Jaxon

Little Violet was scared shitless, but she still put on a brave front and went toe-to-toe with Jasmin. I was impressed and curious. There was no reason to lash out at Jasmin the way Violet did, which made me even more suspicious of her intentions. She was desperate and that was always dangerous.

Violet was hiding something. She thought she’d covered the shame in her eyes when Zane told the team she was the traitor we’d been looking for. She’d tried to look cavalier, but she wasn’t a good actress.

After Zane had called the President and briefed him, we’d boarded a chartered Learjet Tex had arranged and were on our way to South Sudan. I had to say, the man hooked us up; we were traveling in luxury this trip. It wasn’t often we didn’t get stuck on military transports. Two hours into the flight Violet had finally fallen asleep and I took in my fill. She was a small little thing. fun-sized and feisty. She wasn’t the type of woman that normally caught my attention, but there was something in the way that Violet moved that captured my attention.

I made my way to the front of the aircraft where Zane was going over the mission brief with Eric and Jasmin. Leo and Colin, the two other men on our team, had stayed behind at the President’s request. He’d asked to borrow them for a security detail, and Zane had agreed. Much to Linc’s annoyance, he still hadn’t been cleared for field work and was stuck at HQ with Garrett to run tech and communication for us.

“Anyone else having a problem with the false bravado?” I asked.

“It was fun to watch the billy-badass routine when she stepped to Jas,” Eric said.

“Fun? Is that what you call it? I’m still on the fence about tossing her ass out at thirty-two-thousand feet.”

“I’m not buying it,” I told them.

“We’ll know more when Tex gets back to us. The initial report didn’t say much beyond her work history. She started with the FBI, then moved to behavioral science where she worked with them more as a consultant. From what I gather she is somewhat of a human lie detector. They used her in interrogation. That’s her specialty. The CIA recruited her much for the same reason. Only there she was used to debrief returning agents. She also vetted the Level I agents going under for long-term infiltrations.” Zane stopped and huffed out a breath. “Ironically to see if they were vulnerable and could be turned.”

“Remember when we got back from Iceland and we debriefed the President? After Siles told us his contact was a woman, we’d agreed that women are often easier to blackmail.” I reminded Zane.

“As if,” Jasmin interjected.

I ignored her and continued, “Blackmail, not turn.”

“If she’s being blackmailed, the question is, who is she protecting and why,” Eric added.

“That we’ll have to wait on Tex for. I don’t think she’s going to give us any answers, and I’m not sure I’d believe her if she did.” Zane went back to his brief.

“Yet here we are trusting her with intel and planning an op around it. No one else thinks it’s weird she insisted on coming with us?” Jasmin asked.

“I don’t trust her with shit. She’s a trained liar. But, if she was sending us into an ambush why would she want to be there?” Zane looked up and handed Jasmin a map. “South Sudan is controlled by warlords. She’d be stupid to send us into a setup, be present, and think she’s walking away alive. Not to mention, she wants something Wolf has. She won’t turn on us until she has it.”

“Well, her intelligence is still in question. I reserve the right to say I told you so if I live through this cluster fuck.”

“Eye on the prize, Jasmin – getting Wolf and his men out alive.”

***

Several hours later I moved back to my seat to get some sleep before we landed. I was surprised to see Violet awake.

“Did you guys figure out if I’m lying or not?” she asked.

I didn’t bother answering, instead I took stock of the woman who might be leading me to my death. Jasmin had valid concerns. If I was being honest, I had thought them, too. Once Violet found out the team had gone on a black op, it would be easy to forge mission specifics and pass them off when no one could confirm with Wolf, or any of the other guys, where they were going. But Tex said he’d talked to Wolf before the mission. While the SEAL never gave Tex all the information, he did pass on some key details, and used him as a backup plan if the need arose. So far what Violet had told us matched what Wolf had told Tex. That’s all we had to go on at the moment.

I continued to stare at her and as I’d hoped, she was shifting in her seat, not making direct eye contact. She was uncomfortable and nervous. She was trying her best not to show it, but she was failing. The woman sitting next to me was trained to detect lies; the slightest shift in someone’s body language, an obscure movement, an unconscious tick, yet she couldn’t get hers under control. Either it was on purpose to look vulnerable or the situation she’d found herself in was emotional and personal. I was betting on the latter. She hadn’t sold anything; my gut was telling me someone had something of great value to her. Family. That was all of our biggest weakness.

“Are you married?” I asked.

“What? No.” her answer was sure and quick.

Definitely not married.

“Brothers? Sisters?”

“Why are you asking me about my family?” Deflecting, interesting.

“No reason. Making small talk,” I told her.

“Shouldn’t we be talking about what’s going to happen when we land?”

“You and Jasmin will be safely tucked in a hotel in Juba while the rest of us go hunting,” I lied, and waited for her reaction. There was no way Jasmin would go for missing the action.

“No. I’m going with you,” she protested, just as I thought she would.

“Why? You do know there is a civil war going on in South Sudan, right?”

“I’ve been trained in combat arms. I know how to shoot a gun.”

“You’re a desk jockey. And you think we’ll be giving you a gun?” I chuckled, and she flinched. “Besides, going to the range once a year to qualify does not mean you’re trained in jack shit.”

“Why wouldn’t you? Like you said, there’s a civil unrest.” She was hung up on the fact we wouldn’t give her a weapon.

“Let’s see, you helped a terrorist kidnap an innocent woman. You helped a known money launderer plan a coup. Oh, and let’s not forget when my team went in to save the girl, the house blew up, almost killing us all.”

“I didn’t know they’d planted explosives.” Her eyes drifted closed and once again, I saw shame.

I believed she didn’t know the house was rigged. She had no problem taking responsibility for the crimes she had committed.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked.

“Does it matter?”

“Yeah, it does.”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

The woman sitting next to me was very different than the woman back at the barn. Violet had gotten her way and was on her way to Africa with us, but she almost looked defeated and wary, rather than happy she’d talked her way into coming. I couldn’t understand her, and I didn’t like it. She was a jigsaw puzzle with no image to build from, hell, all the flat-edged pieces to make the border were missing too.

“I didn’t want to do it,” she whispered.

“Why then?”

“It was for the greater good.”

“I don’t believe you,” I told her. She may have believed that’s why she’d done it, but I’d bet my savings this was personal for her.

“You don’t have to. I know why I did it, and that’s all that matters to me.” The stubborn lift of her chin brought back the woman who’d first shown up on Zane’s doorstep.

“Unfortunately for you, it does matter. If you don’t want to be locked in a hotel with Jasmin standing guard, you’ll stop playing coy and tell us something.”

I knew Zane had stuck me with Violet because my specialty was extracting information. However, the woman was proving to be a pain in the ass. Her lips were sealed tighter than a dick’s hatband, which was a shame. Had I not known she was a traitor, I would’ve been thinking of a multitude of ways to get her to open her pretty mouth.

“So, what’s it gonna be Violet? Sit with Nightstalker or go hunting with the men?”