Page 120 of The Deals We Make

King steps forward. “Let’s start with the feed from your house and the footage of the cameras around this place. My guess is, if they know about the money and what happened at this place, they can’t be too far away from here.”

“The foster sister,” I say suddenly. “And that fucking sealed file.”

Halo nods excitedly. “Yes. She lived in Hackensack, which is northeast of here. Daryll West had been to see her just before he came for me and Ari and Lola.”

Halo had wondered what kept bringing West to New Jersey. I’d found the foster sister.

“Can we go in your cabin?” I ask King.

“Whatever you need.”

We all follow him as he lets us inside. But my mind is processing what I remember. The sealed envelope said he’d been brutally beaten by a third foster sibling who was older than him and the sister. The third sibling had been physically abusing him, but then, West found out he was abusing the sister too. The older brother was left with life-changing injuries by the timeWest was finished with him. The sister testified on West’s behalf. Everything in the file suggested that Darryl would do anything for his sister.

And if that’s true, maybe his foster sister would do anything for him.

Including enact revenge.

“If he was close to his foster sister, he may have told her more than we knew,” Niro says.

“If we want motive, the fact she might have known he was coming to face off against us, and then disappeared, would be enough,” Spark says.

“Yeah, but why Vex? Why take Calista? For ransom?” Switch asks. “That part doesn’t make any sense.”

Saint shakes his head. “Listen, I know from my time in the ATF that the way women commit crimes is not the same way men do. They are less inclined to commit revenge crimes. My sense is this is something else.”

My head snaps to Saint at that. “She doesn’t want revenge in the traditional sense. She wants to rebalance the scales. She wants the money. There was a car trailing Calista. A black sedan. Couldn’t get a plate. But it was driven by a woman. If she knows what Calista does, she might have taken her to get the money back.”

“Or taken Calista as collateral to make sure Vex returns it,” Catalina says.

“So, let’s go find out everything we can about the woman,” Niro says. “Why don’t Cat, Bates, and I set off in the direction of Hackensack, and you can refine the search as we head toward it?”

“No,” Spark says. “We’re stronger together than apart. We need to set up a perimeter. For all we know, this could be a fucking trap, and we’re standing around in a single large groupin this cabin. If someone has a semi-automatic on the other side of that window, we’re all toast.”

Bates rushes to the window and closes the curtains as King dims the lights.

I yank my laptop out of my backpack and place it on the kitchen counter of the open-plan living area. I need to find the sister’s address as a possible lead and start a search of my files to find the information we gathered about West.

“Marlie Callihan. That was her name,” I say as I set an additional search to see if her or West owned additional land close by. My guess is if they did, that’s the most likely place they would have taken her. We need to check King’s cameras to see what happened when the tracker was dropped off. Maybe the cameras picked up a vehicle or identifying characteristics of the people who took Calista.

Clutch, Halo, and Spark start to plan routes and strategy. King pushes back the carpet of the living room and unlocks a door in the floor. He begins pulling weapons and grenades out from the hole. After the siege here, King has obviously put some time in to upgrade the provisions, beyond those in the panic room he previously installed.

But I start with the cameras.

As I watch, the damn feeds get glitchy.

Slow as fuck.

But then, something stops me.

An email, which, who the fuck reads emails at a time like this? The email is about a new kink dungeon setting up on Valentine’s Day. Asbury Park: Red Rope Lounge.

“Fuck me. Calista is trying to talk to me from wherever she is,” I say.

My brothers crowd around me.

“She is?” Switch says.

I point to the email. “Calista’s middle name is Valentine. Red rope is what I used to tie her up.”