Dean

 

Dean made his way through the creepy, dusty old warehouse, trying to see within the industrial litter and shattered mess where his daughter was hidden. The shooter had completely disappeared. He thought for a second about going back to get Emma but dismissed the thought. She would stay put and be safe back there. He could focus all of his energy on finding Mia.

 

He was no expert tracker, but he’d spent a few odd moments of his life trying to find people who didn’t want to be found, and he saw no sign that this building was anything other than what it looked from the outside: an abandoned building. It had probably been used by junkies, transients, and frightened kids to get away from the parents who did nothing to live up to the name and responsibility they’d been given. He didn’t believe that anyone could’ve gotten into the building, not with a child in tow. That meant Jay had to have another entrance to the building.

 

Which meant that Dean had no idea where to go to find Mia.

 

He felt sick having left Emma behind. He had to trust that she would stay where he’d put her. Thinking about her roaming around this building on her own, trying to find Mia as well — or worse, in the hands of a maniac like Jay, the woman and the girl he loved both at the mercy of a trained assassin — it made him too frightened to keep putting one foot in front of the other. He told himself that Emma was a smart girl who would realize that she was entirely outmatched In this situation, and who would stay exactly where he’d left her. No matter what happened.

 

Even if it was the most ridiculous lie he’d ever told. Sillier than the Tooth Fairy, and more ridiculous than Santa Claus.

 

When his phone rang, he almost jumped out of his skin. He’d been skulking along for so long that the sharp hip-hop beat of the phone’s ringtone was louder than a gunshot to his ears. He crouched down low, looking for who was coming at him, before realizing that he was coming at himself, giving away his position, making himself a target. He fumbled the phone out of his pocket, rushing to silence the sound before it could get him killed, but the unfamiliar number gave him pause. And then he recognized it. It was the same number that had flashed on Emma’s screen when Jay had called her.

 

He put the phone to his ear at the same time that he moved forward quickly, pressing his back against a convenient wall. At least here there were only two approaches, and he could reasonably see both of them.

 

“Listen, you son of a bitch,” he snarled, trying for the classic action hero upper hand approach.

 

Jay had probably heard it all before. He laughed, low and genuinely gleeful in Dean’s ear.

 

“Don’t start, son,” Jay said. “I’ve got your girl right here, and I don’t think you understand all the ways someone like me has the capacity to hurt a child.”

 

“I want her back, Jay. What is the point of this elaborate game? She doesn’t know anything.”

 

“That’s the part that you don’t fucking understand,” Jay snapped. “She knows everything. She has the key that they’re afraid of. She doesn’t even know she has it, but the men who took Emma this afternoon, they would have no problem destroying your daughter. I don’t think you entirely understand that at all.”

 

“What’s to understand?” Dean held the phone away from his ear for a moment, trying to hear Jay’s voice from somewhere other than the phone, get a read on where the man was so that he’d know which way to move in the building. No dice. The empty building was a strange mix of echoes and deadened air, but he wasn’t able to tell anything about where to go next. “You kidnapped a child to save her from some threat that wasn’t even a problem until you got involved.”

 

It was odd, hearing a grown man scoff into a cell phone. “You haven’t been paying any kind of attention,” Jay snapped. “The girl knows what they’re afraid she knows. What her mother knew. She doesn’t know she knows it, and they’ve got the notebook now, so that’s not going to be as much of an issue as it was before. But I wasn’t completely rogue on this one, Patterson. I was hired to kill your kid. I chose not to do it, to do this instead. I’m going to be a dead man when I let her go.”

 

Something twisted inside Dean’s guts. The man was terrifying, and he had held everyone that mattered to Dean in his control in the past seventy-two hours, but it was still disturbing to hear someone speaking calmly about their own death. Jay’s voice was entirely sure, completely convinced that this would come to pass. He was not debating it for a single moment. It was a surety. Dean had heard some of his siblings in the club speak that way — when they knew their lives were close to an endpoint. It was no less disturbing to hear from a trained assassin.

 

“Jay,” he said, and he heard the shift in his tone when he started thinking of the man as a fellow soldier instead of an enemy combatant. “It doesn’t have to be like this. You’ve got the power in this moment, man. Let me get my little girl back, and I’ll do everything I can for you. The Titans has power in this town, and the Scorpions are with us right now. Between the two groups, there’s not much we won’t be able to get done. All I need to hear is what you want. What you need us to do.”

 

“There’s nothing to be done. My time is just up. When I was first recruited to this organization, I was told that it was a good life, until you found the job you couldn’t do. That when that happened, you were done, because the organization does not forgive failures. There aren’t any reasons good enough for backing out of a job you’ve agreed to do. I didn’t realize that the name I was given belonged to a kid. That’s on me. Once I’d taken the job, it was her or me. No excuses. No exceptions.” Dean could almost hear the other man shrug.

 

“Sure,” Dean shot back. He had to get moving. He stayed crouched, but he chose a hallway almost at random, pushing forward, trying to both listen to his phone and keep his ears open to seek out sounds of other people creeping through the building. “But that’s not what I was told by the organization itself when they told me who you were.”

 

That did seem to throw Jay off his game, but only for a moment. “Who did you speak to? That bitch Tracy? She’d say anything to get rid of me. She’s hated me for years. Says I don’t ask enough questions.”

 

“Too many?”

 

“I meant what I said.” A bitter laugh echoed through the phone, and — was there an answering echo, up above him? He turned toward the sound and pressed on. “Guess she was right this time.”

 

“There’s always a way out,” Dean said. “A bigger fish to turn on, a bigger problem to solve. There’s no need to assume the game is over until all the cards are dealt.”

 

“It’s easy to say that when—” Jay’s voice cut off, and Dean’s heart throbbed in his throat. “Your woman is almost here. Emma. She’s a good girl. She’s helped you out more than you know.”

 

“You leave her out of this,” Dean snarled, but Jay was laughing again. Yes, he was down this hall, Dean was sure of it. He moved into a slightly more upright position, sacrificing some stealth for an increase in speed. There was something in Jay that was about to snap, and he had to get to them before anyone else got hurt. And dammit, Emma was supposed to stay in that cubicle, where she was fine (safe was the most ridiculous of all understatements), but it was still where the hell he’d put her, and couldn’t the goddamn woman just stay put for ten minutes?

 

“It’s not me, son.” Jay laughed. “It’s her you need to have that conversation with. She’s almost here now. You take care of your girl. Your woman. Take care of them both.”

 

The click of the phone disconnecting came at the same moment as Dean hitting the end of the hall and finding that the door which led on to the next section, presumably the section that held his daughter, was locked tight.