And you don’t need that, you don’t want that, I know you don’t. Not now, be smart, turn around and listen to me.”

Brock looked over his shoulder. “Get them outta my way.”

“We’ll find her,” Cap promised.

“When?” Brock asked, turning, “After he beats the shit outta her? After he plays his sick f**kin’ games with her? Jesus f**kin’ Christ! ” he said the last on a roar. “She’s been through this before.”

“I know, son, listen to –”

Brock turned his back on the Cap and lifted a finger in Nightingale’s face, “I want your brother on this, f**kin’ now. ”

“He is, Slim, I already called him,” Hank said quietly. “All his boys are on the hunt.”

“Delgado,” Brock snarled, his eyes moving to Chavez, “he needs to mobilize.”

“That call’s been made too,” Eddie told him. “He’s got his team in play.”

Brock glared at them, that bile still eating away at his throat. Visions of Bree in her hospital bed filling his head, visions that morphed into Tess, jaw wired, teeth missing, eyes swollen shut, dark bruises at her neck.

Fuck.

Fuck!

He turned back to the Cap. “My boys need to be picked up from school. I need to make some calls.”

“You do it from in here,” Cap replied.

Brock shook his head. “I gotta be out there. I know where he hides. I know where he creeps.”

“You give that info to Jimmy, Hank and Eddie, they’ll follow it up.”

“She’s my woman, Cap,” Brock reminded him.

“We’ll find her,” Cap promised again.

That bile in his throat was swelling, threatening to choke him. “My job to keep her safe,”

he spoke around the bile, this making his voice thick.

“We’ll find her, son,” Cap promised yet again and his eyes went intense. “Goes against the grain, man like you, I know it. Goes against the grain. But the smartest thing you can do right now is sit your ass down, brief Jimmy, Hank and Eddie so they can work this then call someone to take care ‘a your boys. When we get her, you need to have your shit together

‘cause she’s gonna need you. So, you gotta keep your shit together, Brock, do the smart thing, help us help her.”

After the Captain stopped speaking, Brock “Slim” Lucas didn’t delay.

He walked to the chairs in front of Cap’s desk, sat his ass down in one and looked to Jimmy Marker who was seating himself beside him. Then he ran down everything he remembered about Josiah Burkett which was everything he knew about Josiah Burkett. He didn’t forget anything. Not anything.

Eddie Chavez left first to disburse the first wave of intel.

Hank Nightingale left second.

Jimmy Marker waited until the end.

Then Brock called his mother to go pick up his boys.

And after that, standing at the window in the Captain’s office, eyes staring unseeing outside, that bile still choking him, his brain torturing him, his instincts screaming for him to move, his palms itching, his teeth clenched, it took everything he had to lock himself down and not do, again, what he’d done years ago, something that was wild and stupid and f**ked up then and something that he could have no way of knowing would put his Tess in jeopardy now and, for the first time in f**king years, he prayed.

My wild man, he heard her sweet words whisper in his head. My snake charmer.

Brock Lucas closed his eyes and prayed harder.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Tell Slim

“Do you know what he did to me?”

“You’re the one who hurt Bree.”

“Do you know what he did to me? ”

I went silent when he started screaming.

He had the gun and his eyes on me. He was wrong. All wrong. And all that wrong came from his eyes.

As Brock would say, he was whacked. It shone out of his eyes. Clear as day. It shone straight from his eyes.

How could Bree not see that?

Or maybe he hid it from her.

But he wasn’t hiding it from me.

And it scared me nearly senseless.

Not senseless enough not to pay attention. Not senseless enough not to note exactly where we were, in Englewood, in an old crackerbox house on a big lot that was mostly muddy earth from the snow melt, dead weeds, lots of big trees. I thought it was a weird place to take me. It was a neighborhood, populated and as the afternoon wore on, it would be more populated.

People could hear me scream.

But I didn’t scream.

He did.

He was whacked.

He’d killed Damian, shot him right in the face. He’d shot two other men, one I knew was dead, the other might be. He hated Brock.

So he’d shoot me.

But he wanted to play with me first. I knew this. I knew he wanted Brock to live with that for the rest of his life. He might leave me breathing after or he might not.

But he wasn’t going to play with me for long. I knew this too. He was an old guy, for one.

He couldn’t have that in him anymore. And also, he didn’t care if he was caught. He’d shot three men in the parking lot of Park Meadows Mall. People had to see, to hear. He was going to do what he was going to do to make Brock pay and he wasn’t going to waste any time.

When I didn’t answer, his voice calmed and he ordered, “Take off your clothes.”

I went still.

No, he wasn’t going to waste any time.

This couldn’t happen to me again. It couldn’t. It couldn’t happen to me again. I wasn’t sure I could survive it. Not even with Brock at my back when it was done, if I was left breathing. I wasn’t even sure we could survive it, not from what I knew of Brock, his capacity for loyalty and love, knowing he’d brought this down on me. It would undo him. So even if I survived, he might not.

“Take off… your f**kin’… clothes, ” he semi-repeated and I stared at him.

He moved the gun an inch to the side and squeezed the trigger.

I screamed and jumped as the gunshot sounded loud in the room, the bullet embedding in the wall behind me.

God, please God, someone hear that.

“Take off your clothes,” he again repeated.

I shook my head.

“No,” I whispered and he blinked.

“What?” he asked.

I knew it then. I knew I couldn’t take it. I knew Brock couldn’t take it.

I knew I had to stop this.

And if I got hurt doing it, so be it.

But no one was going to hurt me like that, not again. And they weren’t going to hurt Brock either.