The Bodyguard: A BWWM Bad Body Romance(52)
If he were selfish, he’d want moments like this to last forever. To keep Juliet with him until he knew that she could always be happy. But Hank knew shit like that didn’t happen to guys like him. Juliet deserved more than a man who’d made a vendetta his entire life. She deserved a fresh start.
And that was what she’d get.
Chapter 11: Target Acquired
“We found her.”
Solomon had been having a particularly bad day. While he had always been the most brutal in his family, his father had the most business sense - and atop that, he had years more experience than his son. This, of course, meant that, despite Solomon’s best efforts, his father was outselling him. Gradually encroaching on territory he’d laid claim to.
And if he didn’t do something about it, the motherfucker was going to overthrow all his hard work.
Then he got a piece of news that brightened up his fucking day.
He immediately rose from his desk as Blackjack stepped into his office. It had taken forever for him to find out where the fucker was hiding, but Solomon was much more confident after digging him up. He could trust Blackjack with almost anything, and it was to him that Solomon entrusted locating his errant bitch of a woman.
He should have known his man would deliver. “Where the hell is she?”
At the question, Blackjack scowled. “You’re not gonna like the answer.”
Solomon merely growled in displeasure, resisting the urge to destroy something. “Tell me.”
Jack sighed, thrusting his hands into his grungy pockets. “It’s just like that nurse said. She’s been taken into protection.”
The news was enough to make the slender man curse fluently in both English and Spanish for several minutes. He might have known. Only the government would be able to hide Juliet so damned well that she didn’t trip up and let them find her. Where the hell else would she go? She had no money, no assets and no independence - he made sure of that.
And now his worst fears were confirmed.
“So how the fuck do we get to her?” He didn’t have the skill for planning that his father did - that was for damned sure. And this was the FBI they were going up against, not a handful of punks and street thugs. There was no way they snatched her and came out unscathed.
Somehow, they were going to have to get her to come to them.
“Fuck.” Solomon cursed again. Now that Juliet had gotten away from him, there was precious little chance that she’d come back - not for anything. He had no leverage on her - that was the price of alienating her from her family and friends.
If the FBI had her this entire time, who knew what she told them? She could have blown up all their operations already. But, as far as Solomon knew, there hadn’t been any disruption of flow recently.
Gripping the edge of his desk, he racked his brain wildly. Had anything changed in the past few months? Besides the manor getting trashed and he breaking off from his father, much remained the same. Same product, same distribution...those loyal to his father or himself had been split evenly - though they were always out to whittle one another’s numbers.
Which meant he had to hire some new faces.
Immediately, Solomon stiffened. “We’ve hired some new guys in the past few months, haven’t we, Jack?” At his demand, the man before him nodded curtly.
“A handful. I tried to be careful with it. I know you only wanted motherfuckers who could actually do what we need them to do.”
“Right,” Solomon confirmed, pensive. “If the Feds got to Juliet and made her talk, what do you think they’d do? Send someone to figure out if all that shit she spouts is true?” He rapped his knuckles against the desk triumphantly as the bare bones of a plan began to form. “How many new guys we got?”
“Bout five,” Jack answered him almost immediately. He was the party in charge of said new guys - if they worked out well, he took all the credit. If they fucked up, he dealt with that too. “You want me to look into them?”
“I wanna know where they live. Where their families live. What they had for breakfast. Fuck, I wanna know when they take a shit. If someone’s working for the Feds, we need to know it.”
“Gotcha.” One of Solomon’s favorite things about Blackjack was that he never asked stupid questions. He was a man who got shit done. Always admirable. Solomon liked to think that he ran a ship so tight that a fed rat wouldn’t dare sneak in - but he wasn’t idiotic enough to think that he didn’t have weaknesses.
Everyone had weaknesses.
**
Juliet knew that Simmons couldn’t answer some of her more pressing questions. She’d asked the man everything under the sun since Hank left four days ago and he’d brushed off every attempt at conversation. At some point, he’d stopped answering her calls altogether and Juliet knew she’d have to sit this one out in the dark.
She didn’t know what was worse: not knowing what was going on with Hank and Solomon or sharing a cabin with Crowley who, by this point, wasn’t fond of either she or his absent colleague. Before Hank had fractured his cheekbone, Crowley had at least been amicable. Now, knowing that she’d taken his side, both he and Bosh interacted with her as little as humanly possible.
It wasn’t like Juliet couldn’t entertain herself, but it was never nice to have to live with people you knew disliked you. She had hoped she was done with that when she escaped the Aguiler household.