Chapter 17

Everly pulled her car into the first free space in Landry’s apartment complex. It was probably a little early for him to be home from work, but his place was on the way from her apartment to the SWAT compound, so she figured she’d stop there first and check. If not, she’d head to the compound.

She could have simply called and found out where he was, but the fact was, she was too scared to call. What if he saw her name on the call screen and didn’t answer? Or what if he did answer, and she couldn’t figure out what to say? No, this was something she needed to do face to face.

She grabbed her purse and got out of her car, groaning when she realized she was so rattled she hadn’t even parked straight. What the hell did it matter? She probably wouldn’t be here very long. Regardless of what Jayna said about Landry being as hopelessly connected to her as she was to him, she wasn’t going to delude herself into thinking their conversation would be all sprinkles and rainbows. It was going to take a long time to repair the damage that had been done to their relationship.

She looked around as she crossed the parking lot, but didn’t see Landry’s Jeep. That didn’t mean anything. The parking area wrapped around three sides of the complex, so he could be parked anywhere.

Everly hesitated when she got to the entrance to the building. Maybe she should have taken Mia up on her offer to come with her for moral support.

“You want me to come with?” Mia had offered when Everly told her she was going to see Landry. “I could sit in the car and wait for you, if you want?”

Everly had thanked her, but told her that she could do it alone. Now, she wasn’t so sure. She squared her shoulders anyway and walked inside.

Her steps slowed as she approached Landry’s apartment again. She had no idea what she was going to say to him. On the way over, she’d tried to rehearse something. Most everything she came up with started with some variation of I’m sorry, but none had sounded good enough to really use.

She took a deep breath and reached out to ring the bell, but stopped when she saw that the door to his apartment was already partially open. That was so like Landry. He probably hadn’t bothered to push it all the way closed.

Everly almost rang the bell anyway, but then realized it would probably be a waste of time. If a werewolf’s nose was as good as Jayna had said, Landry probably already knew she was out here, hesitating like some criminal. So why the heck was she still standing here? If she was going to do this, she would have to walk in his place first.

She pushed open the door and walked in, closing it quietly behind her. She was about to call out his name when she heard a noise coming from Landry’s bedroom. She walked across the living area and into the room. She took in the big bed with the covers hastily tossed up over the pillows before she caught sight of movement to the right. Someone was leaning into the closet. And it wasn’t Landry.

Whoever he was, he must have sensed her behind him because he stopped whatever he was doing and jerked up, spinning to look at her.

Her eyes widened when she saw that it was Jim. He gave a start, almost falling back into Landry’s neatly organized SWAT and police uniforms. If he hadn’t thrown one arm out to grab the edge of the closet with one free hand, he would have.

Everly stared at the green rectangular block in his other hand. She didn’t know what it was, but she saw the word Demolition written on it.

“Everly,” Jim said in a tone of voice that didn’t do a thing to help her relax. “What are you doing here?”

What was she doing here? What was he doing here?

She would have asked, but then she caught sight of the duffel bag in the closet. It was unzipped, and there were more of those green blocks inside. Why would Jim put something that looked like a bag of explosives in Landry’s closet?

Alarm bells rang so loudly in Everly’s head she could hardly think. She backpedaled as Jim took a step toward her.

“Everly, this isn’t what it looks like,” he said.

When someone said, this isn’t what it looks like, it was always exactly what it looked like. Heart pounding, Everly turned and ran for the front door.

Jim’s footsteps were loud behind her as she ran into the hallway and raced for the stairs. She only had to make it to her car. Then she could call the cops.

Everly didn’t make it to the top of the stairwell before Jim caught up and gave her a shove in the back. She barely avoided flying headlong down the flight of steps, but didn’t avoid the concrete support column off to the side. She lifted an arm to protect her face, but still hit the column so hard that every ounce of air in her lungs exploded. The pain was immediate, intense, and everywhere.

The impact stunned her so much, she couldn’t even scream. Then Jim was dragging her down the stairs toward the parking lot, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to stop him.

* * *

Cooper sat on the workout bench in the small weight room the SWAT team had put together in the training building. It could hold only about six or eight of his teammates at a time, but it had a lot of weights, and right now, that was all he cared about.

“One more set,” he announced, wiping the sweat out of his eyes, then dropping back on the bench and wrapping his hands around the heavily loaded barbell.

Brooks didn’t say anything—one of the benefits of working out with him—as he took up point at the head of the bench to spot him again.

Cooper lifted the weights off the rack with a growl. The thick bar flexed and bowed, but he ignored it as he slowly lowered the bar to his chest and let it rest there for a moment before shoving up with an explosive grunt. He held the four-hundred-and-twenty-five pounds at arm’s length for a second and let it come back down before doing it all over again. He didn’t cheat the exercise by letting the weight bounce off his chest each time it came down, either. He was here for the burn, not the number of reps he could do.

He’d come back to the compound after seeing Jim, relieved that he didn’t have to worry about his friend being involved in all this bomber crap anymore. But without Jim to focus all his attention on, he was left with only one other person to fixate on—Everly. He couldn’t even remember how many times he’d almost headed out to his Jeep so he could drive by her place and make sure she was okay. He’d controlled himself, but only because he knew Everly would freak out if she caught him snooping around. She’d made it pretty fucking clear she didn’t want to have anything else to do with him. Hell, now that she knew a knife to the heart would kill him, she’d probably send those psycho-ass brothers after him to finish what they’d started.

“Dude,” Brooks said. “You might want to put more weight on the bar because this obviously isn’t enough.”

Cooper looked up to see Brooks grinning at him. That was when he realized his arms, shoulders, and chest muscles were burning like hell. He racked the weights and sat up. “How many reps did I do?”

Brooks shrugged as he came around to take his turn. “I don’t know. I got tired of counting—around forty.”

Cooper stood and moved around the bench into the spotter position. “Yeah, sorry about that. I’m a little preoccupied.”

Brooks laughed in that deep, rumbling voice of his. “You think?”

Cooper was going to mention that he liked Brooks better when he wasn’t talking so much, but he didn’t get the chance because Alex walked in.

“Hey Cooper, you have some visitors at the gate.”

Unless one of them was Everly, he wasn’t interested. “I’m not really in the mood to talk to anyone. See if you can get rid of them.”

Alex snorted. “I think you might want to reconsider. They have guns.”

Cooper frowned. Who the hell would be bold enough to come to the SWAT compound toting weapons? There were only four people he could think of who would be that stupid—Everly’s brothers. Swearing under his breath, he strode out of the weight room. Alex and Brooks followed him to the front gate, clearly intending to give him backup if he needed it.

Tristan, Armand, Giles, and Claude were waiting on the other side of the chain-link fence, looking pissed off as hell.

“Where’s our sister?” Armand demanded, his hand resting on the butt of the pistol tucked in the front of his belt.

A twinge of panic zipped through him. “I haven’t seen her in two days. Is she okay?”

The four Danu brothers looked at one another questioningly, but it was Tristan who answered him.

“We went to see Everly, hoping to cheer her up, but Mia said she’d left for your place over two hours ago. When we went over there to make sure she was okay, we couldn’t find her. We found her car though.”

A part of Cooper’s mind wondered how the brothers had even known where he lived, but he brushed that off as unimportant.

“What do you mean, she’s not there?” Cooper growled. “Did you search around the apartment complex?”

Tristan nodded. “She’s not there.”

Cooper threw Alex a quick look. “Open the fence.”

Not waiting for a reply, he turned and ran to his Jeep. Brooks fell into step beside him, jumping into the passenger seat without a word. Figuring Alex would want to come too, Cooper paused just long enough for him to lock the gate and hop in the back.

Alex grabbed onto the roll bar as Cooper sped away from the SWAT compound. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know that anything is wrong.” Cooper glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Armand’s minivan chasing them. “But my gut has been shouting at me all day to go check on Everly, and I’ve been ignoring it.”

Fifteen minutes later, he squealed to a stop in a space only a few down from Everly’s car. Behind him, Armand stomped on the brakes and brought the minivan from hell to a smoking stop a few cars farther down. The Brothers Stupid jumped out and immediately headed for his apartment. Cooper, Alex, and Brooks caught up before they took two strides.

“You just going to keep it running like that?” he asked as he raced ahead and bounded up the stairs three at a time.

“It’s a frigging minivan,” Armand shouted back. “Who the hell would steal it?”

There was that, Cooper agreed.

He was so desperate to get into his apartment he probably would have kicked in his own door, but someone had already done it. Everly’s brothers no doubt.

“Sorry about the door,” Tristan said.

Everly’s brothers piled in after Cooper, looking around his apartment like they expected her to jump out from behind the couch. His nose immediately told him she’d been there—and so had Jim.

But how had they gotten in his apartment? Neither had a key.

Suddenly, it all came together in one sickening punch to the gut. Jim promised he’d go see Dennis, but instead, he came here. Cooper wasn’t sure why Jim had broken in, but he could think of only one reason his friend would have had blown off meeting with Dennis—because he really was the bomber. Shit. He didn’t know how Jim had been able to lie to him so convincingly, but his friend had played him for a fool. How the fuck could he have been so wrong? Because he’d been desperate to believe anything his friend had told him, not to mention so messed up about Everly that he hadn’t been thinking straight.

But why the hell had Jim grabbed Everly? Since her car was here, and she wasn’t, it only made sense that she’d gone with him. And Cooper’s gut told him she hadn’t gone willingly.

“Shit,” he swore.

Armand glared at him. “What is it? Where’s Everly?”

“I don’t have time to explain,” Cooper said.

Understatement there. Now that Jim knew Cooper was on to him, it was reasonable to assume his friend wouldn’t waste any more time going after Ryan North. If Cooper found the former EOD company commander, he’d find Jim. And if Everly wasn’t with him, Cooper would make Jim tell him where she was. And if Jim hurt her, Cooper was going to kill him, friend or not.

He turned to head for the door, but the Brothers Stupid blocked his way, their faces set like they thought he was full of shit. If they didn’t move, this time he would hurt them.

“Cooper, something’s not right here,” Alex said.

Yeah, no shit. He opened his mouth to say as much when Brooks interrupted him.

“Cooper, we’re about to have company.” And from the tone in his voice, that company wasn’t friendly.

Before Cooper could move, Dennis and his FBI partner, along with three more FBI agents and four DPD uniformed officers burst into his apartment, guns drawn and aimed at him.

Cooper stared. “What the hell, Dennis?” While he was pretty sure they wouldn’t shoot him, he definitely decided he didn’t like the feeling of being on this end of a gun. “Do me a favor and point those fucking guns in another direction, would you?”

“No can do, Cooper,” Dennis said.

Weapon still trained on him, Dennis walked over and pulled Cooper’s gun out of the holster. Then he leaned down and yanked out Cooper’s backup piece as well.

“What’s going on Dennis?” Cooper asked again. He was on the edge of losing his patience. He was wasting valuable seconds with this shit when he needed to be out there looking for Jim. The mere thought that Everly was in danger had him spinning like the Tasmanian Devil on caffeine. “I’m in kind of a rush, so I don’t have time to hang around and chat.”

“That’s too bad Cooper, because I can’t let you leave until I look around your place and ask you a few questions,” Dennis said.

Cooper’s eyes widened. “You’re searching my apartment? What the hell for?”

Dennis regarded him with a look that could only be called disappointed. “Do you own a solid black duffel bag?”

The question took Cooper completely by surprise. “Um, yeah. It’s one of my work bags. It’s in the closet in my bedroom. Why?”

“Wait here,” Dennis ordered as he walked past Cooper to head that way.

“Oh shit,” Alex muttered.

Before Cooper could ask Alex what the hell that was about, Dennis came back out of the bedroom, the duffel bag in one hand and a block of C-4 in the other.

Cooper stared. What the hell?

“And we’re fucked,” Alex said.

“That’s not mine,” Cooper told Dennis.

He realized how incredibly stupid that sounded even as he said the words. How many perps had used that exact same line with him?

But Dennis didn’t seem to be listening anyway. He handed the bag to his partner, then holstered his gun and took out a pair of handcuffs. He read Cooper his rights as he pulled his hands behind his back and snapped the metal around his wrists.

“Dennis, you know this is insane, right?” Cooper asked.

“All I know is that we got an anonymous tip a couple hours ago from someone who said they saw you carrying a black duffel bag possibly filled with explosives into your apartment. And what do you know? The C-4 that I found in there is the same lot used in the bombings.”

“That’s bullshit,” Cooper snapped. “That C-4 isn’t mine.”

But now he knew what Jim was doing in his apartment. One of his best friends in the world was framing him, not only for the bombing, but murdering a fellow DPD officer. Jim must have grabbed Everly because she saw him do it.

Dennis looked for a minute like he wanted to believe him, then his mouth tightened. “Maybe not, and if it isn’t, we’ll get it all straightened out at the FBI office.”

Everly could be dead by then. “I don’t have time to go straighten this shit out. Someone very important to me is in trouble. I need to find her—now!”

“Not going to happen, buddy,” Dennis said, nudging Cooper toward the door.

Cooper tensed, balling his hands into fists so he could break the cuffs. He’d probably end up getting shot a few times, but as long as they didn’t hit him in the head or the heart, he’d be fine.

Tristan locked gazes with Cooper then nudged his oldest brother. “We can’t let them arrest Landry,” he whispered. “He’s the only one who can find Everly.”

Armand looked at Tristan incredulously. “You believe him?”

Since pushing Cooper toward the door wasn’t working, Dennis gripped his arm and tried to drag him. Cooper dug in his heels.

“Yes,” Tristan said softly. “Landry loves Everly as much as we do. More, if that’s possible.”

Armand looked at the cops, then at Cooper. “You’d better be right about this,” he said to Tristan.

Then before the feds or cops could stop him, Armand drew back his fist and punched Dennis.

There was a single second of stunned silence, then it was a free-for-all as Alex, Brooks, and Everly’s other brothers jumped into the fray and started swinging.

The fight would end with her brothers and his pack mates getting arrested for sure, but they were willing to risk it so he could save Everly. He wasn’t going to let their sacrifice go to waste. Cooper just prayed nobody started shooting.

Lifting his shoulders, Cooper snapped the links between the handcuffs, then turned and ran into the bedroom. He leaped for the big window beside the bed, twisting in mid-air so his shoulder hit the glass first. The window shattered, the noise echoing in his ears as he hit the ground two floors below.

He rolled to his feet and hauled ass around the building, heading for his Jeep. But then he skidded to a stop. There were four cop cars right behind his vehicle. He was never getting out of there.

Armand’s minivan, on the other hand, was still sitting in its space all nice and lonely with the engine still running.

Cooper dashed across the parking lot and jumped in, squealed out of the parking lot, and headed for the Triple S-I office and Ryan North, praying Jim didn’t get there first.

* * *

Everly had barely been aware of where they were going when Jim had grabbed her on the stairwell. By the time she’d come out of her impact-induced fog, she’d been taken to some kind of self-storage place and tied to a chair with a thick length of rope. She didn’t know where they were, but the sounds of jets passing over told her that they were close to the airport. Jim was on the far side of the room, leaning over a table, a soldering iron in his hand.

“Don’t bother screaming,” he said quietly. “No one will hear you, and it will only make me jump, which would probably get us both blown into a big pink mist.”

Between the block of explosives Jim had been holding back at Landry’s apartment and the disgusting visual he’d just provided, it wasn’t hard to figure out what her kidnapper was doing—he was making a bomb.

Besides what she’d seen on the news, Everly hadn’t known much of what was going on with the bombing case, except that Landry had been helping the FBI, and that he didn’t like to talk about it. But she never would have dreamed in a million years that Landry’s friend was the bomber.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked softly.

Jim didn’t say anything for so long that Everly thought he was going to ignore her. But finally he put down the soldering iron and turned to look at her.

“Did Cooper ever tell you about how our friends got killed in Iraq?” he asked.

She nodded, trying to remember exactly what Landry had said, and what it had all meant. “He said that a secondary device had blown up in the safe area while you were dealing with the first bomb. He told me that the final report said the deaths were the result of hostile actions.”

“He got some of it right.” Jim snorted and turned to pick up a pair of pliers. “I did go downrange to work on an IED, and a secondary device did kill our friends, but that’s about all the official report got right.”

Jim stopped, his brow furrowing as he leaned closer to the device he was making. Everly wondered if it was wise to keep him talking. She had no idea what he had planned for her—and would prefer if she never found out. Better to keep him talking.

“Then what happened?” she prompted.

Jim let out a short laugh. “I left four of the unit’s soldiers and our commander—Lieutenant Ryan North—in a good safe area while I headed downrange. But the LT decided to move the safe area to a place with better shade so it would be more comfortable. He moved to the same place that another EOD team had used just a week before, something the insurgents hoped we’d do. It was a trap. An IED was planted there, and that’s how those three guys died. The enemy didn’t kill them—Ryan North killed them.”

Everly could see how he might think that. “Couldn’t it simply have been a stupid mistake on his part?”

Jim threw something down on the table with an oath so loud it made Everly jump, practically knocking over the chair she was tied to. “If that was the case, why’d he tell the investigation team I put them in that location? And why did he pay off the only other survivor of the explosive to say the same thing?”

Everly stared. Landry hadn’t said anything about that—obviously, he hadn’t known. “North paid someone to lie to cover up what really happened?”

Jim’s hands were shaking so badly he had to grip the edge of the table to steady them. “Yeah—Specialist Neal Christian. Of course, I didn’t find that out until a couple months ago when Christian called me and told me what he’d done. At the time, all I knew was that two people I trusted lied about me and destroyed my reputation, my career…my life.”

Maybe it would have helped if she had grown up around a military family and could understand how these people thought, but right then, none of this was making any sense.

“All of that just to cover up a mistake?” she asked. “That’s insane.”

“That’s because it was never about covering up a mistake,” he said bitterly. “It was about making sure Ryan North stayed in Iraq.”

Okay, that was even more insane. “Why would anyone in their right mind want to stay in Iraq?”

Jim started pushing small silver tubes inside lengths of larger steel pipe. “Because North had gotten himself sent to Iraq so he could help some people win service contracts from the army. He never spent any time learning how to be a good EOD tech. He was more interested in working deals with all those contractors over there. He figured that by helping to get bigger contracts and sweeter deals, they’d give him a little something on the side.”

Jim kept working on the bomb, running wires from pipe to pipe as he gestured at a cardboard box full of papers on the floor. “Of course, I didn’t know any of this until Christian brought me that box of stuff there. Turns out Christian couldn’t live with what he’d done any longer, but he was too much of a coward to do anything about it. He drove down to see me, dropped all this shit in my lap, then walked out and hung himself a few days later. That’s when I knew I had to do something. If I didn’t, North would get away with everything.”

Everly frowned. “If you have all that evidence, why didn’t you take it to the police or the army?”

Jim laughed again, and there was a really scary edge to it this time, like he was close to losing it. “Because the police don’t care about why a bunch of soldiers died in a foreign country, and the army only wants to bury crap like this. No one was ever going to do anything about North unless I did. That’s when I decided to get out of the army and kill him. A bomb seemed like the most appropriate way for him to go.”

The cold, emotionless way Jim said it convinced Everly more than all the bomb components scattered about the table that he was flat-out insane.

“Do you have any idea how hard it actually is to kill a particular person with a bomb?” Jim asked almost conversationally. “If you just want to go out and kill anyone who wanders by, it’s easy, but if you’re aiming for a particular person? Well, that’s hard as hell. I showed up in town last week assuming I’d get my explosives, build a simple car bomb, kill North, and then find a new job here in Dallas within a couple days.”

Jim never stopped working on the bomb as he talked. “But then I found out that North lived in a fancy condo apartment, with secure parking, guards on the doors, and cameras everywhere. I had to give up the idea of getting a bomb onto his personal vehicle. There was no way to get into his condo without a hundred people seeing me. And the parking garage where he works is even worse.” He shrugged. “I thought I’d come up with a perfect plan to get him as he drove into the garage near his office, but then that cop showed up out of nowhere and set off my bomb too early.”

Jim started yanking on the wires he was twisting together so hard that Everly flinched every time he moved. This crazy guy was going to kill himself if he wasn’t careful, and he’d end up taking her with him.

“The second bombing attempt was rushed, I admit,” Jim continued. “I couldn’t get close enough to the entrance to his office because of the cameras, so I ended up putting it as close as I could. It wasn’t close enough though.”

Jim leaned over and picked up a piece of black material from the far side of the table. She couldn’t see what it was, but he attached the bigger metal pipes to the material.

“But this time is going to be completely different,” he said softly as he worked. “This time, I won’t have any problems getting close enough.”

Everly shuddered. She definitely didn’t like the flat, dead look Jim got in his eyes as he said that last part.

“Why were you at Landry’s place?” she asked, trying to keep him talking. “Why were you putting those explosives in his closet?”

Jim laughed. “Because Cooper is too damn smart for his own good—always has been. He started getting the idea in his head that I was involved in all this. I got him off my case, but only for a few hours. He wanted me to talk to the FBI today, and I don’t have time for that. North has a reservation in a couple hours at the fancy restaurant in his condo building. It’s one of the rare chances I’m going to have to get close to him, and I couldn’t have Cooper showing up and getting in the way. So I dropped an anonymous tip to the FBI telling them that Cooper is storing explosives in his apartment. He’s probably been arrested by now.”

Everly gasped. The thought of the FBI arresting Landry and treating him like a criminal made her so mad she wanted to scream. “How could you do that to Landry? My God, you saved his life!”

Jim glanced at her. “Don’t worry about your boyfriend. I’m sure the feds will let him go at some point, especially after I kill North. But until then, at least he won’t be in the way.”

He adjusted something on the bomb, then lifted the black material off the table and held it up. Her heart began to race when she realized it was a vest.

She watched in horror as he slipped his arms into it and settled the weight on his shoulders. He must have liked the way it felt because he smiled. Oh God. If he was wearing explosives strapped to his chest, it was because he didn’t plan on living through the next attack on Ryan North.

“Why did you kidnap me?” she asked.

“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,” Jim said. “I never would have done it if you hadn’t shown up at Cooper’s place. But now that I have you, it’s sort of serendipitous. I could use your help.”

“How?” she asked, even though she didn’t want to know.

Jim smirked at her. “That restaurant I mentioned? Well, it’s kind of fancy, and a guy walking in there alone might attract attention. But with you on my arm, I’ll be able to waltz right in.”

She shook her head. “I’m not going to help you kill anyone.”

He laughed. “Sure you will. Or I’ll go down to the FBI field office and figure out where they’re holding Cooper, then blow him up instead of North.”

Everly’s heart skipped a beat. She didn’t know if a werewolf could be killed by a bomb, and she wasn’t ready to find out. Considering how much Jim hated North, she didn’t think he’d make good on his threat, but she wasn’t sure. Jim had said the one thing that would get her to do anything he wanted.

“If I help you get into that restaurant, you’ll let me go and won’t try to hurt Landry, or anyone else, right?” she asked.

“Of course I’ll let you go,” Jim said. “I have no interest in killing anyone but North.”

If she went along with him, maybe she’d be able to alert someone at the restaurant and stop the bombing before it started. But as she watched him slip a suit jacket over the explosives vest, she wasn’t sure her plan would work. When he buttoned the single button on the front of the jacket, you couldn’t see anything that indicated Jim was wearing a bomb. What was she going to do, shout out that he was a bomber right in the middle of a crowd?

Jim arched a brow in her direction, like he wanted her to tell him how good he looked. Everly only glared at him. He might have been a great EOD tech and Cooper’s friend, but that had been a long time ago. Now, he was nothing more than a cold-blooded killer.