Chapter Four
Clay
Clay Hart had spent the last two years of his career with the CIA shadowing mercenaries in Afghanistan and keeping watch over the poppy fields the CIA insisted they weren’t harvesting in secret and selling to U.S. drug companies desperately in need of poppy latex. He had learned to blend in, to move about unobserved, and to become part of the shadows until the moment was right to reveal himself.
His superiors had hesitated to send a blue eyed, blond haired operative into the Middle East to “blend in” but Clay had quickly proved that their worries were groundless. He was never made. He never missed his mark. He never failed to get in, get out, get the job done, and do it all without being seen.
But Harley had seen him.
He’d felt her eyes on him as he’d bent over the bed of the truck, wondering what the fuck he was going to do if she decided to come over and say hello. He was a different man than the person she’d known, his heart empty and his soul dark from too much time spent staring into the void, but his face was the same.
She would have recognized him and then he would have had to explain himself. He would have had to come up with a lie that would convince her to drop her guard long enough for him to inject the sedative, and he wasn’t sure he would have been able to pull it off.
He was a master at making lies sound like the truth, but he had never lied to someone he hated the way he hated the woman hidden under the tarp in the bed of his truck.
Clay leaned over, eyeing the lump lying motionless beneath the thick gray plastic before turning back to the moonlit ocean stretching into the distance in all directions. The sedative should keep her knocked out for at least ten hours, more than long enough for the ferry to reach Ko Pha Ngan. From there, they would take his private boat to one of the smallest of the south Thai islands, an unnamed patch of land home to one of the CIA’s inoperative black sites.
Black sites—secret international prisons where the CIA locked away people they didn’t want to attract attention on U.S. soil—were fewer in number than they used to be, but they were still around. This one had closed a year ago but had been left intact, ready for reopening at a moment’s notice. The lights were still on, the water running, and the emergency bunker was stocked with enough canned goods to last a small prison population several months.
He and Harley should be more than comfortable.
Or at least he would be comfortable. Her comfort depended on how quickly she gave him what he wanted.
Clay glanced up at the night sky, lips twisting in a bitter smile. If he’d known that Harley had Jasper on the island with her, things would have gone down differently. But every still he’d captured from the bank security camera in the village had shown Harley alone. When he’d learned that she’d chartered a plane from Ko Tao to Bangkok, he had anticipated having to deal with one woman. One woman who would be easily put down with a tranquilizer dart and shuffled into the bed of his truck.
The airstrip was only for private use; so few planes came in or out that there wasn’t even an air traffic controller to monitor the area. Recon on the strip had assured Clay that the only person who might observe him kidnapping Harley was the pilot waiting in the plane and he wouldn’t be able to get across the field fast enough to stop Clay from driving away.
When a little blond boy had tumbled out of Harley’s car, followed by a tall man with dark hair, Clay had been forced to put away his stun gun and reassess the situation. He wasn’t sure how he was going to explain to the son he’d never met why they would be building a life together without his mother in the picture, but he knew he couldn’t let Jasper’s introduction to him involve being yanked into a truck after seeing his mother and her boyfriend collapse onto the ground.
That was the kind of thing that scarred children for life, and Clay was sure the poor kid was plenty scarred already. After being raised by a sociopath, there was no way Jasper could have survived completely intact. But he was only six years old, still young enough to get help, get healthy, and have a normal life.
Clay had only known about Jasper for six months, but six months was long enough for him to realize he wanted to give his son the world. And if not the world, then at least a chance to grow up without being haunted by the ghosts of his mother’s mistakes. As soon as they were back in the States, he and Jasper would go to therapy for as long as it took to put Harley Mason and the shit she’d put them both through far behind them.
Now it was just a matter of getting Harley to cooperate.
The ferry landed a little after two in the morning. By three, Clay had Harley tucked away in the hold of his fishing boat and was headed south. They docked at the black site’s hidden cove just as the sky was graying, and by sunrise, Harley was tied to a cot in one of the officer’s cottages.
For the first time since carrying her to his truck, he had a chance to study her and see how she stacked up against his memories.
She was still beautiful, her long brown hair framing a face that belonged on a 1950s movie star, with a plush mouth and a chin that came to a sharp point, making her look almost feline when she smiled. She was in better shape than she’d been when they were younger—there were defined muscles on the arms stretched above her head—but still a little too thin, lending her the same air of fragility she’d always had. That delicacy had made it easy to believe her when she’d claimed that people had hurt her.
But she’d been the one doing the hurting. She was a monster, a devil with a pretty face, the kind of evil you never saw coming until your life was shattered and by then, she was already gone, moving on to her next victim.
But not this time.
This time, one way or another, Harley was going to pay for her sins.
Clay settled onto the small couch beside the bed, threaded his fingers together, and watched the morning sun creep across the white sheets, waiting for Harley to wake up and realize there was a bigger, scarier creature in the jungle.