“Who lives here?” she asked, looking around. For all the signs of life, there was hardly anything moving around out there. A few birds. A little rabbit hopping out from under a bush as they walked up the gravel path to the porch. There were a handful of cars out there, both at the curb and in driveways, but Sledge glanced her way and only shook his head ever so slightly before unlocking the front door and stepping aside so she could go into the house. She guessed her questions would be answered once they were inside and he was sure she was safe.
It seemed like there were still plenty of opportunities for surprises though since a girl with curly blonde hair hopped up from the sofa the second Marnie entered. She was pretty, young, and completely unexpected.
“Who are you?” Marnie backed up, bumping into the brick wall that was Sledge’s chest.
His hands landed on her shoulders. “Don’t worry about it. She’s a friend.”
“You’re sure about that?” Even though the girl smiled that didn’t mean much. Not if she was a trained assassin focused on killing her targets.
“Do you think I’d expose you to anybody who’d pose a threat?” he asked with a faint snicker. “This is Kara Collins. She was one of our clients not long ago.”
“Hmm, and you lived to tell the tale?” Marnie asked, her brows lifting. It was supposed to be a joke, but she got the sense that it was the wrong thing to say. The very wrong thing. Sledge stiffened behind her, and she heard the breath catch in his throat.
Kara let it roll off her back. “I did. And so did my sister, even though she was the one who was trying to kill me. They made sure to protect her too. They’re pretty special.” She gestured to an open doorway. “Your bedroom’s all set up with clean sheets, the whole thing. I got here a little while ago and managed to get that done.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” Marnie whispered with a sinking heart. First, she’d assumed the girl was there to hurt her. She’d then made a stupid joke that only made things more uncomfortable. Now, she found out Kara had gone out of her way.
She smiled. “It’s nothing. Believe me. Listen, I know how this feels. I’ve been in your shoes. And I know how much I wanted somebody who understood what I was going through—not one of the guys, even though they’re nice and everything. Someone like me. A civilian, you could say.”
Yes, that was a good way to describe it. That was exactly how it felt dealing with this team. Like Marnie was a civilian and they were the professionals, and it was better for her to stay out of their business and let them do what they did best. She’d already made the mistake of thinking she knew better, of making this all about her.
Sledge was still standing behind her, and to her surprise, he backed further away rather than following her into the living room. “I better get to headquarters.”
It was like somebody had dumped ice water over her head. “What?” she blurted out, horrified. “You can’t be serious. You’re going to leave me here?”
Either he was used to her reacting this way by now or beyond caring. Either way, he let her fear roll off his back. “I won’t be gone forever. I do have to get to headquarters, though. The team needs to meet up. But I’ll be back, I promise.”
“And I’m not going anywhere,” Kara assured her. “Maybe we’ll find something decent to watch on TV.”
Right. That was what people did the day they’d almost died. They binge-watched TV.
No matter what she said, it wouldn’t be enough to stop Sledge. She knew it. He had things to do—she wasn’t the center of his universe. She told herself she didn’t want to be either, but that felt like a lie.
“It’s okay,” Kara assured her, taking a seat on the sectional sofa. “He’ll be back. Believe me, as protective as these guys are, he won’t leave you alone for long. That’s just how it is.”
“You seem to know them well. Do they always get so close with their clients?” She sat at the other end of the sofa, kicking off her shoes and tucking her feet under her. It was a habit, maybe a survival mechanism. Something to help her feel comfortable and normal.
“No, not always.” Kara’s cheeks went pink. “I’m… with Jace. We’re together.”
“Oh! Oh, that’s great. Okay. Now I get it.” Marnie slapped her forehead. “Sorry. I’m a little slow on the uptake sometimes.”
“Not at all. Don’t worry about it.” Kara settled back against the cushions. “You’re in good hands. Sledge is a great guy. They’re all special.”
“They’re a little intimidating, too,” Marnie murmured, then blushed. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be talking that way.”
“You’re not hurting my feelings any,” Kara chuckled. “It’s cool. You can be honest. It’s like a whole other world, dealing with this sort of… situation. Whatever you wanna call it.”
“It is,” Marnie agreed. “It really is. I feel like I’m in a foreign country, and I don’t know the language or any of the customs.”
“Understood.” Kara’s smile twisted itself into a grimace of sympathy. “It’ll be okay. Nobody expects you to know how to handle this, and you’re not the first scared, confused girl they’ve handled. I’m proof of that.”
It was supposed to make her feel better, and she knew it—but somehow, it didn’t. She felt worse than before because she was just one of many. She’d known that, hadn’t she? They’d handled so many clients. It wasn’t a secret.
How many of those clients had Sledge kissed? How many had started falling in love with him along the way? Had he ever gone further with any of them?
Her chest was tight by the time Kara turned on the TV. It didn’t matter what they watched so long as it helped distract her. She wondered if there was anything capable of doing that.
Chapter Twenty-One
“There you go.” Doc held up the blood-covered slug, trapped between the tines of a pair of tweezers. “Amazing how something so small could cause so much damage.”
Sledge only nodded, his teeth grinding together as he held back a groan. Just because they healed quickly didn’t mean they were immune to pain—far from it. The immediate pain of having his back cut into, of Doc fishing around for a slug, was intense.
“You’re lucky it wasn’t worse than this,” Doc mused, cleaning the area where he’d made the incision.
“You’re telling me,” Sledge muttered, snickering. “It could have just as easily gone into my head, and there’s no coming back from that.” Because a brain injury wasn’t the sort of thing even they could recover from. Not easily, anyway—and he wasn’t about to put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger to find out.
The door to the conference room opened, and in walked the rest of the team. To the unknowing bystander, Zane would’ve looked perfectly fine—better than fine, really, the picture of good health. Strong, solid.
Sledge, on the other hand, saw the look in his eye and understood it for what it was. Some of the light had dimmed. The only word that came to mind was hollow. He had a hollow look to him. Anyone who’d ever been through battle knew that look and had probably worn it themselves at least once.
“Glad you’re with us,” he said to Zane as his friend took a seat at the table on which he was still stretched out on his stomach.
“Same to you,” Zane replied, his gaze traveling from Sledge’s face to his back.
“Looks like we both had a close call today.”
“Looks that way.” Zane rubbed his eyes with his fists and ran his hands through his short, chestnut waves. “Just think of what might’ve happened if I’d been a little quicker crossing the street.”
“Odds are, you would’ve survived,” Logan reminded him as he entered the room and took a seat at the head of the table. “What would’ve been tricky would be explaining to the neighbors and the paramedics how you managed to heal yourself.”
“Have we found anything?” Sledge asked. That was enough small talk as far as he was concerned. Not that he didn’t care—far from it since his heart had just about lodged itself in his throat when
he heard the explosion and didn’t get a response from Zane right away—but there were other things to worry about like how to stop the people behind this.
“Val can tell you all about it when she comes in,” Logan assured him. “How’s our client?”
“Kara texted me,” Jace spoke up. “She said everything is fine there. They’re watching TV and generally hanging out. She brought some basic supplies with her, but we’ll go out in the morning to grab some more.”
“Do me a favor? Make sure she knows how grateful I am,” Sledge implored. “I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t leave Marnie there alone.” But there hadn’t been a choice but to leave her. He’d needed to have the slug removed, and they couldn’t have too many people coming and going from the house.
“She said this is the sort of thing she wishes she had when she was going through this,” Jace explained. “Somebody to talk to. Somebody who isn’t one of us.”
“Yeah, she said the same thing to Marnie. You know how she is already—always feeling like people are doing too much for her, like they’re going out of their way and she isn’t worth it.” He shook his head, snickering. “Of course, she’s more like that than ever before now since she feels guilty over Dan.”
That would pass with time—at least, he hoped it would. She would start feeling less guilt over him, over all of them. Whatever it took, he would see to it even if it meant spending the rest of his life bolstering her, bringing her around.
Val blew into the room like a tornado. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean to keep you waiting.” She expressed no surprise at finding a shirtless Sledge stretched out on the table in the center of the room, instead standing next to Logan and looking down at him like she was more surprised to find him sitting where she should be sitting.
Sledge snickered softly, though he lowered his face behind his folded arms so Logan wouldn’t see. If there was one thing he never reacted to very well, it was being undermined during meetings. But Val had a point. She was the star of this particular show.
Rather than let her have the chair, Logan simply wheeled himself to the side. They were all stubborn, but he was probably the worst of the group. The alpha’s alpha, the unquestioned leader—typically unquestioned… that very moment notwithstanding.
“So?” Sledge prompted. “Did you find anything from the information Marnie passed on?”
“I did,” she nodded, though there wasn’t any smile or smart remark. No reminder of how brilliant she was, of how they all owed her their lives and livelihoods.
That was when Sledge knew he wasn’t going to like what he was about to hear.
“You might as well spill it,” Zane muttered. “What did they do? How are they hiding themselves?”
“For one thing, they didn’t make it easy on me—though I didn’t expect them to,” she assured them, pushing back her pink braids when she bent over her laptop, hooking it up to the screen at the head of the room. Now everyone had a view of her monitor.
On the screen were eight names. “These are the names of the people connected to the phone numbers and email addresses Marnie provided. These are the people she says she and Beth were in contact with during the project. It took hours for me to track them down—you’ll notice,” she continued, turning to the screen and pointing to one name after another, “they have very common names.”
Yes, she was right about that. Mary Jones. Steve Smith. Chris Edwards.
She turned back to the group, her gaze landing on all of them at once. “That’s by design.” He noticed the slight hint of self-satisfaction. So she hadn’t completely lost her edge.
“What do you mean?” Logan asked. He sounded more intrigued by what Val was sharing than by the fact that she’d upstaged him in his own meeting, which was a good sign.
“I mean, those are names so common a person has to wade through hundreds of options if they want to find who they’re looking for.”
Braxton looked around the room like he was worried he was the only one not picking up on what Val was trying to tell them. He wasn’t the only one, not by a long shot, since Sledge was having a tough time catching on too.
Until it dawned on him. “They’re assumed names. Aliases.”
“Right.” Val touched a finger to the tip of her nose. “That’s what they are. These are fake names taken on by these cretins, whoever they really are, as a cover-up. They trust nobody’s going to dig too deep and try to learn who they are—that anybody would give up before finding the truth.”
“And what’s the truth?” Sledge asked. He probably could’ve gotten up from the table by then—his back didn’t hurt nearly as much as it had before, nothing more than what he would’ve felt from a bruise or a pulled muscle—but Val’s little bit of theater had him frozen in place.
“The truth is the identities these names point to lead one place. The cemetery.” She turned back to the screen. “They’re all dead.”
“How can you know that?” Jace asked.
“What—you don’t believe me?” But she winked when she turned around. “It’s pretty simple, actually. There’s a page on the website for this so-called company or group or what have you devoted to the team members.”
She pulled up a new tab on her laptop, and the names on the screen were replaced by a series of photos against a white background. “The so-called team,” Val snorted. “A reverse image search on all of them leads back to the same stock image site. They didn’t try too hard with that. The little bits of biographical info under each photo are real enough—only when I searched for these people, using that data, I came up with one corpse after another. Every single time.”
“People this agency has killed?” Logan asked.
“No. People who’ve been dead for years. Hey, maybe they are victims killed a long time ago, but I doubt it. It looks more to me like a list of accomplished, intelligent people with plenty of impressive credentials who died of natural causes and had their identities stolen for the sake of this cover-up.”
“Because who would dig that deep?” Sledge asked the room at large.
“Exactly. They never counted on us being involved—or anybody like us.” Val then sketched a quick curtsy. “And that’s what I did on my summer vacation.”
That got a laugh out of Logan. “Well done, Val. A-plus.”
He then turned to the rest of the team, and his smile dissolved into a scowl. “What do we do with this?”
“For one thing, we never underestimate what they’re capable of again,” Zane muttered. He was still lost, still back at the house whose windows had exploded outward as fireballs tore from inside.
“Fair enough,” Logan murmured. “What else?”
The silence around the room was profound—and unsettling, as it meant no one had the first idea where to go from here. All they knew was what they’d known before.
These people were not to be taken lightly. They were connected, well-funded, and canny enough to know how to set up a credible-looking group that passed the average due diligence performed by any company considering doing business with them.
“I’ll tell you something I plan to pursue after getting a few hours’ sleep,” Val offered. “I wanna know what happened to anyone else they’ve worked with.”
“Can you tell who did?” Sledge asked. It was at least a flicker of hope.
“I have my ways,” she assured him, grinning like the Cheshire cat. “Hawk is already working on getting me into their email server. I’ll be able to see who their servers have been pinging. It’ll give me something to go off of.”
“Good idea. I’d like to know how many other small businesses they’ve worked with and how they turned out in the end,” Logan muttered, his fingers tented under his chin. “I’d also like to see if we can lock down a physical location for the servers. Where are they operating from? There has to be a home base somewhere. That’s how these people think. They can’t stand the idea of everyone working separately, out of touch with each other. They like to be together. They
will choose an out-of-the-way location, something inconspicuous.”
“You mean the way we did?” Zane asked, his brows lifting.
Logan shot him a warning look. “I’ll let that one go, considering what you’ve been through today. Yes, I thought along the same lines when choosing this location for our headquarters. Congratulations, you managed to throw my words back in my face.”
“Hey, it just goes to show you have a good point,” Zane shrugged. It was good to hear him joking again, which was probably the only reason Logan was letting him get away with it.
Logan looked to Sledge. “Are you going back to the house?”
“Of course I am,” he replied. There wasn’t much chance of being detected, at least not by anyone in the neighborhood. Maybe someone would notice a car coming and going from the cul-de-sac, but unless they were familiar with the area, they wouldn’t know that particular tract of land was virtually uninhabited.
All of the houses had been purchased by a certain Wolf Shield-owned shell company when the real estate crisis had been at its worst. Prices had been basement level at that point, leaving the path clear for Logan to snap them up. He paid a company to keep the grounds landscaped, the exteriors of the houses clean and presentable.
No one lived there. Not permanently, anyway.
“I want eyes at Marnie’s,” Logan announced. “Braxton, Jace, Zane, go in shifts. Make it look inhabited. I don’t have to tell you what to do.” No, this wasn’t the first time they’d run a mission like this.
Though it was the first time they’d worked one this complex—the first time Sledge had ever asked himself whether they were up to the task of defeating whoever was behind this.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The most surprising thing happened to Marnie her first morning in the safe house.
When she woke up, she realized she’d slept the whole night uninterrupted and that she felt almost human again.
Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset Page 64
