Page 156 of Shrapnel

Jackson was looking right at Owen, his good eye full of suspicion. “Who is he?”

“I can’t be sure, but I think…I think he’s Jamie’s father.”

After Jamie went missing, he did some deep diving. Into everything. The murder of Renard and his men in a bakery had made big news. Jamie had come home smelling like smoke and Owen had put the pieces together. He hadn’t been positive until right at this moment. How he missed theRenardconnection, Owen didn’t know.

“Dominic must know Jamie from his past. That’s why Jamie looked so horrified in the hallway and why he went with them.”

Owen clutched at his hair, closing his eyes. It was too much. All the information was bouncing around his brain, and he needed to sort it all. Like a game of Tetris, he needed to organize the pieces until they fit.

Dominic was the White Eyed Demon. Somehow, he met up with Mateo and Ian. Mateo wanted revenge on Noah, but Dominic only wanted Jamie. They must have been working together but why? Why did Dominic—who was clearly the brains of the operation—even bother with someone like Mateo? Why did he care about his obsession with Noah and revenge?

More importantly, why did he want Jamie?

“What else did Jamie tell you? About his father?” Grant looked troubled, his fingers twitching toward the knife on his thigh.

“Not much. He was a human trafficker. His mother was from another country and she was on drugs. When he went back, he said she was totally out of her mind.”

“He came back strung out on Heroin,” Grant confirmed. “We know he didn’t voluntarily shoot up.”

Heroin.

Owen sat back in his chair, heart hammering in his chest. “His friend,” he licked his lips and doubled checked Dominic’s date of birth on his arrest record.

“Geeks onto something,” Jackson snarked.

Owen ignored him. “Jamie told me there was another kid. One who protected him when they were little.” He rolled his lips, thinking. “No wonder he was so hard to find. Dominic didn’t erase his records—they don’t exist. Just like Jamie.”

It all made sense. Jamie was born to a trafficked woman, his birth was never recorded. If the friend he mentioned was the same, another child born from a trafficked woman, then he wouldn’t exist either.

“Dominic is that friend. The one from his past.”

Grant studied the monitor. “But why would he want Jamie?”

“I don’t know.” Owen looked up at him. “Jamie told me he killed him.”

Jackson was splayed out on a couch. A different couch to the one he had previously been napping on. This one was pressed into Grant’s bare office. The walls were horrifically white. They reflected the overhead light, a constant back and forth that made Jackson’s eye twitch.

“Yes, thank you.” Grant was finishing his umpteenth phone call. It was somewhere past midnight, but people were still answering.

He hung up the phone and began scrawling notes on a notebook. That was another difference between them—Jackson would rather die than take notes.

“That was an orderly at the VA hospital,” Grant said icily.

“I told you to check the VA hospital for Ian’s records, not that I had a contact in the VA hospital.”

“How could you not?”

“Because unlike you, I don’t accrue minions everywhere I go.” Jackson scratched at the stubble on his chin, grinning a little when Grant’s nostrils flared in irritation. He hated when he did that. Which was why he did it.

“Besides, I’m AWOL, Grant,” he reminded him. “You don’t stay AWOL if you have contacts in the military.”

Grant rolled his eyes. Jackson was surprised. He only let his carefully manufactured persona slip when he was tired. Snarky, tired Grant was one of his favorite versions of the man.

They both knew Jackson was so far beyond AWOL that it was funny. Yes, he was technically AWOL, but he was also somewhere in the Army’s Criminal Investigation Departments top five list of most wanted criminals. Desertion was the least of his offenses according to the CID.

“He was able to get me the file on Ian.” Grant didn’t have a computer on his desk. He preferred hard copies and had studiously written down everything the orderly said.

“Why was he discharged?”