OWN HER: A Dark Mafia Romance(86)

“So Manny goes in, and I can hear ’em get into it. Manny yells, ‘What. The. Fuck.’ And Ronn starts laughing. Like, hysterically. I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with that motherfucker, but… Doesn’t matter. Ronn is laughin’, and then there’s a gunshot. And I had no idea what happened, or what the fuck was goin’ down, but I grabbed my gun and pulled the safety and went in there. And god, Dom. You can’t unsee that shit.” His eyes were gone; he was back in that warehouse in his mind.



I gave him a minute, giving him a chance to pull himself back. “So Ronn shot Manny? Right there and then? That doesn’t even make sense.”



“It does when you know what they had been filming. The girl, Dom. Completely mutilated. Face, body, everything. There was blood everywhere. And I could see Manny was gone. Shot in the face. His head was…” He was choking up. Hell, I was, too.



“And when I got in there, I was ready to shoot Ronn, and I almost did, but he already had me in his sights and he reminded me of why I couldn’t shoot him. Fuck. Fuck, Dom. I wanted to, so badly. I wanted to shoot that motherfucker, for Manny, for the girl, for all of fuckin’ humankind. But I couldn’t. Because, if I did, that would mean—”



He cut himself off, looking down, shaking his head with the slightest movement. When he did raise his eyes, they were red and holding back tears. I had never seen this man cry. Not ever.



He took a minute. “He has my baby girl. Fielding has my Zoe, Dom. I gotta find her, and I gotta get her back, and then I gotta kill that motherfucking son of a bitch. But I can’t die first, and I can’t let anything else matter more. That is what the fuck is goin’ on.”



Holy. Fucking. Hell. The clusterfuck just went apeshit out of control.



Okay, this was way worse than anything I had imagined. And it completely made sense why our Pres was keeping us tied to Hardcore. Shit.



Zoe had always been a little on the wild side, getting herself into drugs and shit. Jesus, she and Tania had a lot in common, from the sounds of it. But if what the Pres was saying was true, and Zoe somehow got taken up by Fielding, like a sex slave, and Fielding was also talking about the same shit with intentions toward Sienna, then the Pres was not talking out his ass. He was being dead honest. And fuck, his heart must be breaking every minute to think of his little girl in that situation. I’d be fucking lost and furious, too.



“Pres, you gotta know. I got your back on this, however I can help. Whatever I can do. What do you know? Do you have a plan?”



“That’s what I’m workin’ on. Zoe’s been gone a long time already, over six months. I don’t even know if Fielding still has her, or if… No. I’m not going there.



“What I do know, from what I’ve overheard and from some bugs I managed to place in Ronn’s office, is that Ronn knows that Fielding trades in sex slaves, human trafficking. They don’t talk about it openly, though, so it’s not something I can pin down. But there are references.



“I gotta find out where she is. I gotta get her back. I gotta believe she’s still…” He couldn’t finish the thought. I didn’t need him to.



“We’re gonna find her, Clav. We will.” I looked at him fiercely, and I could feel my jaw clenching. This game with Fielding was off-the-charts dark.



“But what I was meaning to get clear to you, is that Ronn’s got this on me. He knows that I’m under his thumb as long as he’s got intel on my girl, and he’s holding it over my head. That’s why I couldn’t shoot him at that scene with Manny and the girl. The fucker made me dig a fucking grave that day, for the two of ’em. So now I’m implicated, too, in that sick fucking scene. I’m fucked. But I still gotta get my girl back. And that can be my only priority. You got me? You understand now?”



“Yeah, man, I got you. Loud and clear. And I’m with you on that. Completely.” I raised my arm to him, and we clasped hands, full eye contact. It was a grave trust, and one I would never back down on.



“How are you sure, first off, that Fielding has her, Pres?”



“I got word back then, sent to me from her phone, a text from Ronn that said she’d been taken. Resulting from her ʽdrug debt’ to him, as he put it. And that he’d sold her off to a special business partner to make good on it. I pieced together from a lot of shit since then, that that guy is Fielding. No question.



“I’m pretty sure that Fielding doesn’t know who I am, though. She only had me in there as ʽDad.’ And the text was from Ronn, not Fielding.”