I glanced from the shiny pink bald spot on the crown of the guy’s head to the end of his left arm hanging at his side. “I think he’s not as available as he wants to let on.” A thick gold ring circled his ring finger. Pretty dinged up. Married awhile, then. Guess he was in the market to shake things up a bit.
The thought made me wish I was carrying right about now. Not that I needed a gun to make someone rethink their decisions.
“I think traveling all day has made you cranky.”
I tipped my head up to raise an eyebrow at Titus. “Doesn’t it always?”
“Yep.” He grinned, showing off perfectly straight, gleaming white teeth. How could we have crawled off a fifteen-hour flight into evening rush-hour traffic, spent several hours getting our team supplied and settled, and he still looked fresh as a daisy? His long hair was even neatly curling around his shoulders.
I threw my thick braid back over my own shoulder as we moved forward in line. I felt grungy, grumpy, and desperate to hole up somewhere and sleep for twenty-four hours. But not before we got our McDonald’s fix. “Feed me and I won’t bite your head off.”
He shot me a cocky salute. “That’s the plan, ma’am.”
Titus was the only person I allowed to call me ma’am, maybe because, like every other person on the planet, I was willing to forgo a lot of irritation when his vibe hit me. Relaxed me. Being in his proximity was like getting a contact high. Maybe that was why we paired well together—I was the uptight one, and he leveled me out in a way none of the others could.
The sound of a suddenly raised voice in front of us definitely wasn’t helping. I tensed as the guy two steps ahead of me in line, Mr. Wedding Ring Winker, planted his fists on the counter and leaned forward, right into the server’s face. “Look. I just want to get my food and go. If you can’t make that happen, find someone who can.”
The server, a young blonde with her hair in a ponytail, looking closer to twelve than the sixteen she probably was, blanched. From the wild look in her eyes, she definitely wished she could ask someone to take her place too.
Asshole.
“Sir,” she stammered, easing back from his blatant attempt to intimidate her, “you asked for six fries and four quarter-pounders. Four coffees. That’s what you were charged for.”
“What idiot would order more fries than burgers? They don’t match! You need to clean out your ears so you can actually hear what customers are ordering, then call your manager over here so we can make your incompetence clear. And fix your mistake!”
“I’ll issue a refund for—”
“Is that what I asked for?” he shouted, making the poor girl jump. The overhead lights gleamed off his bald spot, and I wondered suddenly if his slowly dwindling testosterone was responsible for making him a dickhead. It was one thing to be an asshole at home, but to take it out in public and flash it around like an exhibitionist flashing his naked penis at unsuspecting bystanders?
It was two fries, for fuck’s sake.
I dug into my pants pocket, looking for a bill to hand over and put us all out of our misery.
As I peered over Winker’s shoulder, I saw a tear trickle from the server’s eye and track down her pale cheek. “I—”
“Manager!” the asshole yelled. “Now, bitch!”
I didn’t stop to think. My palm landed on Winker’s shoulder before the last word left his mouth. Thumb and finger dug into the nerves where his neck and shoulder met. The asshole winced, lurching sideways with a strained grunt, allowing me to step up beside him and give the server a sympathetic look. “How about I help this gentleman move on while you take care of that refund?”
The girl sagged with relief. “Of course.”
“We’ll wait right over here for that order and a new receipt, m’kay?” I jerked my head to the left, shot her a genuine smile, then shoved my new dickhead friend to the side. His protests were lost as I gripped his arm just above his elbow, digging into the pressure point in the underside of his biceps, and his uncooperative legs buckled unexpectedly.
A smattering of applause registered vaguely as I led Winker—forcibly—to an out-of-the-way corner.
“What the hell—”
I squeezed down on the pressure point again, satisfaction pulsing through me as the asshole’s knees did a jig that forced him to grab hold of the wall next to him. “I’d suggest you be quiet,” I told him, allowing all emotion to leach out of my words. That dead tone, the emptiness in my voice, had started more than one enemy pissing in his pants. Score points for the guy in front of me—his eyes bugged out and he started to tremble, but no acrid smell hit my nostrils, thank God. It was so embarrassing when they did that.
“Now let me tell you what’s going to happen.” I leaned close, nose not quite touching his, and narrowed my eyes. “You’re going to take your food and walk out of here. Quietly. Courteously. Do you understand?”
“Who the hell are you? Let go of me!”
I squeezed again, adding a sharp twist, and Winker whimpered as the pain shot through his body. “Maybe you don’t understand then.” I allowed a small, grim smile to curve my lips. “You’re going to take your food and leave, or I’m going to follow you to your car and make sure you’ve been circumcised the Woody Allen’s Robin Hood way, if you get my drift?” One raised eyebrow and the flick of my knife opening between us made my point. The way the guy’s thighs squeezed together made my smile genuine.
“You’re... I... What...”
“Did you have something to say?” I asked.
He shook his head, his gaze trailing over my shoulder. Whatever he saw had him cringing back away from me. Titus, no doubt. The guy was mellow, but when he put on his soldier face, he was even better at getting guys to piss their pants than I was.
And there was that scent hitting my nostrils, damn it.
Titus shoved a bag of food at the guy. “Looks like you’re all set,” he said, menace somehow dripping from the words. A drink carrier came next.
Winker stuttered and shook, but took the items Titus handed him. One embarrassed glance down at his now wet pants and he shot for the door.
Titus chuckled in my ear. “I can’t take you anywhere.”
“Sure you can.” I shrugged. “Saves you wear-and-tear on your chill.”
He laughed louder. “True.”
A number being called registered in my ears, and Titus turned toward the counter. One big fist caught up the five bags waiting there, while the other grabbed the drink holder. “Ready?”
“I was ready ten minutes ago,” I said, but my step was lighter as we headed for the door. In fact I was pretty sure I smiled the whole way back to the hotel suite we planned to temporarily occupy. Being out of the States for several years meant finding a new hidey-hole, a task we hadn’t had time to accomplish yet.
Maris opened the door at our knock. My kid sister was ten years younger than me and light where I was dark. Her honey-colored hair was twisted into a messy bun at the back of her head, leaving the displeasure on her face in full view. I glanced toward the corner as I entered, noting that Rhys’s expression matched Maris’s. The man rarely spoke and even more rarely smiled, but I could usually count on him to be on an even keel—unless Maris was around. Something about the two of them in the same room seemed to push all his buttons. We’d been confined for hours, traveling, and now...
I frowned at him, a warning to back off. He gave me a minute nod.
Titus’s long legs brought him to the table across the room before I got there. He dumped the food on the surface and began ripping into bags. “Heaven is here.”
“Thanks for pointing out the obvious,” Monty said. Our fifth team member sat up and peered over the back of the couch at us, his hazel eyes sleepy. “Just tell me you got enough Big Macs this time and I won’t kill you.”
“And two whole bags of fries,” Titus crowed.
I stood back to let everyone grab their fill, pulling out my phone and clicking over to e-mail to see if any of the re
al estate “brokers” had gotten back to me with leads on a location for us. A couple of replies waited, and I read through them before coming to an e-mail from an unknown contact. The subject line, Welcome Back, had my heartbeat ticking up a notch. No one knew we were here in the States. No one.
I clicked on the e-mail.
Good evening, Ms. Nixon.
I’ve been an admirer of your team’s success for some time. The problem, of course, is exposure—you don’t want it, but I have the means to make it happen. The tie between your team members and the unfortunate events surrounding Jay Nixon’s suicide might seem deeply buried, but it would, in fact, be easy for me to expose to the very people you don’t want informed.
Neither of us want that, I’m sure. A partnership would easily solve the issue.
Your target is Bram Sullivan, CEO of BSGA Holdings International, headquartered in Atlanta. Natural causes are imperative. Contact me within two weeks when the job is done, and the information I have will remain between the two of us.
I look forward to working with you.
X
Fucking A. “Guys?”
Raucous laughter and good-natured scuffling registered in my shock-numbed ears. I glanced up, my heart in my throat. “Guys!”
Three pairs of male eyes jerked to meet mine. Maris peeked from around Monty to look at me.
I swallowed hard.
“I think we have a problem.”
Chapter Three
Nix —
The room erupted as the last word of the e-mail left my lips. Maris paused, quarter-pounder halfway to her mouth, with a confused, “What the hell?” Monty hit the table hard, curses tripping off his lips that were almost as colorful as Titus’s inventive contributions to the chaos. Rhys was the only one who remained quiet, his lips going tight as his eyes narrowed on mine.
This was bad. Very bad.
“Who sent it?” Monty finally asked.
I glanced from him to my phone and back again. “[email protected].”
Titus snorted. “Figures. Fuckin’ Yahoo users.”
I barely held back a smile despite the circumstances. As if the server they used mattered. “The account will be gone by now anyway.”
Monty had already headed for the computer he and Maris had set up on the flimsy hotel room desk. “We’ll check just to be sure.”
Maris raised concerned green eyes, identical to my own. “They want you to take a contract in order to keep your identities safe?”
“Not ‘your,’ sweetheart,” Titus assured her, reaching over to snatch a handful of fries from her plate—as if he didn’t have two larges already on his. I shook my head. The man had an iron stomach; nothing upset him enough for him to quit eating, even a firefight. “‘You’ are not the ones who did anything wrong.”
Except we had. Maris and I had taken the men in when the military had threatened to lock them in a bottomless pit somewhere and throw away the key. We’d grown up with them. No way had they done what they’d been accused of, what they’d been court-martialed for.
What they could still be punished for if they came to the attention of the US Army or the SOC now, despite the intervening five years.
“They’re accessories, Titus,” Rhys pointed out, echoing my thoughts like he so often did. “The military might not prosecute directly, but civilians would.”
“Always pointing out reality.” Titus shot his teammate double middle fingers. “Thanks for the pep talk.”
“Rhys is right,” I said, as much as I didn’t want to. Reality was all we had to work with. Ignoring it would just get our asses in a sling, as my father used to say.
“No sign of the account or any record of its deletion,” Monty confirmed, returning to the table.
“That’s not hard,” Maris said, grabbing a napkin for herself before beginning to pass the rest out. “Even I can erase an e-mail account without a trace.”
Despite being younger, Maris had been raised exactly like me, with a military father who had no clue what to do with two daughters on his own except drag them along as he trained himself and his men. But she’d always had a softer heart. She was the caretaker. But she’d also been teaching herself some basic hacker skills under Monty’s tutelage, wanting to be useful to the group for more than making meals and washing clothes. She had no clue that her most important role was as my anchor in the fucked-up world we’d landed in after our father’s murder.
“You can do much more than that,” Monty said, his dark tone warning her not to piss him off by minimizing her skills. It was an ongoing thing between them. He accepted a napkin as Maris passed it to him, but held on to it long enough for her to meet his eyes. My heart ached every time Montgomery Wolfe went out of his way to boost Maris’s confidence. Lord knows I’d had very little success through the years, and being thrown into a situation where physical strength and prowess were valued higher than emotional skills had taken a toll on her the past few years.
Rhys cleared his throat, breaking the moment. Maris glanced his way, her gaze staying just low enough not to meet his eyes, but I was certain she could see the rise of his eyebrow in her periphery. I knew because she flushed before handing the giant redhead a napkin too. He was turning away to find a place to sit when my steel-toed boot landed against his shin.
Rhys swallowed an angry curse when he met my eyes.
Stop fucking with my sister, dickhead.
Something flickered in those navy-blue depths. His nod recognized my silent command without promising anything, but he and I both knew if he didn’t cool it, my steel-toed boot would end up somewhere a lot more vulnerable than his leg.
The guys discussed options while I finally fixed a plate. When I was seated, greasy food piled high—thank God for fast metabolisms—and an ice-cold Coke sweating in my hand, I reread the e-mail aloud. “Any thoughts?”
“It’s a single point of contact,” Titus said around a mouthful of food. “There’s not much we can do with the limited data we have.”
“There’s nothing in the e-mail that hints at how he knows about us aside from the reference to ‘connections.’ That could mean anything.”
Monty slurped on his straw, then wiped his mouth with his wadded-up napkin. My guys were nothing if not mannerly. “So we’re all thinking military, right?”
Murmurs of agreement came from all sides.
“Why would the military want you to do a hit?” Maris asked. I tightened my lips around my straw to keep from correcting her you to us. “They have plenty of people who can do that for them; they don’t need someone outside...”
Monty was nodding as she trailed off. “Officially they don’t. But if they’re looking for an off-the-records hit...”
“Then we’re officially fucked,” Titus pointed out.
“Or,” Rhys added, “we’re looking at someone who has access to military information but is using it for a private agenda.”
Which was even worse. Shit.
I fingered up a few fries and stuffed them into my mouth, chewing thoughtfully. “Okay,” I said after I swallowed, “we can’t track the e-mail. What else can we look at to lead us back to our friendly neighborhood Mr. X?”
“We can look at the target,” Maris suggested.
My eyes widened even as a satisfied smile curved my lips. See? We’re a team. “It’s the only solid piece of intel we have: a name and location. There has to be some connection between the hit and the man—”
“Or woman,” Titus interrupted, pointing a fry in my direction.
“Or woman,” I acceded, “that is targeting us.”
Half an hour later, lunch was over and everyone but Rhys was hunched around a computer, Maris and Monty at the desk in one corner of hotel room, Titus and me on the bed staring at a laptop. Our resident grouch had gone to scout locations for our next hidey-hole after pointing out the convenience of us already being in Atlanta, right where the target was. The rest of us scoured the Internet for everything we could find on Mr. Bram Sulliva
n of BSGA Holdings International. Maris and Monty were hacking what they could of Sullivan’s personal accounts, anything they could easily access. Titus and I gathered what public intel we could find.
“This guy sounds like a grade-A prick,” Titus muttered under his breath.
“Because he has money?” I asked, eyeing the suit Sullivan wore in a photo taken on a red-carpet premiere last month. The designer evening wear had to have cost the man a fortune. But then, he was president of a bank; he could afford it.
One hoped, at least. If not, maybe stealing from the bank was the crime someone was hoping to execute him for.
“Because his name is Bram and yes, he has money.” Titus clicked through the pages of the bank’s website, eyes scanning faster than I ever could. The man had a photographic memory and an ability to drill to the heart of intel so fast he left me in awe. Of course, he wasn’t without his prejudices.
I grinned. “What’s wrong with the name Bram?” It was good enough for the author of Dracula, right?
“I keep checking the man’s press photos for fangs,” Maris admitted. A snort escaped me as I superimposed vampire teeth on the red-carpet image I was staring at.
“He just sounds...arrogant,” Titus said.
“Sometimes arrogance is a good thing,” Monty pointed out.
Titus humphed. “Listen to this.”
I watched as he clicked over to Sullivan’s bio page on the bank website.
“‘Mr. Bram Sullivan was founder of BSGA Holdings International in the early 2000s and has been CEO for over a decade, leading our company into a new tier of national and international commerce, including rising to become one of the world’s top ten banks in revenue, profitability, net worth, and market share of deposits. We serve more than ten million customers worldwide, including individuals and small businesses, up to some of the most successful Fortune 500 companies in the world—all thanks to Mr. Sullivan’s skills and expertise.’ There’s a bunch of stuff here about awards he’s garnered, that the bank has won, charities and foundations and...” Titus made a sound deep in his throat that at once conveyed disgust, impatience, and suspicion. “He’s also last year’s ‘most eligible bachelor in Atlanta, who loves his purebred Pharaoh hounds, Cleo and Ra.’”
Assassin's Game Page 2
