Page 32 of Tell Me No
“The job we’ve been working, it’s cartel level,” Iris starts, and I cut him off with a glare.
“Not here. Let’s take this back to one of our rooms. I need to call Helo and patch into my system. Did you find her bag?” I ask, pocketing her cell phone and heading for the club exit.
“No, no bag. Just her phone.” Eli’s emotions are warring for control over his features. Fear and anger fight for domination as he clings to Ember’s hand tightly.
“Good. Hopefully whoever took her took it, too,” I tell him, determination seeping into my bones. “I gave her a gift earlier, for protection, but also for circumstances like this. I prayed it would never come to this, but…”
Words fail me as we pile into the elevator to leave the nightclub. I know I can patch in to the club security feed once I get to my system. The dagger I gave Aurora is fully functional, should she have the opportunity to use it. But the tracking chip embedded in the handle is the feature I’m most grateful for right now.
It takes less than ten minutes to get back to our hotel and into the suite I shared with my wife only a few hours ago. Her sweet, earthy scent still lingers in the air here, as if she’s going to walk through the door laughing like this never happened.
“Alright, talk. What the fuck are you two involved in?” Elijah snap as soon as everyone is safely behind closed doors.
“You know I can’t talk about the shit I do, Eli. Especially in front of everyone like this.” It’s not that I want to keep secrets from my friends, but I don’t want to implicate them in any of the numerous crimes I’ve committed, either. Even though the blood on my hands belongs to murderers and rapists, it’s still blood all the same.
“We’re a little far past that now, don’t you think?!” He shouts back at me. I don’t blame him for being pissed off. Aurora’s safety was my responsibility and look where we are now.
“He’s right, Break. We’re gonna need all hands on deck here,” Iris says. I fall onto the couch, my head hanging in my hands. How the fuck did I let this happen?
“The man we’ve been tracking, Alonzo Figueroa, he’s lower-level cartel, but he’s been working his own shit behind his boss’s back. He’s selling women and children like cattle. I had him in my sights a few weeks back, but there were some complications. We ended up getting our hands on his second in command, Figueroa Jr., and let’s just say that one is no longer with us.” I take a deep breath, trying to calm my racing heart. There’s no telling what Aurora will endure at the hands of that man. I’ve seen the wreckage he’s caused in people’s lives and I won’t let that happen to her. I’ll die before she feels an ounce of pain over my fuck up.
“So he’s after you now? Because you took out his son?” Eli asks, fists balled up at his side. “And he took the only thing that could possibly be seen as a weakness for you. My sister, Jason. MY SISTER!” He screams, his face red and eyes bloodshot from angry, unshed tears.
“We haven’t seen him in weeks. The guy fell off the face of the Earth,” Iris attempts to reason with him, but it’s no use.
Aurora is my only weakness. She’s the only person I would kill a thousand men for. I would sacrifice myself a million times over to save her, and Figueroa knows that.
“I can track her. If she has her bag, I can track her,” I say, more to reassure myself than anyone else, remembering the goal I had when I came back to this room.
Pulling my laptop from my bag, I log in to my home system remotely. It takes me less than a minute to open my tracking software and begin triangulating her location.
“I really think, after all this, of course, you need to analyze the fact that you have a tracker on your wife,” Everett says, and I scoff.
“Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth, okay? It was a precaution for occasions like this,” I tell him, feeling grateful for my overactive imagination for once.
“It’s gonna be like half an hour before the tracking program is locked on. But once it is, it’s accurate within five feet of her location.” Ive never been so anxious my life as I am right now just watching the program work.
“You couldn’t design something that worked a little faster?” Eli grumbles, dropping onto the chair across from me and leaning his head back.
“You want fast or accurate?” I snap at him. I know he’s pissed, but this is my wife we’re talking about. My fucking soul. I have just as much riding on finding her as quickly as possible, because Aurora is my only source of sanity. Whatever shreds of humanity I have left all lie with her. Without her, I’ll burn this whole ugly world to the ground and let the flames drag me back to hell.
Everett dials Helo, putting him on speaker and catching him up on the night’s events. Someone must have already texted him because I hear the beeping of my security panel at the same time I receive a notification on my phone that there’s activity at my house.
“What do you need here?” He asks.
I give him a long list of things to do from my home base. I’ve had eyes on Figueroa’s warehouses for weeks now. I’m not sure how he managed to slip through the cracks, but hopefully I can move my search along a little fast by comparing those known locations to Aurora’s tracker.
“Surely they couldn’t have gotten out of Vegas already, right?” Ember asks, the fear in her voice palpable.
“People like this have connections, sunshine. You can catch a flight out of the country in under an hour if you know the right people and have the money,” Eli replies.
The mood saturating the room is a somber one. I push myself to keep digging, keep checking every loophole and backdoor I can possibly find to get into Figueroa’s business. I want to know who he’s texting, where he eats lunch, when he goes to mass and asks the priests to absolve his many sins.
Despite the pain beginning to radiate through my knuckles, I don’t stop. Line after line of code crosses my screen and I dig into them all. I will find her. Nothing on this earth will stop me.
“Uh, Break. Your hard drive is doing some kind of beeping and flashing,” Helo says through the speaker. For a helicopter pilot, he’s never been very tech savvy.
“Good. That means it’s got a signal from her end. Don’t fucking touch anything,” I tell him, and Iris suppresses a laugh.
