Erik yanked it out and smiled at Castle. “I don’t think psychopath is the right word for me. Really fucking pissed off at being screwed over by the man I loved describes it much, much better.”
Castle, his hands clutched against his gut, collapsed to the floor with a pained grunt.
Erik rinsed the blood off his hand and knife before he returned to the living room and grabbed the duct tape. He slapped a piece over Brad’s mouth before taking the knife and plunging it into the bound man’s upper thigh.
Blood pumped from the artery as Erik made his way over to Olivia’s side. She was screaming through the tape, struggling to get to Brad, crying. Erik grabbed her by the hair and pressed his cheek against hers as he forced her to watch her husband bleed out in front of her.
“Oh, don’t worry, Olivia. When he’s gone, then I’m going to have some fun with you, too. Enough fun that when Emery sees you, he’ll have an inkling of the kind of pain he’s caused me.”
* * * *
It was nearly an hour later when Erik returned to the kitchen to wash the blood off his hands. That’s when he realized Castle wasn’t there.
“The fuck. Where’d he go?”
He followed the blood trail out the back door. The man had collapsed in the yard, in the shade of an oak tree and not easily viewable from either neighbor’s house due to the shrubs on either side.
He didn’t want to risk calling attention to the guy by going out there, but from the rigid set to Castle’s body and the flies buzzing around him, Erik assumed he was dead.
Then he realized he’d need the car keys and Castle’s wallet.
Fuck.
Moving as fast as he dared, he went to the guy’s side. Yep, dead. After getting not only his wallet and keys, but Castle’s phone as well, he returned to the house.
He finished cleaning up and began going through the house. Laptops, phones, wallets.
Address books.
He didn’t have Emery and Sean’s new address, but it would likely be in one of those devices.
And taking them would make it look like a robbery to the cops.
He found a rolling suitcase big enough to hold everything and put it by the front door. He paused to take a picture of the scene with Castle’s cell phone.
This is something that should be preserved for posterity.
Revenge.
Beautiful, sweet revenge.
Nonchalantly, he opened the front door and moved the suitcase out. Carefully balancing his crutch and the suitcase, he returned to Castle’s car, loaded his loot into the backseat, and drove off.
Chapter Seventeen
Emery had returned to work the day after their sudden departure from Yellowstone. Sean, however, decided to take Friday off and use the weekend as well before returning to the grind. Hell, he’d already planned on taking the time off anyway.
Might as well use it. He’d just put Isla down for a nap after lunchtime and thought he might be able to get two seconds of peace for himself to go through some e-mails. He opened the living room sliders and took his laptop out onto the screened porch. The delightfully cool sea breeze from the Gulf felt amazing on the bright, sunny day.
He thought he heard a car pull up into their yard, but then ignored it.
What he couldn’t ignore was what sounded like a thousand elephants suddenly pounding up his stairs at warp speed.
What the frak?
By the time he’d made it into the living room, he spotted a large, Wyatt-shaped shadow on the other side of the front door. And he started pounding on the front door.
“Sean! Open up. Right now.”
“Shit!” He raced over before Wyatt could start pounding again and wake the baby. “Dude, shh! Isla’s down for her nap!”
Wyatt charged in as Sean opened the door.
Then he realized his friend had a gun in his hand.
“Dude! What the fuck—”
“You alone?”
“No. Isla’s upstairs—”
“Dat’s not what I mean, Sean. Your momma, anyone else here?”
He couldn’t take his eyes off the gun, which Wyatt kept at his side and pointed down. “No. What’s going—”
“Em called me. Asked me to come over.” He placed his free hand on Sean’s shoulder and waited until Sean looked him in the eye. “Olivia and Brad. Dey…” He stopped for a moment before his voice broke. “Dey gone, Sean. Man, I’m so sorry to have to be the one to tell you dat.”
Ice crept through his veins. “What? What are you talking about?”
Wyatt pushed the door shut and locked it, dead-bolting it, too, before turning back to Sean. “You been home all day? Inside?”
“No. I took Isla down to the beach this morning.”
He looked up the stairs.
“Wyatt, dude, you’re fucking scaring me, and I don’t like that you’ve got a gun.”
“You like it a lot less if someone in here wit’ us. Let’s get upstairs and look.”
The alligator shifter, now warned about a sleeping toddler, kept his movements light and fast as he raced up the stairs. Before Sean could stop him to confirm exactly what he’d meant about Brad and Olivia, Wyatt opened and was through Isla’s door without a sound. When Sean caught up to him, he was checking under her bed and then went to look in the closet. He emerged, nodding, and silently closed the door behind him.
Sean still needed to process the news. “What do you mean they’re gone?” he whispered, unwilling to believe it might mean the obvious.
Wyatt met his gaze again. “Gone, man. Dead. You stand right here and scream your head off anyone comes out o’ any of these rooms but me, got it?”
“Dude—” But Wyatt was off again, into one of the guest rooms. Only after he searched the entire upstairs and motioned for Sean to follow him back down to the first floor did he speak again.
“I don’t know all the details yet,” Wyatt softly said. “So no good askin’ me. I wouldn’t call Em yet if I was you. He’s tore up bad, trying to deal with his mom and dad an’ everyone right now. We need to finish searching this house first, then we do the next thing. He said to tell you he’d call you shortly once he can.”
“Dead?”
“Sean,” he said, his voice lowering almost to the growling alligator sound Sean remembered, “we got to keep you and Little ’Un safe. Now let me finish dis. You stay here.”
He searched the lower floor, including every closet. When he returned, the gun was holstered in his back waistband.
Wyatt put both his hands on Sean’s shoulders. “Listen to me right now. Go pack. For you, for Em, for Little ’Un. Several days’ worth, at least. Then I’m loading you both up and we’re heading to Sarasota.”
“What about my mom and dad?”
“Mari’s there right now tellin’ ’em. I dropped her off. She gonna drive ’em in their car.” He walked over to the front door and looked out the viewfinder.
It hit Sean like a ton of bricks. “Fuck,” he whispered, all strength gone. His knees gave way and he heavily sat on the second stair. “It’s fucking Erik, isn’t it?”
Wyatt didn’t look at him. “Not sayin’ what or who because I don’t know. I don’t know all the facts. I only know—”
“Em wouldn’t have sent you here if it was an obvious accident. Not with a gun and going all Gator SWAT Force.”
Wyatt didn’t reply.
“I thought you said you killed him!”
Wyatt slowly turned. “I didn’t see what finally happened. And dat’s what I told Em at the time. I had his leg, he was bleeding, and a couple of bull sharks were after him. Even wit’ him disabled, I couldn’t keep up wit’ him. He headed toward open water. I tol’ Em all o’ dat. He wasn’t healthy when I lost sight o’ him. And dis might not be anything to do wit’ Erik. Lots o’ bad people out there who ain’t Erik. Human and shifter.”
Sean held his head in his hands and fought the urge to vomit.
“Sean, you need to hold it together now. For Em, for everyo
ne. Dey gonna need you be strong for dem.”
“The babies,” he forced out as a strangled whisper. “What about the babies?”
“Don’t know yet. I haven’t heard. He didn’t say…” The gator’s voice broke again, which was almost harder to deal with than the news itself. “He jus’ said Olivia and Brad.”
In his pocket, Sean’s phone started vibrating from a call.
Emery.
He thumbed answer but before he could even say anything, Emery was already talking. “Sean,” he said, his voice sounding choked almost beyond recognition, “is Wyatt there?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Listen. Do whatever he says.”
“But—”
“I’m sorry, I…I can’t talk right now.”
“The babies?”
There was a painful moment of silence. “We don’t know yet. We’re trying to find out. They haven’t found them yet.”
“Love you.”
He heard the heartbreaking sound of Emery sobbing. “Love you, too, babe. I’ll see you shortly.”
And then, he was gone.
Sean stared at his phone for several minutes, trying to process the exchange. Finally, he looked up at Wyatt.
His friend held out a hand to him to help him up. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll help you pack.”
* * * *
They waited until just before they were ready to leave, and had everything packed in Wyatt’s car and had Isla’s car seat transferred over, to wake the toddler. At first, she was overjoyed to see Uncle Wyatt.
Then, as Sean picked her up and began to carry her to the bathroom to get her ready, she frowned. “Da, what’s wrong?”
He didn’t bother trying to force a smile, knowing the girl would see right through it anyway. “We need to go to Grandma Louise and Grandpa Joseph’s house, honey. We’re going to meet Daddy there.”
“Why?”
He drew in a long, shuddering breath. He didn’t want to have to have this conversation with her. She was so young, had already been through so much loss at her age.
It wasn’t fair she had to go through something like this again, even if it wasn’t losing a set of parents.
“Well, sweetheart, we got some bad news.”
“What?”
“Remember how at Christmas, your Uncle Ken and Aunt Holly called me and Daddy?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you remember why?”
She scrunched up her face. “Mommy and Daddy and the baby went to the Goddess,” she whispered solemnly. Then she clarified. “My other Daddy. Not this Daddy. Not Daddy Em.”
He nodded. “Aunt Olivia and Uncle Brad went to the Goddess today.”
“Why?”
Oh, please, not this. He was barely hanging on by a thread as it was. And he didn’t know the whys yet.
Wyatt swooped in for the save. “We don’t know, Little ’Un. Dat’s why we’re all goin’ up to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.”
Surprisingly, that seemed to satisfy her. “Okay.” She gave Sean a strangling hug that threatened to tip him over to tears again. “I love you, Da.”
“I love you, too, sweetheart. You have no idea how much Daddy and I love you.”
She looked over his shoulder at Wyatt. “Love you, too, Uncle Wyatt.”
Sean knew the gator shifter was forcing the smile to hide his own pain. “Love you, too, Little ’Un. Now, enough talkin’. We need to get movin’.”
Sean had thought the ride to Yellowstone from Spokane felt long.
He was wrong.
Dead wrong.
The less than an hour that it took for Wyatt to drive them to the Nadels’ house in Sarasota felt like it took a thousand agonizing lifetimes. When they arrived, there were already several cars parked in the driveway, including the SUV and his mom’s car.
“Lots of people here,” Isla chirruped from the backseat.
As Sean got out and rounded the car so he could get Isla, he muttered to Wyatt, “Mari drives fast, huh?”
He chuckled. “She learned quick. She make me turn white, and you know dat no easy feat.”
When they walked in, the aroma of something delicious, food, washed over them. Sam Morita spotted them first and came over to hug Sean.
“Your mother’s in the kitchen, cooking.”
“How long y’all been here?” Wyatt asked.
“Eight minutes.” Sam took Isla from Sean and kissed her cheek.
Wyatt pondered that. “Damn. Dat woman is fast in the kitchen.”
“It’s kind of her superpower,” Sean said. “Cooking for the masses in times of crisis.” He glanced around. “Where’s Em?” he asked his dad.
“He’s in the study with Joseph and Louise.”
Sean left Isla with his dad and Wyatt and made his way into the study.
Emery sat in the corner, one hand rubbing his temple, cell phone in the other, and talking in low tones with someone.
Louise sat on the couch, crying, Joseph next to her with his arm around her shoulder.
He leaned in and hugged both of them. The way Louise wordlessly clung to him as she sobbed broke his heart. He knew he had to be strong for them, for all of them. He loved Olivia and Brad, but he hadn’t been as close to them as he was some of the other siblings because of the distance.
And then…
His gut rolled. “Dad,” he whispered. “The…the babies?”
He looked like he was going to shrug, then shake his head, then he finally settled on something between the two. “We don’t know yet. Emery’s trying to find out.”
Sean straightened and stared at his mate, who was still on the phone.
If those babies were alive, they were their babies, and he wanted them safely with them. Right then. As soon as possible.
Screw anyone who tried to hurt them or take them away from him and Emery.
While he wanted to know what happened, he wasn’t sure he wanted to ask Joseph and Louise. They were obviously still processing the news. Not to mention there would be plenty of damn people asking them that same thing over the next days and weeks.
And Emery was, after all, the pod Alpha now.
Sean heard the front door open and slam closed. A moment later, Laura ran into the room, crying, and threw herself into her parents’ arms where their sobs renewed.
No, he didn’t dare ask them what happened. He’d wait and hear it when Emery could tell him.
He walked over to his mate and put his hand on Em’s shoulder. Emery reached over and grabbed Sean’s hand, holding and squeezing tightly as if to not be swept away in a raging river of grief.
Sean wouldn’t let go until Emery was ready, even if he had to stand here all damn night with him.
He pressed close and rested his other hand on Emery’s other shoulder. Sean also didn’t bother distracting him with silent questions through their mate-bond.
No clue how long he stood there with him. But Emery gave a sudden, gasping sigh. “The babies are safe,” he said to everyone before returning to the call.
The room expelled a collective sob of relief, and someone standing in the doorway passed the news to the rest of the house. It was if the very walls let out a held breath at the news.
Sean closed his eyes and struggled to hold back tears. The babies—their babies—were safe. He hated that he had to already think like that, but if Erik was behind this, he knew they had to get to them as quickly as possible to protect them.
Isla now had a new brother and sister, although this was a grisly way to get them.
Emery was still on the phone when Gus and another alligator shifter arrived. Then Christopher and his wife, and Reese, all joined them in the study.
Finally, Emery got off the phone and stared at it a moment before looking at everyone. He took a deep breath and leaned into Sean. “The babies were at a neighbor’s house,” he hoarsely said. “One of their podmates. She’s still got them. Brad’s pod Alpha and some of his men are there standing watch until we get there.”
>
“Dey armed?” Wyatt softly asked from the doorway.
Emery nodded. He stood and gave Sean a crushing hug, lingering before finally turning to face everyone. “I’d rather only tell this once,” he said. “Let’s get everyone out into the living room.”
Chapter Eighteen
Emery still hoped that at some point Sean would shake him awake out of this nightmare. He’d have a good laugh about it and either go back to sleep or get up and go about his day.
As he stood there in the living room with friends, loved ones, and podmates gathered around, he tried to compose his thoughts.
He knew as pod Alpha his duty would involve days like this. Well, not like this, but handling the grief-filled end of the scale.
Never had he imagined it would hit so close to home in such a way. He expected he’d have to be the rock, the strong one, the one others could lean on and look to and depend upon.
Right now, he felt empty, a fragile, hollow shell at risk of shattering.
Sean slipped his arm around his waist and he leaned in, glad to have his mate there by his side.
He knew he’d need every ounce of strength Sean could spare for him.
Emery tried to speak, licked his lips, and tried again. “They…we don’t know exactly what or who right now. Olivia took the kids over to the neighbor’s house this morning like she always did before work.”
He took a deep breath. “Apparently, Brad dropped his car off last night at the shop for repairs. Olivia was supposed to take him in on her way to work. One of his coworkers was going to run him to the garage after work. Neither Brad nor Olivia got to work. No one could get them on the phone all morning. One of the guys Brad works…”
He swallowed back the lump in his throat. “Worked with, is a good friend of his and is in his pod. He went over and…”
He had to take another breath to steady himself. “He found them. He’s the one who called it in to the police and then called their pod Alpha.”
He paused to collect his thoughts. “They were attacked. I don’t have all the details on that, either. But there was a guy found dead in their backyard, too. The police don’t think he was the one who attacked them, because it looks like he was murdered. He didn’t have any ID on him, and police are still trying to identify him.”