Dusk (Dangerous Web #1) - Aleatha Romig Page 0,6

his hands from the table. “Plus, I trust him.”

“He fucked up,” Mason replied.

Patrick shook his head. “Whatever the fuck happened would have happened whoever was on the ranch.” He turned to Mason. “We need to figure out who is capable of hijacking your security. Someone knows their shit. This wasn’t a chance kidnapping. This was planned and well executed. Garrett was probably right. The two most accessible women were taken. We need to figure out by whom.

“First, we are getting Lorna and Araneae back. Despite the way it looks, I believe Garrett and Antonio are the reason all four women aren’t missing. Their presence made the kidnappers act quickly.”

Mason nodded. “I’ve been thinking about the security system we put into place when we rebuilt the house on my ranch. I was fucking sure it was hack-proof. But right now, with the data we retrieved, we’re missing nearly thirty minutes. It’s a black hole. There’s no fucking way to hijack the entire system, not unless you know exactly what we did to create it.”

I thought about that too. What we’d done was unique. We’d created the system as a hybrid of multiple top-notch systems. I nodded as I hit a button to lift the screen before me. Even though we were on our way from Chicago to Montana, I could access our main system back in Chicago, the one in our tower. It wouldn’t be as fast. That was why I usually stayed behind. I worked the keyboards while Sparrow, Patrick, and Mason hit the ground running.

This time was different.

This was my wife.

There weren’t enough chains to keep me in Chicago. I had to be wherever my wife was. I began to type upon the keyboard, accessing our mainframe.

“Seven hours since the system went black,” Sparrow said, standing with his grip on the back of the chair, his knuckles blanching from the pressure. “Six fucking hours since we got the first call.” He looked at Patrick. “I need a list of everyone and anyone that knows that fucking ranch exists and belongs to Mason.”

Patrick nodded as he too began typing away at another keyboard.

We were flying above the clouds.

Beyond the small rectangular windows, the sun shone brightly, reflecting off the billows of white. On the ground, it could be gray and cloudy, yet we couldn’t see it. That was how this scenario felt. The answer could be as close as the underside of the clouds, yet we couldn’t see it.

The plane continued west, toward the sun.

The first call had come to us at 2:20 p.m. Chicago time, an hour ahead of Mason’s ranch. The first message was that Antonio wasn’t responding. I immediately tried to access the ranch. When I couldn’t, I called Mason. He was away from the tower, as were Sparrow and Patrick, all three in three different locations.

They’d all had fires to extinguish.

Day in and day out, there has been so much shit happening lately. Little fires—some literally—everywhere. Explosions. Missing merchandise. Raids. Warrants. Fighting among the ranks. Gang against gang disputes. The list went on and on.

It wasn’t only the Sparrow outfit that had been inundated.

Our allies—the Detroit bratva, a smaller organization in the region, our cohort in Denver, and even those in New Orleans—were also fighting a barrage of stupid incidents. For the last two months, it had been as if we and our allies were being systematically tested.

One incident was a series of small car explosions in the public parking garage of our tower. That was too close to home for any of us. It was then that Sparrow decided our wives needed to be away from the tower, away from Chicago. We analyzed each of our retreats. I used the term our, yet I didn’t own a retreat, not like the other three men.

Patrick’s, on Padre Island, Texas, officially belonged to his daughter. Sparrow’s, in Ontario, belonged to him through an LLC. Travel to his cabin required crossing the border, something that of late was getting more complicated. Mason’s in nowhere Montana made the most sense.

He’d purchased the ranch through a shell company a few years ago, from himself. Of course, when he’d owned it at first, it had not been under his legal name. The trail of transactions was long and difficult to navigate. Taking our wives to the ranch seemed to be the best answer.

Lockdown could be arduous within three stories of a glass tower. All of the women had expressed their dissension on multiple occasions. The four of us agreed that having