Dominance Never Dies (Masters and Mercenaries #11)(6)

His brother had an odd sense of humor. “So if this isn’t about Erin, what’s going on? Should I call Michael in?”

Ian’s face returned to its former grimness. “No. And I don’t want you talking about this to Michael right now. If we need to, we’ll bring him in later, but what I’m about to tell you is strictly on a need-to-know basis.”

Shit. It had to be about Hope McDonald. He’d known Ian was looking for her. She was the last of the two people they held responsible for Theo’s death. Erin and Nick Markovic had taken out the senator, but his psychotic daughter had gotten away.

Why hadn’t Case been more involved in the hunt for her? Why hadn’t he become obsessed with searching out the woman who’d had a sick fascination with his brother? She was still out there. Likely still working on her memory altering drugs. Ten had a taste of that and he’d said it was beyond torture. Hope McDonald had created a drug and therapy protocol that could rewire the brain over long periods of time. She’d used it on Ten to make his torture seem endless, to trick his mind into giving him pain without harming his actual body to a great degree.

Why wasn’t he working harder to stop that?

Because he was hollowed out on the inside and Theo had taken all the good and noble parts of them to his grave? Because all Case was good at doing was throwing himself in front of bullets?

Ian had known that. It was precisely why he’d sent Theo into the field as a lead instead of him.

“Have you found her?” Case got down to business. If Ian had found out where Hope was holed up, he would likely send Case in to try to take her out. It was what Case wanted. He was the only one with nothing to lose. Ian and Sean had daughters and wives. They had lives.

If there was a battle to be fought, Case was the cannon fodder of the family.

“I’ve found where she was.” Ian reached down and pulled a folder out of his bag. “She’s been working on a private island off the coast of Argentina. Apparently the pharmaceutical company she worked for had a secret lab there. Not that it’s on the books, but Liam found a couple of people who were willing to talk.”

Liam O’Donnell. He was the sneaky one. When Case had first hired on with Tennessee Smith, he’d made a study of the men of McKay-Taggart. He’d asked Ten his opinion of them. Theo had wanted to run through the daisies with his arms held open wide, some whiny ballad playing in the background as he embraced his long-lost brothers and their hodgepodge family, but Case had been more cautious. He’d wanted to know what Ten thought of them. O’Donnell, he’d explained, was the sneaky one. The others looked like what they were. Adam was the sarcastic hacker, Jake Dean the muscle. Alex and Eve were a team of thinkers, cautious and methodical. Ian was…not even Ten could properly describe Ian Taggart.

But O’Donnell was tricky. He played the part of the charming Irishman. Family man with his lovely, gentle wife and kid. To look at him on the surface, one would likely think he was nothing more than a well-trained soldier. Liam O’Donnell put together puzzles no one else thought to play with at all. He saw patterns almost everyone else missed.

Liam was the heavy thinker of McKay-Taggart. So why was he being wasted on a simple search mission?

“Did you send Li in because Erin’s sidelined?”

Ian opened the folder. “Li asked to go in. I had Adam on the hunt, looking through documents and records of anywhere she might have gone. He heard some rumors on the Dark Web about some crazy doctor trying out a memory drug in South America. While Adam was working his magic, Li went back down to the Caymans.”

“To look for Theo’s body?”

“He had a theory,” Ian explained. “He wanted to test it.”

“What theory?”

“You know I found bloody sheets in the room where Ten was held.”

Case had walked into it himself. He could still see all that blood. So much of it and most of it had been his brother’s. He’d stood in the place where his brother had died. It was marked with his blood and then a trail that led inside the building where Ten had been held. “Yeah, but they wouldn’t have taken his body away in bloody sheets. They likely used a tarp or something.”

“Liam found Des’s body.”

That was news. Desiree had been the other operative they’d lost during that terrible night. She’d worked for Damon Knight out of London. “What? So did you find Theo’s, too?”

“Liam tracked down one of McDonald’s security team.” Ian’s voice was low, almost intellectual, as though he was just a CO going over a mission report and not talking about his dead brother. “He admitted that they’d disposed of Des’s body, but not Theo’s. According to that asshat, once McDonald was dead, they fled.”

“But Theo was killed before the assault on the compound. He died the same night as Des. If they got rid of her body, why wouldn’t they do the same to his?”

“The security team wasn’t allowed in that building that night. They were issued specific orders to stay out. At first Li thought it was to protect Hope’s experiments. Now he thinks something different.”

A chill went through Case’s body, causing the hairs on his arm to stand up. Hope McDonald had been a brilliant surgeon. Erin had told him how Faith had pleaded with her sister to come out and save Theo.

Hope McDonald had been obsessed with Theo.