Page 83 of Fighting for Scarlett

Dreams they shared.

Dreams she’d made him realize he had even if he refused to allow himself to acknowledge them.

“Easy, man,” Phantom murmured, and Tate realized he’d curled his fingers into fists and started stalking toward Rocco.

“Not going to keep it from you,” Rocco assured him. “Eagle just wants me to be sure you can handle this before I tell you.”

Then it was bad.

If Eagle was worried about what he was going to do, it had to be even worse than he was thinking, and there were already a dozen worse-case scenarios forming in his head.

“I can handle it,” he vowed. He had to. Simple as that. Because if he couldn’t it would be Scarlett who would pay the price.

Rocco studied him, expression inscrutable, but then he nodded. “Scarlett was just released from jail.”

“Huh?” How could that be? Much as he had hated it, they’d decided against allowing anyone outside the small circle of people he was sure were trustworthy to learn that Warren Barone had claimed innocence. It meant leaving Scarlett in prison until they had a name of who had set both her and Warren up, but in the end, he was the one who had set this in motion by allowing her to be arrested and they had to play through the hand he had dealt.

“How did she get out?” Rex asked.

“Eagle had a pretty tight rein on things,” Bubba added.

“Who got her out?” Phantom asked.

“Walter Gunnerman,” Rocco told them.

Sifting through all the names of Prey employees he’d learned over the last couple of weeks, Tate placed the name as being one of the lawyers Prey kept on retainer.

From what he knew, the Reactivator was almost complete, and Athena Team had contacted the lawyer to discuss filing for a patent.

“No way, man, he’s loyal to Eagle and Prey,” Ace said.

“We rescued Walter’s daughter several years back after he got himself into some trouble. It was a joint mission with Prey’s Charlie Team. A loan shark sold off all his client’s debts to a human trafficker looking to make a quick buck by clearing the debts in flesh. Walter’s then thirteen-year-old daughter was taken along with a bunch of other girls and women. We were able to recover all but one of the girls, and the trafficker and most of his key men were killed. Walter was so grateful he vowed to stop gambling. It’s been over a decade, and he’s been clean ever since. Family first. Job second. There’s no way he would betray Eagle after everything the man did for him and his family.”

But that wasn’t quite true.

There was always a limit.

Everybody had one.

And when you reached that limit there was nothing you wouldn’t do.

Walter Gunnerman might have reformed and gone on the straight and narrow, but he knew about the drug, and he obviously knew that Warren had been suspected of being the mole because he had to have used something to get a judge to sign off on getting Scarlett out.

There was only one thing Tate could think of that would cause the lawyer to turn on a man who had helped him when he was at the lowest point of his life.

“If Walter relapsed, got himself in debt again and panicked, needed an out, he might have thought selling the drug was an easy option,” Tate said. “And if Raul Castillo threatened his daughter, his family, then I'm guessing there isn’t anything the man wouldn’t do to keep them safe. We have to bring him in, get him to talk.”

“We can't,” Rocco said, stopping him in his tracks when he had already started heading for the door.

Dread pooled in his stomach. “Why not?”

“Because Walter and Scarlett have disappeared,” Rocco replied gently. “Eagle got wind of what was going on just as it was happening, but he was too slow getting someone to the jail. Walter and Scarlett were already out the door. He reviewed the security footage, hoping to get a lead on their direction, since Walter wasn’t answering his phone.”

“And?” he prompted when Rocco didn't continue.

“And the footage shows Walter drugging Scarlett and shoving her into the trunk of his car,” Rocco finished.

Scarlett had been kidnapped.

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