chapter sixteen
She shoved the flash drive inside. The command prompt told her it would take three minutes to decrypt the files, and she wasted no time.
She took the laptop back to her room and set it on the bed. Then she opened the closet to look for something to put her things in, finally settling on a small duffel bag. She’d gathered everything together, but she couldn’t very well carry it all in a shopping bag. Still, she hesitated before taking it, but she knew what she had to do. Funny that after everything she’d done to him, she paused at the thought of stealing his duffel bag.
He’s not going to care about the bag once he realizes what you’ve done. The annoying little voice in the back of her mind just wouldn’t stop pointing out the obvious.
While the files were still opening, she packed the rest of her things. She had to be ready to move. Rafe wouldn’t sleep forever, and she was already pushing it. Maybe part of her was hoping he’d wake early and stop her from leaving. He’d tell her that he didn’t care who she was or that she’d been plotting against him from the start, that he loved her anyway and they could take on the world together.
Yeah, right.
But even as she sneered at the overly sappy thought, her heart banged a mournful beat in her chest. She could deny it all she wanted, but there would always be a part of her that wished that scenario could be real. Her stomach clenched.
She should stop the pretending. He’d hate her in mere hours.
By the time she finished shoving her clothes in the bag and had swiped all her toiletries from the bathroom sink as well, the computer was done. She clicked on the program to see just what Rafe had deemed important enough to keep under lock and key.
She understood why it had taken so long. There were so many files. Names, dates, account numbers. Her mouth fell open as she accessed document after document.
Classified files.
Diana covered her mouth as she read through profiles on foreign dignitaries and notorious crime lords from around the world. These files contained everything about the person in question, including their family members and their routines. What was all this?
As she kept reading, her stomach seized up. The people in these files were not good men. Certainly not the kind of men she wanted to have information on.
Drug lords, murderers, terrorists and human traffickers. Why would Rafe have profiles on these men? If Rafe associated with these kinds of people, he couldn’t be the man she thought he was.
Then she opened another file, and her father’s face filled the screen.
Her head spun.
Diana gasped so loudly she wouldn’t have been surprised if it woke Rafe, but she was too riveted to even notice. She stared back into her father’s eyes, confronted with the face she hadn’t seen in so long. Tears filled her eyes as that awful night came back.
It was one thing to think that Rafe had information about her father’s death, but this was too much, seeing the evidence that he’d studied her father, looked for an opportunity to hurt him. A choked whimper escaped her lips, and she was on the verge of closing the file when something stopped her. She’d come this far and wouldn’t back down now. It was time to find out exactly why Rafe had done this. What had he wanted? Was it politically motivated, or had her father just pissed off the wrong person and paid the price with his life?
Diana took a deep breath and forced herself to start reading. Just like the others, it detailed all her father’s information along with his family at the top. That was the only part that was familiar. As she read, heat flushed her body and her stomach roiled.
What the hell?
Who had written this report? The man they described was not her father. A drug trafficker? Human trafficking? Her stomach protested and bile rose in her throat. Diana clapped a hand over her mouth, afraid she’d vomit right then and there. Her father would have never done those things.
Then she moved to the next page, and her heart sank again as she scrolled through pictures of her father standing with armed men, looking for all the world like he belonged there. Then there was a picture of him with Uncle Boris, and the notation next to his name indicated that he was also a wanted criminal in several countries.
That was when Diana realized that nothing was as it seemed.
Diana closed her eyes. Of course. How naïve she’d been. Her father was one of these men. The men whom people feared.
One line on the page had her frowning. It was the report of an exchange of funds from Boris Klinkov to her father. You don’t have time to go down this rabbit hole. But she couldn’t help herself. She clicked the file name.
Boris Klinkov was a family friend. She’d grown up calling him Uncle Boris. He was involved in these horrible things too? Was anyone who she thought they were? Had her mother known?
Too sick to keep reading and too afraid to not continue, she scanned the page. Boris Klinkov had given her father twenty million dollars. In exchange, on her twenty-fifth birthday, she would be married to him, giving him the Jewel of the Sea.
She couldn’t hold the bile back anymore. She barely made it to the toilet in the hallway bathroom. Even as she emptied the contents of her stomach, her mind reeled. Her father had sold her. To Uncle Boris. The man was older than her father had been.
You can panic later. Time to run.
With shaking fingers, she took out the thumb drive and put it in her pocket. It felt like she was underwater or moving in slow motion. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to get her legs to go any faster. All she could see were the horrible things written in that report, and a million questions would start swirling in her brain. Images and memories kept coming back, things that hadn’t made sense before but suddenly had whole new meaning in this context.
Suddenly she felt like she had a target on her back. She shivered at the thought of being at the mercy of men like her father. Rafe wouldn’t be able to protect her from someone like Boris. From what she’d seen of him and on the files, he was no longer an assassin.
You can’t wait for someone to protect you, you need to protect yourself.
This whole time she’d assumed Rafe’s past was the obstacle, but she was the one related to criminals. And she’d brought them right to his doorstep. All the contacts she’d used to get her ready for this mission—her brothers’ contacts. Criminals. Maybe Uncle Boris had even helped. After all, she was soon to be his property.
Diana closed the computer, stowing it in the duffel. Once it was securely zipped, she slung it over her shoulder. Pausing in the doorway to his bedroom, she took one last look at Rafe sleeping on the bed. Her eyes took in his dark hair falling over his brow and the muscular body that was everything dreams were made of. She stared without blinking, hoping to commit the sight to memory, to burn it into her mind so surely that she’d never forget what almost was.
She needed that memory to get her through what was to come.
Chirp. Chirp. Chirp.
Rafe rolled over and tried to hit the annoying bird outside his window. It didn’t stop singing but instead just hopped over to the next windowsill. Frustrated, he tried to reach for it again but couldn’t move his arm. Panic filtered through the soft veil of comfort that he’d been wrapped in and he thrashed, trying to free himself. All he accomplished was rolling over and hitting the ground. Hard.
“Ooomph” was about all he could get out before his head started pounding.
Rafe opened one eye carefully and peered around. The room didn’t look familiar at first until he saw the legs of his dresser across the room. Why was he looking at the legs? He groaned and managed to turn over onto his back, and when the ceiling came into view, that gave him some answers. The room looked unfamiliar because he’d never seen it from the floor before.
Everything hurt, but Rafe kept his lips clamped together. His limbs were still unresponsive, so his best bet was to remain silent until whatever chemical agent that had been used on him wore off. He would examine things more carefully later to figure out how one of his enemies had managed to get so close. Transitioning into a civilian life made men go soft, but he’d been so sure that his security was tight. The idea that someone could actually get close enough to drug him was maddening. Then he remembered that he hadn’t been alone before he fell asleep, and his heart leaped.
Diana. What had they done to Diana?
Strength he didn’t know he had roared through his veins, and he managed to roll over and push up onto his arms. His head swam in a sickening wave, and he panted through his mouth, helpless, battling back dizziness and nausea. He had to fight through. He had to make sure she was safe. But once he was able to move again, he had to concede that he wouldn’t be much help to her as weak as he was, if she was even still there. Nevertheless, he pushed to his knees. It took quite a bit of effort, but he managed to stumble down the hall. Diana’s room was empty. He kept going to his office.
As soon as he walked in, his eyes went to the painting. The safe was wide open.
God. If they’d taken what was in the safe, then there was no doubt this was an ORUS job. Who the hell else would even care about the files he’d kept or go through the extreme security measures to access them? It also meant that Diana was likely already dead. A dull moan slipped from his lips as he struggled to remain upright.
Diana, his poor, sweet Diana, wouldn’t have stood a chance against an ORUS-trained hit man. Despair unlike anything he’d ever known swept through him.
He had to call Noah and Lucia. He had to warn them. Maybe they could find out who’d done this. Rafe needed to know. If it took him the rest of his life, he’d find out who’d hurt Diana and make them pay.
Then he remembered his cameras.
Anyone ORUS deemed capable of taking him on would have disabled most of the cameras, but with his training, he knew how to hide a few that might not have been found. His laptop was still on his desk, so he dragged himself over to it and used his fingerprint to boot it up. When he opened the security system and saw that it hadn’t been disabled or tampered with, he faltered. What the hell?
Even with a new Orion in charge, there was no way an ORUS agent would be this sloppy. For the first time, Rafe looked down at himself and forced the fog to clear from his mind. Nothing about this made sense. He’d been in the bed, vulnerable and unable to defend himself. So why was he still alive? What kind of job was this where they’d open his safe and take Diana but wouldn’t kill him?
He pulled up the video for the day and sped through until the timestamp showed a few hours ago. Then he saw Diana walk out of the front door with a duffel over her shoulder. Alone.
Rafe rewound the video and watched it again, searching her face for signs of coercion. Was there someone else who’d threatened her and made her leave? There didn’t appear to be anyone else in the video. Why would she just leave in the middle of the night?
Then he thought about the way he’d woken up, obviously after being drugged, and he looked back at the video. He paused it on Diana’s face.
“Who the hell are you?”
THANK YOU for reading the first book of the DEEP duet. The next book, Deeper, releases on 1/29/18.
While you’re waiting, catch up on Jonas and JJ's hilarious antics in their steamy, suspenseful novel - FORCE.
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EXCERPT of FORCE © August 2017 M. Malone and Nana Malone
Jessica Jones closed her eyes, exhausted. Day after draining day of pulling double duty while her bestie and partner in crime was on maternity leave was starting to take its toll. Like hell was she going to start complaining, though. If anyone deserved happiness, it was Lucia. Her best friend had been to hell and back and deserved the time off.
JJ could deal. After all Lucia would do it for her. Besides, JJ wasn’t letting a prima donna fashion designer run her into the ground and call uncle. She’d rather burn her Jimmy Choos first. She could handle anything their boss Adriana could dish out.
It felt like she’d only shut her eyes for mere seconds before she frowned in her sleep.
Something was wrong. Very wrong.
When she peeled her eyes open again, she was in hell.
“Oh my god,” she screamed.
But that scream was her first mistake. It meant emptying out her lungs, which meant she needed to breathe... and that meant lungs full of smoke.
It was so hot her hair plastered against her head and her sheets clung to her naked breasts from sweat. Yeah, she slept topless, so what? It had been so hot lately.
Frantic, she looked around the room trying to find the source of heat. It was so dark she couldn't see anything. But she could feel the smoke all around her, cloying and thick, wrapping around her and constricting her lungs.
“Don't panic.” The sound of her own voice out loud scared her out of her frozen state. Fear immobilizes. Anger motivates. That’s right, get pissed off!
If there was anything JJ was good at, it was being hot tempered. What the fuck was smoke doing in her room anyway? She’d just had a goddamned blowout. She needed to charge that color and cut to whatever or whoever was the source of this fire.
Move your ass girly.
She had to move because she was not dying in this room. She did not survive her past to die like this. Fuck that noise. Besides, if she died like this, Lucia would resurrect her ass and kill her all over again. After Lucia had survived being stalked and almost killed, JJ had a new appreciation for the meaning of life.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed, letting out a sigh of relief when her toes met the carpet. Now that her eyes had adjusted to the dark somewhat, she could see the faint hint of an orange glow from down the hall. Which meant the fire hadn't reached her room... yet.
But the bedroom door stood open to the hall, which was probably why she could already smell the smoke.
It was weird that the door was open. She always closed the door before going to sleep. It was one of the things Lucia’s husband had drilled into her. Noah owned a security company, and his overprotectiveness toward Lucia had spilled over onto JJ. Now she always had one of the annoying, albeit sexy, guys who worked for him trailing her to and from work, and her apartment had been subjected to a thorough security ‘review’ by Noah’s resident IT wizard. Matthias had deemed her place ‘merely acceptable.’
JJ was pretty sure they'd have asked her to move if they hadn’t known from experience that she didn't take suggestions well. The last thing she needed was some man trying to tell her what to do. Maybe Lucia was okay with that, but she wasn't interested. JJ knew from experience that she didn't want any man having control over her life. Never again. That alpha-asshole shit didn't work for her, so they could shove their over protectiveness where the sun didn’t shine.
With a quick glance at the open door, she realized it was actually lucky she'd left it open, otherwise she might not have woken up until the flames were closer. What the hell had woken her? You can think through that shit after you’re safe. Yeah, good point. She grabbed up her comforter and wrapped herself in the thick fabric, bringing it up over her head as she stepped into a pair of slippers.
How far to the door? The window might be an option if the fire escape hadn’t been welded over some years ago. She looked up and then squinted in the darkness. And then she saw the shadow in the hall. The man-sized shadow.
Fuck me. She opened her mouth to scream then reached into her bedside drawer for the nearest weapon she could find. She’d been aiming for the retractable baton she kept in the top drawer. But instead she’d come up with a gag gift from a bachelorette party a couple of years ago. A giant purple vibrator.
What are you gonna do with that? Fuck him to death? Well that was a thought.
“Who the hell are you? And what the fuck are you doing in my apartment?”
He stepped forward slightly, his body still half-hidden outside the door, and JJ raised her makeshift weapon.
“I'm here for you, Jessica. I’m always here for you.”
JJ clutched the blanket closer, and her fingers curled around the vibrator as his voice washed over her. The low tone of his words sliced through her veins. That voice. It had been so long since she'd heard that voice. She'd hoped to never hear it again, except in her nightmares.
“How did you find me?”
His chuckle was almost as terrifying as the words that followed. “I never lost you.”
JJ screamed and backed up so fast that she stumbled and fell on the bed. The comforter tangled around her and she fought against it, certain the next touch she'd feel would be the last.
Strong hands wrapped around her flailing arms.
“Damn it, you crazy woman, I'm trying to help you!”
It took a few seconds before she recognized the voice, her terror distorting it into the one she feared most. When she finally spoke, her voice was tiny.
“Jonas? Is that you?”
The comforter was pulled back away from her eyes, and Jonas’s handsome face appeared. Jonas Castillo worked for Noah’s security company and was a regular fixture in her life. He was routinely assigned to protect Lucia, and by default JJ, during the workweek. She took great pleasure in giving him hell, and he was usually cursing her name or bickering with her.
“Yes, of course it's me.”
Before she could question what he was doing there, she felt herself being lifted. She clutched his shoulders automatically, disoriented after her fall. Now she wasn't sure if that had actually happened. Had she been dreaming? It was so hard to tell.
“Jonas, did you see anyone else in the apartment?”
“Like who? Don't you live alone?”
Was that jealousy in his voice? Even under these circumstances, JJ couldn't resist the urge to screw with him a little.
“Actually I don't. We can't leave without my favorite guy.”
“Who? And if you have a boyfriend, where is he? Some help he is during an emergency.”
“Well, Fluffy has never been much help during emergencies, but he blows the best wet kisses.”
Jonas didn't pause. “I'll come back for your dog, I promise. But I have to get you to safety.”
It must have been the smoke affecting her brain, because at first JJ didn't realize what he’d said. It wasn't until they were at the front door that she understood he meant to leave.
“No! I have to get Fluffy!” JJ swatted at his massive chest. She must have surprised him because his arms loosened around her legs, giving her the room she needed to jump down.
“Damn it, JJ! This is serious. We don't have time to stop.”
“It'll just take a second.” JJ raced back to the guest bedroom and grabbed Fluffy, covering him with the comforter as she ran.
Jonas picked her up as soon as she hit the hallway and ran for the front door. They passed a crew of firefighters in the corridor outside her apartment. The smoke was thicker out here, so JJ buried her face in Jonas’s shoulder, making sure to keep Fluffy covered too.
When they got outside, Jonas set them down carefully on the grass, safely away from the building. An EMT approached, and Jonas pointed at JJ. She was going to protest, but dissolved into a coughing fit as soon as she opened her mouth. The young man frowned and knelt on the grass next to her. Then his eyes widened when her comforter slipped and she almost flashed an entire boob at him.
“Hey, eyes up, kid.” Jonas glared at him before yanking his shirt off. He put it over JJ’s head, and she maneuvered carefully to get her arms in without dropping the comforter completely. If she hadn't felt so crappy, she'd have told him exactly where he could shove it. She didn't need anyone speaking for her.
Just to annoy him, she gave the EMT a bright smile that had the young man blushing furiously. Jonas scowled at both of them.
After a flurry of activity, blood pressure cuffs, and oxygen, they finally left her alone. That's when Jonas got a good look at her again. Her and Fluffy.
“A fish? You risked your life to save a fucking fish?”
JJ scooped up Fluffy’s bowl protectively. “Fluffy is not just a fish. He’s a Japanese fighting fish. A total badass.”
Jonas looked like he wanted to strangle her. Normally that was exactly the effect she was going for, but strangely, it wasn't as satisfying as usual.
“Thank you, Jonas. For coming in after me.”
He looked as shocked as she felt by her sudden gratitude.
“Of course. It's nothing. The fire department would have gotten to you soon. I just happened to get there first when Matthias said your alarms were triggered.”
The talk of alarms brought back memories of the man she'd seen in the smoke. It had happened so fast, and she couldn't be sure what was real and what had been a dream.
“Did you see anyone in there?” At his confused look, JJ clarified, “In my apartment?”
Jonas knelt and looked her in the eye. “Was there someone in there with you, Jessica?”
It was all such a blur, and she didn't like the way he was looking at her. Noah’s entire crew was extremely overprotective, so if she said the wrong thing, she'd end up on house arrest with Jonas as her jailor. Plus, it was likely it had all been a dream. Jonas had been in her apartment. He would have seen if anyone else was there. The man in the smoke was nothing more than a shadow from a past she'd rather forget.
“No, I meant in the building. I just want to make sure all my neighbors got out okay.”
Jonas looked like he wanted to say something else, but Noah arrived just then with Lucia right behind him.
JJ accepted a hug from her friend, and that was when it really hit her.
“I guess I'm homeless now.”
Noah’s voice carried from behind Lucia. “You'll stay with us, of course.”
JJ’s eyes met Jonas’s, and she knew he was thinking about her earlier question.
“It’s for the best,” Jonas said.
She glanced over at Lucia. “Free rent and a house full of hot men. Count me in.”
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