“I’m coming. We are either riding together, or I am following you. You pick but make it snappy. We are on a time crunch,” I said, looking at my invisible watch.
My friend looked down at me, his face masked with concern. “You don’t need to see this,” he whispered.
“If it concerns Romano or the girls, then I do.”
Jer looked at James.
The agent rolled his eyes. “I don’t give a shit anymore, but Connors will be pissed.”
Jer rubbed the back of his neck. “That shit is on you, G.”
“Speaking of my fiancé, where is he?”
“Already there.”
“Where?”
Jer and James shared a look, and I stepped closer to both men. “I will chop your dicks off and feed them to you. Where. The. Fuck. Is. Dean?”
“With Kevin Matthews,” James answered plainly before turning away.
Chapter Ten
Dean
Gwen was going to fucking kill me.
I hadn’t been home in over eighteen hours. We dropped Aiden over at the Jackson’s last night, and after I made sure she was settled, I headed out into the early morning to get intel.
That intel was Kevin Matthews.
Jer’s boys found him locked up under Busch Stadium.
There was a network of passageways underneath the stadium, almost as large as a parking garage. After we left a faceless Tipponi to rot on the pitcher’s mound yesterday, we told members of the street crew to keep an eye on the closed baseball park. The Cardinals were out in California this week.
Five hours after we dumped the body, an anonymous tip was sent in to the STL PD. Red and blue lights showed up at the scene.
Then, Jer got a call from one of his boys, Dontell, this afternoon.
According to him, some mafia goons showed up at the investigation. After they viewed the body, they headed into the stadium going, in the opposite direction from which they came.
He followed them downstairs to the ground level and one secret door led to two, and boom:Kevin.The three of us spent the rest of the afternoon moving him to a safe house outside the city.
Hell, I couldn’t even tell you what day it was.
Everything was about finding the girls. Nothing else mattered.
My days used to blend together when I was under Romano, too. Sometimes, I didn’t even care whether not the sun would rise the next day, because the darkness I had to immerse myself in drained the life out of me, like my own personal vampire. Now, I was forced to awaken that side of me again, and a new fear created itself inside my chest, fear for my son—my innocent son. There was a monster inside me, born and bred by the bloodshed Romano demanded.
His penance.
Spilling blood to protect Gwen was never a problem for me, but now, I had Aiden to worry about. There were sides of his father he could never know, a darkness that would never touch him. He would get to live the life I never could.
“You are bigger than I expected.”
I looked up from my crossed ankles, shaking off my parental worries, to the man bound to a chair.
I'd never gotten the chance to meet Kevin Matthews officially, but I knew he was there the night of his brother’s accident. Over the years, I had pondered why he didn’t jump into his brother’s fight to aid him, but time gave me the answer. Kevin Matthews didn’t give a rat’s ass about his sibling; his hatred for him was rooted deep, whether he wanted to admit it or not. There was jealousy there, and maybe after all this time it had faded. Who the hell knew?
