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Down below are the rooms where we relax, decide on jobs, catch up, meet to strategize. What the fuck ever.
This place is no frills. This is where we take people who never make it out again. And where hard-core secret meetings happen.
“Where the fuck is Elliot?” I ask Smith.
He crosses his arms. “Last-minute fill-in for you, remember? And you don’t get to talk to him until you calm the fuck down.”
The door opens and Malone comes in. He pulls out a chair and sits, putting his booted feet on a table. “What? I’m here for the entertainment.” Then he sees my face. “Sorry.”
The asshole isn’t sorry.
“Elliot didn’t have a who’s who guide. She went into the place, and it’s only when she didn’t come out that he went looking.” Malone shrugs. “The art guy? Trent somebody? He was in there, confused about where she went, but then he got a call and had to go.”
“And Elliot just let him?”
My vision is tunneled, everything in me stretched taut. There’s time enough for real focus, but if I don’t let this rage out, I’m no good and?—
I will not have another Fina on my hands.
Not Dakota.
No way.
“Trust me,” Smith says. “I want blood over this. But…” He plays a message and it turns my blood cold.
“I’m okay, I want to get away, after… after everything. So tell Daddy not to look for me.”
Malone looks at my face and shoots up from the chair. “Daddy?”
I turn, grab the chair, and throw it so hard against the wall that lesser men than these two would have run. Fuck.
“She left that with her friend.” I say this, don’t ask it. “I want Elliot and I want him now.”
“That’s not going to help.”
“Says Smith, the voice of fucking reason.” I start to pace.
“Dakota’s my daughter.” He’s tapping in things on his phone screen.
I turn to Smith. I like him, I do. He’s my friend, but right in this moment, I can’t fucking stand him. I want him in tiny pieces, and they both know it.
“Orion,” Malone says, almost as quietly as I spoke. “This is?—”
“He let this happen to her. He wasn’t man enough to follow her. He sent someone else. Not even a fucking Knight. Just one of our people.”
“And you think you would have saved her?” Smith stalks up to me and we’re almost nose to nose. “Do you want to know why I didn’t fucking go? Because she wouldn’t have let me. You screwed it up by screwing her.”
“Shoulda got me some popcorn for this show,” Malone mutters. He holds up his hands in defense as I swivel to face him.
I move away and punch the wall, then I rub my hand over my face. Beyond the fury is a numbness. And beneath that…
Letting out a slow breath, I ask, “When did she leave the message?”
“We’ve been on this since we discovered Dakota was gone,” Smith says to me. “This morning, I went by Alejandro’s. He wasn’t there, but I asked Harley to let me know if she heard from Dakota. The message was forwarded to me between me calling you and you getting here.”
So if this happened while I was upstate, and she got the message in the last half hour, that means they had time. Time enough to get her on a jet, then a boat to that island. They’re a worldwide operation, but they’re not overly organized. Walking in and taking her is. And it’s ballsy.
But the island is plain sloppy, and I’ll bet everything I own that’s where she is. I do some calculations in my head. She sounded a little out of it and scared to fucking death. The timing is right to do all that last minute and to do the deed—take her, transport her—with a plan in place.
