“How many men do you need?”

“I don’t need your men,” he said. “I just need my MC brothers and a plane.”

“The other jet is at the airport. It and anything else you need are at your disposal.”

Garret grabbed my arm. “What’s going on?” His gaze kept shifting to Zio and the others. “Are my parents okay? Ciana? Who attacked the compound?”

I told Jet to hold on a minute and quietly gave Garret a condensed version of everything his dad had just told me. “You have two choices here,” I muttered, shooting a glance at Zio before turning back to him. “You can go down with your dad and the MC to deal with Ramirez, or you can come with me to get Ciana back.”

He groaned in frustration at the difficult choices I’d just given him. “Fuck, Ryan. Lis could be with Ramirez. If it weren’t for that, I would go with you, but if there’s even a small chance that she might be with him—that she might be alive—I have to try.” His green eyes filled with flames. “And if she’s not, I’ll take my time and chop him up like O’Brion did my sister.”

The memory of seeing Nova on that table flashed before my eyes, and I quickly had to shake the image away before I could speak. Lifting the phone to my mouth once more, I spoke to Jet. “I’m going to need you to wait until Garret gets back. I’m going to put him on the next commercial flight out. He wants to be with you when you take down Ramirez.”

“Tell that boy of mine to get his ass moving, then. Time’s a wastin’, and I’m thirsty for that bastard’s blood.”

41

Ryan

Just outside of Montreal, Quebec, was an estate few people knew about. The place was surrounded by a thirty-foot wall enclosing the six hundred acres of land. It had taken three days, but we’d finally found where Bain O’Farrell had taken Ciana, and it was within those walls.

Three days, she’d been with him. After only an hour with Sheena, Ciana had had her hair shredded and her body burned repeatedly. From everything I knew about the man who was my distant cousin, he was ten times worse than our shared great-grandmother. With each tick of the clock, I couldn’t help thinking it could be the last time she drew breath.

Bain must have known we would come for Ciana. There was no way we would leave her, especially not with a monster like him.

We went in prepared for war. Every man on our payroll who could shoot a gun, other families who were loyal to us pledged their own men, as well as Theo’s and Adrian’s own soldiers. If Bain had come in like a militia ready to go into battle, then we had arrived to give him exactly what he’d asked for.

But when we reached the gate, the men who walked along the wall with high-powered rifles called for me to step out. Without hesitation, I opened the door, ready to negotiate if that was what they wanted. We had men already hidden on our side of the wall. All of them with sniper rifles trained on those walking along the top. But it wasn’t them we worried about. It was what awaited on the other side.