by Alyssa Cole
EAGLE’S HEART
Alyssa Cole
www.loose-id.com
Eagle’s Heart
Copyright © January 2014 by Alyssa Cole
All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the original purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission from Loose Id LLC. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Image/art disclaimer: Licensed material is being used for illustrative purposes only. Any person depicted in the licensed material is a model.
eISBN 9781623006136
Editor: Kierstin Cherry
Cover Artist: Mina Carter
Published in the United States of America
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San Francisco CA 94104-0809
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This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning
This e-book contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language and may be considered offensive to some readers. Loose Id LLC’s e-books are for sale to adults ONLY, as defined by the laws of the country in which you made your purchase. Please store your files wisely, where they cannot be accessed by under-aged readers.
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Dedication
This book is dedicated to my own handsome, funny, and thoughtful polyglot. To Nicolas, for always knowing what I need—sometimes even before I do—and for supporting me no matter what. Je t’aime.
Acknowledgment
There are many people to thank. First and foremost, Colleen, Derek, and Krista for always pushing me to write better and harder, and for being all-around great people and excellent friends.
My editor, Kierstin Cherry, who is simply amazing and for some reason decided against nuking the submitted draft of this novel from space. Thanks for all your insightful feedback and for having faith in my story.
The wonderful writers of RWA-NYC, who have taught me everything there is to know about publishing romance. I’m really lucky to have such warm, supportive people to look to for encouragement.
All of my writing friends, who inspire me during our many discussions of craft, plot, and possibilities, especially Maya FL, Mala, Erin, and Shara.
Lastly, I’d like to thank my parents. They’ve always supported my desire to write, and in addition to giving me the great literary foundation any writer needs, they (unknowingly) provided me with the smutty novels that still inspire my present writing. Thanks for encouraging me in everything I’ve attempted. Having parents who believe in you is the greatest gift a writer can receive.
Prologue
This can’t be happening.
Salomeh clutched her purse tightly to her side and stumbled from Principal Watkins’s office on legs that barely held her up. Her hand was a brown blur through the tears pooling in her eyes as she absentmindedly smoothed a hand over her thick curls, making sure they were still pulled back into the tight bun that had become her signature look.
She blinked the tears away.
Somewhere in the back of her mind she was already running through the list of things that wouldn’t be done that afternoon: the meeting at her mentoring program, helping girls with internship applications, checking out potential scholarships for a student interested in engineering. The mundane tasks that ate up the majority of her time every day were in jeopardy now.
“It’s not true,” she said, struggling to control the quaver in her voice. “I’m her teacher. I would never—”
The words stuck in her throat. She couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge the sickening allegation that was being lobbed at her, let alone speak of it.
“You've overstepped your boundaries on several occasions, but I know you wouldn’t harm a child,” Watkins said, his salt-and-pepper mustache twitching. “However, people can and will believe the mother, especially with the girl corroborating her version of events.”
“I was just trying to help,” Salomeh said weakly, sapped of the vigor that had animated her argument with Watkins before she’d been hit with the awful news: her favorite student, the girl who was as close to a daughter as she’d ever thought possible, had betrayed her.
“Well, perhaps if you’d paid heed to my guidance, we wouldn’t be here right now. As it is, I suggest you contact the union and a lawyer immediately,” he said from the safety of the doorframe. He obviously felt sorry for her despite the fact that they had constantly been at each other’s throats since she had landed her position at the high school three years ago. An uppity English teacher was the last thing Watkins had wanted to deal with, especially one who cared more for her students than producing the impractical testing scores the board of education demanded. So while she knew he felt bad for her, she could already see the gears spinning in his mind, the statements distancing him from her and her unconventional techniques.
“Good luck, Miss Jones,” he said with finality as he closed the door to his office.
Salomeh tried to get a grip on her situation, but it didn’t make sense in any permutation. Why did she need a lawyer? She had reported her suspicions of Yelena’s abuse, gone through all the proper channels, but somehow the charges had boomeranged back to her. All of her years of hard work—of sacrificing her free time and her love life and most everything that a woman her age usually strived for—all that she had done for her students… Did it mean nothing in the face of one false accusation?
She walked down the deserted hallway of the high school in a kind of dumb shock, almost missing the vibration of her cell phone from deep within her purse. She automatically dug it out and answered without checking to see who it was.
“Salomeh Jones? This is Troy Ayers from the Brooklyn Post. Do you have a minute to answer some questions?” The man spoke quickly in an assured tone that seemed to indicate the call was more of a formality than an actual search for information.
“Questions?” she asked. Her hand trailed along the chipped banister as she walked slowly down the steps. She was numb with dread, and her footing was unsure.
“You’ve been accused of having inappropriate relations with a female minor in your care. What is your response to these allegations?”
Salomeh stopped and sagged against the wall of the stairwell. She wished she could sink through the cool blue tiles and find herself in some alternate dimension where this type of treachery wasn’t possible.
“What is your response?” Ayers repeated. There was something gleeful in his tone, as if he enjoyed having caught her unawares.
She finally mustered up the strength to respond. “False,” she said, the desperation in her voice apparent even to her. “They’re completely false.”
“So you didn’t provide alcohol to the girls you mentor while supervising them at a concert last month? Show them pornographic movies during an overnight trip—”
That jolted her awake. She snapped up from against the wall and jogged down the remaining stairs. Her momentum carried her through the exit doors at a rapid pace.
“Those are lies!” she s
aid. “And blatant ones at that. Any further questions can be directed at my lawyer.”
“Just so you know, the public usually sees lawyering up so soon as a sign of guilt,” Ayers continued. “Why don’t you just talk to me, and I’ll help spin this—”
Salomeh ended the call and threw her phone back into her purse. Her breaths were shallow, and she felt the claustrophobic veil of a panic attack descending on her as she stood in the humid summer afternoon. Clusters of students milled about in front of the school, and she eyed them warily. Had they already heard? Would any of them believe it?
Yes, they would. She knew her students would defend her, but high schoolers loved a salacious rumor, especially if a teacher was involved.
As she turned to take a route that would be less populated, she felt compelled to look across the street. Two men watched her intently from the comfort of an impossibly shiny luxury sedan. She recognized at least one of them. Alexi, the man she had reported for harassing Yelena, leered at her, his close-set blue eyes dull and somehow simian. His bulky frame was hunched over the steering wheel, and he made a rude kissing noise at her when she looked his way.
Salomeh shuddered.
The other man gazed at her from the backseat, his attention just as disconcerting as that of his deranged chauffer. His eyes were also blue, but clear as ice and so cold that her first instinct was to seek an escape route.
The man was attractive, but in a frightening, predatory way. His dirty-blond hair was combed back from his forehead, a style that would have made him look like a laughable Wall Street caricature if not for the aura of danger about him. His thin lips curved into a mirthless smile before he gave her a polite nod of acknowledgment.
A series of unpleasant thoughts raced through Salomeh’s head: empty street, two men who want to hurt me. She tensed, waiting for them to act, but Alexi simply pulled the car away from the curb, tooting the horn as he drove past her.
Salomeh thought back to the confrontation that had taken place at Yelena’s apartment on the day she had decided to go to the police about the girl’s abuse. Alexi had scoffed.
“You go ahead and do that,” he had said in his Russian accent, completely unfazed. “My boss runs this town. You fuck with me, and he’ll destroy you.”
Salomeh had thought it was the empty threat of a mafioso wannabe, and reported him and Yelena’s mother anyway. The police officer she’d spoken to had been so receptive. He’d even followed up and asked her what she knew about Alexi’s criminal activities because the drug angle would probably get more traction than the abuse, sadly. Would she be willing to testify?
She’d repeated all that Yelena had told her, word for word.
Salomeh’s heart began to beat wildly, and she thought she might faint. She recalled those cold eyes that had been locked on her from the backseat, the menacing power the man had exuded.
She was in serious trouble.
She stood in the shade of one of the large oak trees lining the street, her mind in overdrive as she tried to plan the steps that could be taken to mitigate this disaster.
There has to be some way out of this, she thought, grasping at hope. All I have to do is explain what happened, and the bad guys will be put away, and my life will not be ruined.
“Salomeh Jones?”
She turned in the direction of the voice, only to be blinded by the flash from a camera, her hope disintegrating in the bright light like a precious artifact.
“I’m from the Brooklyn Daily. Do you have anything to say about the allegations of molestation being levied against you?”
Chapter One
Two weeks later
Julian Tamali rubbed his knuckles lightly over his eyes, trying to rid them of the gritty sensation that came from hours of squinting at the sundry types of intelligence handed to him over the past two days. Judging from the sudden surge of intel, something big was about to happen, but he and his colleagues hadn’t been able to figure out what precisely that was. There was an increase in chatter among the West African gangs in the tristate area, which wasn’t good given the recent uptick in jihadist activity in the region. Mali, Mauritania, and Niger were all fighting extremist factions, and the last thing the US needed was a group of those guys deciding to take a trip to NYC. Conversely, the Albanians had been eerily quiet, particularly the gang that Julian was trying to take down. He knew that Albanian gangs didn’t usually mix Muslim religiosity with their business, but he was wondering if these patterns were really a coincidence or the calm before the storm.
He leaned back in his office chair and gazed at the piles of papers distributed into uneven stacks across the dented metal surface of his desk. Bardhyn’s trail had been fairly cold for a year, so when the mafia boss had popped up on the New York City Balkan Gang Squad’s radar a couple of months back, Julian had flown in immediately, only to be rewarded with no new leads.
He sighed and pushed papers out of the way to reveal the small photo, creased and dog-eared with age, that was hidden in their midst. A mother and father, both dark-haired and dark-eyed, wore proud smiles as they gazed down at their children: a cocky-looking teenage boy, dark-haired like his parents but with green eyes, and an auburn-haired girl of ten. The boy wore a conical hat and a linen shirt paired with a gold-trimmed red vest. The girl, wearing a linen shirt and blue peasant skirt, had latched on to him from the side as she laughed up at him.
Julian ran a finger over the picture's frayed edge, and then said, “How long are you going to stand there, Yates? It’s kind of creepy.”
Miranda Yates, the agent he was sharing the office with—or rather whose office he was intruding upon for the duration of his assignment—moved from behind him to sit at the desk facing his.
“Eyes in the back of your head, huh?” she asked, handing him a small cup of coffee as she moved past him.
“No, but I can sense a woman’s gaze from fifty paces,” he drawled in his deep, lyrically accented voice.
She rolled her eyes and dropped into her seat.
“Coffee’s from the Turkish place down the street, so you should like it,” she said as she removed the jacket of her slim-tailored suit and placed it on the back of her seat. She was tall, almost as tall as him, with long blonde hair she wore in a mussed ponytail that belied her general anal retentiveness.
“Considering your line of work, I should probably break it to you gently that Turkey and Albania are, in fact, two different countries,” he said as he took a sip. “But this is very good, thank you.”
“You’re welcome, smart-ass. I thought you’d need it since you’ve been combing through these files with no rest,” she said and then ventured on, glancing at the picture. “I checked that out when you first got here. You were a pretty cute kid, even if your clothes were weird.”
Julian noticed her gaze slip from the picture to his hand, following the path of raised scar tissue that stretched up his forearm and under his sleeve.
“Glad to see we respect each other’s privacy around here,” Julian said, despite the fact he had already looked over Yates’s desk in addition to doing a background check on her, her sister, and her sister’s husband. He had passed on running one on her twin niece and nephew, as they were toddlers.
But the photo was more than background information: it was a totem, and something he didn’t share with others. The conjecture in her eyes when she’d looked from the picture to his arm had elicited a reaction that he usually prided himself on being able to suppress.
“Darling, we work for the FBI,” she said shortly. “Invasion of Privacy is my middle name, and it better be yours too, while you’re assigned to this task force.”
She took a sip of her coffee and booted up her computer.
Julian regretted being brusque with her. Although his charm was supposed to be one of his main assets, he wasn’t used to working with others for long periods of time. His job had begun in the translations department, the Arabic division, before he had made an unprecedented position change and even
tually landed the case that had driven him toward the law in the first place—trying to take down Bardhyn Murzaku.
“The clothes are traditional Albanian peasant clothing,” Julian said, trying to reel Yates back in. “The hat is called a qeleshe; the vest is called a xhaqete.”
“A jacket?” she asked archly. “How thoroughly exotic. Never heard of such a thing.”
“Xhaqete. It’s a cognate…” he began and realized he was dipping into language-nerd territory. “Anyway, we were dressed up for a folk-dancing recital.”
“You should try that outfit out here in New York. I’m sure you could pull some Albanian chicks and then milk them for info. Bat those pretty lashes at them, and let them touch your qeleshe, and they’d be putty in your hands.”
Julian grinned.
“From what I’ve seen, the look du jour for Albanian kids these days is gold chains and T-shirts down to their knees, so I think I’d stand out a bit in that outfit.”
“Well, those are the aspiring rappers. The gangsters favor tracksuits, for the most part, with the exception of Birdie’s crew. They’re always dressed up like they’re going to the Cotton Club. Gentleman gangsters, if you will.”
At the mention of Bardhyn’s nickname, Julian realized he still held the picture in his hand. He placed it facedown, drained the coffee in one long gulp, and started shuffling through papers again.
“If there’s one thing I can say about Birdie, it’s that he’s consistent. He was always an elegant dresser, even when most people in our country couldn’t afford to eat.”
“Was he also always a sociopath?” Yates asked, and Julian knew what she was really asking. He asked himself the same thing every day.
Did you always know what he was? Did you do anything to stop him?
Julian shrugged.
“Maybe so. We were young, and he was my friend,” Julian said. “I thought he was so clever and cool that his quick temper just seemed like quirk.”
