The Sweetest Thing (Book 1) ✓

34 - Final battle

          Dax

It was like I was watching from the outside all the things happening between the time I was talking with Rebecca and getting to burst into a big mansion that had a high probability to belong to Chris Roth – one of the high ranks in his family drug cartel. All I knew was that I was ready to explode the moment I heard his connection to my sister. A sister that I was trying to keep in line so hard that she decided to just go with the big illegal fish and not listen to me and my "too positive and absolutely impossible vision for her future." Her words, not mine. What she told me was that it was hard to be good, staying away from her friends and earning legally money that barely cover her needs. When she starts speaking, making all the excuses and whining it was absolutely impossible to live like that in her 20s I knew that I had nothing left to offer her, unfortunately. When she was younger it was easier to make her see the world through bright pink glasses, make her believe that everything was possible, she just had do make up her mind and do it. And in the beginning, it worked. But then she met with a wall after a wall, stopping her from doing what was right and it became extremely hard for her to fight all her battles on her own. Even though I was always telling her that she had me in her corner. I was ready to fight her demons every day if it meant that she was going to be okay. But she didn't want to be a burden...so she decided she deserved the bad stuff happening to her, cause she somehow persuaded herself that she was bad.

When Caitie told me about all her reasons and insecurities, I felt helpless once again. Here she was thinking that she was bad and didn't deserve anything good and I had no idea whatsoever. She was just trying to play a role in front of me for my own sake, because she didn't want for me to worry about her, deciding that at least one of us should have a normal life. In her eyes, she was already a lost cause and I knew that I had a lot of work to do to finally change her mindset and make her see that she is worth it for good life too.

But before I deal with my sister and her messed up vision of herself, I needed to find my girl. I knew that she was going to help me understand the way Caitie think and find a way to break her high walls of self-loath.

When my SWAT team found out who we were going after, Max immediately made some calls to find possible locations. When we had a few of Roth's houses we tried to eliminate as many as possible, because we didn't have the resources to go to all of them. Luckily, my sister had some inside info that helped us choose one of the mansions. She heard Chris talking about a river getting closer to his house and the actions needed to stop it from flooding the building. We didn't know if he was going to take a hostage to his own home, but my sister was adamant that Chris thinks that he's invincible, so we hoped his cockiness to be as big as my sister was saying.

My whole team was ready and in full gear, driving to Chis Roth's mansion when Max got a call from our boss. He wasn't very happy that we were taking everything in our own hands, but my team leader managed to persuade him that we were going on the address just to see what's happening and if we had some proof of illegal stuff we'll talk with him, ask for legal papers from a judge and only after we had a warrant in our hands, we were going to search the mansion. I wasn't sure that I could keep the promises that Max was making, because if I saw just a glimpse of Lily, I was sure that I was going in, without waiting for some bullshit papers. And I think our boss knew that, because he finished the call with just "Don't make something extremely stupid or illegal, boys. I can't deal with searching for a whole new SWAT team."

We got as close as possible to our target and spread out in the forest around the building to survey. We didn't know how many people were in there. We didn't have blueprints for the mansion, we didn't even know if we were on the right place. Just hoped that we were. And hoped that Lily was still breathing. This was the biggest amateur job we had ever been to, but unfortunately, we didn't have any other choice.