Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 71949 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 360(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71949 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 360(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
“Gordon Brown.”
The room shrinks.
The buzzing rush in my ears gets so loud I almost miss the rest of what he’s saying.
Gordon Brown.
Chef.
My father’s chef.
My flesh tightens around me, threatening to suffocate me.
“Dani?” Raven is in front of me suddenly. “Look at me.”
I do. Her eyes are fierce and frightened.
“You okay?” she asks.
“No.” The word surprises me with its honesty. “But I will be. Once Belinda is back home.”
Vinnie straightens. “Gordon Brown, like that Gordon Brown?”
Chef blinks. “So I was right to make the connection.”
Raven squeezes my fingers once before letting go and standing. Her spine is steel. “Dani’s father had a chef,” she says. “Not a cook. Not a house helper. A trained chef.”
Chef meets Vinnie’s gaze and then Raven’s. He resists looking at me. “Is that…bad?”
I swallow. The language I want is ugly. The language I choose is clean. “He’s dangerous.”
My mind whirls.
Diego Vega.
Chef Gordon Brown.
How is this all connected?
Maybe it’s not.
But Chef Charleston felt the connection. It was enough to drive him to come here in the early hours of the morning.
And in that instant, I know it with bone-deep certainty…
Belinda isn’t just in danger.
She’s in the kind of danger people don’t come back from.
17
HAWK
I’m here.
The coordinate.
I kill the engine and let the night swallow the noise.
I sit with it a second, hands still on the wheel, headlights glaring at an old fence and what’s behind it. An old building. Barn, shed, take your pick. It all looks the same after enough summers and storms. The coordinates Reyes sent put me miles from the closest road.
If he wanted to ambush me, this would be the perfect place.
Nothing moves.
No second set of lights. No whisper of tires on gravel.
Just me and another old building on our property, this one near the northern border instead of the south, but other than that, it’s no different from the one where the shit went down with Vega eight years ago.
Fucking Diego Vega.
The man just won’t stay dead.
Not for Eagle. Not for Falcon and me.
Not for Vinnie and not for Daniela.
He keeps turning up like a bad penny, and somehow every road I drive ends up with his prints in the dust.
Where’s the connection that I’m not seeing?
Something my father locked in a drawer and labeled “no other choice?”
It must be related to Ted Tucker somehow. Why else would my father have offed him? It sure as hell wasn’t because he was some threat to my mother and sisters.
I breathe out through my teeth, force my hands off the wheel, and reach for my phone. Not the burner I’ll use to send Reyes a photo later—if there is a later—but my regular phone.
Robin’s number. She was supposed to be looking into the Tucker situation. I tap it.
Straight to voicemail. Figures.
“Hey, Robbie,” I say, “I’m near the north forty at oh-dark-thirty. Remember that thing you were poking at? Call me back. Or better yet, meet me at my place. Bye.”
I hang up, tuck the phone away, and grab the Maglite from the passenger footwell. I packed it out of habit, same as the folding shovel, same as the small crowbar and a coil of rope.
When I step out, the air is cooler than it was at sunset, and the wind carries sage and dust and a hint of distant water. The Bellamy property sprawls wider than most cities. I once joked you could hide a stadium out here and my father would call it an outbuilding. I’ve seen maybe ten percent of our total land. Falcon used to ride his motorcycle out to the fencelines when we were kids, hauling himself home with cactus spines and a grin. If anyone’s been up here, it’s him.
I click the Maglite on and sweep it across the nearest fencepost.
The building sits thirty yards beyond. I walk closer. It’s gray with the roof sagging in the middle. A pair of doors is chained together with a padlock.
Looks pretty harmless.
Which is why it’s not.
If Reyes wants this place razed, there’s a reason. Either there’s something in this old barn that shouldn’t be, or there was, and he needs the last of it to disappear in a way that leaves no trace.
I check the dirt at the threshold. The soil here is dense hardpan over sand. Still, the Maglite skims scuffs that aren’t natural—disturbed patches, a faint crescent where a boot toe pivoted instead of a coyote paw. Not from yesterday. But not from ten years ago either.
The padlock itself is old but not welded by time. The chain is newer—galvanized links with the shine not quite scoured off. Someone cared enough to keep people out semi-recently.
Or to keep something in.
I step to the side and run the light up the seam of the doors. Two minutes with a crowbar would get me in.
“Trenches first,” I tell the dark. “Then accelerant after dawn. Not tonight.”