“Emilia, let’s go.” Lavinia reached out a hand to help her up. “You have research to do.”
She rolled her eyes but accepted the hand. Violet popped to her feet too. “I’ll go with them, in case I forgot to mention anything.”
My mates didn’t say it out loud, but the way Mercer and West looked at Emilia said one thing in particular:find another way.
Maybe we would get lucky and she would, but I doubted it.
Starting now, I needed to get ready to face down the man who’d ruined me.
I needed to be prepared, mentally and physically, to ruin him too.
Chapter
Forty-Two
TALIA
“There’s no other way.”
Emilia’s words struck me with a sense of fear. And relief, maybe? A combination of things that I couldn’t quite place. I wrung my hands together, focusing on breathing as emotions washed through me.
She’d worked all night looking into the information Violet had gotten. In the bright, mid-morning light we were huddled around her computer screen in her bedroom, waiting for her consensus.
“See here?” Emilia played a video feed of a hotel hallway, and we watched four men walk down it and into room 217. “Mercenaries. He has hired protection, and they’re not going to be easy to take on in a confined space.”
“We could manage it,” Mercer said.
Emilia shook her head. “I’m not done.”
She switched the camera feed to another, showing the extravagant hotel lobby. She didn’t hit play, only pointing out a series of figures that stood along the edges of the room. “Eachone of these guys work for the O’Connors. When they catch wind of a conflict in the hotel, you won’t make it out of there. And they’re not just in the lobby—they’re out in the back alleyways, roaming nearby streets, everything.”
“How did Benjamin make it in there to hide out if his cousin doesn’t know he’s alive?” West demanded. “There’s gotta be a gap somewhere.”
Lavinia laughed dryly. “He probably walked in like a hotel guest, wearing a disguise and hiding his face from the cameras. To get him out, you’ll be starting a gun fight and committing a kidnapping. The situations aren’t the same.”
West growled. “We can fight our way out.”
“Maybe if you were highly trained lethal assassins,” Emilia said. “No offence, but you’re just bikers. Getting Benjamin out alive would require a level of stealthiness that you guys don’t have.”
She was right, as much as my mates didn’t want to admit it. We had to draw Benjamin out if we didn’t want to risk his life and theirs—and I would rather let Benjamin run free forever than put my alphas in that much danger to get him.
“Looks like I’ll go to the Jubilee Harbourfront Hotel, then,” I said.
I kept all hesitation out of my voice, somehow.
“We can draw him out another way—” Mercer started.
I cut him off. “How? He knows by now that we know who he is. I bet Brooks knowing he’s alive completely ruins part of his plan, so if I go talk to Brooks O’Connor, it should piss him off enough to pull him out of hiding. Then we only have to create a plan to get him before he gets me.”
Saying it out loud made it sound so simple. Do A, then B, followed by C.
It wasn’t, not really.
I’d have to rely on myself not to break under pressure. We’d have to trust that Benjamin didn’t have an ace hiding up his sleeve. Anyone else joining the game last minute could throw us into turmoil. Brooks O’Connor could ruin it all, too.
“I’ll contact Brooks and set up a meeting,” Lavinia said.
“You have contact with him directly?” I asked.
