Chapter One
The heavy sound of the metal elevator doors closing behind her made Persephone snap her head back to check that no one stood there. She’d ridden up to the second floor alone, so she had no reason to think anyone was behind her.
But still, she looked back.
Late nights never bothered her as much as the darkness that went along with them. Working until three in the morning didn’t unnerve her, but walking to her car after her shift at the hospital always made her feel vulnerable, even if it meant she only had to walk across the bridge that connected the main building to the parking garage. She knew it was probably silly to worry since no one in the hospital’s history had ever even been mugged going to their car. In fact, if it wasn’t dark, she wouldn’t have given it a second thought.
But it was dark.
In fact, as she hurried out of the bridge and onto level two of the garage, she wished she had taken her father up on his offer to have one of his security men escort her to and from her vehicle each night.
She quickly pushed that thought out of her mind with a silent scolding for him and herself. She wasn’t a child anymore. Yes, she would always be his child—his oldest of three daughters—but she’d long passed the age when she needed anyone to guard her safety.
A twenty-eight year old woman didn’t need some guy following her around all the time. Talk about cock blocking. Her father would have sent the biggest and meanest looking man he employed. Persephone knew him far too well. He would have made her have some Cro-Magnon guy tail her day and night. She had a feeling it would have been the fulfillment of every wish he’d had since she announced she planned to move away from the estate and live on her own.
Marshall Gilmore liked to say he had more money than God, who Persephone suspected had little use for one man’s comparisons, even if he was the owner of seventeen television stations, six newspapers, and the most successful media conglomerate in the history of the world. And her father liked to throw that money around, especially when it came to getting his own way.
But Persephone hadn’t succumbed to the almighty dollar and stood her ground when she decided she wanted to live on her own and have her own career. Her parents had hemmed and hawed over her choice like she had announced she planned to give up life on this planet for a stint on Mars, dangling all sorts of offers to tempt her into staying at their twenty-five acre estate. They’d build her a home of her own if she’d only stay. It would have a private entrance away from the main house. They’d release her trust fund money in a lump sum instead of having it come to her in parts as it already did.
They offered everything under the sun, and Persephone knew her father would have put the sun on the bargaining table if he had control of it to keep her living at the Gilmore estate. What they didn’t understand was her choice wasn’t about extracting more money from them. Just by being born a Gilmore meant she’d have more than enough money for anything she’d ever want to do in life.
She chose to move away to her own two-bedroom apartment, even though it didn’t have acres of land surrounding it and even though she had not a single person to wait on her day and night there, because she wanted freedom.
The problem was at that very moment in the darkness of the Christie Medical Center parking garage that freedom she’d fought so hard for felt frighteningly lonely. And that made her feel vulnerable, something she’d hated feeling since she was a little girl.
Persephone quickly scanned level two of the garage and saw her silver BMW parked in the corner spot she tried to snag whenever she could. It meant her car had some light shining on it from the streetlight directly outside the garage. She liked to think that if anyone was lurking around that area, she’d see them because of that light.
It was probably more fantasy than reality, but it made her feel better.
The sound of her rubber soled shoes hitting the concrete and echoing around her was interrupted only briefly by the metallic sound of her keys bouncing off the tiny pepper spray can that dangled off her keychain. Tightly grasping her keys and the pepper spray, she quickly walked toward her car, her eyes darting left and right to see if anyone hid in the shadows.
Her heart pounded with every step so by the time she reached her driver’s side door, her hands shook in fear. Taking one last look around, she pressed the key fob and saw the locks pop up inside the car doors. She quickly got in and relocked the doors as she breathed a sigh of relief.
All that stress for nothing, she thought, shaking her head at her foolishness.
Easing her vice-like grip on the car keys, she stuck one in the ignition and turned the engine on, causing the pepper spray canister to knock against the steering column and make a hollow, metallic noise. But another noise caught her attention, and in a split second she looked up to see the horrible face of a strange man staring back at her in the rearview mirror.
Terrified, her heart slammed into her chest as she scrambled to grab the pepper spray on her keychain, but before she could, he reached around the seat and clamped his hand over her mouth, forcing her back against the headrest. She couldn’t breathe, and the smell of gasoline coating his hands filled her nose. She fought him, tearing at his thick, meaty fingers with her own knowing her life depended on it, but only for a few seconds before something hard hit her in the side of the head, and then everything faded to black.
* * *
Nick Hanson sat back in his chair and blew the air out of his lungs. The cards he held in his hand didn’t impress him, but he needed to win back some of the money he’d lost in the past hour. Around the table sat the usual group of men he played poker with a few times a month. They’d been a group of ten at one point, but between marriage and work assignments, tonight they were down to seven.
“Those cards aren’t going to get better just by you staring at them, Nick.”
He looked up and glared across the table at Xavier, a hacker he’d worked with in the bureau. Too cocky for his own good and younger than everyone else playing, he routinely pushed Nick’s patience, especially when they played poker.
Looking over his cards, Nick frowned. “Smart ass. Are you in a hurry or something?”
Xavier grinned. “In fact, I have a date later tonight. I’m looking forward to using your money to entertain the young lady.”
Next to him, Hunter threw his head back and laughed. The former LA detective enjoyed busting the hacker’s ass any chance he got. “You better hurry, Nick. The blow up doll store will be closing soon.”
Xavier snapped his head to his left and scowled. “Fuck you, man. When was the last time you got laid anyway? I’m betting it wasn’t even in this century.”
Nick watched in amusement as they shared insults. Even though Hunter had a few years on Xavier, nearly twenty years sounded like a long fucking time to go without sex. As their ass busting got nastier, he silently calculated that Hunter not having sex since the twentieth century would put him somewhere in his mid-teens the last time he got laid.
Hunter shook his head after Xavier once more made a crack about his sex life. “You have a strange obsession with me fucking, dude.”
To Nick’s right, Gideon came to Xavier’s defense, like usual. “You were the one who brought up the sex doll. Seems to me you have sex on the mind. Is it because you aren’t getting any?”
A Navy Seal and expert in hand-to-hand combat, Gideon had left the service a year ago. Lately, he’d spent his time working with Nick on his cases and being as big a ballbuster as his buddy Xavier. A few years older than the hacker, he always joined him when he started busting chops.
Hunter rolled his eyes, knowing better than to spar with both of them. “I have no problem talking about who I’m fucking, but something tells me it’s just the two of you who are obsessed with where everyone else’s dick is going every night.”
He looked over to his left and smiled at Roman. Of all the men around the table, Nick knew for a fact that he had no interest in Xavier and Gideon’s sex obsession. An Army Ranger, he tended to say little, preferring actions to words. At the moment, the grimace that twisted his expression told everyone he didn’t give a single fucking damn about talking sex during their card game.
“Whose turn is it to bet?” Roman asked, clearly wanting to return the focus to poker.
“Nick’s,” Xavier quickly answered, pointing at him. “He’s just hoping his cards get better if he holds them longer.”
Collapsing them into a single pile, Nick shook his head. “Fold.”
“And the reason you couldn’t say that five minutes ago?” Gideon asked in disgust as he threw a red chip into the center of the table. “Raise.”
“Fuck you,” Nick said, folding his arms across his chest. “You’ve gotten to be a royal pain in the ass since you met Xavier. You know that?”
Gideon laughed and waved off his claim. “When did you get so damn sensitive, Nick?”
Seated next to him, Marius tossed two more chips out. “Your five and up five. And get off Nick’s back. We could always go to your shithole apartment and expect you to play host with the fucking most.”
Nearly as serious as Roman, Marius, ex-CIA, shed his spook vibe when they all got together and liked to poke at Gideon and Xavier when they got going.
Standing from the table, Nick gave him a nod and a smile as Gideon chafed at his comment about his place. A typical bachelor, his apartment offered little more than four walls and a bed. They’d tried moving the game to other places, but after trying Gideon’s practically empty rooms and Hunter’s condo in a building nearly an hour away from D.C., they all decided Nick’s place in Georgetown with a poker table and enough room to fit them all worked best.
“Deal me out,” Nick said as he headed for the couch. Maybe if he sat out a few hands his luck would return.
He grabbed the remote and pointed it at the TV. Tilting his head back, he listened to some show as he stared up at the ceiling above him. Bits and pieces of words from the TV and the men behind him floated into his head, but nothing sounded very interesting.
As the hand ended and Gideon celebrated a win with his usual gloating, Nick’s phone vibrated in his pants pocket. Startled, he fished it out and looked at the screen through bleary eyes, not recognizing the number. Who the hell was calling him at just after ten at night?
He answered it curtly. “Hello.” Unlike the way most people made it sound like a question, when the word came out of his mouth this time, it sounded more like an angry utterance.
“Hello, Mr. Hanson? Mr. Nick Hanson?” a deep voice asked in a cultured way that made even those common words sound important.
“This is him,” he answered, even more tersely than he’d said hello.
“Mr. Hanson, my name is Marshall Gilmore. I’ve been told you’re just the man I should hire for a job I have,” the man said confidently, as if they’d already struck a deal on this job of his.
“Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”
A long moment of silence hung in the air before Marshall Gilmore answered flatly, “Because I’m told you’re the man to call when you need someone to go undercover.”
Nick sat up straight on the couch and focused on the TV as the man’s statement bounced around in his head. That’s who he’d been for years in the FBI, but he hadn’t had a case like that in far too long. Long enough that he’d turned to seeking out family members for old rich ladies to supplement his bank account.
Maybe wishes did come true after all.
“You’ve got my attention, Mr. Gilmore. What do you say we meet tomorrow and talk about this job of yours you think I might want?”
“I don’t have that long to wait. My daughter’s been kidnapped and gone for a week. The FBI can’t seem to find its ass with both hands, so I’d like you to come to see me tonight. If you’re wondering if this is worth your while, I’m paying three hundred thousand dollars to get my daughter back, and if you get her back safely, I assure you for the rest of your life you’ll see a handsome benefit from it.”
For that amount of money, he’d take a drive to this guy’s house and hear what he had to say. Nick hadn’t had a kidnapping case in ages, so the job already intrigued him.
“Okay. What’s the address?”
Marshall Gilmore gave him the information and then said, “Mr. Hanson, I can’t bear the thought of my daughter being hurt. They’ve had her for too long already. I don’t want to lose her to these people.”
“Give me a few minutes to get ready and I’ll be there within the hour,” Nick said as he stood from the couch to find his shoes.
“Thank you. When you get to the gate, tell the guard there your name. He’ll know to let you in.”
The phone went dead, and Nick stuffed it back into his pocket before searching for where his tie had landed hours before when he threw it off before the card game. As he did, he wondered who this Marshall Gilmore was to have a hundred grand to throw around and a guard with a gate protecting his house.
Whoever he was, he’d just made his night.
From behind him, he heard Marius say in a low voice, “Something tells me our guy Nick just got a new job.”
Nick turned around and smiled. “Someone’s got to pay for all this splendor. We don’t want to end up hanging out at Gideon’s and sitting on cardboard boxes, do we?” he joked.