by Lili Valente
If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have seen that the door was cracked or that someone stood on the other side.
Her hands flew to cover as much of her nakedness as she could—one arm across her breasts and one hand darting down to shield her sex—as she backed away. She was about to call for Jackson when Adam stepped into the room, holding a phone out in front of him.
“Dominic sent me.” He kept his eyes on the floor, making it clear he wasn’t interested in her nudity. “You have to leave now. A helicopter landed on the other side of the island. The men sent to kill you will be here within the hour.”
“I have to tell Jackson,” Hannah said, her adrenaline rush transforming to a frantic, hunted feeling. “He has to come too.”
“He’s the reason they found you. Look at his messages,” Adam said, gesturing for her to take the phone.
Dread flooded through her, transforming her stomach into a hard knot. With a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure that the entrance to the bathroom was still empty, she took the phone. It didn’t take long to see what Jackson had done, but she still didn’t want to believe.
She didn’t want to believe that he’d lied to her or betrayed her trust and she really didn’t want to believe he’d done something like this. But the proof was right there in the two final messages.
The first was a question from someone called Titan beneath a photograph of a woman Hannah never thought she’d see again. It was Harley, older, with her hair bleached blond and sadness tightening her features, but Harley, no doubt in her mind.
She knew her sister was alive even before she read the message confirming her suspicion—
I’ve tracked Harley Mason—now Baudin—to a small village in southern France. I.D. is 100% certain via image and DNA analysis. How do I proceed?
The last text was a response from Jackson—
Kill her.
The phone clattered to the floor and a sound rose in her throat—half cry of shock, half wail of grief—but she stifled it with a fist pressed tightly to her mouth.
“Hannah? Are you all right?” Jackson called over the sound of the bathwater.
“I’m fine,” she called back, but she was anything but fine.
Her sister was alive. Alive. But maybe not for much longer.
Because Jackson had given the order to kill her. To kill a member of her family, her sister. All his talk about loving her and not wanting to hurt her had been a lie. He was a liar and a killer and she’d been a fool to let herself believe anything else.
The realization made her feel like her heart was being ripped out of her chest, but there was no time to grieve the death of the man she’d thought Jackson was, not if she wanted to leave the island alive. Heart racing, she spun and hurried to the closet, grabbing the first dress she laid hands on and pulling it over her head as she crossed back to Adam.
“Let’s go,” she whispered. “He’ll be out any second.”
Adam nodded and motioned for her to lead the way. “There’s a golf cart out front. I’ve disabled the car and the other carts. He won’t be able to follow us except on foot.”
Hannah broke into a run in her bare feet, racing silently through the house and out the front door. Outside, the world brooded in an ominous bluish-yellow light, the sickly moon hanging in the sky coloring everything in shades of ugly. It was a night for death and betrayal, but she was going to escape. She would get off this island, away from Jackson, and she would find some way to save her sister’s life.
Harley might be a monster, but she was her monster, and she didn’t deserve a death sentence.
“Hold on.” Adam slid onto the golf cart seat beside her. Hannah gripped the metal bar on her right, squeezing tight as the wheels churned through the gravel and the cart zoomed away down the road.
The house was nearly out of sight when she heard Jackson roar her name. “Hannah! Hannah!”
Tears filling her eyes, she set her jaw and kept her eyes on the road in front of her. There was nothing to gain from looking back.
She had nothing else to say to Jackson Hawke. Not even goodbye.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jackson
As soon as he emerged from the bathroom, Jackson knew something was wrong. The sheets were empty and his cell was lying on the floor halfway between the bed and the door.
Stomach clenching, he quickly crossed the room, his pajama pants whispering ominously in the silence. Whatever this was about, it wasn’t good. He’d deliberately left his phone in his room when he’d come to bed, not wanting to risk Hannah seeing something she shouldn’t.
At least not yet.
If the Titan agency’s trip to southern France proved fruitful—if Harley truly was alive and in hiding—then he would tell Hannah what the detectives had uncovered. Until then, there was no point in upsetting her. Or in getting her hopes up.
Hannah hated what Harley had done to him, but the woman was her twin. They shared a bond and Hannah still loved her. No matter how many crimes Harley had committed, Hannah would be thrilled to learn she still had a sister.
He knew there might come a time when he would have to choose between his love for Hannah and his hate for Harley. He also knew that, if that time came, the choice had already been made.
Hannah was all that mattered. She was his heart and soul and the reason he’d returned from the dead. Before her, he might as well have been six feet under. He’d deluded himself into thinking his life had purpose, but a lust for vengeance wasn’t purpose, it was a disease that ate away at your soul, leaving you blind. Before Hannah, his existence had been solid darkness. She’d brought him back to the light and reminded him that there were a hundred thousand things in the world more important than revenge.
There was her smile and her kiss and the way she touched him first thing in the morning, with that hint of hesitation, as if he were a beautiful dream she couldn’t quite believe was real. There was her laugh and her sweet spirit and the way she gave herself entirely into his keeping. Her trust humbled him, her heart transformed him, and her happiness was the only thing that mattered.
She was all that mattered and now she was gone. He knew it the moment he picked up the phone.
His conversation with the Titan group was pulled up on the screen, including two new texts. One that confirmed Harley Mason was still alive and a second that issued a kill order, an order he sure as hell hadn’t given.
“Hannah!” Jackson dropped the phone and ran, his bare feet slapping on the cool wood floor as he hurried through the darkened house, his heart in his throat and the terrible certainty that Hannah was in danger crawling across his skin.
He emerged into the soft humidity in time to hear a golf cart puttering away from the house.
“Hannah! Hannah!” He screamed her name as loud as he could, but there was no answer. By the time he fell silent, the soft rumble of the cart’s engine had faded and there was only the wind, shushing through the palm leaves.
Fighting the urge to chase after her in his bare feet, he sprinted to where the car was parked beneath a wide overhang near the entrance to the kitchen, but a glance at the slashed tires was all it took to assure him he wouldn’t be getting anywhere in the Cadillac. Cursing, he cut across the grass to where the other golf carts were parked in the equipment shed.
He was halfway to the staff cottages when he heard a woman cry out, followed by a rapid stream of Spanish.
Shifting direction, he circled around Eva’s bungalow. On the other side, he saw the cook sitting on the ground in the soft pool of light from the bulb above her door, cradling her son’s bloodied head in her lap.
“Mr. Hawke,” she said, reaching a hand toward him. “We need a doctor. Please, we have to get Dominic to a doctor.”
“I don’t need a doctor, Mama.” Dominic sat up with a groan, gently pushing his mother’s hands away. “Head wounds bleed a lot. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
He turned to Jackson, body weaving slightly as he pressed one palm to the flo
wing wound near his hairline. “Adam’s not who you think he is, Mr. Hawke. I believe he means to hurt Hannah. We need to put a guard—”
“Hannah’s gone, but I think I know where she went. I heard a golf cart leaving the property,” Jackson said, hands balling into fists and the need to run after her becoming almost irresistible. “Tell me what happened. Quickly.”
“I was coming to check on my mother,” Dominic said, swallowing hard. “Adam stopped me before I could knock on the door. He said he knew I’d been hired to keep Hannah safe, but that I was going to fail. We struggled. I was close to taking him, but he’s working with someone. I was hit on the head from behind and didn’t come to until a few minutes ago.”
At least two men, Jackson mentally catalogued. At least two men he had to destroy before they hurt Hannah. That was all that mattered. He could grill Dominic on the rest of his story—especially that part about being hired to protect Hannah—at a later date.
“Stay here,” Jackson ordered. “Watch the house. If she comes back detain her somewhere safe until I get back.”
“Take my gun.” Dominic reached down, pulling a small revolver from a holster hidden beneath his jeans. “If Hannah is still alive, she might not be for long. I believe these men were sent to kill her. If you get a clear shot at them, take it.”
Jackson’s throat threatened to close as he took the gun and quickly checked to make sure it was loaded. “I don’t have time not to trust you right now, Dominic. But if you’ve kept something from me and it leads to Hannah being hurt…”
“I want to keep her safe,” the shorter man said. “I swear it.”
“For your sake, I hope that’s the truth.” Without another word, Jackson hurried on to the equipment shed only to find the remaining golf cart had been tampered with. Given thirty minutes with a few wiring tools, he knew he could correct the problem, but he didn’t have thirty minutes and neither did Hannah.
Abandoning the shed, he ran back toward the main house. Underneath the lanai, where the beach chairs and umbrellas were stored, sat two lightly rusted bikes. Shoving the gun in the back of his pants, he grabbed the larger of the two, swung onto the seat, and began pumping hard down the road leading away from the estate.
Years of pushing his body to the breaking point had given him thigh muscles of pure steel. He could bike around this entire island twice before he gave out. He would be able to catch up with the cart, and when he did, he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot first and ask questions later. The men in front of him had given up their right to mercy when they’d laid hands on the woman he loved.
He loved her. He loved her so much, but he’d only said the words once.
He wanted to say them a hundred more times, a thousand. He needed Hannah safe in his arms more than he needed his next breath and by the time he reached the fork in the road and turned instinctively toward the airfield, his heart was threatening to punch a hole through his ribs.
He’d tested the edge of his endurance nearly every day of his adult life, but terror had never been a part of his daily runs or workouts. After he’d been released from prison, he’d assumed he was immune to this kind of fear—a man without a soul doesn’t have much to be afraid of—but that was before Hannah. Before her love and before she’d given him something priceless to lose.
He swore beneath his breath, jaw clenching as he pumped even harder.
He told himself the rumble he heard wasn’t a plane engine purring to life. Then he told himself that he would reach the field in time to stop the plane from taking off. But he knew he was grasping at straws, knew it even before he saw an unfamiliar aircraft lift into the sky, flying low over his head as he leapt from the bike near the airfield’s entrance.
Jackson’s head snapped back, but it was too dark to see much of the plane aside from the breadth of the wings and the red stripe running from the nose down toward the belly, illuminated in the spill of the headlights. He didn’t know who owned the plane, but he would bet his fortune that Adam was flying the aircraft, which meant his own plane was useless.
He couldn’t fly a plane or follow the men who had taken Hannah. He couldn’t do anything but stand and watch the aircraft move farther away from the island, heading north before veering slightly to the east and gradually disappearing from sight.
When the sky was empty once more, he did a sweep of the small, shuttered outbuildings and the field, finding two golf carts parked by the gate in the glow of the lamp lighting the area, but there was no sign of Hannah. There was no sign of a struggle either, simply the imprints of her bare feet in the dust next to Adam’s larger ones. There was another set of prints, too, slightly smaller than Adam’s that tapered at the toe and had no pattern on the bottom of the shoe. A dress shoe, he guessed, which told him nothing.
He had no idea who Adam was working with, why his most trusted employee had betrayed him, or what he planned to do with Hannah. He only knew that he had never felt more helpless than he did right now, not even on the day he was led away to a cell and locked away for a crime he hadn’t committed.
“I’m going to find you,” he said softly, staring up at the star-flecked sky in the direction where the plane had flown away. “I’ll find you and if they’ve hurt you, they will pay for it. I swear it.”
The vow helped calm the impotent rage burning in his gut. If there was one thing he was good at, it was tracking down people who didn’t want to be found. He would find Adam, and the man would pay the price for betrayal. He would pay in pain, suffering ten times the torment for every mark he left on Hannah’s skin.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Hannah
Someone else was flying the plane, but Hannah didn’t know who it was. She supposed in some part of her mind, she had assumed it was Dominic. Adam had said that Dominic sent him, after all, and Dominic was the first one to approach her about the dangerous people who might be coming to the island.
But when the aircraft reached cruising altitude and Adam slipped into the cockpit to take over the controls, it wasn’t Dom’s dark head that ducked through the door leading into the cabin. It was an enormous, silver-haired man with broad shoulders, a strong jaw, and the most familiar pair of brown eyes in his lightly tanned face.
They were Jackson’s eyes, but so much colder. Colder even than the day he’d pulled off her blindfold and glared down at her with a ferocity that had made his contempt for her abundantly clear.
Hate was a terrifying thing to see in another person’s eyes, but at least it meant that the person still had the capacity to feel deeply. Love and hate were opposite sides of the same coin and shared far more similarities than differences. They both came from the heart and the heart could be reasoned with, appealed to, even changed from time to time. The heart knew how to forgive, and as long as forgiveness was a possibility, hope was never beyond reach.
But this man’s eyes were…empty. The windows to his soul had been blown out and any mercy he might once have possessed had escaped into the ether, never to be seen again.
One look at him and Hannah’s gut sensed the approach of an enemy. It was all she could do not to cringe in her chair as the terrifying man began to speak.
“Hello, Miss Mason. I’m Ian Hawke. I’ve come to take you to your sister.”
A sudden surge of delight streaked through her fear, but it was gone in an instant, excitement at the thought of seeing Harley too fragile to survive the terror swelling inside her.
Jackson had betrayed her trust in the worst way, but not everything out of his mouth had been a lie. She believed his stories about his father, the cruel man who had never given his son the love a child deserved and had abandoned Jackson without bothering to find out if the charges against his son were true or false. No matter what Ian Hawke said next, she knew the fact that Jackson’s father was here wasn’t a good thing.
“Why?” she asked. “Why are you taking me to Harley? What do you want?”
The older man smiled, but it was nothing like Jackson’s smile. There wa
s no light or joy in it. He was simply baring his teeth, the smile an implied threat that made her pulse speed faster. “You’re clever, but not as clever as your sister. We had to drug her to get her onto the plane. She knew better than to trust anyone but herself.”
Adrenaline dumped into Hannah’s bloodstream, her most primitive instincts screaming for her to run, but there was nowhere to run to. She was trapped in a plane above the ocean with a man who made Jackson look like a teddy bear in comparison, and there would be no escape.
“As for what I want,” Ian continued, settling onto the small leather couch next to her seat. “I want your father to pay his debt. If he does, you will be allowed to live.”
The tension fisting in her middle eased a bit. If Ian wanted money, her father certainly had enough of it, and he wouldn’t hesitate to pay her ransom. For all his faults, Stewart Mason valued her life as much as he valued his fortune. She was about to tell Ian as much when he spoke again.
“I think he’ll choose you, anyway,” he said, smiling that terrible smile. “You’re the good girl, aren’t you? The one who always did as she was told? I understand your sister was his favorite once, but when he realizes he can only keep one daughter, I suspect he’ll see the wisdom in sparing your life instead of hers.”
Only keep one daughter. Only one.
He was taking her to her sister, but she might only have hours with Harley before one of them was murdered.
Acid surged up Hannah’s throat. A moment later she was bent double, retching on the floor of the private jet whisking her away to meet the fate she’d been running from for six long years.
Jackson and Hannah’s story concludes in DIVINE DOMINATION
releasing in August 2015.
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