Page 44 of Targeted By Love
“Forgot something in the car, babe. Back in a minute.”
One bodyguard remained at the apartment entrance and the other walked in front of us as my brother and I headed for my car. But Ezra pulled me away.
“Has it been checked today? For explosives?”
I caught the bodyguard’s eye and his almost impeccable shake of the head.
“No.”
Ezra steered me toward the end of the parking garage.
“I found something.”
“Something as in Seb?”
He made a “maybe” face and shoved his tablet at me, an inch from my face.
“What am I looking at?” My brother expected me and the rest of our siblings to be as tech literate as he was. And rather than wading through a slew of data, I wanted him to tell me. I stared at enough figures in my day job.
“It’s a mention of Seb.”
That news didn’t spark joy. It was confirmation of what we already knew, and despite their disagreements and different personalities, Seb and Rhodes were brothers. Maybe he had been found and arrested. Or worse. He was in a shallow grave, his remains being whittled away by ants and beetles while flies laid their eggs to eventually become maggots.
I shivered because I’d put many former living beings in that situation, though where possible, our wild wolf cousins disposed of the bodies.
“Just spill. Is he alive?”
“As far as I know. Pretty certain he’s in hiding.”
“So? We assumed he was or… you know.”
“I can’t access the file, even with my skills, but if I had to guess, he’s either in witsec or the feds have him in a safe house.”
I rolled my eyes at my brother acting as though he was part of law enforcement and referring to witness protection as witsec.
Hmmm, so Seb had information they needed, and rather than toss him in jail where someone would shove a knife in his ribs, they had him tucked away.
“Perhaps he’s going to sing like the proverbial canary and that’s why they have him.” Did they do a deal so he’d get a reduced prison term if he’d testify against Germaine? Except what jury is going to take the word of a petty—or maybe a hardened—criminal? And no matter the outcome of the trial, he’d be killed in prison, even if he was in solitary confinement.
My mind whirred, going in one direction, pulling back and starting down another, but gradually, I pulled the threads together.
“This is what we know. Seb has been a petty criminal since he was a teen.”
“Check.” Ezra made a chart and put a mark in the column beside, “petty criminal.”
“He gambled, and that probably led to debts, which is where he got into the clutches of some very bad guys.”
“From petty to big time, or bigger.”
“Germaine dabbled in drugs, and while Seb wasn’t addicted to the hard stuff—we’d have seen signs—he bought weed from the bear den. He was in debt and forced to pay off the money by selling hard drugs. But he stole money or drugs or both. Or something like that.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Ezra noted.
“His activity catches the attention of law enforcement who offer him a deal, the details of which we don’t know.” All of it was guesswork.
We went back and forth offering more suggestions. Germaine discovered he was being double crossed and ordered the hit, a signal to Seb he had to stay in line. When I didn’t follow throughon the hit, Germaine had a bomb planted to kill Seb and to heck with his new husband. The feds pulled Seb out and hid him away. Rhodes hadn’t heard from the husband recently either.
It was dawning on me that while Seb had a checkered past, maybe he’d been trying to do the right thing—or he’d been backed into a corner—and wasn’t the bad guy Rhodes knew him to be.