The Syndicater: A Dangerous Dark Romance (Dark Verse Book 6)
The Syndicater: Chapter 30

The idea of being a father was insane but incredible.

While he did think about being a family and starting a conversation with Zephyr, her announcement had shocked him. Not unwelcome, of course, but just shocking.

Alpha sat in the fucking study, just waiting to go back home. He was so done with being in Tenebrae. As much as he liked the place, it was too much for him. He liked the solitude of his jungle, the lush green that surrounded his compound, and the dogs that were his family. Leah was taking care of them, but now more than ever, he wanted to return because his wife was expecting their first child together. Though nothing in her body had changed yet, Zephyr was absolutely glowing, and he was happy to see her happy.

Amara had told him to keep an eye on his wife, just in case her need to pee increased in frequency, and to get it checked. He’d already scheduled an appointment with her gyno when they returned the day after.

She had confided in him the night before about her fears, not just for the baby but for her own mind. She didn’t know when the next bout of depression would suddenly hit her, and she was terrified that her hormones would harm their child. Alpha had just held her close and told her not to worry, that they would get through shit together, but the fact was, he had his own set of fears. Being a father was a responsibility, bringing a child into their world and trusting the world with them. It was too much to think about at times.

‘It’s been confirmed,’ Victor told him on the phone. He’d stepped up big time to the mantle while Alpha and Zephyr had been away, proving his merit and his trustworthiness, though Alpha was still a little skeptical. Maybe he would always be.

‘It was Hector?’

‘Yeah,’ Victor reconfirmed. ‘The autopsy reports came back. This has the Shadow Man written all over it.’

Well. Good riddance. Between Hector and Xavier being dead, both suspected courtesy of the Shadow Man, Alpha wondered what the hell was up with him for the hundredth time. It was their second last day in Tenebrae, and they were all sitting in the study, having a final meeting before they all went their way.

Dante and Amara were sitting on one couch, Tristan and Morana on another, he and Zephyr on the third, and Luna alone on an armchair. The meeting had been convened because all of them had different information, and it was time to consolidate it all.

Alpha put the phone down and looked around the room at people he had begun to consider family. ‘It was Hector. We can’t say for sure but you can guess the main suspect.’

Dante still had disbelief and anger on his face. ‘I have scanned the entire property, and all I found was a shadow near the lawn. Nothing. Who the fuck is this guy? And how the fuck did he get inside my house?’

Amara placed a hand on his arm, trying to placate him, her face marred with a concerned frown. She had been out of sorts since the morning when she discovered the photograph, more worried about her friend than her biological father. Victor had begun tracking Vin through his sources, too, now that Hector was dead and he was freer, but frankly, Alpha didn’t have a good feeling about it.

Alpha understood Dante’s frustration, though. He would be fucking pissed too, if someone broke into his home where his family lived and left behind a bloody souvenir. He looked at the photograph on the table that Amara had found. Her biological father, his throat cut clean through with a wire wrapped around it, his body slumped on a messy desk, blood all over the papers. It was a gruesome scene, one that would shake anyone who wasn’t used to seeing that kind of violence.

Tristan picked up the photo, examining it for any clues while Morana typed away on a tablet. ‘There was no breach in any of the systems,’ she informed everyone. ‘All doors and windows were closed.’

Dante gaped at her. ‘Then how the fuck did he get in, Morana? Because he did, and he left that for a reason.’

‘Have you found the party guestlist?’ Tristan asked suddenly, throwing the photo back on the table in the middle.

Morana shook her head. ‘There wasn’t one available. It must have been on paper, and it was long ago. A lot of the useless junk from Lorenzo’s time was thrown when Dante cleaned house.’

‘What about the number patterns?’ Dante spoke again. He’d shared the pattern Xander had found, thanks to the last message Vin had sent, with the numbers adding up to seventeen.

Morana shook her head. ‘It doesn’t look like a code to me. From what Vin told you, it was most possibly numbers for The Syndicate girls. The Shadow Man told me last week to get my old codes ready. For whatever reason, he wants it to be working. I’d stopped looking at it a while ago but they’re almost ready now. I’m thinking of entering the numbers into it to see if their combination leads to any result.’

Zephyr opened her mouth next to him, hesitating. Alpha wrapped an arm around her, encouraging her to speak. ‘When Hector was holding Zen and me, he called her 5057. Said she had left her friend behind.’

Left a friend behind.

5057.

Left a friend behind.

Two men.

Dark night.

Metal fence.

‘Don’t concern yourself, I’m keeping an eye on her.’

‘More than keeping an eye, I’d say. You’ve got her under your thumb.Who’s she?’

‘5057.’

‘Shit, the one who left the friend behind?’

‘Yeah. Daughter of someone important. I have my orders, and you have yours. Make sure no one replaces a thing. The Syndicate would kill us.’

‘And we never met.’

‘No.’

Something flashed in his head, a shadow of a memory teasing his brain for a microsecond before it was gone.

A headache split his head open, making him groan as he held it.

‘What’s wrong?’ Zephyr’s voice drummed into his skull from the side.

‘I think I got a flash,’ he rasped out, clenching his eye shut as the ghost pain behind his missing eye intensified. It felt like someone was cleaving it out with a spoon, the dull edge making the pain sharper. He began to pant.

‘Alpha?’

‘What did you hear, Alpha?’

‘What’s this syndicate thing, Hector?’

‘Tell me what you heard!’

‘What did you get into?’

‘What’s this 5057? Is it someone? Who was that man?’

‘Fuck, why did you have to listen?!’

The throbbing in his temples made his teeth grit, an animal noise leaving him as he held his head in both hands, breathing heavily.

‘Baby?’ Zephyr’s hand was on his back, her voice scared.

Alpha kept a hold of his head, letting his heart calm down and his brain work whatever the fuck was happening to it. Everyone thankfully stayed silent as he breathed roughly, his body shaking as his wife rubbed his back over and over. He didn’t know how long it took, but after what felt like hours, the throbbing finally subsided to a dull ache.

He exhaled, looking up to see everyone staring at him with varying looks of concern. Dante was almost up and off his seat.

‘I’m okay,’ he told them all, his voice still rough.

‘What happened?’ Zephyr asked him, and he let out another breath.

‘You got triggered,’ Amara deduced from her place, her face grim.

He gave a nod. ‘No idea why. Just got a flash of memory. The night I was attacked.’

Zephyr gasped at his side, her hand flying to her mouth. He turned to look at her, his eye taking in the heartbreak on her face. He wished he could have told her he remembered her or anything about their time together. Maybe someday, he would get another flash that would let him share that good news with her. For now, it was just this.

‘Hector attacked me,’ he told them, something they all already knew. ‘But there was another man there. I don’t remember his face clearly, but I’ve heard his voice somewhere. He was older. They’d been talking about The Syndicate, about 5057, and how she was someone important’s daughter and how she left a friend behind.’

‘Well, hell,’ Dante muttered, leaning back on the couch again. ‘This is wild.’

‘I think that’s why I was attacked,’ Alpha deduced. ‘I heard something I shouldn’t have. Maybe there was more which I can’t fucking remember.’

Everyone stayed silent, processing.

‘So it is a number for the victims.’ Morana broke the heavy silence, coming back on track. ‘Or something else?’

‘Did you look into Xander’s phone?’

Morana’s face fell. ‘Yeah. He has some calls from an unknown number once a month. They don’t last for more than a minute so it’s difficult to get data, but from the scrambling pattern, it seems like the Shadow Man.’

‘He led us to him,’ Amara added, reminding them.

‘He’s involved in everything.’ Dante ran a hand through his hair. ‘I don’t understand why everything leads to him and The Syndicate.’

‘You think he’s involved in it?’ Zephyr asked quietly.

Alpha didn’t think so, his instinct telling him it was the opposite, given the way he was working and leaving a trail of bodies of people rumored to be in the organization.

‘A few months ago,’ Alpha began, remembering what he’d heard on the ground. ‘One of my girls on the ground told me about a bunch of bodies suddenly dropping. High-profile people were killed in their homes. The rumors said it was him, but it was more activity than there ever had been before.’

‘What happened a few months ago?’ Morana mused out loud, looking up as if trying to recall information.

Dante sighed. Amara rubbed his arm. ‘We need to replace him.’

‘Can we… maybe bait him?’ Morana suggested, her eyes flickering for a split second to the only person in the room who had stayed silent throughout the discussion, not a sound from her.

Luna Caine.

Who was studiously staring at her hands, folded together in her lap, her knuckles white with how hard she was gripping herself.

Alpha felt his eye hone in on her keenly.

The Syndicate taking her, the Shadow Man showing up and sending her file, leading them to her, now breaking in here that she was there. She was the only commonality between them.

His focus on her made Zephyr look at her too, followed by Dante and Amara, who followed their gaze, Morana already looking at the girl. The last one to look up was Tristan, seeing everyone staring at his sister.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ he demanded, his voice dangerous, protective.

Alpha understood, but apparently, everyone else came to the same conclusion he had. The logic made sense to everyone else.

Morana took the brunt of it, the only person in the room immune from his wrath. ‘The Shadow Man knows your sister.’

Tristan’s gaze swerved to his sister, who sat with her jaw trembling. Alpha felt a sliver of sympathy for her. Sitting there like that under such scrutiny couldn’t be easy.

‘So?’ Tristan persisted, refusing to accept what was right in front of his face. ‘He knows all of us.’

Morana took a deep breath in. ‘I think she knows him too. None of us do.’

At those words, Tristan’s eyes sharpened on his sister. He joined the rest of them as they looked at her, waiting for her to speak. It would be ideal if she denied it, but it would be better if she admitted it, better because they would finally have some fucking answers.

Luna sat in the armchair, not fidgeting, not squirming, just utterly still and pale, keeping her eyes lowered and her hands together in that tight grip, breathing in and out and in and out again.

‘Is this fucking true?’ Tristan demanded, his voice hard, harsh for the first time with his sister.

None of them said a word, not as she flinched at the tone of his voice. Alpha bit his tongue to tell Tristan to mind his tone, that little flinch affecting him. But he stopped himself. This was too important, too big.

They all waited as she took her time, finally inhaling deeply. She finally looked up, her green eyes shimmering, and looked around at them.

Then, she opened her mouth.

‘I do know him.’

The words came out in a halting, shaky voice. Words that fell like bullets on their ears, causing all of them to tense and sit up automatically at her confession. The magnitude of it hit him in the chest. The Shadow Man, the most fearsome myth in the darkest part of the underworld, the one man even the biggest monsters feared meeting on a dark night, the one ghost who had confounded all of them, was known by this tiny petite woman with a sad soul.

And then, while they were processing the words, she dropped another bomb on them, this one even more lethal, even more impactful, with even more consequences.

Quietly, the previous tremor from her voice gone, replaced by the strength he hadn’t known she had possessed, she looked up. Her eyes stared each and every one of them in the eye with defiance he hadn’t thought her capable of, sitting up straighter than she had before, more powerful in her stance, and said three words that hit them all like a tsunami.

‘I love him.’