Dominance Never Dies (Masters and Mercenaries Book 11) (37 page)

Mia might like flowers but there was something she liked even more. Mia liked intel. Mia liked information that led her to a great story. Maybe there was more than one way to apologize. Maybe it was time he started loving her for exactly who she was. Crazy. Smart. Competent. Loyal.

“I have to get her back.” He had a lot to do. He had to get his girl back and find his brother.

Maybe they weren’t two different ops at all.

“I think you do. I think if you let that one go, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. The bad news is you got the Taggart temper. We’re kind of assholes sometimes. The good news is we tend to have ridiculously good taste in women. Now let’s go and deal with the fallout because Grace had no idea Theo was alive and she’s going to want someone’s balls for keeping secrets. I’m nominating Sean. Charlie’s already talking about more kids so I need to keep my balls intact.”

He followed his brother out, his mind on Mia.

A few hours later, Case locked the door, closing out the rest of the world before setting the alarm.

Hope McDonald was still out there. They couldn’t risk her coming after Erin. Especially not now that she knew the Taggarts had figured out Theo was alive. One of the plans to come out of the evening had been moving Case in. They’d talked about taking turns, but it made more sense for Case to watch over her. If he went out of town, she would be assigned a guard. TJ would come to work with her after her maternity leave.

She’d been surprisingly all right with it.

He walked back into the living room. It was empty. He could hear Erin talking softly. She must be down the hall, in TJs room. He began to wander that way, worried about her.

She’d been sedate most of the evening, talking in logical tones, asking all the right questions.

It wasn’t what he’d expected. She’d teared up in the beginning but she’d been right back to super-tough Erin after that. Grace had cried more than Erin had.

She was holding it all in and there wasn’t a lot he could do about it. If Theo was here, he would tell him that Erin needed to scene. It was how she’d been able to express emotion, but he couldn’t do it. He wasn’t sure she could anymore either. Erin hadn’t been back to Sanctum once since Theo had died.

What was he supposed to do? His brother wasn’t here. All the girls had left. Should he talk to Erin? He needed to talk to Erin because they’d candy coated a bunch of stuff and he couldn’t stand the thought of her believing things would be easier than they were really going to be.

God, he wanted to talk to Mia. If Mia was here, she would know what to do.

He stood outside the door, looking inside. Erin held TJ in her arms, holding him close to her body.

“Daddy’s coming home, baby boy. Your daddy is going to come home and we’re going to be a family. I promise you I’ll do everything I can to bring him back to us. Daddy’s coming home.”

Shit. The world went a little watery. That was Theo’s son in there. His son. It hit him with the power of a locomotive. Theo had made a baby and he had a woman who loved him. He’d made a family who needed him.

Case needed Mia.

He stepped back out, giving Erin time with her son. She hadn’t been unmoved. Public tears weren’t something Erin would easily do. She would hold it in and give in to her grief when she was alone.

Had Mia cried by herself after she’d walked away? She didn’t have a baby to cuddle, a piece of her love to hold close.

He’d been a dick. How could he have said those things to her? He’d been so worried about what he couldn’t give her that he hadn’t thought at all about what he could. He’d worried about himself, about getting hurt.

They’d been so incendiary that he hadn’t imagined she could hurt. She was larger than life. She was the girl who could tell everyone to fuck off and walk away without a care. The tough girl who didn’t give a damn what anyone thought.

Except she’d been soft for him and he’d fucked her over.

“You still up?”

He turned and Erin stood in the living room, her face blotchy from crying. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

Her mouth curled up in a tired smile. “I don’t know that anything can truly disturb me tonight.”

“I’m sorry we kept it from you. I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought the idea that Theo was out there…” How did he explain this to her?

“Being tortured and perverted for some crazy doctor’s experiments was worse than thinking he was dead?” Erin didn’t prevaricate.

“Yeah, I guess. I guess I didn’t want you to have to think about what could be happening.” It was all he’d been able to do except for those few soft moments when Mia had been in his arms.

Erin walked to the sliding glass door that led out to her backyard and stared out. The moon was full, offering some illumination to the darkened room. “I wonder if she’s managed to convince Theo he’s in love with her. It’s rape, you know. She’s raping his mind. I wonder if she’s raped his body, too.”

Yes. That was one of the things he’d wondered about as well, one of the dark scenarios that had run through his brain. Mia’s report had kind of put it to rest. “He calls her Mother.”

“I know. I looked through the report Mia wrote while I fed TJ. I’ve gotten good at doing things one handed with a baby hanging off my boob.” She glanced back. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll love him no matter what’s gone on. If he screws a hundred women while he’s out of his head, I’ll welcome him back into our bed after a healthy STD check. The only thing that matters is he’s alive.”

“I didn’t want you to worry about him.”

“That’s because you’re a dumbass.” She turned. “I get to worry about him. I get to think about him. I get to hope for him. I get to be anxious about whether or not he’ll still love me when he comes home. Earlier tonight I thought about how my boobs aren’t what they used to be and I’ve got stretch marks. Stupid things. Inconsequential things. And I get to worry about them because he’s alive. I know he’s going through hell and I’m going to ask him to go through more, to take all the pain they give him, anything he has to so he can come home and be with me and meet his son. God, Case, I fought him so hard because I thought I wasn’t good enough for him.”

“He thought you were too good for him, too tough and smart.”

She laughed, but there were tears in there, too. “I was a bitch to him but that was my armor. When he died, I thought I was being punished. It’s funny how arrogant we can be at times. To think the world revolves around us, that the universe chooses us, selects us for punishment or reward. I spent years with my first husband, taking his shit because I didn’t know how else to be. I wasn’t woman enough for him.”

She never talked about her husband. Case knew she’d been divorced, but not the hows or whys. “He was obviously a dick.”

“He was quite awful and I took it for as long as I could and then I wouldn’t take shit from anyone for a long time. But Theo wouldn’t let go.” She sighed and sat down in the chair that had been Theo’s, the old recliner Case knew they’d fought over because it was pretty much a piece of crap. Erin always sat there now. “He would call me. I wouldn’t answer. At first he would hang up and try again later, but when he figured out I was ducking him, he started leaving these messages.”

“I told him he was wasting his time.” Theo would stop what he was doing in order to call a woman who claimed to not want to have anything to do with him. “I always thought you were going to hit him with a harassment suit.”

“No. The messages he left…there was nothing sexual about them. He didn’t ask me for anything. He told me about his day and then said he wished he knew how mine had gone and he told me good-night. I listened to them about a hundred times. I didn’t reply or anything. I deleted them after a while because I thought I was fooling myself. I deleted all of them, but I listened to them. Do you have any idea what I would give to have those messages? To hear his voice telling me good-night, sweetheart?”

“I miss him, too. It’s why I…it’s why I was so awful to Mia. He was right there. I could have reached out and grabbed him.”

“We don’t make the best choices when our loved ones are in danger. I want you to think about the fact that she’d already seen you get shot and then she likely had seconds to decide if she wanted to send you into danger again.”

He’d done nothing but think about that moment for days. “I need to apologize.”

“Oh, you need to grovel. You need to man up and use every resource you have available to get that girl back. You know how to run an op. What’s the first thing you do?”

“Decide on my objective, take stock of my assets. I’ve learned I need to carefully review all my assets because oftentimes the inherent value isn’t on the surface.” Ten had drilled it into him. Case had been the leader on Ten’s team, but Theo seemed more comfortable with Ian. Again, he’d made a mistake by not carefully thinking things through. He couldn’t go storming into her life. He had to think, had to figure out how to be the man she needed. “I need to make things right with her brothers, too.”

“Yes, you do, but I think you’ll find they’re the easy ones.” She sat back. “He’s out there. He’s here on the same planet, sharing the same air. We’re going to get him back.”

He sat down across from her. “I will do everything I can. I promise you that. But Erin, you need to understand that the Theo I bring back might not be the one who left.”

“You find his body. Bring it to me and TJ and I…we’ll find his soul.”

Because she was the keeper of his brother’s soul, his natural mate, his other half.

Mia was his. How horrible that he’d figured that out only after he’d lost her.

Erin sat up suddenly. “What did you say about assets?”

“Uh, I said I had to look at all my assets.”

“Because sometimes the most important asset of all is the one that seems to have no value.” She stood, her eyes bright. “Oh, Case, I think I just figured out how to find Theo. It’s a long shot, but…you’re right. We have an asset we didn’t realize we had. We have Avery.”

He wasn’t sure how Liam’s wife fit into this. Avery was awesome. She was kind and funny, but she certainly wasn’t an operative. She’d become Serena Dean-Miles’s assistant. Serena was an author and Avery helped organize her business. They went to romance conventions together. “Avery’s good at social media. You think we can trick him into friending me on Facebook?”

Erin’s eyes rolled. “You should be happy you’re so attractive. I need to call Avery. She has a friend who might be able to help us. Sometimes we don’t see the patterns. We don’t see that the path is right in front of us if we just have a little patience. And our last piece is in place. Hutch is there.”

She wasn’t making a ton of sense. “Hutch being kidnapped is a good thing? Erin, she’s going to wipe his memory.”

“Not if she wants his skills, she won’t. She wants a hacker. It’s not the same. His skill isn’t muscle memory, it’s all brain power. If she screws with his mind, she loses the reason she took him in the first place. They’ll be looking for somewhere safe to hide.”

He still wasn’t following her, but if she was right and they could get a message to Hutch… “We could send a message of where to meet us and maybe Hutch could convince them. The intel we discovered pointed us to somewhere in Asia.”

“They won’t stay there long. She needs someplace quiet, someplace to continue her experiments. She needs an ally.”

“A clinic like her sister’s?” Hope’s first experiments had been conducted at her sister Faith’s clinic in Africa. It was where Theo and Erin had fallen in love. “Faith had no idea what her sister was doing.”

“But what if she found someone who didn’t mind, someone who would trade her clinic for cash, protection. Someone already based in Africa. We can’t fool her with a start-up clinic. She would be wary of that. But a clinic that had been around for a while, a clinic led by a woman with a past. It wouldn’t matter that she’s trying to right her wrongs. Someone like Hope would look at this woman on paper and see opportunity if given the right push.”

It clicked into place. “Stephanie. You want to use the woman who was driving the car that killed Avery’s first husband and child?”

He knew the story. Avery had been young when she’d lost her daughter and husband to a teen who’d had some beer and gotten behind the wheel. Though her blood alcohol level had been below the legal limit, they’d been in New York and Stephanie had been underage. The law was clear. Any alcohol in a minor was considered a DUI. Stephanie had gone into a deep depression and it had only been Avery’s grace that had saved her. Avery had told him once that she figured Stephanie owed her a good life for the ones Avery had lost. Avery had been the one to pay for Stephanie’s medical degree, to send her off to Africa to do good work.

At the time he’d been floored by how far Avery had gone to forgive the girl who’d harmed her. Now his heart seized because Avery’s grace, her belief in forgiveness might save them all.

“We’ll herd them to Stephanie’s clinic. We’ll go on the Deep Web and start some rumors. Little things at first,” he said. “We’ll have to be patient. Hutch will find us and then we’ll be waiting for Theo.”

“And we’ll bring him home,” Erin said with quiet will.

And they would bring him home.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN