Chapter 9

CHAPTER NINE

"How pissed do you think your woman would be if I tackled her to the ground and stole her phone so I could change this shit playlist?" Jonas inquired with his head tilted back, staring at the ceiling as if he could Jedi mind trick Aria's music to stop.

Fucking hell, here we go.

It was highly likely she'd be pissed. It was a definite I'd be engaged.

"She's not my woman," I corrected, then yelled, "Aria!"

"Yeah?"

"Switch playlists, woman, this shit sucks!"

The music got louder.

Jonas righted his head. I shrugged.

"You knew she'd turn that shit up," he accused.

He was right, I did. What could I say? The music was shit but she was amusing.

"No letter." Jonas brought us back to work.

"I'll have Kira check if George or Brittney put in for mail forwarding."

Jonas nodded as he glanced around the dining room.

"Remember when we were in that house in Prague?"

"The mansion?" I asked.

"Yeah, the mansion with the diamonds hidden in the walls."

Not just any diamonds—blood diamonds from Botswana that we'd tracked through Africa where they entered into Spain by way of Morocco. Spain, France, Switzerland, Germany, then finally into Czechia.

Three bags of rocks, each weighing right around fourteen ounces, was enough to cause a shitstorm of epic proportions. Each of those bags held roughly nineteen-hundred carats. In other words, the transporters had smuggled nearly ten million US dollars' worth of raw diamonds across a continent and four countries besides. The good news was the seizure of those diamonds meant they weren't traded for weapons. The bad news was and still is, people were willing to murder over a fucking bag of rocks.

"I've been thinking," he started. "The walls in here, the living room—hell, all of the downstairs walls—are gypsum. The upstairs is a combination but all of the exterior walls are drywall."

"I'm not tracking," I told him.

"Someone remodeled the upstairs and replaced the plaster with drywall. Earlier, Aria said when she bought the house, and the earlier videos confirm, she had no plans of a major reno upstairs."

He was correct. Aria had explained the change in plans when Jonas had asked why she switched gears and decided to lose a bedroom for the sake of a closet and a bigger bathroom. Bottom line, it was for resale value. The master bedroom closet was shit. No woman would walk into the master and fall in love with shit closet space and a tiny bathroom. But she would make her kids share a room or forgo a guest room for a big, beautiful bathroom and closet.

I wasn't a woman—I bought my house because it was close to the office. I didn't have to deal with traffic, nothing needed to be repaired, and the wall in the living room was big enough to hang a huge-ass TV on the wall. But I reckoned Aria knew what she was talking about and not because she was a woman—she was fucking smart.

"Brother, you've lost me. We're already going off the working theory someone broke in and tore the wall apart because they were looking for something. The question is, did they find it?"

"We need to tear down more walls." Jonas said.

Aria would have a shit hemorrhage if she heard him say that.

"Are you crazy?"

"For shits and grins I looked through the doorbell footage Kira found from the house at the end of the block."

"I watched the same footage. There was nothing there."

"Sure there was. An ambo, police, and fire truck all passed that house at twenty-three-nineteen."

I couldn't recall the exact time but after eleven sounded about right.

"Okay."

"I pulled the emergency callouts from that night. The woman who lives two doors down had a heart attack."

Jesus fuck .

"You're thinking whoever was in here, heard those sirens and bolted?" I needlessly asked.

"Yep."

Well, fuck .

Jonas was right—more walls had to come down.

Aria was going to go apeshit. Not that I blamed her. Every new sheet of drywall that had to go up cut into her profit.

"What's this got to do with the mansion in Prague?"

"The homeowner's assistant hired a crew to do a remodel. The homeowner never knew his house was essentially a storage facility for contraband."

Damn, but he was right about that, too. Our team wasn't part of the search—we left after we tracked and detained. But the briefing we got was that the rich couple who owned the house had no idea their assistant had ties to terrorists. The men the assistant hired for the remodel were part of the organization. They'd installed secret panels throughout the house that were later used to hide weapons, drugs, and diamonds.

"You think whoever the Calvins hired to do the upstairs remodel hid shit in the walls?"

Jonas shrugged.

"If you needed a place to stash something, didn't want it found, and I had access to someone else's house, why not hide it in their walls? What are the chances someone's going to tear down walls?"

"Slim, but if there was an issue with the wiring and the drywall needed to be removed, whatever was hidden would be found. Or if a pipe broke and?—"

"I get it, you're right. But how often does that happen? I think we need to pull the permits on the house and see who did the remodel upstairs."

That would take a ten-minute visit to planning and zoning.

"We'll hit up planning and zoning tomorrow. While Aria finishes up, I wanna check out the attic."

Jonas frowned and leaned away from me.

"You're on your own with that, pal."

"Pussy," I taunted.

Jonas's hands came up and without heat he muttered, "Until you've been trapped in an attic for forty hours you can fuck right off."

"Why are we fucking off?" Aria asked as she passed the opening to the dining room but didn't stop to hear the answer.

Jonas took this as his opportunity to circle back to his ribbing.

"That woman's got a fine?—"

"Don't," I cut in.

" Right ." He drew out the word. "Is there a reason you don't like me commenting on your woman's fine…sense of style?"

He was so full of shit. Aria was wearing another pair of faded jeans and a plain black t-shirt. Neither of which was stylish—she was remodeling a house. Both, however, hugged her frame. The jeans especially once again showcased her fine ass.

"Told you?—"

Jonas interrupted me. "When are you going to remember I don't listen to shit people tell me? I believe one-third of the shit that comes out of people's mouths. But actions, body language, deeds…now those speak the truth. So, brother, you want me to believe you're not hot for the woman, you got your work cut out for you. And even then, I won't believe you. But I will tell you, it's way past time you realize that your ex is a useless bitch. What she?—"

"Don't."

"There's that word again," Jonas pointed out. "You say that a lot when one of us tries to talk to you about her. You don't want to hear it but you need to. That shit she laid on you, is bullshit."

There was never a good time to get into any sort of conversation about her. But with Aria in the other room, it was seriously not the right time.

"I know what she is and I know what she laid on me. What I don't know is why the hell you're bringing it up."

"Because the time is ripe, Smith. So ripe it's rotten. It's been a long time and the fact you're still not over it? That says that rot's in your gut and if you're not careful it'll poison you."

It took extreme effort to remember Jonas was a brother, a man who'd had my six, stood beside me in battle, spent ten years living a different version of the same hell I had lived through. If he hadn't been, my fist would've been down his throat.

"You're wrong, Jonas, it's not in my gut. It's leached into my blood. You all think I'm brokenhearted. I'm not. I'm just plain broken. There's no fixing what she did. There's no getting over it. It lives in me, that poison courses through my veins." I stopped long enough to hear the water in the kitchen still running before I continued, "Aria's not my woman, but she is a good one and she doesn't need some asshole commenting on her ass to get a rise out of me. That's all I'm saying."

"I bet that ass gets a rise outta you," he mumbled under his breath.

My temper flared.

"Seriously," I grunted. "Did you not just fucking hear me?"

"I listened to about two seconds of that garbage that came out of your mouth. After that I tuned you out and watched the guilt for something that is not yours flood your eyes. I watched you flinch when you lied and said Aria wasn't yours and I saw you frown when you called her a good woman."

Christ, the guy was infuriatingly observant.

"Jonas—"

He stepped closer, bringing himself damn near nose-to-nose with me. "One day it'll be too late. One day you'll be lying there thinking about your life and it'll be too fucking late to go back and fix all your regrets. Too late to live the life you wanted to live. I don't think for a second your heart's broken, your mind is. Your problem is you believe her . You believe all the lies she shoved down your throat."

He stopped, and when he did, I couldn't suck in enough oxygen to tell him to fuck off. Unfortunately that gave him the opportunity for him to deliver his kill shot. "This might make me a total motherfucker but if that bitch wasn't already dead, I'll kill her for what she did to you. What she continues to do. And that's on her, too. That was her choice to go back. She knew what would happen and she left you for him knowing however that went down would fuck you up. I'd slice her throat for that alone."

After he aimed his arrows and pierced through the armor I'd spent years building, Jonas left me standing alone in the dining room with my chest burning and my head more screwed up than it's ever been.

I did not love her now, but I once had. Yet I couldn't find an ounce of affront my friend straight out said he'd kill my fiancée if she was still alive. That threat should've been a betrayal of our friendship, of the brotherhood.

But I couldn't find the betrayal. All I could find was loyalty.