“Kai,” I said quietly. “I know you’re not like them. You tried to save London. You know what they’re capable of. Don’t let them have Georgie, too.”
“If Tanner’s told them anything, it’s too late to stop.” He sounded resigned and it pushed the fear into my stomach, churning like a cyclone. “We’re all finished.”
“Where would he take her?”
“The shed maybe? But he’d know I’d find him there.” Kai was silent a few seconds and I could hear him getting back in his car. “The school.”
“School?”
“Georgie’s old school. Tanner was taken by them as a kid. He was trained, if you want to call it that, and Connor was his first assignment. He hung out at the motorcross track where he met Connor and Georgie. Became friends. When Connor died, his new assignment was Georgie. Tanner used to watch Robbie cut her.”
“Jesus. Fuck.”
“He was to tell us when Georgie was … vulnerable enough to trust me.”
I was pulsating with so much fury I thought I was going to break. Vic must have seen it because he leaned over the seat and squeezed my shoulder.
We knew one another pretty damn well and right now, I was volatile as hell.
Kai gave me the directions and I repeated them to Tyler who had turned around and headed for the highway. “Deck. I suspect Tanner killed Lionel. He set this in motion.”
“And that means?”
“It means he wants them to bring him and Georgie in.”
“Why would he do that?”
“So you can’t have her.”
“Fuck.” I ran my hand over the top my head, back and forth then down my face.
“Meet you at the location.” The line went dead.
I threw the phone on the dashboard. “Tell me you’ve found something on this Tanner kid? Anything, damn it.” I stared out the window but saw nothing. The fear had changed to rage, and the rage was now a cold-steel determination to destroy and conquer anyone or anything that stopped me from finding Georgie.
Vic sat forward so each elbow rested on Tyler’s and my backrests. “I narrowed it down to one missing boy a year before this Tanner kid showed up at the motocross track where he met Connor and Georgie. A ten-year-old Michael Donald vanished from his Toronto home, never to be seen again. No leads, nothing. He fits Tanner’s description with the compilation. Time frame is right. I’m guessing whatever organization we are dealing with took him in, tortured him, trained him, brainwashed the kid.”
Tyler shook his head. “Jesus, he was a kid.”
I glared at Tyler. “Yeah, who can make Georgie disappear.”
“I know, Boss. But whoever these people are, they’re taking in children. They need to be stopped. Fuck, Connor would do whatever it took to take these guys down.”
Yes, he would. Connor was the guy who always helped the kids wherever our missions took us. And now he was part of an organization that destroyed them. “And we will.”
Josh spoke from the backseat. “Why would he want to bring her to them? Kai says he has a thing for her. I’d think he’d want to get her far away from these assholes. Not a chance would I let those fuckers near my girl.” Josh cleared his throat. “Sorry, Boss.”
“If he knows her and I are together, the only way to get us apart is to bring her in. If Kai is right, there is no escape from these people, so trying to run would be stupid.”
Our advantage, they had no idea what Kai had told us. If Tanner had yet to make contact with the organization, then there was a chance we could stop everything from snowballing into a total cluster-fuck of a nightmare.
We drove for a half hour before Tyler pulled over on the shoulder and nodded to a school down the block. “Looks like this is it.”
It was two minutes later that Kai pulled up behind us. Tyler reached over and put his hand on my arm. “I know you’d like to blow Kai’s brains out right now. Fuck, Boss, I do, too. But he wants London, that gives him a reason to go after them.”
I wouldn’t kill him, but fuck, I wanted to. Just the thought of Kai’s involvement in this … I unclipped my seatbelt and got out. Kai was standing with a knife in hand and without his usual air of cockiness.
“We bring her home,” I ordered. Because if we didn’t, my darkness would smother the only good parts of what I had left and I’d never come back from that—nor would I want to.“YOU KNOW, I used to stand on a milk crate outside the shed and look through that window.” He nodded to the left at a dusty window at the back of the shed. “I’d watch Robbie with you. Hear your sobs. I wanted to soothe you, hold your hand, but they wouldn’t let me.”