Dominance Never Dies (Masters and Mercenaries Book 11)

by Lexi Blake

  Shit. The world went a little watery. That was Theo’s son in there. His son. It hit him with the power of a locomotive. Theo had made a baby and he had a woman who loved him. He’d made a family who needed him.

  Case needed Mia.

  He stepped back out, giving Erin time with her son. She hadn’t been unmoved. Public tears weren’t something Erin would easily do. She would hold it in and give in to her grief when she was alone.

  Had Mia cried by herself after she’d walked away? She didn’t have a baby to cuddle, a piece of her love to hold close.

  He’d been a dick. How could he have said those things to her? He’d been so worried about what he couldn’t give her that he hadn’t thought at all about what he could. He’d worried about himself, about getting hurt.

  They’d been so incendiary that he hadn’t imagined she could hurt. She was larger than life. She was the girl who could tell everyone to fuck off and walk away without a care. The tough girl who didn’t give a damn what anyone thought.

  Except she’d been soft for him and he’d fucked her over.

  “You still up?”

  He turned and Erin stood in the living room, her face blotchy from crying. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  Her mouth curled up in a tired smile. “I don’t know that anything can truly disturb me tonight.”

  “I’m sorry we kept it from you. I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought the idea that Theo was out there…” How did he explain this to her?

  “Being tortured and perverted for some crazy doctor’s experiments was worse than thinking he was dead?” Erin didn’t prevaricate.

  “Yeah, I guess. I guess I didn’t want you to have to think about what could be happening.” It was all he’d been able to do except for those few soft moments when Mia had been in his arms.

  Erin walked to the sliding glass door that led out to her backyard and stared out. The moon was full, offering some illumination to the darkened room. “I wonder if she’s managed to convince Theo he’s in love with her. It’s rape, you know. She’s raping his mind. I wonder if she’s raped his body, too.”

  Yes. That was one of the things he’d wondered about as well, one of the dark scenarios that had run through his brain. Mia’s report had kind of put it to rest. “He calls her Mother.”

  “I know. I looked through the report Mia wrote while I fed TJ. I’ve gotten good at doing things one handed with a baby hanging off my boob.” She glanced back. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll love him no matter what’s gone on. If he screws a hundred women while he’s out of his head, I’ll welcome him back into our bed after a healthy STD check. The only thing that matters is he’s alive.”

  “I didn’t want you to worry about him.”

  “That’s because you’re a dumbass.” She turned. “I get to worry about him. I get to think about him. I get to hope for him. I get to be anxious about whether or not he’ll still love me when he comes home. Earlier tonight I thought about how my boobs aren’t what they used to be and I’ve got stretch marks. Stupid things. Inconsequential things. And I get to worry about them because he’s alive. I know he’s going through hell and I’m going to ask him to go through more, to take all the pain they give him, anything he has to so he can come home and be with me and meet his son. God, Case, I fought him so hard because I thought I wasn’t good enough for him.”

  “He thought you were too good for him, too tough and smart.”

  She laughed, but there were tears in there, too. “I was a bitch to him but that was my armor. When he died, I thought I was being punished. It’s funny how arrogant we can be at times. To think the world revolves around us, that the universe chooses us, selects us for punishment or reward. I spent years with my first husband, taking his shit because I didn’t know how else to be. I wasn’t woman enough for him.”

  She never talked about her husband. Case knew she’d been divorced, but not the hows or whys. “He was obviously a dick.”

  “He was quite awful and I took it for as long as I could and then I wouldn’t take shit from anyone for a long time. But Theo wouldn’t let go.” She sighed and sat down in the chair that had been Theo’s, the old recliner Case knew they’d fought over because it was pretty much a piece of crap. Erin always sat there now. “He would call me. I wouldn’t answer. At first he would hang up and try again later, but when he figured out I was ducking him, he started leaving these messages.”

  “I told him he was wasting his time.” Theo would stop what he was doing in order to call a woman who claimed to not want to have anything to do with him. “I always thought you were going to hit him with a harassment suit.”

  “No. The messages he left…there was nothing sexual about them. He didn’t ask me for anything. He told me about his day and then said he wished he knew how mine had gone and he told me good-night. I listened to them about a hundred times. I didn’t reply or anything. I deleted them after a while because I thought I was fooling myself. I deleted all of them, but I listened to them. Do you have any idea what I would give to have those messages? To hear his voice telling me good-night, sweetheart?”

  “I miss him, too. It’s why I…it’s why I was so awful to Mia. He was right there. I could have reached out and grabbed him.”

  “We don’t make the best choices when our loved ones are in danger. I want you to think about the fact that she’d already seen you get shot and then she likely had seconds to decide if she wanted to send you into danger again.”

  He’d done nothing but think about that moment for days. “I need to apologize.”

  “Oh, you need to grovel. You need to man up and use every resource you have available to get that girl back. You know how to run an op. What’s the first thing you do?”

  “Decide on my objective, take stock of my assets. I’ve learned I need to carefully review all my assets because oftentimes the inherent value isn’t on the surface.” Ten had drilled it into him. Case had been the leader on Ten’s team, but Theo seemed more comfortable with Ian. Again, he’d made a mistake by not carefully thinking things through. He couldn’t go storming into her life. He had to think, had to figure out how to be the man she needed. “I need to make things right with her brothers, too.”

  “Yes, you do, but I think you’ll find they’re the easy ones.” She sat back. “He’s out there. He’s here on the same planet, sharing the same air. We’re going to get him back.”

  He sat down across from her. “I will do everything I can. I promise you that. But Erin, you need to understand that the Theo I bring back might not be the one who left.”

  “You find his body. Bring it to me and TJ and I…we’ll find his soul.”

  Because she was the keeper of his brother’s soul, his natural mate, his other half.

  Mia was his. How horrible that he’d figured that out only after he’d lost her.

  Erin sat up suddenly. “What did you say about assets?”

  “Uh, I said I had to look at all my assets.”

  “Because sometimes the most important asset of all is the one that seems to have no value.” She stood, her eyes bright. “Oh, Case, I think I just figured out how to find Theo. It’s a long shot, but…you’re right. We have an asset we didn’t realize we had. We have Avery.”

  He wasn’t sure how Liam’s wife fit into this. Avery was awesome. She was kind and funny, but she certainly wasn’t an operative. She’d become Serena Dean-Miles’s assistant. Serena was an author and Avery helped organize her business. They went to romance conventions together. “Avery’s good at social media. You think we can trick him into friending me on Facebook?”

  Erin’s eyes rolled. “You should be happy you’re so attractive. I need to call Avery. She has a friend who might be able to help us. Sometimes we don’t see the patterns. We don’t see that the path is right in front of us if we just have a little patience. And our last piece is in place. Hutch is there.”

  She wasn’t making a ton of sense. “Hutch being kidnapped is a good th
ing? Erin, she’s going to wipe his memory.”

  “Not if she wants his skills, she won’t. She wants a hacker. It’s not the same. His skill isn’t muscle memory, it’s all brain power. If she screws with his mind, she loses the reason she took him in the first place. They’ll be looking for somewhere safe to hide.”

  He still wasn’t following her, but if she was right and they could get a message to Hutch… “We could send a message of where to meet us and maybe Hutch could convince them. The intel we discovered pointed us to somewhere in Asia.”

  “They won’t stay there long. She needs someplace quiet, someplace to continue her experiments. She needs an ally.”

  “A clinic like her sister’s?” Hope’s first experiments had been conducted at her sister Faith’s clinic in Africa. It was where Theo and Erin had fallen in love. “Faith had no idea what her sister was doing.”

  “But what if she found someone who didn’t mind, someone who would trade her clinic for cash, protection. Someone already based in Africa. We can’t fool her with a start-up clinic. She would be wary of that. But a clinic that had been around for a while, a clinic led by a woman with a past. It wouldn’t matter that she’s trying to right her wrongs. Someone like Hope would look at this woman on paper and see opportunity if given the right push.”

  It clicked into place. “Stephanie. You want to use the woman who was driving the car that killed Avery’s first husband and child?”

  He knew the story. Avery had been young when she’d lost her daughter and husband to a teen who’d had some beer and gotten behind the wheel. Though her blood alcohol level had been below the legal limit, they’d been in New York and Stephanie had been underage. The law was clear. Any alcohol in a minor was considered a DUI. Stephanie had gone into a deep depression and it had only been Avery’s grace that had saved her. Avery had told him once that she figured Stephanie owed her a good life for the ones Avery had lost. Avery had been the one to pay for Stephanie’s medical degree, to send her off to Africa to do good work.

  At the time he’d been floored by how far Avery had gone to forgive the girl who’d harmed her. Now his heart seized because Avery’s grace, her belief in forgiveness might save them all.

  “We’ll herd them to Stephanie’s clinic. We’ll go on the Deep Web and start some rumors. Little things at first,” he said. “We’ll have to be patient. Hutch will find us and then we’ll be waiting for Theo.”

  “And we’ll bring him home,” Erin said with quiet will.

  And they would bring him home.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Long after Erin had talked to Ian, had brought Avery into their circle and formed their plans, after Erin had finally fallen asleep, Case sat up. He sat in his brother’s chair, his mind whirling. The sun was coming up over the horizon but he was staring at his phone.

  Mia hadn’t called. Mia could be miles from him by now. He wanted to think that she was in Austin, but he couldn’t be certain. No one would tell him a thing, and according to Riley Lawless, she probably wouldn’t answer her phone if she saw it was him.

  Would she listen to a voice mail?

  It worked for Theo. Somehow his brother was still giving him advice, still leading the way when it came to this type of thing. When it came to loving someone.

  It was barely daylight. Maybe if she was sleeping, he would catch her off guard and have a few precious seconds to talk before she hung up on him.

  He dialed her number and was sent straight to her sweet voice telling him to leave a message. Yep, he should have known she would be too smart to leave her phone on.

  “Hey, it’s me. I know you don’t want to see me, but I needed to tell you something. I took your advice. Ian and I told Erin tonight. It felt good to tell her the truth. Naturally Erin being Erin, she came up with a plan. I would love to run it by you, to get your take on it. You’ve studied up on the drug she’s using and I could understand it better. Anyway, if you get a moment, give me a call.” He felt like an idiot. “Okay, thanks.”

  He hung up. Yeah, he wasn’t great at that.

  Three hours later she sent him a report on the drug and everything she’d managed to find out about it. She’d dug deep and gone to various sources, her analysis providing many theories on how the drug would work in combination with certain therapies. At the end of her e-mail, she’d left him with a chilly “best wishes on his search” and she hoped it all went well. She explained she was heading off on assignment and wouldn’t be in touch for a long time.

  Very polite. Very much like Mia.

  He called her again, not at all surprised to go to voice mail. Her voice mail was very much his doghouse, and he would have to do his time.

  “Hey, sweetheart, I wanted to call you before you left. I hate the way I spoke to you that last day in Cartagena. I’m ashamed of how I treated you and I can’t stand the thought that I won’t be able to look you in the eye and tell you that I’m so sorry. I know why you did what you did. I’ve got a temper on me and I know I need to deal with it. I called Kai and I’m going to get some anger management therapy because I never want to speak that way to you again. Because I need you to understand that it wasn’t some convenient thing for me. That week we spent together was everything to me. Anyway, if you want to talk, I’m here. Be safe.”

  When he hung up, he opened an e-mail and sent a note to Ezra Fain explaining that if Mia happened to be interested in interviewing a SEAL, he had a friend who’d agreed as long as she would protect his identity. An old buddy of his was willing to show her exactly how his team worked and he’d gotten clearance. He asked Fain not to tell her the invite had anything to do with him. She would likely turn it down.

  Fain’s reply had been short, but he’d promised to keep Mia safe. It hurt to know he wouldn’t be the man protecting her, but Case accepted it. For now, Mia needed time.

  The days rolled on.

  September

  “Hey, sweetheart. Therapy sucks. I’ve got to do this group thing where we all sit around like idiots and talk about how much fun it is to beat the shit out of people, except then someone makes us feel bad about it. I thought I had anger issues. Man, do not take Bear’s yogurt. Just a helpful hint I’ve learned. So while anger management sucks, I think I might be getting good at it. Your brother pissed me off today and I didn’t even think about killing him. Not once. Maiming, yes, but I think that’s progress. Drew’s getting better, too. I brought him enough information on Castalano that he just threatened to bitch slap me. He didn’t actually do it. I think the way to get to Castalano is through his partner’s daughter. This business crap is as bad as war, except I don’t get to shoot anyone. Yeah, I know. Back to the couch for me.”

  October

  “I read the article in Time about the Navy SEAL team. It was awesome. You captured the spirit of the team. I can’t believe you actually tried some of the BUD/s training. Well, I can. You’re a little crazy, but in the best way possible. Just wish I’d been there to see it. We’re dressing TJ up for Halloween. Erin managed to find a costume that makes him look like a live grenade. Yeah, I’m worried for that kid. We’re going over to Jake and Adam and Serena’s in an hour or so. It’s a party for the kids. I’m pretty sure Serena and Erin have already set up the kids for marriage or something. Did I mention Serena had a girl? She’s a week younger than TJ and she’s definitely got Adam’s eyes. Brianna. It’s a pretty name. I’ve been thinking about Hutch a lot lately. I think it’s all the Halloween candy. We got a little brush from someone Adam thinks might be him. It’s just a couple of e-mails and some talk in a room on the Deep Web, but we’re hopeful. I think Erin’s plan is working. Happy Halloween, baby.”

  November

  “Riley’s getting pretty good with target practice. I know he’s not likely to need it, but I want to make sure he’s as safe as he can be going in. It’s weird to think that he’ll be in New York in a couple of months. I think he’s ready. Now all we have to do is find the right way to lean on Ellie Stratton’s current
batch of lawyers. I’ll find a way to get Riley in there. While he’s getting good with a gun, I’m trying to be patient. It seems like most of what I do these days is wait. Adam is fairly certain he’s been talking to Hutch on the Dark Web. I think my brother’s somewhere in Pakistan right now, but Ian doesn’t want to move. Any move could spook McDonald, and if she thinks for a second… Sorry. I want to talk about nice things with you. Hope you’re having a good day.”

  “It’s Thanksgiving and it’s hard without Theo. It was his favorite holiday. I wish you were here holding my hand. I miss you, Mia.”

  December

  “So just when I thought I had the uncle thing down, TJ started eating solid food. What the hell? I’ve been in a lot of horrible situations but none of them scared me as much as that first diaper. How could mashed bananas make that smell? It’s never going to end because the team is breeding like rabbits. Charlotte’s pregnant again and Phoebe and Jesse are having a boy. You’ll never guess what they’re naming him. Harry. No. Got you. James. James Harold Murdoch. Ian actually went to church to pray for a boy this time. Just one. I heard him praying to God to bring another penis into his house. I guess the girls are all into princess stuff right now and they like dressing up their dad. My big brother can rock a tiara, let me tell you. Naturally I bought them a big case of princess costumes for Christmas. Heard you were spending the season in London. Riley told me you’re writing a story about Damon Knight’s old unit and the mission that got him the Victoria Cross. I’m glad Ian could set that up for you. I’m sure it will make a hell of a story. Merry Christmas. Stay safe.”

  January

  “I saw Fain the other day. I was going up to Michael’s place and he was coming out of the building. Apparently he’s got a girl he sees when he’s in town. He said you came home for the holidays at the last minute. I’m glad. Your brothers would have missed you. I know I do. Every day that goes by makes me miss you more. I don’t know if you’re listening to these messages or maybe you’re just deleting them, but I can’t stop. Not until you tell me to. I think we’re going to make a move soon. The person we think was Hutch has been quiet, but I think I’ve pinpointed where they are right now. I found a cluster of well-done bank robberies in Italy. They’ll move soon because the cops will be on them. I think they’ll take Stephanie up on her offer. Protection in exchange for cash. The minute we get a yes, I’ll have to go to Sierra Leone and wait for them. I’ll let you know when I’m leaving. I hope the book is going well. I love you, Mia.”