Rockwell Agency: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “Ms. …Austin,” the operator said, obviously having traced her call and found that she was staying in a hotel room under that name. “I can assure you that if you cooperate with this investigation you will have as much privacy and protection as we can provide to you. But I do need you to come in and make an official statement.”

  “No—” Adele said, affecting extreme emotion in her voice. “Just go to his house. The body is in the freezer in his garage. I know it is. You’ll find it there—you’ll come up with some way to find it. I can’t do this.”

  She rattled off Barrett’s address and hung up abruptly, not giving the person time to respond. Then she turned to Victoria with a slow, satisfied smile. “Well, that should keep Barrett busy for some time. He’s going to have a hard time deciding what to do first—respond to the fact that I have you, or that the police are going to be swarming his house now. What a dilemma.”

  Victoria took a deep breath and stepped back, holding her hands up as though she was indicating that she’d had enough. “Listen, you have all the cards here. That’s very clear. You’re in charge. You’ve made the point. You’ve taken me. You’ve set up Barrett. You have my daughter under surveillance. Everything is going to work out the way that you wanted, and I know there’s nothing I can do about it. The police will go to his house, and they will find some way to get a warrant and search it, and they will find a dead body—and he’s done. He can’t stay in Baton Rouge after that.”

  Adele was already bored with the woman’s summation. “And your point is?”

  “I want out,” Victoria said. “Look, I like Barrett a lot. I mean—you’ve seen him, right? He’s gorgeous. The sex is great. He checks a lot of boxes. But I’ve only known him for a day and a half, and in that time, my life has turned upside down. I have a daughter to think about. I have my job to think of. I have my whole life to think about. He’s not worth any of that to me. He’s just not.”

  Curious, Adele studied the woman. There was every possibility that she was lying, and Adele was well aware of that. But there was also the possibility that she was telling the truth, and that the feelings that Adele had seen written all over Barrett’s face didn’t exist for Victoria. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that, given what a short time the two had known each other. And Victoria had initially met Barrett because she had suspected him of terrible things.

  “Go on,” Adele said, crossing her arms over her chest. “What are you really saying? Be straightforward. I’m not interested in narratives.”

  “I want out,” Victoria repeated. “I want safety for me and my daughter, and I’m willing to give Barrett up to you, in order to get it.”

  Adele’s eyebrows arched. Perhaps she should have considered this possibility, but she hadn’t. It was yet another thing to contemplate in the moment—as it happened in real time. “Really?”

  “Really,” Victoria said. “Look, I’m a police officer. I know how to assess situations. I know when I’m in a position where I need to call backup, or I’m not making it out alive. And this is one of those situations, but the only backup I have is giving you what you want from me. You want me here to dig into Barrett even further. To control him. To make him hurt as he worries about me and my safety. Fine. I get it. I’ll help you—if you promise me that my daughter and I walk away from this unharmed.”

  Adele had to admire the woman’s boldness. Briefly. And without accepting her at her word. “What makes you think I would let you walk away, knowing what you know?”

  “Because I can’t hurt you,” Victoria said, shrugging a shoulder. “If I came out with some story about a dragon shifter family, no one would believe me. Just like you’ve been worried all these years that, on your own, no one would take you seriously. I’d be a fool to go to the media or to the public in any way. And I’m no match for you physically. Obviously. And if I understand you right, you’re going to come out with the information about dragon shifters yourself, once you’re back in a position of power. So …what exactly do I have to use against you?”

  Adele nodded, crossing her arms over her chest. “Your assessment of your own helplessness is more astute than I thought it would be.”

  “I am helpless,” Victoria said. “Helpless to get myself out of this situation and to cooperate. Just as I’ve told women when I teach self-defense classes. If someone has a clear ability to overpower you—don’t fight back. Give them what they want. If someone comes up to mug you, just hand over your things. If a man traps you and is going to rape you—you’re not obligated to fight back with everything you have just to make sure that people believe that it was rape. Cooperate. Survive. That’s what I tell them, and it’s what I’m about to do, too. Cooperate—so I survive.”

  Despite herself, Adele was persuaded by the woman’s impassioned speech. In all honesty, Victoria didn’t have any real reason to be loyal to Barrett. Loyalty wasn’t an emotion that Adele much understood anyway. She only believed that there was one person in the world loyal to her and that was Cade. She would be loyal to him as well—unless it meant his life or hers. And then she would save herself.

  But there did remain one question. “What makes you think that I need your cooperation?” Adele asked Victoria. “I’m perfectly capable of using you for my own means whether you want me to or not.”

  “Obviously,” Victoria said, “but if I do cooperate, then you can accomplish even more. You want him to feel totally helpless and rejected, right?”

  Adele narrowed her eyes. The answer was obvious.

  “I know that’s what you want,” Victoria said, moving on with her proposal anyway. “What better way to make that happen than for you and I to go see him together? I side with you. I reject him, and I laugh in his face—I tell him that all of this was a ploy. That I was working with you the whole time. That the intimacy, and the sex, and all of the things we shared were just part of your scheme. We’ll come up with a backstory about how you approached me a long time ago, and that’s why I knew to go to his house the morning that the body appeared. We knew that he would try to woo me, and my job was to make sure that he fell hard and fast for me, which he definitely has. But we’ll rip it all out from under him.”

  She couldn’t help it. Adele smiled at the deviousness of it. It was so far beyond anything that she had planned, because all she’d intended to do was show Barrett that she could rip his beloved from him. What Victoria was suggesting was an even deeper, darker betrayal. It was almost beautiful in its darkness.

  Adele loved it. She wanted it. She craved the idea of seeing the absolute misery on Barrett’s face—the face of the man who had been born to be her replacement when her family had kicked her out for daring to believe that the Rockwell Clan could be something more.

  She wanted it so much that she jumped at it, her pulse hammering with excitement. “You do that,” Adele said, “and I’ll guarantee that your daughter is safely returned to you, and that you get to walk away with her at the end of it. But you have to skewer his heart and show it to me on a platter.”

  Victoria nodded. “Consider it done.”

  Chapter 32

  Barrett

  Barrett pulled back up to his house and parked in his driveway. His thoughts were still tangled up in the scene that he’d just witnessed—that he’d played a role in. It was a lot to process, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about any of it. On the one hand, he’d gotten the elders to admit that he was the best person to lead the Clan, and he’d gotten very close to full vindication when he pointed out that Adele had to be behind all of this. It felt incredible to know that he had taken his leadership back again and that nothing was ever going to shake him from that position again.

  On the other hand, he’d lost both of his parents. His mother had broken and flown away, and he didn’t know if she would ever return to Baton Rouge, or if she would go home to the family she had left so many years ago. And even though his father was still here, Barrett had lost him, too. If he’d ever really had him.

 
He got out of the car, looking forward to seeing Victoria and telling her everything—the bad and the good. Barrett walked up the stairs of the porch and started to get out his keys, but then he realized that the front door was cracked open.

  Immediately, he got a bad feeling in his gut, and when he pushed the door open further and stepped inside, the vibe in the room was all wrong. He knew, instinctively, that Victoria wasn’t there. From the soft lingering of her scent, he would guess that she had been gone for about an hour.

  His heart was pumping, but he forced himself to think rationally before he reacted. Walking to the garage, he looked to see if the body was still in place.

  It was. She hadn’t left with the body, to dispose of it elsewhere.

  Had she gone to the police?

  Was she scoping out areas to leave the body where her partner could find it, allegedly for the first time?

  Barrett pulled out his phone and saw that he had no messages from Victoria. There had been no signal out in the bayou, but he’d been back in range plenty long enough for messages to come through if there were any to come through.

  He looked around the living room, trying to piece together what she had been doing here alone, and when he saw Victoria’s phone, his heart sank. He knew without a doubt that she would never leave the house without her phone, because she would want to be able to contact Olivia, and she would want to be able to get a message from him if there was something important he needed to tell her.

  That left him with only two options—something bad had happened to Olivia, and Victoria had rushed out without her phone. Or she had been taken from the house against her will.

  He was willing to bet that whichever scenario was accurate, Adele was behind it all. She was going to use Victoria to get to him, and it was a great plan on her part because he was already frantic with the need to get Victoria back. He hadn’t even realized just how much he had needed to pull her into his arms and hold her and kiss her when he got home, and now that she wasn’t here—now that she was missing—he knew that the moment he did see her again he was going to cover her beautiful face in kisses and tell her how he really felt about her.

  He would tell her that he loved her.

  And he did. He loved her so much. Something had happened to the Rockwell Clan in this generation, and they had all been drawn powerfully to the people who were supposed to be their partners. Maybe it was part of a rejuvenation of the Clan. Maybe it was a sign that something was changing. He didn’t know. He only knew that Ryan had fallen hard for Angela almost right away. It had been the same for Jordan. For Quentin. For Hannah. And he knew it had happened to him, too. Victoria was his person, and she would always be his person, and he had to find her, and save her, and persuade her to stand by his side—always.

  Barrett turned back towards the door, striding towards it to pull it open, so that he could run back to his car and find some way to track where Victoria had gone. He would start at Olivia’s school and make sure that the girl was safe—God, loving Victoria meant loving Olivia, too, and he barely knew her at all. He wasn’t just going to take on a life partner, he was also going to take on a daughter. And would Victoria want to have more children? Would Olivia be okay with that? What would happen when Olivia wasn’t a dragon shifter but their other kids were? Surely one of their kids would be. Maybe that was what was happening through this new mating that the Clan was engaging in. Maybe they were going to start having more children, some of whom wouldn’t be shifters. Maybe they would have different capabilities. Maybe they would make the Clan blend in better. Maybe …

  He cut off his thoughts, as he pulled open the door to his car. This wasn’t the time to be romanticizing about the future, no matter how badly he wanted to jump right into it with Victoria and all that awaited them. His first task was to make sure that he and the rest of the Rockwell Clan were safe from the woman who was terrorizing them—safe from his sister. No more dead bodies. No more threats of exposure. No more inner turmoil and politics.

  And God help her if she had Victoria with her. Or Olivia. If that’s what had happened, Barrett would make sure that Adele paid for it with her life.

  As he got into the car, he pulled out his phone and called Quentin. “Victoria is missing,” he said when Quentin answered. “I left her at the house. The door was open, and her phone was still in the living room. I think Adele has her. I need one person to stay with my father, and I need all other hands on deck. If Adele hurts her—.”

  He couldn’t even finish the sentence, not knowing what he would do if that happened.

  “What do you need?” Quentin asked, wasting no time on false comforts or pointless questions. He got right to the point.

  “I need everyone on the task of figuring out where Adele has been staying, and how she’s been getting in and out of the agency and in and out of my house. She must have some way to fly under the radar—to be invisible. I don’t know. But she’s been in town, so there’s some trace of her somewhere. I want her found—now. Nothing is more important.”

  “Got it,” Quentin said. “I’ll update you as soon as we find something.”

  The two men hung up at the same time, and Barrett started up the car, ready to pull back out of the driveway. He eased his foot off the brake, both hands firmly on the wheel, and he turned his head to look over his shoulder as the car started to slide backward.

  He braked sharply, his eyes widening at the sight of Victoria walking up to the driveway, striding along casually as though she didn’t have a care in the world. She was still wearing the clothes she had taken from the closet in his house earlier, and her hands were slipped into the pockets of the black slacks. The green blouse stood out starkly against her creamy skin, and her fall of silky red hair fluttered in the wind, framing her beautiful face.

  The sight of her took his breath away, but there was something different about her expression that gave him pause.

  It was only a moment’s pause, though, and then he slammed the car into park and jumped out, starting to run towards her. When she saw him approaching, she stopped walking, not reacting at all when he grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her into a grateful hug.

  “My God,” he said, kissing her hair, and her forehead, and her eyes, as his hands moved to cup her face. “I thought something had happened to you. Victoria—you scared the shit out of me. The front door was open, and your phone was there …and the house …you’d been gone for a while. Your scent wasn’t strong enough.”

  She still hadn’t said anything, nor had she leaned into his embrace or returned his kisses.

  Barrett eased back and looked down into her face, scanning her eyes for some hint as to what was going on.

  “Victoria, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve found something,” Victoria said. “I need you to come with me.”

  “Come with you where?”

  “Do you trust me or not?” Victoria asked, placing her hands on his arms and dislodging his hands from her shoulders. “Get back in the car. I just need to grab my phone from inside—actually …” She winced. “I don’t need my phone. Let’s just go.”

  Confused, Barrett dropped his hands from her and stepped further back. “Victoria, what is going on? What’s happened? I’ve only been gone a few hours—I don’t understand.”

  “It’s the body,” she said, walking towards his car and opening the door to the back-seat. She peered into it, then stepped back, looking at him before she closed it again. “I need your help with it. There’s a place I want to put it, but I need a second pair of eyes.”

  Barrett glanced towards the garage, where the body had been frozen for the past two days. He hadn’t specifically checked, but he hadn’t sensed that the body had been moved when he walked into the house earlier. His senses were so fine-tuned that he thought he would have picked up on that. The body had been frozen, but he could still pick up on the slight odor of it, and he hadn’t noticed that odor had been missing in the house.

  The
n again, he had been thinking only of Victoria.

  Whom he trusted.

  Whom he loved.

  Whom he intended to ask to marry him.

  She had thrown him off by being missing and then with her odd greeting, but he didn’t have any real reason not to trust her. She was looking at him, waiting for him to walk towards the car, and he did so.

  “Are you okay?” he asked her, lifting a hand to touch her cheek. “Are you having doubts or …are you struggling with moving the body? As a police officer?”

  “Of course, I am,” she said, walking around to her side of the car and getting in on the passenger side. “We don’t have much time, Barrett.”

  There was definitely something wrong, but he didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t know any better way to figure out what was going on than to do as she said. He got in the car and pulled his phone out, making a quick call to Quentin as he put the key in the ignition.

  “Hey,” he said when Quentin picked up. “I’ve got Victoria. Just letting you know. Keep looking for Adele, but I’ve got Victoria. We’re dealing with the body right now.”

  Quentin expressed his relief that Victoria was safe, and the two men hung up again. Barrett put the car in reverse for the second time in a matter of minutes, and looked over at Victoria. “Okay, where are we going?”

  “Get on the interstate,” she said. “Head north. We’re going to drive for a little over an hour. It’s an out-of-the-way place—literally nothing and nobody around. It’s perfect.”

  He wondered why they needed to drive over an hour there and back just to scout out a place, but it was clear that the dead woman was weighing on Victoria’s mind, so he would devote the time to making sure that she felt like they were doing the right thing with the body. Although he did wonder …

  “Where were you when I got back?” he asked, driving towards the interstate. “You didn’t have a car—you couldn’t have gone out to wherever we’re going.”