Page 37 of DFF: Delicate Freakin’ Flower (Family Ties #5)

Webb

W e were halfway across the county when Eddie’s name lit up on the truck’s Bluetooth system.

I hit the accept button on the steering wheel, heart already in my throat. “Eddie?”

“Yeah,” his voice crackled through the speakers, low and tight. “We just had company.”

Every muscle in my body tensed.

Elijah, riding shotgun, immediately straightened. “What kind of company?”

“Two men walked in dressed like hospital orderlies, but everything about them screamed military. They moved in tight formation, communicated efficiently, and didn’t hesitate for a second.

They brought a gurney and claimed they were there to move Gabby “for testing.” No paperwork.

No official authorization. Just enough confidence and polish that they might have pulled it off—if I hadn’t been watching them like a hawk. ”

I swore under my breath. “Jesus.”

“Ira backed me up,” Eddie continued. “He might be old, but he’s fast. In a blink, he got behind one of them and swung the IV pole like a club, catching the guy off guard. At the same time, Gladys started shouting about a fire and yanked the emergency alarm.”

“She what?” Elijah barked out a laugh.

“She knew it’d lock down the floor and call in hospital security, and it worked like a charm. The guys panicked and made a run for it. One managed to escape, but the other wasn’t so lucky.”

“You have him?” I asked.

“He’s out cold after he hit the tile hard when Ira took him down. I stashed him in the medical supply closet three floors down, hidden under a blanket cart. Right now, security’s tied up with the fire alarm and the chaos unfolding upstairs, but that’s only going to buy us a short window.”

Elijah cut in, glancing at me. “We can’t go back.”

I gritted my teeth, already fighting my instincts. Every part of me wanted to turn the wheel, head back to that hospital, and keep Gabby within arm’s reach.

“Elijah’s right,” I decided finally, my voice like gravel.

“If we chase every attack, we’ll never stop the next one.

We need to get ahead. Call one of the other trucks and get someone to the hospital—quietly and fast. Let Eddie know where to drop the guy so they can extract him without drawing attention. ”

Elijah made the call and got it organized.

We rode in heavy silence for a few minutes. My hand clenched the wheel tighter than it needed to. I couldn’t get Gabby’s face out of my mind. She was lying peacefully in that ICU bed, completely unawareofhow close she’d just come to being taken again.

And for what? So Barris could finish what Maddox started? No. Hell no.

We called Marcus and Jackson on a group line as we neared Jackson’s place. Jesse and Remy were in other vehicles, but we were all converging there to regroup.

“We need a new play. They’re getting bolder. If they’re willing to walk into a hospital in daylight, this ends now.” It was eating away at me how close they'd gotten to taking her again, especially with Gabby being so vulnerable right now.

“They’re not going to stop unless we break them,” Marcus replied. “We find Barris, we stop the engine. Maddox is scrambling, but Barris is holding the leash.”

Jackson chimed in. “I’ve got my boys pulling footage from the hospital and surrounding blocks. If we can catch the plates on the guy who ran, we follow that trail.”

I drummed my hands on the steering wheel to try and get rid of some of the anxiety weighing me down. “Go ahead with that, we’ll be there in fifteen. Let’s plan the rest of it out in person.”

When we pulled into Jackson’s driveway, the place was already buzzing with activity. Trucks were lined up along the drive, and armed friends moved through the shadows just beyond the reach of the porch light. It felt less like a gathering and more like a war council coming together.

Inside, Sasha was already waiting. The moment I stepped through the door, she spun around from where she’d been pacing and stormed up to me, her eyes blazing.

“She hasn’t woken up? Are you serious, Webb?”

“She made it through surgery.” I understood why Sasha was so upset—my feelings mirrored hers in every way. “She’s stable, but she just hasn’t opened her eyes.”

Sasha’s eyes welled up for a second before fury overtook the fear. “I swear to everything, I’m going to de-ball Colin Maddox and Clayton Barris with—” she spun on the spot, scanning the room, “—my cat’s nail clippers.”

Everyone froze, scanning the room for them in case she decided it'd be therapeutic to start now.

Jackson blinked. “You mean those tiny?—”

“Yep, the blunt, slightly rusted ones,” she snapped. “Then I’m going to play tennis with their nuts before feeding them to my cat, who, I’ll remind you, is cross-eyed and unpredictable.”

Even I took a step back. That cat was fucking unnerving.

“Don’t worry, he’s got a real taste for revenge,” she muttered, grabbing a bottle of water and unscrewing it like she was prepping a weapon.

“And maybe I’ll just send my dad to the hospital.

He has privileges. He can get Gabby moved somewhere safer.

Hell, maybe I’ll get him to do plastic surgery on her and change her face entirely. ”

“No,” I growled, sharper than I meant to. “She’s perfect as she is. No one’s touching her.”

Sasha raised an eyebrow, clearly pleased by the reaction but unwilling to let me off easily. “You better hold onto that energy, Webb, because I’m calling in Malcolm and Benny.”

Every single brother in the room froze and spoke in unison.

“Oh, shit,” Jackson whined. "But they're unquestionably insane."

Sasha grinned wickedly. “Exactly.”

Marcus groaned, rubbing his face harshly with his hands. “They make us look like kindergarteners on a sugar crash.”

“They don’t play by any rules,” Jackson agreed.

“Good.” The smile on Sasha's face was sinister. “Because neither do I anymore.”

The dining room resembled a tactical operations center combined with a tech startup’s panic room.

Phones buzzed nonstop across the table, competing with the soft clatter of keyboards as open laptops displayed GPS routes, social media tracking tools, and encrypted internal comms. Handwritten notes scribbled hastily on napkins were wedged between coffee mugs and a half-eaten plate of breakfast sausage someone had abandoned hours ago.

The tension in the room was palpable and thick enough to cut with a knife.

Marcus was on one end, looping through digital traffic cameras Remy had tapped into, while Jesse barked into his phone, trying to lean on a friend in FDLE for unofficial surveillance logs.

Jackson paced along the back wall, muttering strategy to himself and occasionally punching details into a shared doc we’d been updating like a living beast.

I sat at the head of the table, half-listening to Elijah and Sasha go over timelines and possible fallback points for Barris, my knee bouncing with pent-up adrenaline.

My eyes flicked constantly to my phone—waiting for any call, any update about Gabby, even though Eddie had promised to text if she so much as twitched in her sleep.

Then the door blew open.

“We have chaos!” Sasha shouted, fist-pumping the air as two men strode into the house like they owned it.

Malcolm and Benny—the "legends"—were finally here.

Benny looked like he hadn’t seen a hairbrush in years and might have fought one to the death.

He had tattoos crawling up both arms and a denim jacket with what I thought was dried blood on one sleeve, but I wasn’t going to ask.

Next to him, Malcolm wore an old motorcycle cut with a patch on the back that read “No Chill, No Mercy.” His grin was as charming as it was unnerving.

“Gentlemen,” Malcolm greeted, clapping his hands and surveying the war table. “So, who are we hunting and can we blow them up?”

Jesse leaned in and whispered to Elijah, “I thought you were exaggerating with that story you told me.”

Elijah whispered back, “They always say that… and they’re always pussy cats. At least, so far, they have been.”

Benny dropped into the chair across from me, cracking his knuckles. “Here’s the play—we bait him.”

“Barris?” I asked, wary.

“Yeah, let’s put something onlinelike a fake update about Gabby’s recovery.

Keep it just vague enough to make him twitch, to make him wonder if we’re bluffing or if she’s really talking.

We need to add a location—somewhere we control the exits.

Then we wait and spring the trap.” He made an exaggerated exploding sound while throwing his arms out wide, mimicking the blast of something going off.

Marcus immediately shook his head. “That could risk innocents.”

Benny shrugged. “Then put it in the middle of nowhere. Use my cousin’s junkyard—people already avoid that place because it smells like regret and motor oil.”

Malcolm jumped in. “Or we could fabricate a private jet manifest. Maddox has investors, so the moment money starts walking, he panics like all businesses do. If we show one of his biggest backers pulling out—maybe claiming they’re flying into Austin to cut ties—it could be enough to send him into a full spiral. ”

Remy looked up from his laptop, blinking. “Where are you getting all this?”

“My second job is digital misinformation,” Malcolm admitted with a grin. “Totally freelance. Very illegal. Don’t ask questions.”

Sasha beamed. “Told you they'd help.”

We all sat around the table, glancing between the three cousins, each of us in varying stages of disbelief.

What they were suggesting was, without question, illegal—but it was also undeniably brilliant.

Morality didn’t exactly hold much weight in the situation we were in, and yet, our usual sense of right and wrong was clearly struggling against the sheer audacity of the plan.

Still, this was about saving Gabby’s life, and when it came to that, did morals even matter?

Jesse finally broke the silence. “Do we even want to know how many laws you’ve broken in the past twenty-four hours?”

“Depends on how tightly you define ‘broken,’” Benny winked.

“Or ‘laws,’” Malcolm added.

I rubbed my hands together, exhaled slowly, and stared at the screen in front of me—still no updates on Maddox or Barris.

“All right, let’s build the bait.”

Because if these psychos were going to bring the fire, we might as well aim it right at the snake pit.

Malcolm pulled his laptop out of a weathered messenger bag covered in patches and profanity, then set it down like he was about to perform a magic trick.

A few keystrokes later, he was deep into what looked like ten open browsers, two burner accounts, a dark web chat forum, and what might’ve been a Russian server or a fantasy football league—I couldn’t tell.

Finally, he rolled his neck like a prizefighter entering the ring. “We’re going with the investor angle. Maddox has his fingers in five holding companies that are funneling funds into that swamp development. I just traced the public face of one—Lioncrest Equities. Sound classy, right?”

He didn’t wait for a response.

“I’ve set up a digital breadcrumb trail that makes it look like Lioncrest is pulling out—complete with a pre-released public statement. It’s designed to trigger high-level panic, the kind of pressure that’ll make Maddox drop the act and stop pretending he’s still in control.”

Benny leaned over his shoulder, chewing on a toothpick. “Tell them about the pilot thing.”

“Oh, right,” Malcolm smirked. “I also mocked up a fake flight log. It shows Lioncrest’s ‘chief financial director’ flying into Austin tomorrow. It's even timestamped and GPS-stamped. It’s vague enough to not be confirmed but specific enough to make Maddox sweat.”

Jackson, who had been watching with crossed arms and skeptical eyes, let out a low whistle. “That’s actually brilliant.”

Malcolm winked. “You say that like you’re surprised.”

I found myself leaning in, trying to catch up. “And how does that lead him to us?”

“I added just enough fuzziness in the metadata—location tags, digital watermark anomalies—that Maddox’s team will try to trace the source of the leak. That’s when they’ll land on the dummy profile I've made. That profile’s been ‘liking’ posts about a certain little ranch in central Florida.”

Jesse blinked. “You’re baiting a trap using social media breadcrumbs?”

“Exactly,” Malcolm chuckled. “Like luring a bear with peanut butter—except the peanut butter’s made of money, paranoia, and his crumbling ego.”

Even Marcus looked impressed now, arms crossed, head tilted slightly. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

Malcolm grinned. “Oh, yeah. You don’t want to know how many MLM pyramid schemes I’ve tanked for fun.”

Benny burst out laughing. “He once convinced an entire crypto startup that electric car dude was buying them out.”

“Almost worked,” Malcolm muttered.

Elijah, usually the most skeptical of all of us, finally leaned forward. “So, what happens when Maddox or Barris takes the bait?”

Malcolm cracked his knuckles. “We track them through the back-end analytics. IP address, if they’re sloppy. Surveillance footage if they send someone to verify in person. Either way, it gives us a pulse and a target.”

The room went quiet for a beat, and I looked around the table at my brothers—men who usually relied on instincts, fists, and a damn good plan made five minutes before the punch was thrown.

But now we were watching a guy dismantle Maddox’s empire with a laptop, a fake flight manifest, and the gleeful chaos of someone who liked this game way too much.

And damn it all, it was working.

“All right,” I said, standing and gripping the back of my chair. “Set it. Let’s watch Maddox run.”