When Dean and Emma walked back into the conference room, he felt calmer. More centered. The monitors were turned off, so his daughter’s worried face was no longer staring at him from whatever room she was held captive in. It was a little bit easier to breathe. Most of the suits had been moved out of the room. If he listened hard, he could hear fierce sounds of flesh hitting flesh. Glancing around himself, most of the Titans were still present, and most of the Scorpions were gone. He could only assume that they’d linked these shitheads, through Jay, to Fred’s death, and were taking their revenge as they could. Or they were just looking to vent some fury on the mind of assholes who were happy kidnapping little girls in order to get what they needed. Whichever way it went was fine with him. The bastards deserved to be beaten within an inch of their lives.

 

The asshole whose sac he’d crushed under his boot was still curled up in his chair, tears streaming down his face. Honestly, Dean had to admit that the man was moderately impressive – there were plenty of guys who would still be screaming in pain from the bruising he’d taken.

 

Connell nodded as Dean approached. “Good old Damian is ready to talk. Think he’s got something we might want to hear?”

 

Dean gave a shrug as he squeezed Emma’s hand one more time, then stepped away. He needed to be the big, brash biker for this, not the man who’d just made love to his girl to re-center himself and find himself all over again.

 

“I guess we’ll see. It’ll make a difference whether we call an ambulance for these ugly fuckers, or just leave them here to bleed until they figure out how to get some help on their own.” He summoned a nasty grin that showed all his teeth as he stepped closer to the man. He could see Emma out of his peripheral vision. His girl had come out of that room somehow tougher than she’d been when she stepped inside. If he had to guess, he thought it would have something to do with how, before, she had always needed to hide the world she came from, and now, at this moment, she could flourish. Embrace her history.

 

“What do you think, Roth?” he said, setting his ass up on the tabletop again. “I think I felt something pop under my boot before. You think you can get that shit repaired? Maybe if you get to a hospital real soon. But without that?” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He didn’t touch Roth’s body again, but he rested his boot on the edge of the chair, and the guy squeezed his thighs tight in reflex, trying to protect his balls. Dean didn’t blame him – they had to be swollen and miserable at this point.

 

“I’ll tell you anything you fucking want,” Roth replied. Glancing up at his mouth, Dean noticed that his lower lip was split, a bright bruise forming on his jaw. He must’ve tried to mouth off. Connell didn’t like it when guys in chairs got mouthy.

 

“Why the sudden change?” Dean asked. It was a legitimate question, even if it did make the guy glare up at him, murder in his eyes. “It’s awfully easy to give out shitty information in order to keep us from getting where we need to. It’s why most people avoid torture.” He let his grin get just a little wilder, a little more deranged. “You want to know why I don’t avoid torture?”

 

Roth gave him an almost mulish look, and all Dean did was lift one eyebrow a little higher. The man winced and looked away. Dean chuckled to himself. He’d get to skip the speech about how he loved to hear grown men scream, then. That was nice. It had worn thin over the years.

 

“Look, we, years and years ago, had an operation — bigger money than we’d ever handled before. And some intern from legal aid showed up to help with a completely unrelated HR complaint. She saw more than she should’ve. We dealt with it.”

 

The rage at hearing Sam reduced down to something so small and pathetic was white-hot, but he choked it down and pushed it away. It wasn’t what he needed right now. It wouldn’t help him.

 

“Keep talking.”

 

“We thought it was sorted. Legal aid never picked anything up, and we didn’t even have to pay off the damn cops. Hit and run, they never looked further. We were done. No more worries. We kept on with business.

 

“But it turns out that someone’s kid goes to school with this kid. As she grows up, she starts talking about finding Mommy’s secret notebooks, where she kept all her secrets. And my backers get scared. What if that ancient deal gets blown, and suddenly we’re all on the hook for a lot of money? We decided we needed to find out if the kid knew anything. We hired an organization. A group who was going to take the aunt, the one who cared for the kid. We were never going to hurt the kid. They would find out if the aunt knew anything, and then they’d let us know, and we’d decided what to do. We had contingencies.”

 

The son of a bitch actually shook his head with a sense of ruefulness. “We were never going to hurt anyone. That was never our plan.”

 

Dean had a crystal clear image for a moment where he leaned back, lifted up his boot, and kicked so hard that this fucker’s nose was imprinted on the back side of his skull. He took two long, slow breaths, forcing himself to let the violence and blood fade from his mental vision before he spoke. But before he got the words in, there was a flying piece of furniture, and a long piece of solid wood, the leg of a chair, cracked into the back of Roth’s head, pulling another scream from him. Emma stood there, her face flushed and her eyes wet.

 

“The aunt has a name,” she said, her tone tangled and angry and frightened. “The child has a name. They are people. They are real, living people who you hurt because of money.”

 

The man looked up with a snarl, all veneer of civilization stripped away by being hit by a woman. He started to try and step out of the chair, but it was easy enough for Dean to press his boot against the fucker’s sternum, and then he wasn’t going to go anywhere. He didn’t need to do anything else to protect Emma. She clearly was ready to handle herself.

 

“There’s no other reason in the world,” Roth said and spat in her direction.

 

Connell growled even before Dean did, and the gun he’d put down when he and Emma had stepped away from the table earlier was suddenly in his hand again, the barrel pointed at Roth’s forehead.

 

“You’ve disrespected my family before,” Dean said, his voice coiled and so tight with so much rage and years of loneliness as he had truly believed that the best thing he could do for his daughter was to stay the hell away from her. “You’ve disrespected my child. My wife. My sister. And now my girl. I should kill you where you sit.”

 

Roth faced him, and even though there was suddenly a sharp smell of urine in the air, he didn’t flinch away. There was nothing more this bastard could give him. Nothing more that he could find out. He was ready to put this man in the ground and know that he would never have to think about him again.

 

Emma was there next to him, her eyes steady on his face. Afterward, he would think to himself that if Emma had flinched away, if she had shown fear at who Dean had the capacity to be and the lengths he would go to protect the people he loved, he would have shot Roth in the head and walked away, calling it done. But the softness and mercy in her eyes let him put the gun down, never having flicked the safety off.

 

Misty, the hacker sister who was working the monitors, let out a happy yell. “The trace worked!” she said to the room at large.

 

Dean glanced at Connell. The older man nodded, moving closer to keep an eye on Roth, although all the fight seemed to have gone out of the man. Dean walked to Misty, and Emma followed him.

 

She was working on a tiny laptop hardly bigger than a composition notebook, the screen covered with words he recognized as computer code, but didn’t come close to understanding. Her laptop was wired to another machine, the one that appeared to have been controlling the monitor displays. He could see the small thumbnails in the corner, but pulled up was an image of Mia, curled up in a small room with cinderblock walls. She was still. She looked—he pushed back on the thought before it could fully form. She was asleep, he was sure of it. Children could sleep harder than anyone else, wasn’t that true? Especially given what she’d been through in the past few days. He found himself searching the grainy image hard, looking for any sign of her condition. Any sign that she was well. He missed everything Misty said about the technical details, and it didn’t matter. All he wanted in the world was to touch the screen of the computer, somehow press his touch through the technology to let his baby girl know he was coming. He was going to take care of her. He was going to make her safe, and no one would ever hurt her again.

 

When Misty said, “The weird thing,” though, he forced himself to break his focus and pay attention. Nothing good ever followed that statement.

 

Emma’s hand rested light on his arm, pulling his attention to her. It was good to have her there, beside him. It was good to believe that she saw something better in him than most people did. That the darkest thing inside of him had not frightened her, not for even a moment. She had stayed by him, even when he gave up entirely to the monsters inside of him to try and save his baby girl. Maybe, just maybe, he was going to find a way to make this work.

 

“The weird thing,” Misty started again, seeming to realize that she had his attention now, “is that I couldn’t get through the firewall at all, and then it just… disappeared.”

 

“What do they say?” Dean asked, stopping himself from asking what “the kids” said just before the words escaped his mouth and turned him into an old man on the spot. “You’re leet? Your hack-saur are the rock-saur?” He knew the words were written differently, with numbers in where the letters should go, but he’d never given a shit about computers in his life, and he wasn’t about to start now. He pronounced them like he’d heard them pronounced, like they were some weird species of dinosaur.

 

Misty choked on a guffaw. “Yeah, maybe if you’re ninety, you might say that. But no, this wasn’t me.”

 

“So, what was it?” Emma asked.

 

“It almost seems like someone saw my attempt to bring down the firewall and dropped it themselves. So I could run the trace and figure out where they are.” She looked up, and Dean saw a wariness in her eyes that he could feel in his own mind. “But why would they do that?”

 

“I can think of some reasons,” Dean started to say, and then Emma’s phone started to ring. She pulled it out of her pocket, and her face went blank. “What is it?” he said as the phone went into its second ring.

 

“Cassidy,” she replied. Her face had gone ashen, her eyes nervous.

 

“Isn’t that—” and then he remembered who had been on the line, every time “Cassidy” had called or sent a text for the last few days. “Answer it,” he said, pushing a command into his voice that made him nervous, but that he couldn’t have left out if he tried. “Answer it now.”