Chapter 59: Dare you
The data card felt like a shard of ice in Beth’s palm, its coldness seeping into her skin.Around her, the ranch was a portrait of deceptive calm. The only sound was the whisper of the wind through the dry grass and the distant, methodic clang of a gate being repaired.
She walked back toward the house, her heels sinking slightly into the softened earth near the gardens. The scent of jasmine from the trellises was overpoweringly sweet, a fragrant mask over the afternoon’s violence. She needed a lifeline, one only a certain kind of monster could provide.Damien answered on the first ring. “Tell me you’re wheels-up.”
“Not yet.” Her voice was steadier than she felt. “We shot down his drone.”
A beat of silence. She could picture him, the sharp intake of breath, the way his jaw would tighten.“Christ, Beth. That’s an act of war.”
“It was an act of trespass.With a chemical marker payload.Dove recovered the data core. It’s intact.” She paused, leaning against the cool marble edge of a garden bench. “He’s been mapping us.For weeks. High-resolution scans, looking for soil disturbances.”
Another silence, longer this time. When he spoke, his tone had shifted from frustrated urgency to a cold, analytical calm she recognized.It was the voice he used before bad things happened. “He’s looking for bodies.”
“Yes.”
“Then he’s not just posturing.He’s building a case. For the authorities, or for his own private excavation.” She heard the faint sound of a lighter clicking, the slow exhale of smoke. “You can’t stay there.”
“If I run, he wins.He gets to dig. He gets to pick apart my family’s history and lay it out for everyone to see.” She looked down at her bandaged hands, the white gauze a stark reminder of her own capacity for violence.“I need to send a message. One he can’t misinterpret.”
“Bethany.” Her name was a sigh, a warning. “What are you planning?”
The memory surfaced, unbidden and sharp. The boundary marker on the old fire road, the dust hanging in the air. Enrique Vega, leaning against his polished Range Rover, his smile all white teeth and predatory charm. “A woman like you needs a man who understands strength,” he’d said, his gaze slipping past her to where Damien stood, a silent, brewing storm. “Not as a threat, but as a complement.A Donna in the true sense.A queen. Not a shadow.”
He’d said it right in front of Damien, not knowing the history, the years, the obsession that simmered between them. The sheer, breathtaking audacity of it still made her blood heat.As if she would ever be his trophy, his secured border.
If she were to stand beside anyone in that shadowed world, it would be Damien. The thought was no longer just a warm shock in her gut; it was a chilling calculus. A partnership of equals in all things.Legal, criminal, marital.To stop fighting the pull and instead harness it. But it meant looking full into the darkness, both his and her own. It meant accepting that the woman who nearly beat a man to death in a bar wasn’t an aberration.She was the inheritor. The legacy. Could she live with blood not just in the soil, but actively, intentionally, on her hands?“Beth?” Damien’s voice cut through her reverie.
“I’m going to hit his operations in San Antonio.The trucking routes, the warehouses. Dove is pulling the files now.”
“That’s my world, Beth. Not yours.” His protest was automatic, but she heard the thread of something else in it—pride, perhaps, or a fearful respect.
“It’s my world if I say it is. You don’t get to gatekeep vengeance.” She let a sliver of the old sarcasm into her voice. “Besides, my family has been handling ‘logistics’ longer than yours has. We’re discreet.”
“Discreet is making a problem vanish.What you’re describing is a fireworks display. It’s loud.”
“It needs to be loud. He needs to hear it.” She stood, began pacing the flagstone path.“You taught me that.Sometimes a whisper isn’t enough. Sometimes you need a scream.”
A low, humorless chuckle came through the phone. “God, I’ve created a monster.”
“You didn’t create me, Damien. You just left me enough room to find out what I already was.” The admission hung in the air between them, across the miles of empty highway and scrubland.It was the closest she’d come to the truth in years.
He was quiet for a long moment.“Send me the details of what you’re planning. Let me coordinate my people on the ground.You provide the targets, the access points. I’ll provide the… theatrics.”
It was a concession.A massive one. An invitation into the machinery of his power.“Why?” she asked, the word barely more than a breath.
“Because if you’re going to do this, you do it right. You do it so completely that he never thinks of looking in your direction again.” His voice dropped, softened. “And because the thought of you stepping into the line of fire without me there makes me physically ill, Bethany. I know you don’t want to hear that.But it’s the truth.”
Her throat tightened. She didn’t know what to do with that truth, with the raw, unguarded fear in his voice.So she deflected, as she always did. “Your jealousy is not a protection detail, Rossi.”
“It’s not jealousy,” he shot back, the familiar heat returning. “It’s tactical concern.Your sister is a force of nature, but she’s one person. Vega has an army of soulless bastards who would shoot a woman just as soon as look at her.Let me help.Please.”
The ‘please’ did it. It was so rare, so disarming.She closed her eyes.“Fine. I’ll have Dove send you the files.But Damien,” she added, her tone firming.“This is my operation. My message. You are… consulting.”
“Consulting,” he repeated, and she could hear the smile in his voice.“I can live with that. For now.”
She ended the call and stood in the garden, the setting sun casting long, dramatic shadows.The jasmine scent was cloying. Inside, Dove would be at the computer, pulling up manifests and schedules, mapping the veins of Enrique’s empire.Beth looked at her hands again. The bandages were starting to fray at the edges.Soon, she would give the order.Soon, things would burn. The thought should have terrified her. Instead, a strange calm settled over her, colder than the data card, sharper than the broken drone.It was the calm of a decision, finally made. The calm of stepping into a role she’d spent a lifetime running from.
She turned her back on the perfumed garden and walked toward the house, toward the blue glow of the monitor, toward the beginning of the scream.