Dark Vengeance Part 2 Read online

  Lina felt more relieved than disappointed. The idea that Augustus Noble—a man she pretty much hated—might have been able to telepathically sense her baby in her womb before she could had seemed so goddamn unfair and wrong.

  “But…you’re okay with this?” she asked. When he looked visibly puzzled, she added, “I know what you think about humans and Brethrens mating. An abomination—isn’t that what Brandon said you Kentucky clans call it?”

  His expression shifted, growing momentarily remorseful—something she had no accounting for. “We have called many things abomination in my lifetime,” he remarked after a moment. “Most of which have been unduly so.”

  Taking up his drink, he walked away, disappearing through the open doorway into the suite’s bedroom, and remaining gone for so long, she began fidgeting uncomfortably in her seat, wondering if he’d passed out in there or something.

  When he returned, he still had his drink—or at least, the now-empty glass—but in his free hand, he carried a rectangular slip of paper. He presented the latter to her wordlessly, then turned on his heel and went to a nearby table to refill the former.

  It was a check—one made payable directly to her in the amount of $1,000,000. At the sight of all of those zeroes, her mouth went dry, and her throat caved in on itself. “What’s this?” she asked, little more than a croak.

  “That sum should be more than sufficient,” Augustus said.

  “For what?” For a long moment, she could only blink stupidly at him.

  “The pregnancy, of course. You don’t have health insurance, am I correct?”

  “I…uh, no…I mean, yes,” she stammered. “I mean, yes, you’re right. No, I don’t have insurance. Not yet, I mean. I…I just started my job and I…”

  “I’ll make some phone calls in the morning, speak with some of Michel’s kin,” he said. “I’m sure that one of them would be willing to make any arrangements necessary to assume charge of the child once it’s born.”

  Lina felt all of the color drain abruptly from her face. “What are you talking about?”

  “Michel’s human kin are familiar with raising our kind,” Augustus said. “They would be more than capable. Of course, if you’d rather terminate the pregnancy, that check should cover those costs, as well.”

  “What?” Now the color returned to her, twin flares of heat in her cheeks. Had he sensed this in her mind? She was ashamed to admit it—hell, she hadn’t admitted it yet, not even to herself—but the possibility of getting an abortion had been there, nagging at her, insistent and persistent.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you.” He turned to look at her from over his shoulder, his expression somewhat surprised. “I’m only trying to help.”

  “I…I don’t need your help,” Lina stammered. Her brows narrowed and she rose to her feet, tossing the check at him. “And as far as I’m concerned, you can cram that million dollars up your ass.”

  He watched the check flutter to the floor, then looked at her, visibly bewildered. “Can I do nothing by you that does not seem wrong?” he asked. “Our acquaintance has been limited, yes, and brief, but still, I don’t understand your hostility.”

  “You mean besides just offering to buy me off?” she demanded. “I’m sorry I’m not as easy to manipulate as Brandon is.”

  Augustus arched his brow. “I beg your pardon?”

  She held his gaze evenly. “You heard me. Ever since his father died, you’ve played Brandon like a drum.”

  “That is an ironic statement, considering you are the one who cut ties with the boy—yet remain persistent in your attempts to interfere with his life.”

  Balling her fists, Lina stood. “Excuse me?”

  “Isn’t that why you came here tonight? Why you wanted to see Brandon? As you told me yourself—the two of you have parted company.” He regarded her for a long moment, then raised his brows in unison. “That’s not why you came here, is it?” he said slowly. “You hoped for a reconciliation.”

  Lina flushed. Had he sensed this, too? She’d be lying if she said the idea hadn’t occurred to her; that the pregnancy could be the leverage she needed to get Brandon back from Pilar, soul mate or no soul mate. “That’s none of your goddamn business,” she snapped. “And don’t try to turn this around on me. You know damn good and well what you’re doing to him. You know how close he and his father were. You know how devastated he’s been since—”

  “Brandon isn’t the only one who’s been affected by Sebastian’s loss,” Augustus interjected coolly.

  “Oh, give me a break!” Lina rolled her eyes.

  “I hardly think I need to explain myself to you,” Augustus said.

  “Why? Because I’m a lowly human?” Lina shot.

  “Frankly, yes,” Augustus shot back. “Your life comes and goes in the blink of an eye compared to ours—as inconsequential as the footprints of an ant. You think Brandon has a chance at happiness with you? Your child’s grandchildren will be dust before his lifetime is through. How will that feel for him, do you think, to not only watch you die, but to watch each successive generation that the two of you might build together—all of them before him? You think it’s love, but all you can really offer him is heartache—a cruel, devastating cycle that will haunt him to his grave long after you’ve rotted away in yours.”

  “And you mean to…what? Save Brandon from that?”

  “I had hoped to, yes,” Augustus said.

  “But now I’ve ruined everything,” Lina said. “I’ve messed up all of your plans.”

  He glared at her for a long moment. She could see the muscles straining in his neck, drawn taut and tense through his jawline and shoulders. “You continue to make it difficult for me to convince him of my point of view, yes,” he said in a clipped tone. “And if I can’t protect him from something so relatively simple…how can I hope to at all?”

  He turned away, but not before Lina saw something unmistakable and unexpected flash across his face—anguish. Despair. Helplessness. Hopelessness. The same maelstrom of emotions that tugged and pulled at her own heart.

  He took up his drink and walked out an open door onto the balcony. Immediately, the wind off the Gulf tugged at his hair, sending the panels of his robe flapping like a pair of ebony wings.

  “You’re not going to throw yourself over the railing or anything are you?” she asked.

  He turned to look at her from over his shoulder. “I hardly think so.”

  She stood and ventured out onto the veranda. The ocean breeze whipped her hair into her face, and she tried to smooth it back behind her ears. She could have baited him again, kept their heated debate going, and a part of her was tempted to—the part that kept thinking of Marcus’s admonitions.

  Off-shore bank accounts. Weapons acquisitions. Human trafficking. Drugs.

  All at once, however, to another part of her—the part that had empathized with the flurry of pained emotions she’d seen in his face—was no longer so convinced.

  “You think Brandon’s in trouble,” she said quietly.

  Augustus cut her a glance. “So do you.”

  “Can you sense him?” Brandon had always told her about how strong Augustus was—about how he’d nearly brought the entire Brethren Council building crumbling in on itself when Allistair Davenant had tried to burn Brandon alive. “Is he somewhere nearby? Can you tell?”

  “No.” Again, his expression grew pained, a sort of longing that suggested to Lina that he had tried this repeatedly, over and over, each time more desperately, each time in vain.

  She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. Off-shore bank accounts, Marcus had told her. Weapons acquisitions. Human trafficking. Drugs.

  Even if all of this were true—even if Augustus had willingly put Brandon into a risky position by involving him in those activities—the fact remained that Brandon was missing and Augustus clearly had no idea where he was, and this distressed him. Like Lina, he suspected Brandon was in danger. Whether from the guy, Aaron Davenant, he’d
mentioned as a possible suspect in Michel Morin’s murder, from Tejano Cervantes and his gang, or a rogue member of Valien’s own corillo who was working on the inside on Tejano’s behalf—it didn’t matter.

  Whoever it is, they’re the common enemy here—the bad guy, Lina thought, looking up at Augustus. “Look,” she said at last. “Regardless of how we feel about each other…Brandon loves you. He’s told me as much.”

  He inclined his head slightly. “As he’s told me about you.”

  “So…” She shrugged. “Maybe we could put aside our differences for a while…work together, find out where he’s gone. You know, that whole ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ thing.”

  He arched his brow. “You consider me your enemy?”

  Shooting him a glower, she said, “This isn’t about you or me.”

  “It’s about Brandon, yes,” he finished for her. Then, after a long pause: “I would be amenable to a collaborative effort. For Brandon’s sake.”

  “Alright, then,” she said.

  “Shall we shake on it?” he offered.

  “Don’t be an asshole.”

  The corner of his mouth hooked. It might have been the first time Lina had ever seen him smile.

  “Go get dressed,” she growled. “I know where we can start looking for him.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  You’ve got to be kidding, Jackson signed to Lina, as once again, he stood facing her, filling the back doorway to Valien’s garage. His hands moved sharply through the air, angry gestures that matched his furrowed brows and the downturned corners of his mouth. He jabbed one thick finger emphatically in Augustus’s direction. What is he doing here?

  Same thing as me, Lina signed back. Looking for Brandon.

  Jackson uttered a hoarse bark of laughter. “What?” he said aloud. “You didn’t have any luck with your chota badge or your FBI pal, so now you figure you’ll try anything?”

  Augustus cleared his throat. “If I may…” he began, but Lina cut him short by holding up her hand, crossing-guard style.

  “It would be really helpful if you didn’t,” she assured him. Jackson didn’t just dislike Augustus. He held the man single-handedly responsible for the loss of his job on the Brethren farms, and for keeping Brandon a veritable prisoner there for so many years. She suspected that had she not been standing between them—and if Jackie hadn’t felt at least a tiny bit of restraint since she was his sister—then Augustus would probably be wearing his own ass for a hat at the moment.

  Augustus must have read her mind and caught this last, because he stepped back with no further protest. “Fair enough.”

  “Look, Jackie.” Lina redirected her attention to her brother. “I know something’s going on, that you’re hiding something from me. You’re a crappy liar, and your girlfriend’s even worse.”

  “Unless you’ve got a warrant, you’ve got no business here, Lina,” Jackson said. “No reason to hassle Brandon. Either of you.” He said this last with a pointed glare at Augustus. “So just do yourself a favor and get back in the car…”

  He doesn’t know, Augustus said inside Lina’s mind. It had been awhile since anyone had spoken to her telepathically, and she jumped in surprise. When she glanced at Augustus, she found him looking at her, his amusement thinly disguised, his brow arched slightly. About your pregnancy…or about you and Brandon at all.

  No, she replied with a scowl. And that’s how it’s going to stay—got it?

  Seems like I’m not the only one who would have had concerns with regards to your relationship, he remarked innocently.

  Shut up, Augustus, Lina growled. Aloud, she took her mounting frustration out on her brother. “Goddamn it, Jackie, if you know where he is, will you just tell me?” she snapped.

  “They took him.”

  Lina jumped in surprise again as a man walked into view from over Jackson’s broad shoulder. She hadn’t recognized his motorcycle from among the assembled bikes in the lot, but immediately recognized Valien Cadana’s dark hair and eyes, his strikingly handsome features.

  Jackson sidestepped at the sound of Valien’s voice, letting the corillo leader take his place in the doorway. Valien wore an unbuttoned short-sleeved shirt over his customary wife-beater tee, and Lina could see a double-holster shoulder harness, the butts of his matching pistols standing out in prominent relief against the thin chambray of his shirt.

  “Who took him?” she demanded, hoisting her chin so she could meet his gaze.

  “You know who did,” he replied, his mouth turned in a grim line. “Tejano Cervantes.”

  * * *

  Valien led Lina and Augustus into the bay area of the garage. Jackson trailed behind them, looking surly but keeping his mouth shut and his hands still. It wasn’t immediately noticeable to Lina—who wasn’t mechanically inclined—until she glanced over at a corner office area and saw the upturned desk, papers scattered all over the floor, that the place had been ransacked.

  “The apartment upstairs is in the same shape—worse, even,” Valien said. “They were fast but they were thorough. They tore through just about everything.”

  “What were they looking for?” Augustus asked, but Lina had a sudden, sinking suspicion that she knew.

  Papi used to keep this in the wall safe at the garage, Pilar had told her of the little Mayan statue—the wayob, she’d called it. It was there the night Pepe came… Whatever this thing is, my father died to keep it away from Tejano Cervantes.

  Valien shook his head. “I don’t know, sir,” he said. He kept doing this—referring to Augustus as “sir,” and keeping his gaze averted whenever directly addressing him. He seemed to be actively seeking Augustus’s input rather than Lina’s, and Lina suspected that if she’d returned to the garage without Augustus, Valien would have never let her past the threshold.

  It’s not a machismo thing, she realized. It’s a Brethren thing…or in this case, a Nahual thing. Either Brandon’s told him about Augustus’s status, or Valien can just sense it somehow…either way Valien knows he’s an elder.

  “There are security cameras outside,” she said. “Do they record, or just monitor?”

  “They record. They’re set up on automatic eight-hour loops,” Valien replied. “I’ve already checked them, though. You can’t make out much, except that someone takes him.”

  “May we see?” Augustus asked, because he, too, must have realized that Valien wouldn’t defer as readily to Lina.

  Valien nodded, directing his reply to the toes of his boots. “Yes, sir. Of course.”

  * * *

  Valien was right. There wasn’t much to be seen on the grainy security recordings. One camera showed Brandon walking down the stairs leading from the upstairs garage to the main bay area. Or at least, Lina assumed it was Brandon; from the quality of the digital image, it was difficult to make out much more than his silhouetted form as he crossed toward the back door.

  “See that light?” Valien pointed to a tiny flash on the screen, more for Augustus’s benefit than Lina’s. “Someone was outside, ringing the bell.”

  And through another camera, the one Lina had seen near the light on the back of the building, they could see another indistinct, silhouetted figure standing outside by the rear entrance. Just as the interior camera showed Brandon opening the door, the exterior one showed this same figure stepping quickly backwards, blending into the shadows along the outer wall of the garage.

  “Any idea who that could be?” Lina asked, but Valien shook his head.

  “I can’t make out any details,” he said. “No clothes, no face, nada.”

  It both puzzled and troubled her that they had yet to see anyone else in the recordings—and from the different cameras positioned in the front and sides of the building, there were no vehicles or motorcycles noticeable. Nothing to indicate even a small group of people, like she would have expected had Tejano come to search the garage for the wayob statue.

  The camera by the back door showed Brandon step outside. He walke
d forward several steps, then stopped. She watched him start to shake, not slightly or from the cold, but abruptly and violently, as if he suffered some kind of seizure. His knees buckled, his arms thrashing, and he fell onto the ground. Here, he continued to writhe and jerk, as the shadowy figure from earlier stepped out of hiding and slowly approached. The figure leaned over, caught Brandon by the arm, and dragged him into the garage, closing the back door behind him. The interior camera showed Brandon lying still on the floor while the figure crossed over to the desk inside the bay. After a few moments, during which the figure appeared to be working with some kind of electronic panel on the wall, the cameras all went black.

  “He cut the security off,” Valien said. “He knew what he was doing, too. Bypassed all of the access codes and shut the entire system down. The others must have been waiting outside, and he let them in once the cameras went dark.”

  Lina, however, was not so sure.

  “What happened to Brandon?” she asked. “Whoever he is, the guy didn’t even touch him.” Worried, she glanced up at Jackson. “It looks like he went into convulsions or something. I’ve never seen him have a seizure like that.”

  Jackson shook his head. “Me, either.”

  I’ve seen seizures like that before, Augustus said in Lina’s mind. But not with Brandon. Aaron Davenant could cause them telepathically to occur. He used them to attack Naima at the Morin compound in Lake Tahoe.

  Aaron Davenant was the one he’d mentioned earlier, suspected of murdering Michel Morin. Could he have made it all of the way to Florida from California that fast? she wondered.

  I did, Augustus told her pointedly.

  Lina frowned. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Aaron Davenant showed up around the same time Tejano Cervantes did.

  But why in the hell would he?

  * * *

  Can they overhear us? Lina asked. Valien and the others? With their telepathy, I mean?

  Not if I don’t want them to, Augustus said with a smirk.

  She nodded. Good. What do you know about off-shore bank accounts, weapons acquisitions, human trafficking and drugs?