped out of the way. “Fine. Go be John McClane and yippee-ki-yay it up. But you get me those ten minutes, whatever you do, and I’ll make sure all three of you get out of there alive.”
Chapter Nineteen
The warehouse was in a part of the city the politicians downtown preferred to pretend didn’t exist. Rundown, abandoned, falling apart—Dahlia had seen plenty of places like this in her travels. She’d taken shelter in warehouses like this during the months she’d spent homeless, had slept on cold concrete floors, listening to the scurrying of rodents and other unwanted people echoing through the cavernous emptiness.
Her stomach soured, and bile rose in her throat.
She wanted to run.
God, did she want to.
She even took her foot off the gas and coasted to a stop still a half a block from her destination. Her hands shook, and she gripped the wheel harder to get them to stop.
Her personal devil waited inside that warehouse.
She couldn’t do this.
She slammed the car into reverse—but stopped before taking her foot off the brake as a vision of Vaughn flashed in her mind’s eye. The hurt on his face when she’d left him at that motel outside of Atlanta, the pain in his eyes he’d tried so hard to hide when she approached him outside Wilde Security.
She had to do this for him. It was a fool’s errand, but if she had even the slightest chance of saving his brother, she had to try. Because if Cam died, so would Vaughn. It might not be a physical death, but it’d rip out his soul, tear a gaping hole in him that nothing would ever fix. He’d never be the same. She knew all too well what it was like to lose so much of yourself you never found your way back, and she wouldn’t let it happen to him.
She sucked in a deep breath and put the car in gear again, inching toward the warehouse. The side door opened as soon as she parked and Cristiano Bellisario stepped out, followed by his little shit of a cousin, Tommy. They were the same age as her, but seemed years younger due to either coddled, too-privileged upbringings, or a stunning lack of intelligence. Probably both. Cristiano wasn’t going to win any awards for brainpower anytime soon, and Tommy thought the world owed him anything he wanted. He’d always had an ugly mean streak, and the sneer on his face now sent shivers cascading through her. Obviously, five years had done nothing to mellow him out.
“Tommy.” She was surprised at how level her voice sounded since her heart was threatening to hammer out of her chest. “Cris. It’s been a long time.”
Tommy’s only acknowledgment was to sneer again. Cristiano’s expression remained weirdly blank, as if there was nothing going on inside his head one way or another. He held open the door with his big body and said, “Father will be here soon.”
Dahlia gazed at the doorway and told herself she had to go in, but her feet wouldn’t move.
She could do this. She had to do this. For Vaughn.
Tommy gave her a shove from behind, and she tripped over the metal lip of the doorframe.
Despite its dilapidated appearance from the outside, the interior of the warehouse actually was miles away from the ones she’d sought shelter in. It was clean and well-lit with stadium-like seating surrounding an enormous metal cage at the center of the space. Obviously this was one of Giuseppe’s underground fight clubs. Hadn’t Vaughn said that was how he first landed on Giuseppe’s radar?
Cam sat in the cage, his back to the wire, his knees drawn up, head resting on his folded arms. He looked a little banged up, but he was breathing. Which, if she was honest with herself, was more than she’d been expecting.
As her footsteps echoed in the space, he gazed up. One eye was swollen shut and his lip had been split open, but he looked so much like Vaughn that her heart stuttered. Logically, she’d known they were identical twins. She’d even met Cam before and knew he and Vaughn were about as identical as twins got. Even so, she hadn’t been prepared for the gut-check reality of seeing a man with Vaughn’s face all beat-up and held captive.
Cam’s one good eye widened. “Lark?”
Oh, how she wished she could be Lark again. Life had been so much simpler, and for a brief, shining moment, she’d been happy.