Dominance Never Dies (Masters and Mercenaries Book 11) (3 page)

Theo would have been standing there telling him that Mia was nothing at all like Courtney. Mia wouldn’t care that he didn’t have any damn money. He’d stood there like an idiot explaining he’d spent everything he had to make life easier on Erin because Theo was gone and it was all his responsibility now. So much fucking responsibility because his brother was dead and Theo’s girl was pregnant and that left Case to make things right.

He couldn’t go into any relationship without the woman understanding he had to take care of his brother’s almost wife and kid, though he hadn’t mentioned the pregnancy. That was a surprise for another time. Until Erin actually acknowledged her condition, he wasn’t mentioning it to anyone outside the family. Mia hadn’t blinked. She’d told him he was doing the right thing and why the hell would he even question it.

Mia might be the one. The silly, stupid, romantic movie one.

One good fucking thing in his life.

“I don’t know if I’m serious about her yet.” He definitely needed time. Time to get used to the fact that he was kind of serious about this woman. Way more serious than he’d been in forever.

He needed to know more about her. The couple of times they’d talked, she’d managed to turn everything around to him. It had been such a change from his usual girl that he was kind of in a fog when she was around. She seemed so interested in who he was as an actual person.

“So you’re cool if I ask her out?” Michael asked.

He felt his whole body swell in response. Like a caveman who’d been challenged.

Michael grinned at him in the mirror. “Message received.”

Case started for his locker. “You’re an ass.”

Michael followed after him. With the exception of Theo, Michael was his closest friend. Michael had been on the CIA black ops team with him. Ten’s Men, as they’d called themselves. Now they were Tag’s. “Maybe, but you’re completely delusional if you think you’re not crazy about that chick.”

“She’s cool.” And hot as hell. When he’d kissed her he’d damn near shoved her up against a wall and taken her right then and there. He could practically feel her legs winding around him. That was the moment he’d known he couldn’t do it. It would have been quick and a little violent, and he wanted to be tender with her. He wanted to be different with her.

Michael opened the locker next to his, shrugging out of his vest. “You need to be more self-aware because if you’re not you’ll lose that girl the minute she hits the dungeon floor. Boomer kind of drooled over her and I’m going to warn you that JT is talking about getting a membership here and she’s exactly his type. He’ll play dirty, too.”

He could play dirty. He could snipe that rich motherfucker from a mile away. “Tell your brother to stay away from my…”

Fuck. He’d almost called her his sub.

He was saved from that completely embarrassing mistake by his eldest brother’s deep voice. “Case, I need to talk to you.”

He looked back and Ian was staring at him, his face set in serious lines, though it was always kind of set that way these days. Even when he was holding his daughters there was a seriousness that had been absent in the days before Theo died.

It was how Case measured time now. There was BTD and ATD. Before Theo Died and After Theo Died. Mostly the ATD sucked ass and was marked with grim reality.

“Sure.” He pulled out a T-shirt and put it on, shoving his vest in his gym bag. Mia had never seen him shirtless. The vest he wore in Sanctum kind of perfectly covered his scars. What would she think when she saw his ruined back? The bullet wounds on his chest? The nasty scar a knife had left on his upper thigh. “What’s up?”

With his big brother it could be anything. Damn. It could be about work. McKay-Taggart did work around the globe. What would he do if Big Tag wanted to send him and Michael out in the field? They had a couple of cases they were working on in Houston, but that was an easy flight and he could get back home for Sanctum nights.

He didn’t want to leave Mia.

“Let’s go talk in Wade’s office.” He turned and started out of the locker room.

Case’s stomach dropped. If he wasn’t willing to talk in front of Michael, it was serious.

The last time Big Tag had shown up with that grim look in his eyes, it had been to tell him that Theo was dead.

Had something happened to Erin? She hadn’t been willing to admit she was pregnant yet. Could she not accept it? Had she done something to hurt herself?

“You want me to wait, man?” Michael watched as Big Tag left the room.

Case shook his head. He had no idea how long it would take. “Nah, it’s fine. I’ll call you if it’s anything important.”

Case forced himself to move. He wasn’t sure he could take another blow. If something had happened to Erin, he wasn’t sure he could handle it. He would have failed Theo on every level.

He wanted to go see Mia, to kiss her again and forget about reality for a little while. He took back everything he’d thought about going slow. They needed fast. He needed to get her in bed and burn off all the pain. She would accept it, accept him. She would take everything he had to give and return it all with her sweetness.

He opened the door to the manager’s office. Wade Rycroft had taken over management of Sanctum when Ryan Church had made a bazillion dollars on some new tech device he’d created. Ryan and his wife, Jill, still played at Sanctum, but the Dom in residence job had gone to a big cowboy from South Texas.

Wade wasn’t present in his office. Ian was sitting behind the desk. “Shut the door behind you.”

Case closed it. “Just tell me. Fucking get it over with, Ian. What’s happened to Erin?”

Ian’s head shook. “Nothing. Erin’s fine as far as I can tell. She’s apparently in serious denial about the bun cooking in her oven, but other than throwing up every morning and calling it the flu, she’s fine.”

The unspoken message? Erin was as fine as a woman could be when she’d recently lost the love of her life to a bullet.

Case slumped into the chair in front of the desk, letting his bag drop to the floor. Relief poured through him. “Thank god. I thought maybe she’d lost the baby or something.”

“I’m sorry,” Ian said. “She’s fine. Faith is back home for a week before she and Ten head back to Liberia for a few months. They’re having some girl time. God, I hope they give Ten a makeover. He’s got that beard shit going again. Maybe I should send him a glitter bomb, too. Once his beard is all pink and sparkly he’ll have to get rid of it.”

“You didn’t send Guy a mere glitter bomb. You sent the dude exploding glitter dicks. He’s suing you, you know.”

Guy Ferland was an ex-military man himself. He ran a security company that as far as Case could tell didn’t vet their clients as well as McKay-Taggart. He was willing to do a lot of shady shit, and lately he’d run up against Big Tag, who didn’t take well to shady shit. Hence the exploding glitter dicks that might or might not have put out an eye.

A brilliant smile crossed his brother’s face. “Yeah, I can’t wait for that trial. Mitch wants me to just pay the cleanup costs, but he’s not counting on how awesome it’ll be to have some judge have to say the words
exploding glitter dicks
. That’s going to be worth all the court costs.”

His brother had an odd sense of humor. “So if this isn’t about Erin, what’s going on? Should I call Michael in?”

Ian’s face returned to its former grimness. “No. And I don’t want you talking about this to Michael right now. If we need to, we’ll bring him in later, but what I’m about to tell you is strictly on a need-to-know basis.”

Shit. It had to be about Hope McDonald. He’d known Ian was looking for her. She was the last of the two people they held responsible for Theo’s death. Erin and Nick Markovic had taken out the senator, but his psychotic daughter had gotten away.

Why hadn’t Case been more involved in the hunt for her? Why hadn’t he become obsessed with searching out the woman who’d had a sick fascination with his brother? She was still out there. Likely still working on her memory altering drugs. Ten had a taste of that and he’d said it was beyond torture. Hope McDonald had created a drug and therapy protocol that could rewire the brain over long periods of time. She’d used it on Ten to make his torture seem endless, to trick his mind into giving him pain without harming his actual body to a great degree.

Why wasn’t he working harder to stop that?

Because he was hollowed out on the inside and Theo had taken all the good and noble parts of them to his grave? Because all Case was good at doing was throwing himself in front of bullets?

Ian had known that. It was precisely why he’d sent Theo into the field as a lead instead of him.

“Have you found her?” Case got down to business. If Ian had found out where Hope was holed up, he would likely send Case in to try to take her out. It was what Case wanted. He was the only one with nothing to lose. Ian and Sean had daughters and wives. They had lives.

If there was a battle to be fought, Case was the cannon fodder of the family.

“I’ve found where she was.” Ian reached down and pulled a folder out of his bag. “She’s been working on a private island off the coast of Argentina. Apparently the pharmaceutical company she worked for had a secret lab there. Not that it’s on the books, but Liam found a couple of people who were willing to talk.”

Liam O’Donnell. He was the sneaky one. When Case had first hired on with Tennessee Smith, he’d made a study of the men of McKay-Taggart. He’d asked Ten his opinion of them. Theo had wanted to run through the daisies with his arms held open wide, some whiny ballad playing in the background as he embraced his long-lost brothers and their hodgepodge family, but Case had been more cautious. He’d wanted to know what Ten thought of them. O’Donnell, he’d explained, was the sneaky one. The others looked like what they were. Adam was the sarcastic hacker, Jake Dean the muscle. Alex and Eve were a team of thinkers, cautious and methodical. Ian was…not even Ten could properly describe Ian Taggart.

But O’Donnell was tricky. He played the part of the charming Irishman. Family man with his lovely, gentle wife and kid. To look at him on the surface, one would likely think he was nothing more than a well-trained soldier. Liam O’Donnell put together puzzles no one else thought to play with at all. He saw patterns almost everyone else missed.

Liam was the heavy thinker of McKay-Taggart. So why was he being wasted on a simple search mission?

“Did you send Li in because Erin’s sidelined?”

Ian opened the folder. “Li asked to go in. I had Adam on the hunt, looking through documents and records of anywhere she might have gone. He heard some rumors on the Dark Web about some crazy doctor trying out a memory drug in South America. While Adam was working his magic, Li went back down to the Caymans.”

“To look for Theo’s body?”

“He had a theory,” Ian explained. “He wanted to test it.”

“What theory?”

“You know I found bloody sheets in the room where Ten was held.”

Case had walked into it himself. He could still see all that blood. So much of it and most of it had been his brother’s. He’d stood in the place where his brother had died. It was marked with his blood and then a trail that led inside the building where Ten had been held. “Yeah, but they wouldn’t have taken his body away in bloody sheets. They likely used a tarp or something.”

“Liam found Des’s body.”

That was news. Desiree had been the other operative they’d lost during that terrible night. She’d worked for Damon Knight out of London. “What? So did you find Theo’s, too?”

“Liam tracked down one of McDonald’s security team.” Ian’s voice was low, almost intellectual, as though he was just a CO going over a mission report and not talking about his dead brother. “He admitted that they’d disposed of Des’s body, but not Theo’s. According to that asshat, once McDonald was dead, they fled.”

“But Theo was killed before the assault on the compound. He died the same night as Des. If they got rid of her body, why wouldn’t they do the same to his?”

“The security team wasn’t allowed in that building that night. They were issued specific orders to stay out. At first Li thought it was to protect Hope’s experiments. Now he thinks something different.”

A chill went through Case’s body, causing the hairs on his arm to stand up. Hope McDonald had been a brilliant surgeon. Erin had told him how Faith had pleaded with her sister to come out and save Theo.

Hope McDonald had been obsessed with Theo.

“You think she saved him.”

Ian nodded. “Li does and I’ve learned to never doubt his instincts. He found surgical equipment in the base. It had been locked in a room, but it had also been used. We typed the blood. It matched Theo’s.”

Shouldn’t he have felt something? If Theo was alive, shouldn’t he know it deep down in his bones? “He could still have died. According to Faith, she lost him in the field. You honestly believe one surgeon working alone could have brought him back?”

“Li thinks so.” Ian turned the folder around, sliding it across the desk. “He found evidence of an unscheduled flight landing in Havana that night. The storm was going to the west so Mexico wasn’t a possibility.”

His heart was starting to race. “Did Li check the hospitals?”

“Of course, and there was zero record of any American having surgery that night or being admitted at all.”

“But?” There had to be one.

“Li checked the deposit records of the doctors and staff in the closest hospital. Several members deposited decent sums of cash within a week. All American dollars.”

“It’s still thin.” That could be for anything.

“Yes, which is precisely why I didn’t say anything until now. I haven’t even told Sean about this yet, and I certainly wasn’t going to get your hopes up until I had a decent lead. Liam greased the wheels a little. He finally managed to get a nurse talking. It cost us a pretty penny but the nurse says that in the early morning hours there was a surgical room used that wasn’t on the books. She got us a list of what tools were ordered and the type of blood they used to transfuse the patient who she claims was a large blond man.”

“Theo’s blood type.” Could it possibly be true?