Rockwell Agency: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  Chapter 30

  Barrett

  There was a hush over the crowd, and Barrett found himself holding his breath, waiting to see how they would answer his question. He had asked them to choose between him and his father. Going with his father meant pushing Barrett out and effectively telling him that Adele had been successful in her attempts to undercut his position in his own family and his own Clan.

  Going with him meant putting a black mark across his father’s legacy and calling the man a failure. And a liar.

  There were soft murmurs now, and Barrett purposefully chose not to listen to them. But they only lasted for a moment before Hannah stepped out of the crowd.

  “Is this even a question?” she asked, turning to the others and looking astounded. “How can you debate whether you want a leader who is transparent and one that has imposed some regime of secrecy on you and who is standing here, abandoning his own son, in the name of his own reputation?”

  “Enough,” Gideon said, barking the word as he stepped forward. “I will not allow this to go on any further. My son, like my daughter, has turned his back on the Clan because he has exposed that which is only harmful to us, to our unity, and to our faith in our leadership. If he would turn against his own family, he would turn against you.”

  Barrett felt his face flush with anger, and he turned on his father, stalking up to him. He put a finger in his father’s face, towering over the man, who was four inches shorter than him. “You will not turn this around on me,” he said, his voice dark with his fury and his sense of betrayal. “Do you have a thought that’s not for yourself and your own preservation?”

  “You are too young, too immature, and too idealistic to know what you’re talking about,” Gideon spat. “I’ve given you everything, and the moment that you had any kind of power, you threw it back in my face. You’ve failed. You’ve ended the Rockwell Clan line—because I can’t have more children now, and you are no more fit than your sister.”

  He spat the last word, and the spittle from his lips flecked against Barrett’s face.

  It was the last straw for Barrett. He had come to this meeting angry with his father but willing to see how he would react—willing to forgive if they could work together from to deal with Adele.

  But his father was more corrupt than he could have imagined. Perhaps he was as dangerous as Adele, because he seemed to be willing to do anything to retain his own position.

  Barrett reached his hands out, and he shoved his father backward, his hands landing squarely on his father’s chest.

  He could have pursued the aggression and fallen on his father to strike him again and again. He would have won. He was younger, stronger, faster, and he was angrier, too. But he didn’t do that. He just shoved the man, making him stumble backward, and then he held up his hands and stepped back, pain and frustration clogging his voice as he spoke. “We’re not family anymore.”

  Norman started to step in, but before he could, Nola, who had remained in tears and silent throughout this entire altercation, stepped between her husband and her son. “I don’t want this.” She held a hand up to each of them, her fingers trembling with nerves. “I want my family back. I want my children. I’ve been longing for them for so many years, and this Clan—running this Clan, being a Rockwell—it’s not worth giving that up.”

  “Nola,” Gideon said, having readied himself to come back at Barrett. “Be quiet and step back. Now.”

  “No,” Nola said, turning towards him with sorrow in her eyes. “No, I’m not following you anymore, Gideon. You’ve ruined my family. My children. You’ve turned them against you and each other and I …I’ve let it happen. I’m not staying here anymore.”

  Gideon thrust his finger to gesture at Nola to get away. “I said shut the fuck up and get back!”

  Barrett moved to protect his mother, ready to take up her case. In his mind, she was still an innocent victim in this, and it was his father leading the charge against him.

  But before Barrett got to her, she jumped into the air. Her clothing scattered as she shifted in front of them all, and her wings spread out, cutting through the air as her tail cut between Barrett and Gideon. She soared upward, high into the sky, her wings flapping, and her burnt-orange scales glowing against the blue sky.

  If there were concrete rules against flying at times that would expose the Clan as a whole, she was flying in the face of them. Anyone—anyone—who looked up into the sky would see a dragon flying through the air, and there would be no mistaking it. There would be nothing to prevent them from getting it on camera. There would be nothing to prevent them from using it to confirm the whispers that had always existed beneath the surface in Baton Rouge.

  But no one went after her, all of them standing there, watching the woman who had helped to lead the Rockwell Clan for so many years disappear, eventually, above the sparse but effective cloud cover.

  Barrett felt a pang as she disappeared, but he didn’t blame her for fleeing his father’s control. He turned away, and he was ready to appeal to the crowd once again—to ask them to abandon the leadership of the man who had just driven his wife off.

  But Gideon had no intention of accepting his wife’s decision to walk away from him—at least he had no intention of taking it lying down.

  He let out a string of expletives, cursing Nola up one side and down the other. “It was her,” Gideon spat, waving one arm towards the sky where his wife had just disappeared. “She was the one who failed Adele. Who made Cade so useless. Who coddled you all those years.” He spun towards Barrett, addressing the last statement towards him. “This was all her fault. I was saddled with her, and it ruined all of you—it ruined my legacy. My leadership. She’s the one who should pay for all of this.”

  Barrett couldn’t even feel anger over his father’s statement. He was so disgusted with a man who would blame the woman who he was supposed to love and cherish, for his own failings. Even if his mother hadn’t been perfect—and she hadn’t been—she was still his mother, and she was still Gideon’s wife, and she didn’t deserve to be controlled all her life and then blamed for things that clearly lay at the feet of his father.

  His father—a man he didn’t even recognize anymore.

  It was time to make a strong move, and he needed to know if his Clan was going to back him.

  “Ryan and Jordan,” he said, his voice loud and commanding. “Take my father into custody.”

  Norman stepped forward. “Barrett, that would be unprecedented.”

  “What is unprecedented is my father’s absolute disdain for the things that we claim to hold dear. As protectors of this state and its people. As dragon shifters, who are called to something higher than our wants and needs. He has shamed us all, and he has betrayed us all. He has betrayed me, personally. And I won’t stand here and let it continue anymore.” He turned towards his friends. “Ryan? Jordan?”

  Without hesitation, both Ryan and Jordan walked towards Gideon, preparing to grab him from either side and restrain him.

  Gideon backed away from them. “I am your real leader. You’re fools to trust my son. All of you, fools! I was a fool to ever try to believe the best of him. I wanted him to be better than his sister, but he’s not. He can’t be. His mother tainted all of them!”

  Gideon continued to rant, but Ryan and Jordan paid him no mind, circling him as Gideon backed away, ready to take him into their custody the moment that they could do so without harming him.

  As they did that, Ryan looked back towards the crowd, dotted with elders—the very people who had removed him from his position of leadership. And as he made eye contact with each one of them, they each gave him a nod, some of them looking away as though embarrassed to be seeing such a display of selfish ego from Gideon, the man who they had championed over him.

  But Barrett didn’t let them off the hook lightly. This was not the kind of situation that a subtle nod of admission was going to get them out of. “Are you with me?” he demanded, looking back around
at each one of them. “This is the moment that you decide the future of the Rockwell Clan. You either get behind me now, and you trust that I’m leading this Clan the way that it should have been led—the way that my grandfather led it during his time, and my great-grandfather during his time. Or this is the end of the Rockwell Clan. Speak now.”

  The elders’ answer, if they gave one, went unheard. Applause broke out among the crowd, spontaneously—from the people themselves. He didn’t know where it started, but it swept around the crowd standing in the depths of the bayou, and the sound reverberated off the trees and through his chest. People who he rarely spoke to but who he knew were part of his Clan smiled at him, applauding right along with the ones who he saw every day. Hannah threw her hands up in the air and called out his name.

  “Barrett!”

  It caught on just as quickly as the applause, and people were soon chanting his name. The elders didn’t join in on the throng of approval, but they made no move to stop it either. And one of them—the man who had challenged him just a few minutes ago—actually stepped forward. He stretched his hand out to Barrett, and the two men shook hands firmly.

  Barrett, who didn’t need thunderous applause or chanting, but who felt moved by the gesture nonetheless, smiled out at the crowd. Then he raised his own hands to quiet them.

  “I’m going to take that mandate, and I’m going to make this generation of the Rockwell Clan the best that it’s ever been. And if you trust me, I know that together we can accomplish exactly that.”

  He turned just in time to see Ryan lunge at his father, who was still attempting to evade capture—and still ranting, though his ranting had also been drowned out by the chanting. It pained him to see his father looking so old and so foolish in front of people he had once led, but Barrett hadn’t forced the man to make the decisions he’d made. He’d only called him out for his mistakes. A good man knew how to admit his mistakes.

  “Take him,” Barrett said to Ryan and Jordan. “Don’t let him toy with you.”

  They had been respectful, but at Barrett’s instruction, the two both lunged for Gideon simultaneously, grabbing at his arms and subduing him between them.

  But Gideon was still trying to thrash, and in a moment of desperation, he shoved them both off and jumped into the air to transition and fly away, the same as his wife had done. But Jordan reached up and snatched him back from the air before he could shift, and she knocked him to the ground, pinning him there easily.

  He was much bigger than her, but Gideon was old now, and shifters lost their strength gradually over time. There was more strength in one of Jordan’s arms than in Gideon’s whole body, and she had no trouble keeping him pinned.

  Norman moved to stand next to Barrett, as they watched Ryan and Jordan kneel over Gideon. Sadly, Norman placed his hand on Barrett’s shoulder, and he squeezed. “I’m sorry,” he said, loudly enough for all to hear. “I’m sorry that I let my love for my son blind me to who he was. Who he has become. This is my fault as much as it is his.”

  Barrett lightly removed Norman’s hand from him, but only to put his arm around his grandfather’s shoulders.

  “Good men admit their mistakes, and they make them right. That’s all any of us can do. If he had done the same, he would be standing here with us right now, and we would take on the next challenges together.”

  But Gideon hadn’t been able to humble himself.

  “Take him back to the agency,” Barrett said. “We’ll restrain him there—temporarily. Until he’s tried by the elders, the way I would have been for the crimes he allowed people to believe I was committing.”

  Barrett looked out over the crowd again at the people who awaited his next words. They were simple words.

  “Go back to your lives,” he said. “Go to work, go to school, and go home. Do what you need to do. I’m going to find my sister, and I’m going to make sure that she won’t trouble us again.”

  And that’s exactly what he was going to do. First, though, he was going to go back to Victoria and tell her everything that had just happened—everything that he wished so much that she had been here for. And he was going to ask her to be part of the new Clan he was going to start forming today. One that valued all of the old traditions while embracing the new ones—like taking life partners from outside of the dragon shifter world and embracing them within the shifter community.

  He was going to ask her if she felt the same way about him that he felt about her. And if she did, then she was going to be the wife of the Rockwell Clan leader. Together they would find even better ways to protect the people of the city and state they both loved.

  Chapter 31

  Adele

  She didn’t like going off the plan in this way. It didn’t sit well with her, and it reminded her far too much of that night so many years ago when Candace—the interfering bitch—had looked at things on her computer that she’d had no business looking at. Adele could still feel the immeasurable anger that had come over her when she’d seen Candace watching the video that Adele had spent so many hours filming in preparation for announcing to the world that dragon shifters were among them and ascending to her rightful place of power, putting an end to the misconception that dragon shifters somehow existed to serve the people of Baton Rouge.

  It was the same sort of anger that she felt now, knowing that her plans to unhinge Barrett with her quiet, persistent mental torture that would culminate in his finding the body in his living room and being tied to a murder and run out of town. But she was much older and more experienced now, and she knew that there were better ways of dealing with that anger than what she had done to Candace that night. She’d had her hands wrapped around the girl’s neck, choking the life out of her, as she shook her back and forth, screaming curses. She had been entirely overtaken by rage, and it had ruined everything she’d had planned and caused her to find herself stranded, on her own, and in no position to reveal herself to anyone or ascend to any power.

  That wasn’t going to happen again. That’s why she had taken Victoria calmly, knowing that the woman would only be useful to her, and that was why she was taking her time deciding what to do next. There was a part of her, and it was no small part, that wanted to call Cade and tell him to snatch the young girl, Olivia, from her school and murder her in the woods just so that she could be the one to tell Victoria and see the look on her face.

  She might still do that. But she did at least know that it would only be a selfish impulse, and that was an improvement from thirty years ago.

  What she was going to do next was halfway planned out and half-based on her instincts for destruction.

  Wearing the bracelet that made her invisible had allowed her to follow Barrett around without him ever seeing her, and she had caught enough glimpses of him with Victoria to know that there was something special between them. Something special that she intended to take full advantage of.

  She knew that he was at a meeting—discussing her. And she knew that he would eventually arrive back at his house and realize that Victoria was gone. That her things were still there. That she hadn’t left on her own accord. Adele picked up her phone and traced a finger along the edge of it, contemplating. She started to unlock the device, but then she tossed it aside, getting up off the bed, and pacing the hotel room. She was only minimally aware of Victoria, sitting to her left-hand side, having fallen quite some time ago.

  There were just so many ways she could destroy Barrett. It was hard to settle on one and commit to it when she felt like she would be missing out on so many others.

  She debated for another moment, but then she grew impatient with herself, and she stalked over to the hotel phone and picked it up.

  “Give me the number for the local precinct,” she said, barking the order at Victoria. “Hurry up.”

  “Why?” Victoria asked, sounding skeptical. “What do you need them for?”

  Adele flashed her angry eyes at the woman. “To set up a book club. What do you think I need t
hem for? I’m going to inform them of the dead body that I left in Barrett’s house thirty-six hours ago that no one has properly picked up on.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a good idea.”

  “I’m not going to tell them that I put the body there,” Adele said, “and I’m not asking for your input. I’m asking for a phone number, you useless woman.”

  There was a moment of hesitation, during which Victoria likely considered that, if she needed to, Adele could just look the number up herself or call downstairs and have the call transferred. She might have even considered the fact that having the police involved in whatever was about to go down wasn’t the worst thing in the world for her. Whatever her consideration was, Victoria rattled the number off to her, and Adele dialed it.

  The call rang twice before an official-sounding voice answered.

  “Baton Rouge police department.”

  “Yes, I need to report something suspicious. It’s not an emergency, though. Have I called the right number?”

  “Go ahead, ma’am.”

  Adele held up a warning finger as Victoria stood and started to walk towards her. She shook her head, glaring at the woman. “Okay, I have information that a man I spent the night with last night has a woman’s dead body in a freezer in his garage.”

  Victoria lunged forward to grab the phone, and Adele struck her across the face, sending her rolling onto the carpet with just one blow.

  “Excuse me?” the operator said. “That’s quite an accusation, ma’am. What would make you say that?”

  “I saw it with my own eyes. He bragged about it. I was terrified. Then he forced me to have sex with him, and I did, and when he slumped over afterward, I managed to get away. I ran and I’ve only just calmed down enough to talk to someone.”

  “You were raped?”

  “Yes,” Adele said, watching Victoria as she got back up. “Yes, I was. By a murderer. I have his address. I’ll give it to you. But I don’t want any part of this. I never want to see him again.”