Chapter Eight

Tracking Agent James Stroyer without him noticing was a lot harder than it sounded on paper. James had become paranoid over the last 5 years to the extent that he moved through his life now as if he was always being tailed. That made actually tailing him a pure pain in the ass… but if anyone could manage the task, it was Special Agent Erica Hawkins. There was likely no one in the world who knew him better. Or at least… she had.

Agents Stroyer and Hawkins had been quite the couple for some time… up until about 5 years ago when a dashing and dangerous young dragon by the name of Mateo had entered her life in the most unexpected way. But then again, when you run undercover operations in the middle of Las Vegas, you were bound to meet some strange and interesting characters.

Back then, she had been just a regular agent working in tandem with the DEA, running undercover stings to take down the larger drug runners in the grittiest city near the border. But after everything that had happened, she had made it her mission to rise high enough in the ranks to rival Stroyer. She had no choice. No one else was going to stop him.

She was too late, it seemed, to stop him from invading the DeLeon estate down in Ensenada and when she arrived two days behind him, she ran into a brick wall. How would she manage to contact any of the DeLeon family without alerting Stroyer and throwing everything into chaos? She knew that the moment he caught wind of her, he would lose his mind… or worse.

Another 2 days passed before Erica made her move. She had been watching Lucia come and go from the estate on grocery runs or various errands and she knew it was her only shot of getting word into the house. She trailed the woman from nearly the moment she left the estate one evening on a trip to the market… and once Erica was sure Stroyer had no eyes on them… she made her move. A single, simple note was slipped into the woman’s shopping bag. A note to the one person in the house she knew for certain would be on her side. She only hoped Lucia was willing to hold up her end of a bargain she had no idea about.

Later that night, just outside the farthest back wall of the estate property, Erica waited. She had no guarantee anyone was coming to meet her, but she had to hope. She also had to hope that Stroyer hadn’t bothered to confirm the blind spots of the estate’s security system and remedy them.

Her heart stopped cold in her chest when she heard a bit of rustling just overhead, so she froze in place and just listened. It took all of her training not to yelp when someone dropped from the top of the wall down to the ground beside her. For a moment, only a moment, she thought she was looking at Mateo and she nearly cried out. But then he stepped forward enough for her to see him clearly and she realized that it was not Mateo… but his brother. The man she had been waiting here to see.

“Thank God,” she whispered. “I had no idea if that woman would actually hand over the note to you… or if it would end up in Stroyer’s hands.” She offered out a hand to him. “Special Agent Erica Hawkins, FBI. Thanks for meeting me.”

Ignacio just stared at her for a moment, hesitant about trusting an FBI agent in even the slightest way. But he gave in and shook her hand in greeting, though he remained silent. He figured she was going to do all of the talking anyway.

His shoulder tensed, and his mind flashed briefly to Maia, who was likely pacing up in his room right that very moment, pissed off and restless that he hadn’t let her come along with him. Her tongue lashing had been harsh, but he stood his ground and made her stay behind. All of this was just too dangerous, and he wasn’t willing to risk her safety in the slightest. Not that he was a fan of leaving her in the house with Stroyer… but he had to choose the lesser of two evils and this was it.

“I’ll make this quick,” Erica continued. “I know exactly why Agent Stroyer is here and none of it is good. Your brother Mateo is… involved pretty heavily and to be honest, is the cause of all of this.”

That got Ignacio to make a face. Mateo was the cause of everything? There was no way. But before he had a chance to interject and ask a question, she was talking again. So he shut up and listened.

“Long story short, Ignacio, is that Stroyer and I used to be a couple. I met your brother and… well… things happened,” she rattled off her story quickly, but that didn’t mean it was any less shocking. “Stroyer got jealous… like… really jealous. He took it out on your brother and for the past 5 years he has kept Mateo locked up in the same facility he had been holding you and Maia in.”

“Ok, hold on a second,” he spoke up finally. “Mateo has been held prisoner… for 5 years? What the fuck did he even do!?”

“Well, the real reason James locked him up is because Mateo came between him and I,” she confessed, glancing over her shoulder as she continued. “But on paper, it’s because your brother was running, flying actually, drugs across the border and feeding a major drug ring in Vegas. But James has kept your brother under lock and key, letting him be used as a lab rat, all of these years.”

“But that doesn’t explain how Mateo is responsible for all of this…” Ignacio posed.

“When you had your little… mishap in the Mojave and turned all those miles of desert to glass? That was when James realized how to really hurt Mateo the way he wanted to. He had to go after Mateo’s family… and when you made all of that glass, James knew he had found that family.”

Ignacio tensed up again, putting the pieces together slowly in his head. Thankfully, Erica could see he was having trouble working it all out, so she did the work for him. Not without a short but exasperated sigh, of course.

“I cheated on James with Mateo… James got super jealous and took it out on Mateo,” she explained. “When he realized that Mateo was a dragon, not to mention a drug runner, he decided to lock him up and basically torture him for years as payback. Then you had your little accident and he realized there were more of you, likely family, and that he could make Mateo suffer even more if he managed to capture the whole crew.”

She paused and reached out to gently grab Ignacio’s shoulder, her green eyes locked onto his as she made a silent attempt to emphasize the seriousness of the situation at hand. The shock of red that was her hair, even in the shadowy darkness, was a leery omen in Ignacio’s eyes.

“Ignacio…” She said, softly yet sternly. “Stroyer is going to lock up everyone you love and torture them in front of Mateo until they all die. He doesn’t care about anything else but making Mateo suffer. Do you understand?”

“Of course,” he said, somewhat in shock by all of this information. “What… what do we do about it?”

“We get Mateo out,” she said, flatly. “I know you and Maia managed to escape from there once. I’m hoping you’ll be willing to do it again.”

“For my brother? Anything,” he said, without hesitation. “But it’s going to take more than you, Maia, and me. We nearly died last time. We’re going to need Rafael’s help.”

“Whatever it takes,” she said, squeezing his shoulder before letting it go. “Give word to Lucia when she goes out shopping tomorrow evening. I’ll find her and we’ll go from there.”

Ignacio nodded. There was nothing else to say and so he turned to head back the way he had come, though he seemed to have misjudged the height and couldn’t quite make it high enough to curl his fingers over the edge. Erica stepped in with a smirk, laced her hands together and offered it to him as a step-up. He gladly took it, went up over the wall and set about mentally preparing himself to convince Rafael to join a possibly suicidal rescue mission.

He explained everything to Maia the moment he got back and the two of them came up with a plan. The following morning, they set it into action and hoped it would all pan out. Maia did everything she could to distract Stroyer. She cornered him in the kitchen getting some breakfast and proceeded to play the beg, plead, and cry game with him. When that didn’t work, she tried the not-so-willing seductress angle. Anything to keep him distracted long enough for Rafael and Ignacio to have their little chat, uninterrupted.

Once he was sure Maia had Stroyer pinned down, Ignacio slipped into Rafael’s office. Despite his elder brother’s initial protests, Ignacio forced him to listen and then proceeded to explain everything to him—his loss of control over his own dragon fire while trying to make a gift for Maia in the desert and how he had turned miles of it to glass. He explained about Mateo, his drug running and the love triangle between Mateo, Stroyer, and the redheaded, Agent Hawkins. Everything Ignacio knew about what was happening, he shared with Rafael… and then he asked the big question.

“Will you come with us to rescue Mateo?” Ignacio asked, hopefully.

Rafael remained silent for so long that Ignacio was sure he had decided against helping to save Mateo. Shaking his head, Ignacio forced down his anger towards his brother and attempted a nicer approach.

“Please, Rafael,” he begged. “Mateo is our brother and a member of the DeLeon dragon family. You always say I run from my family duties. Well, isn’t saving a member of our family part of that duty?”

“Oh, spare me the ironic lecture, Ignacio,” Rafael cut him off. “Of course, I will help you. No human, let alone that psychopath Stroyer, should ever be allowed to hold a DeLeon against their will.”

“Thank you, Rafael,” Ignacio said, relaxing with relief.

“Arrange our departure however you need to. I will make sure Lucia and Manuel know what’s going on enough to keep things secure while we’re gone.”

Later that night, just shy of midnight, two men transformed into dragons within the garden walls of the estate, and with a rider on each of their backs, they took off into the night. Ignacio, Rafael, Maia, and Agent Erica Hawkins flew northbound towards the US/Mexico border and the Government bunker in the Mojave where Mateo was being held. They would free him, all four were confident of that.

As they flew, a set of eyes watched them from a darkened upper window of the DeLeon estate. There could only be one reason why they had left like that, and Stroyer knew exactly what that reason was. As he watched them fly off into the darkness of the sky, Agent James Stroyer simply smiled.