Chapter 58: Drive Me Crazy
The silence after the drone’s signal died was louder than the rifle shot that brought it down. It wasn’t a clean kill; Hayes’ team had fried its electronics, sending it spiraling into a rocky outcrop east of the main house. The air still carried the faint, acrid scent of burnt plastic and lithium battery fire, a tang that cut through the usual smells of dust and sage.
Dove knelt by the twisted wreckage, her gloved hands sorting through the shattered carbon fiber. Beth watched from a few feet back, her arms crossed tight against her chest.The bandages on her hands looked garishly white in the unforgiving sun.
“Commercial model,” Dove said, holding up a warped rotor arm.“Heavy payload modification. Had a camera array, sure.But see this?” She pointed to a scorched cylinder mounted underneath. “That’s not for pictures.That’s a chemical marker pod. Sprays a UV-reactive mist.Invisible to us. Glows like a neon sign under the right scope.”
“For targeting,” Beth said, her voice flat.“For targeting,” Dove confirmed, dropping the piece. It clattered against the other debris.“He wasn’t just looking, Beth. He was painting the barns, the cistern, the main house. Getting coordinates nice and precise for someone.”
Beth’s phone rang.The number was blocked.She knew.
She walked a few paces away, the dry grass crunching under her boots, and answered. “You’re costing me in salvage permits, Enrique.”
His laughter was warm, practiced, the sound of a man who enjoyed the game board more than the pieces.“Bethany.Always so dramatic.A little harmless probing. The sky is free, last I checked.”
“The sky over my property isn’t. And your toy was armed.”
“Armed?With a little dye?My engineers were testing a new mapping system.For agricultural purposes. You run a ranch, you should appreciate innovation.” His tone dipped, became intimate, a subtle shift that made her skin crawl. “We could have avoided this little misunderstanding if you’d taken my calls last week. Or had dinner with me in Austin.”
The memory flashed, unwelcome and vivid.That charity gala last fall. Enrique, sleek in a Tom Ford tuxedo, holding her elbow just a second too long, his gaze dropping to her mouth. Damien had been across the room, frozen in the act of raising a glass, his green eyes turning to glacier ice. He hadn’t known who Enrique was then.Just a man touching his ex-wife. The possessive fury that radiated from him later was a living thing. But Enrique had just smiled, a cat playing with a particularly interesting mouse, completely unaware he was brushing up against a bear.
Did he really think, after all that, after the lawsuits, the land grabs, the whispered threats, that she would ever consider being his Donna?The title was an insult. A gilded cage in a hacienda full of hired guns and sycophants. A partnership with a man who saw her as a shiny asset to be acquired, a useful key to a legacy he couldn’t grasp.
If she were to be anyone’s partner, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the blurred lines between boardrooms and backrooms, legal holdings and illicit ones… it would be Damien’s. The thought was a sudden, shocking warmth in her gut, terrifying in its simplicity. It wasn't just about the obsessive pull between them, the unresolved history.It was about scale. About matching wit for wit, ruthlessness for ruthlessness.A true merger.Legal, criminal, marital. An empire built on two spines instead of one.But Damien would never go for it. He parceled out glimpses of his world like rare delicacies, always shielding her, a habit left over from a marriage where he’d thought protection was love. He barely let her taste it now, even when she was neck-deep in its consequences.And to stand beside him fully?It meant accepting her own inheritance. Not just the money, not just the land. It meant stepping into the shadow of the Montgomery name and all it truly stood for—the “fixers,” the people who made problems disappear. It meant looking in the mirror and seeing the woman who had almost ended a man in a bar fight over a disrespectful comment, the cold, calculating fury that had taken over before Dove pulled her off. Could she live with blood not only in her soil, but on her hands?Directly, intentionally?
“Your agricultural engineers can probe somewhere else,” she said, her voice cutting through his smug silence. “Stay off my land.”
“It’s such a large piece of land, Bethany. So much… empty space.A person could lose things out there. Or find them.” All pretense of flirtation evaporated.“My nephew is still missing. The debt your uncles paid didn’t settle the account. It just transferred the balance… to you.”
“Alejandro is living his best life under a new name, thanks to my family’s generosity. You don’t want him. You want an excuse.”
“I want what’s under that dirt,” he hissed, the smooth facade cracking.“And I will have it. We can do this the hard way, with fires and noise and lawyers.Or we can do it the easy way.You have dinner with me. We talk.Like civilized people.”
Civilized. While his modified drone smoldered at her feet.“The easy way closed when you filed that wrongful death suit. We’re past talking, Enrique.”
“Then you leave me no choice.” The line clicked dead.Beth lowered the phone. The warmth of the sun felt suddenly hostile. Dove was standing now, holding a small, sealed plastic box she’d pried from the drone’s core.It was sleek, military-grade.
“Found the brain,” Dove said, her face grim.“It’s not fried. Signal cut off before the wipe protocol engaged.” She popped the lid. Inside, nestled in protective foam, was a data card.“He wasn’t just painting targets, Beth.He was downloading. This thing has been taking high-res scans for weeks, mapping every inch. And it’s been doing it on a closed-loop, storing it all right here until retrieval.”
Beth took the box. The data card was cool against her fingertips. “What could he possibly see from the air that he wants this badly?”
“Not what,” Dove said, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her wrist. “Where.He’s looking for disturbances in the earth, changes in vegetation.Anomalies. He’s not hunting for treasure. He’s hunting for graves.”
The word hung between them, final as a tombstone slam.
Beth’s promise to Damien echoed in her head—get in that jet.But running now meant letting Enrique dig. Letting him tear up her history, her family’s secrets, with excavators and questions. She looked toward the main house, the jet a silent silver sleeper on the distant tarmac.An exit.
Then she looked down at the data card in her hand.A declaration of war.
“Get me everything we have on Enrique’s operations in San Antonio,” she said, her voice quiet but absolute. “Every trucking route, every warehouse, every bar he owns. Every lieutenant who drives a nice car and has a wife who likes to shop.”
Dove’s eyes narrowed, then ignited with a fierce light. “You thinking of sending a message?”
“I’m thinking,” Beth said, turning the cold, hard rectangle of the data card over in her palm, “that it’s time he learned what my family’s business actually is. We don’t just make problems disappear, Dove.” She met her sister’s gaze. “Sometimes, we deliver them.”