Sierra punches play on the recorder and then grabs the back of the kitchen stool, as if bracing herself for what comes next.
“Your wife called the Ridell offices,” a familiar male voice that I can’t quite place, says, but I know Ridell. They make military robots. “She asked questions we don’t want asked,” the man adds.
“When?” Another male voice I know to be that of Devin Marks’s asks. “What questions?”
“Today,” the other man says. “She called from a payphone, but we used voice recognition. She pretended to work for you, and tried to find out when a delivery was going to happen. How the hell does she even know about Ridell?”
“I’ll handle her,” Devin bites out.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer you’re getting,” Devin snaps back. “I don’t answer to you.”
“Wrong answer, because if the wrong people find out there’s a leak, we’re all dead. Make her go away or they’ll make you go away.” The sound of movement fills the recording. Paper. Clothing. Shuffling. “Do it my way this time,” the other man says, clearly handing something to Devin. “Use this.”
“What is it?” Devin asks.
“Poison. It won’t show up on tests. It’ll look like she had a stroke.”
The tape ends while my fury is just getting started. “That’s when I ran,” she says. “I was afraid to stay another moment.”
“You recorded this?”
“Yes,” she confirms. “He was working. I went by his office to get a check for a charity event I was coordinating. Everyone else was gone. I was terrified, but I stayed that night. I assumed he’d need to plan my murder before he made it happen. I needed to plan as well. If I had any chance of escaping, and getting my mother out of there safely, I needed time to get to the bank without him suspecting anything.”
“That meant waiting until morning,” I supply.
“Exactly,” she confirms. “And that meant I had to wait until he went to work. I had to act like nothing was wrong. Fortunately, he woke to some emergency at work and barely spoke two words to me that morning. The minute he left the house, I packed what I could, went to the bank, and then picked up my mother with thirty grand in my pocket. It was the most I could risk, what I could take without them calling Devin.”
I press my hands on the table directly across from her. “Where is your mother now?”
“I told her the truth and then put her on a cruise ship with twenty-five thousand dollars. I wanted her as far away from me as I could get her. From there, I had her get off at one of the ports, an island with a low cost of living.”
She gave her mother almost all of her money. “What island?”
“Las Terrenas, in the Dominican Republic, and I was worried about her passport being tracked, but my mother proved resourceful. She met some man who got her a new identity. She never used her passport.”
I don’t tell her how common an escape path she’s chosen, or how likely The Beast will be looking for her, and her mother, through that route. Nor how dirty most of those island officials are, and how quick they’d take a pay-off. “Who was the other man on the audio?” I ask.
“He’s your reality check. His name is Norman Casey. He’s—”
“Deputy Director of Intelligence at the CIA,” I say, the voice on the recording clicking now. “I’m aware of who he is. What is it that you suspected you knew or actually do know and about who? Aside from the fact that they plotted your murder?”
“It started with a few of Devin’s phone conversations that I overheard, but didn’t quite make sense. Until one did. He ordered the murder of a man I knew who worked inside his operation. I was in denial until the man had a car accident.”
“Before or after your car accident?” I challenge, more certain than ever that it was no accident at all.
“After,” she says, “and when I was still bedridden. When I heard him order that killing, his tone said that this wasn’t the first time. I did my research and tracked a series of apparent accidents that I could tie to him in some way, shape, or form.”
“Why were you calling Ridell?”
“I started putting together a file of documents that detailed those people that I believed had been murdered and what I thought might be illegal sales of arms to foreign governments. I was trying to tie Riddell to Devin.”
“Do you have those records?”
“Yes, I do,” she says. “I wasn’t leaving without them. I kept them in a lockbox in Colorado, but I took them with me when I ran. I got nervous, though, carrying them with me. I put them in a new lockbox in Dallas where I planned to turn them into the FBI. Obviously, that went wrong and I had to leave so quickly that I didn’t dare go after it.”
“We have men there,” I say. “I can have—”
“No,” she says quickly. “We cannot have random people involved in this.”
“My people are not random people.”
“No, Asher. No. No. No. That is everything I have on him besides this tape.”
“All right,” I say, holding up my hands. “Then we’ll go together.”
“How do you even know Norman Casey?” she says, changing the topic, and I let her. For now.
“I was SEAL Team Six,” I say. “We worked so closely with the CIA that we were—they are—often called the CIA's Praetorian Guard.”
She blanches. “You were Six? The Six?”
“Yeah. I was Six and so was Luke, but neither of us want the attention that announcement gets us. That aside, sweetheart, what you just told me explains a helluva lot.”
“What does that mean?”
“Five years ago, the CIA sent my team to Mali to recover a civilian hostage as well as a load of weapons that were supposedly stolen while being delivered to our military. That hostage was your bitch-ass whimpering Beast. Only he wasn’t a beast, then. We had to escort him through a hostile village where women and children lived. We were attacked and he freaked the fuck out and grabbed a militant’s gun. He killed a woman and two children.”
She swallows hard. “Killer. He’s a killer. I knew that. I just didn’t realize he could pull the trigger himself.”
“With ease,” I say. “And without remorse. He said they got in the way.”
“What did you do? Could you do anything?”
“We escorted him to the extraction point and I put him on the cargo plane that they sent for us. Once he was inside, I joined him, threw him against the wall, pulled my service weapon, and pointed it between his eyes. I proceeded to tell him that if I ever saw him outside of my duty, I’d kill him. Luke was the next on board and he joined me. He repeated exactly what I’d done and said. Every member of our team repeated my actions and my words.”
“What did he do?” she asks. “How did he react?”
“He threatened us. He said he’d report us. I told him that he’d murdered those people and that was a war crime, but I told him I wouldn’t bother reporting him. I’d just kill him.”
“And then what?”
“He shook like a baby, as well he should have. We all took our seats across from him. We left him in a seat alone on one side of the plane, and not one of us spoke. Not that we could over the engine noise. We all just stared him down. So you see, sweetheart. If he finds you next to me, and Luke for that matter, I promise you he’ll think twice about coming at you. Because if one of our SEAL team goes down, the rest will go after him. All I have to do is put them on alert.”
“It’s not just him,” she says. “It’s the CIA. You know that now.”
“I get it. I do. But I have friends inside the agency that I trust.”
“Like I had a friend in the FBI in Texas? I did. That’s who I went to for help. I knew he would know what to do about Devin. But he was Team Devin. He gave me up. That’s what I’m telling you, Asher. Devin’s reach is wider than you’re giving him credit for. CIA and FBI, and even broader.”
“We have the team and resources to handle him and to take him down. He needs to be taken down.”
“CIA and FBI, Asher.”
“Royce and Kara are ex-FBI and I will tell you that there isn’t a naive or stupid bone in either of their bodies. They get it. They know corruption exists. We have the right team to beat Devin Marks.”
“I need to think,” she says, standing up and pressing her hands to her face.
I round the table and catch her hips with my hands. “Every minute I give you on this, I give him.”
“I know that, but by being here, I’m the magnet that could be drawing him to you, Asher. I don’t doubt that Luke and Blake are good men, but they have families. I don’t want them hurt and one mistake, one trusted person inside your circle that’s disloyal, will get everyone killed.”
“I need you to trust me,” I say. “For now, we’ll isolate our trust to just the Walker brothers themselves. We’ll talk through the risks with them.”
“Not yet. It’s too soon. I told you. I need to think.”
“I have to call my SEAL team and alert them that there’s trouble with Devin Marks, and that means Luke, too. I need—we need them on alert.”
“Not yet.” She curls her fingers around my shirt. “What part of that do you not understand? Not yet, Asher.”
“Sierra—”
“You can’t tell me none of those SEALs are corruptible.”
“I won’t tell you that there is no SEAL that is corruptible, but my team, the men I worked with, are not. I would bet my life on it. I have bet my life on it. I don’t have to tell Luke, or any of my SEAL team, that this is about you. I just need to put them on alert that Devin Marks may need to be dealt with, once and for all.”
“Luke isn’t stupid,” she argues. “If you put him on alert about Devin Marks, he’ll know it’s about me. So I repeat: Not yet.”
Not yet.
I drag her to me. “I am trying not to push you, but ‘not yet’ is a phrase I don’t accept readily with lives on the line, including yours. We’re going to have to get by them now.”
“Let go of me, Asher.”
“That’s not going to happen. I’m all in, remember?”
“And what if I’m not?”
Anger burns in me hard and fast, and I tangle fingers in her hair. “Let’s find out.” My mouth closes down on hers, tongue stroking deep. She makes a frustrated sound and that turns to a moan and in an instant she’s kissing me back, wrapping her arms around me, melting into me, holding onto me like she’s afraid I’ll escape. But it’s her that keeps wanting to run, her that I’m not going to let escape. I’m not leaving her exposed. And that’s what she’s about to find out. “Call me him if you want, but I’m not letting you go.”
“You aren’t him,” she says, her fingers pressing into my arms. “I don’t think you’re him.”
“Prove it. Trust me.”
“I do trust you.”
“No.”
“Yes. I do. That isn’t the point.”
I cup her face and tilt her head back. “You have to let me do what I need to do.”
“I just need to breathe.”
“Breathe with me,” I say, and I cover her mouth with mine again, and that’s when I snap. When I want to own this woman like I know she doesn’t want to be owned. But I need her. I want her. I have to have her, and protect her. She kisses me like she wants the same. Like she needs me, and wants me just as fucking badly. We are wild, hot, desperate. We are all over each other, touching, licking, biting. And it isn’t long until her pants are gone and mine are down. I’m lifting her, the thick, hard length of my erection pressing inside her, all the way inside her, and she is tight and hot and soft, and strong in all the right ways. I hold her like that, our bodies connected, and she holds me. I don’t know for how long, but with her weight against me, our bodies molded close, my need for this woman burns deeper, sharper than any evil she believed Devin Marks holds. She buries her face in my neck, and she smells sweet and floral—too sweet for the war she’s now forced into. War that consumes and leaves no escape unless you fight and win. I know that feeling well, while she knows it only now. I understand that now, here, holding her, buried inside her. I understand the fear, the anger, the need to make the right decisions and the fear that you will not. And the need to escape the pressure, if only for a short while.
It’s that need that has me pumping into her and pulling her against me. She holds on, panting next to my ear, and when I feel her snap, feel her slip into this moment with me, I lose everything but her, and this, and I do not even know where we start and end. It’s a whirlwind of passion, and a near desperate grinding of our bodies, until we are both shaking, quaking, trembling.
I come back to the present with the memory of that recording, and the man who is supposed to be her husband plotting her murder. With the memory of the scar on her belly that I know was that bastard’s doing. That bastard will pay. He will hurt. He will suffer.
I bury my face in her neck and whisper, “He will burn in hell before he touches you again.”