Tiger Mom (Killer Moms #4) - Eve Langlais Page 0,58
organs.
On the negative…
Macey was gone.
As were the girls.
Because he’d failed. Failed to protect.
The realization riled the demon that lived inside his head. The one that made him do bad things.
Bad. Bad. Things. For a moment, as he stumbled naked from the alley, his gaze slewed to a tavern, the noise of it spilling onto the street, promising alcohol to dull his senses. He could probably find some drugs too and make his misery vanish for a moment.
But where would that leave Macey and the twins?
At the mercy of a bastard. He needed to find them. Fast. But for that, he needed help. First, though…pants. A man with his dick and balls hanging out wasn’t exactly inconspicuous.
This time of night, few clotheslines held any items. Still, he managed a sarong of sorts with a blanket left hanging over a rickety fence. Loins covered, he still lacked a weapon or a phone.
It was maybe a half-mile of aimless wandering from where he’d been dumped before he saw a guy wearing his shirt and shoes. Could it be that he had other items of Ted’s, too?
He slipped into an alley and waited for the guy to pass before grabbing him, slamming him into a wall and growling, “I think you have some shit of mine.”
The guy didn’t have his phone, but he knew the fellow who did, and he took Ted to him once they’d chatted a while with fists.
Recovering his phone, shirt, and shoes, but still wearing a fucking blanket skirt, he placed his first call. “She left!” he barked the words into the phone as soon as Marie answered.
“What happened?”
He offered a quick explanation that left Marie cussing up a storm.
“That idiot!” Macey’s handler huffed. “She should have waited for aid.”
“Can you blame her? She panicked once she knew that her ex had the girls. What a clusterfuck.” Ted raked a hand through his hair.
“He won’t harm the girls.” Marie sounded mostly certain. But there was a bit of hesitation.
He felt it himself. Along with a cold dread. “But he will hurt Macey.”
“Most likely.”
Anger boiled. “This could have been avoided if you’d just had him killed.”
“We couldn’t.”
“What do you mean couldn’t?” he snapped as he paced. “You’re an agency of professional assassins.”
“And we tried when we first extracted her. It resulted in two deaths and a third operative put in the hospital, who retired after. Each attempt resulted in abject failures. So, we stopped.”
“Why didn’t Macey engineer something? Isn’t she supposed to be some kind of whiz? She could have concocted something to take him out without ever coming close if her reputation is true.”
“Oh, it’s true. But the thing is, love and hate are a complicated thing. Especially when children are involved.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Let me put this more clearly for you. How do you kill someone’s father? Could you kill, let’s say, the twins’ father?”
“Hell yeah,” he quickly blurted. “The guy is scum.”
“Let’s say you did finish him. Would you tell Portia? The twins?”
He thought about looking them in the face and admitting what he had done. Would they thank him? He’d read the texts the girls had exchanged. Excited about meeting their dad. They’d gone in with high hopes. What if, for all his faults, the guy was a good father? What if the twins loved him?
Could he still kill the man?
“They’d be better off without him around.”
“Yes, they would. Hence why we tried in the early years. However, as time passed, despite Portia’s fear of Ronin, she could never bring herself to strike that final blow. Which meant, we couldn’t act either.”
“She should know better than to bring sentimentality into it.”
“And yet isn’t that what you’re doing? You’re determined to rush in and kill, kill, kill.”
“He’s a threat.”
“Yes, but the true mission isn’t his fate. It’s that of Macey and the girls. We need to locate them and extract them in a way that harms no one.”
“And how do you suggest we do that?”
“I don’t know.”
The three scariest words he’d ever heard.
Chapter Nineteen
Portia regretted drugging Ted, especially given the look of betrayal in his eyes. The good news was that it would last just long enough for her to get this meeting over with.
She didn’t want to leave him helpless for long. Ted had left her no choice, though. She couldn’t risk angering Ronin. Not with the girls possibly in his care.
She didn’t believe for a moment that the message she’d received had come from Mae. Which meant that he’d sent it. If Ronin thought for one second