Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 110360 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 441(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110360 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 441(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
“Oh God,” I choked.
Devon was around the table and beside me in the very next beat. His arm came around my shoulders, pulling me into his side. Brooke leaned with me, both of us pressing into him like he was the only fixed point left in the room.
Which, honestly, he was.
Apollo’s voice came through Leo’s phone. I could hear the shape of it but not the words.
“How much?” Leo asked.
My stomach sank.
“When?”
My chest tightened.
He exhaled slowly through his nose. “That’s what I thought. Stand by.” He lowered the phone. “About a year ago, Marty made a cash withdrawal from his personal account. A hundred thousand dollars. Cash. No purchase record. No trace of where it went.”
Brooke jerked as if she’d taken a bullet.
And I came apart.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just the last thread finally snapping.
Marty had known. He had been carrying this for a year without telling me. He had pulled a hundred thousand dollars out of his own pocket and paid Jason himself.
And now he was gone, the money was gone, and Zoey was gone, and all that quiet, stubborn, Marty-shaped love hadn’t been enough to stop any of it.
“He didn’t tell me,” I cried.
“No,” Devon said, pressing his lips into the top of my hair. “He was protecting you the only way he knew how.”
My heart shattered, all the broken pieces slicing through me.
But Brooke shot out of her seat so fast the chair nearly fell over behind her. Every man in the room moved instinctively, hands reaching, bodies turning, before they realized that they didn’t need to catch her.
“He’s gonna want more money.” She was almost breathless, staring at me with wild, bright hope. “That’s why he took her. Not because he wants her. He just wants another payday.” She grabbed my hand across the table. “He won’t hurt her if he thinks there’s still money coming.”
Devon slanted his head, agreeing but really not liking it.
“So we give him the money.” She looked back to me. “Whatever he wants. We give him the money and he gives us Zoey, right?”
“Absolutely,” I replied. “Anything. Whatever he wants.”
Devon’s hand covered mine. “It might not be that easy, babe.”
“Then we make it that easy.” It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t even remotely close to the same ballpark as fair. But desperation never was. “You promised me you’d get her back.”
His eyes flashed dark, not with anger or doubt. It was the pure determination of a man who had made a promise he had no intention of breaking.
“I will,” he vowed. “But we gotta do this right, and rarely does right equal easy.” He glanced at Leo. “We bring the cops in. Tell them everything. I don’t trust them to handle this on their own, but they’re gonna be drowning in warrants and wiretap authorizations and bureaucratic tape for a while. Keeps them busy. Keeps us clean. And there’s no way Jason’s going to sit on this long enough for any of that to matter anyway.”
Leo’s lips gave the tiniest twitch. “Finally, he learns something.”
31
DEVON
I laid out the complete story for the detectives, clean and fast. Jason Horton, the payoff, Marty’s hundred thousand, the Arrow connection, all of it. They took notes, asked questions, then told us to hang tight as if that was even possible with Zoey missing.
Then we waited.
And fucking waited.
And every single minute that passed, a fiery rage for both Jason Horton and the LAPD grew inside me.
Lofton and Brooke must have put a thousand miles on the tile floor of that restaurant. Every time I’d guide her back to a table, she’d last about ninety seconds before she was up again. I stayed on my phone. Leo stayed on his. We moved through the space in overlapping orbits, working every angle we had while, God willing, the detectives were working theirs.
Jude pulled a chair next to Brooke and sat with his elbows on his knees and said absolutely nothing, which turned out to be exactly what she needed. Because she finally stopped pacing.
And then she started spinning the damn soy sauce again.
It was my fault.
Not in the way Leo would frame it—not the clean, professional assessment of a man who had made the correct call under impossible conditions. No, it was the other version, the true version, where I had been forty feet away with a clear line of sight, a loaded weapon, a decade of training, and I had sat in that car watching a man snatch a child from her mother.
The worst of it was, I would make the same call again. Given the information I had at the moment, assuming Lofton was the target, I did what I was supposed to do.
But knowing the right answer didn’t make the weight of it any lighter.
I looked at Brooke. Blood soaking through the gauze. She’d gone to her knees on that pavement. She’d clawed at him with everything she had. She’d hit the ground hard enough that I’d heard it from inside the car. Then she’d gotten back up anyway and kept going because that was what mothers did, and I had sat in that car and watched it happen.