Page 5 of The Madman's Nightmare
His gaze shifted to the side before he looked back at me, and I was scared of what I saw in his eyes. I’d only seen it once before, when I confronted him after my dad, Chuck’s brother kidnapped me. Devlin had kept secrets from me, putting me into danger, and from the look in his eyes, whatever he had to say wasn’t good.
I placed my glass onto the blanket and gave him my full attention.
“I don’t know where to start,” he began, and it felt like an eternity before he spoke again. “When you moved in with Chuck and Blaire all those years ago, I was still trying to untangle myself from the web I’d spun around myself after Marco.” I nodded, remembering him telling me how he had to work for years to build Callahan Security into a trusted name, and during that time, he was dealing with the sins of his past. “Well,” he swallowed hard and said, “Something from my past has come back to threaten me.”
“What is it?” I asked, scooting closer to him as I felt my heartbeat increase. “Are you in danger?”
“No,” he tried to reason as he took my hands into his. “But I’m having trouble getting a handle on the situation and as hard as I tried to keep you out of it, I think you should know, just in case.”
“Just in case what?” I posed and he scrunched his nose and pressed his lips together.
“These people,” he shook his head, appearing worried.
Throughout the last few years, he’s faced off with some of the worst people in the country. He’s battled alongside his siblings to protect all of us, and not once did he seem worried. I was getting scared of who or what this threat was.
“Tell me,” I requested and when I went to open my mouth to ask another question, I happened to glance over his shoulder.
There was a man standing behind him, hiding in the dark, leaning against a tree. I’d never seen him before and I squeezed Devlin’s hand, trying to relay that someone was behind him. Devlin released my hand and carefully slid his hand under the leg of his jeans, retrieving a snub-nosed .38 from the holster he always wore.
Spinning on his butt, he turned to see who was behind him when I felt someone approaching from behind me. I turned to see who was there at the same time I heard a shot ring out.
My head snapped back to Devlin, and I saw the man with a gun in his hand, casually walking closer to us. Touching Devlin, I saw his blue eyes look back at me before he collapsed onto the blanket in front of me.
The gasp that came out of my mouth was instant as I tried to see where he was hit but someone clamped their hand over my mouth and yanked me from the blanket. I tried to fight them, but they were bigger and stronger than I was as they hoisted me off my feet and away from the blanket.
In the weaning light, I saw the man who was behind Devlin squat down and check on him before lifting his eyes to me as he stood. His smile was feral as he reasoned with a shrug, “One less madman to worry about.”
I felt my world shift off its axis as the person holding me injected something into my neck, burning as it entered my bloodstream. The last thing I remember before everything went dark was the vision of my husband dead on the ground with his blood staining the blanket as I was dragged away from him and into the unknown.
Chapter 3
Devlin
Ishould have been more careful with Elise. I should have told her sooner about Bradon and Kendra. I shouldn’t have let anyone get the drop on me, but here I was, playing dead with a gaping hole in my chest as someone took my Lamb from me. I didn’t have the strength to move and as I looked up at the man who shot me, I vowed to make him and whoever thought they could take her from me pay with their lives.
I knew if I tried to fight back at that moment, I could end up dead for real, and who would be there for Elise and my sons? Shifting my eyes, I watched through tears as Elise slumped over as the man holding her shifted her to his shoulder. The person who shot me walked up to her and lifted her head with a grip into her hair, and her face was slack from whatever they gave her.
They were speaking, but the black tunnel vision I was fighting grew bigger and bigger as they turned and carried the love of my life away from me and into the darkened forest surrounding more than half of the lake. I tried to fight the growing darkness and as the last visual of Elise disappeared from my sight, I let the nightmare engulf me.
“Why are you doing this to me?” she cried, and I shook my head, wishing she’d get the point.
“Listen, Kendra, it was never like that for me. I’ve been honest from the start,” I tried to reason, but she only cried harder.
My brother, James, and her brother, Bradon, sat off to the side, watching Kendra lose her shit. She had always beenemotional and irrational, but her behavior today was the worst I’d seen. I hated that we had an audience, but hopefully, one of them would step in and help me make her understand.
Reaching her hand out, she tried to grab hold of me, and I stepped back. Her red-rimmed eyes lifted to mine as she pleaded her case. “Why her? She can’t give you what I can, Devlin. You know you’ll come running back to me once you see she’s just a little girl, unable to be what you need.”
I lifted my hand and pointed at her, my voice deepening as I warned her. “Do not speak about her that way.”
Kendra swiped the tears from her cheeks and shook her head as she turned away, speaking under her breath. I looked at James, and he rolled his eyes and leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest. He’d warned me for months about Kendra and her unhealthy attachment to me. He said I needed to make space between us or there would be trouble, and it seemed he was right.
Bradon was watching with an unreadable look on his face. He was more like James than either would admit. They both watched, observed, and worked out the problem in their heads. He kept watching his sister—if she even was his sister—and the only way to know he was feeling anything was his incessant tapping of the fingers on his left hand. It was a tell when he was stressed and something I’d picked up on within the first few days he and Kendra were around.
They showed up a few weeks after I’d killed Marco, and at first, I thought they were just going to be passing through. Eventually, they started spending more time with James and me, helping with issues. Once I saw their usefulness, I told James we should keep them around. He agreed, for a while, but he’d been warning me that Kendra was sinking her hooks into me. Or at least she was trying.
Elise was the only girl for me, but she was still too young and innocent for someone like me. She left for college last month, and I started to divest myself of the seedier parts of my portfolio. If I wanted to be the man she deserved, I needed to clean up my act and become legitimate.
Which led to this conversation with Kendra and Bradon. I told them they had to move out of the house since I was putting it on the market. I needed capital to start a business that James and I had been working on for the last year or so. We wanted to use Marco’s paranoia and our computer skills to start a cyber security business.
