by Dawn Ryder
She smiled at herself and pointed the remote at the garage door. It slid up in response. She left her car in the driveway and walked into the garage. There were two trucks inside it, one for a gardener and another for deliveries.
A quick tap on the remote and the door slid shut again. She had to point the remote at the door leading into the house and click it to unlock the security system. As the door slid down and the sunlight was cut off, she pushed the door open to the walk-in pantry. Sitting on the island were the promised boxes of ingredients for the night’s party eats.
There was also a man.
A huge one with a black ski mask pulled down over his face, standing on the island as he was drilling something into the side of the beam that ran across the ceiling.
Jenna blinked, but he was there, turning to face her as she heard the door behind her close and click as it locked.
Fuck.
She’d dropped the stupid remote into her pocket, and the doorknob wasn’t turning.
The guy was cussing, jumping down from the island as she tried to get the dammed remote free of her pocket. Her fingers were nothing but a tangled mess as she fought against the fabric of her pants and felt like her dammed heart was going to burst because it was thumping so hard.
“Stay away from me!” she warned.
Her voice came out in a tone that was far less than confident. Mr. Ski Mask man was less than impressed, too. She caught a hint of his eyes narrowing before he was reaching for her.
“Don’t touch me, asshole!”
This time, something clicked inside her. Like a button being pushed. It happened as he reached out for her, a need to survive surfacing above her horror. The self-defense training she’d been required to attend at work kicked in. The guy only gained a partial hold on her arm before she clamped his hand down beneath her own and twisted under his arm, taking his hand and arm along with her motion.
There was a grunt from him as she twisted and tried to lock up his arm.
Unfortunately, he’d had self-defense training, too.
He dropped his shoulder and turned, breaking her hold with a snarl.
“I mean it … don’t touch me!”
That was another lesson from her classes, be vocal. Make sure you told your attacker to stop.
It made it so much easier to convict them that way.
Yeah? Well you have to survive first.
He came at her, and she popped a back fist into his eye. Practicing on a hand-held pad was no preparation for the feeling of her knuckles sinking into the soft flesh of his eye and hitting the bone of his skull.
She let out a gasp as the impact traveled up her arm and into her shoulder. There was a grunt and then a snicker. The unexpected sound drew her attention to the doorway, which opened into the kitchen. There was a second man there, watching them through the slits in his ski mask.
The distraction proved fatal.
One moment she was trying to decide why he was snickering and in the next the man in front of her had her face down on the island, her arms twisted up behind her.
“Need any help?” the man in the doorway asked.
There was a grunt from the man behind her. He had his weight on her, pinning her to the smooth marble. “Get off me!”
“Greer…”
“Yeah.” The guy in the doorway moved toward her. He pulled something from his vest.
She caught a glint of light shining off the end of a very sharp needle before she was fighting for her life. The guy behind her underestimated her response. It gave her a tiny taste of relief because she managed to push off the island as his feet gave.
But he pushed her back into place a half-second later.
“Sure you have her?” the first man asked.
“Do it, our window is closing.”
There was an unyielding note in the first man’s tone. It chilled her blood, making her realize that she’d never really been afraid before.
No, she understood true fear now.
Her heart was racing, sweat popping out all over her skin as she strained against the hold on her. All the while, she watched the guy in front of her coming closer. The man behind her grabbed her hair, using the hold to flatten her head on the island. It gave the first man a clear path to her neck.
She thought she caught a hint of remorse in his eyes before he was tapping the needle against her neck. It stung, but what she felt most was the horror.
Was she going to die?
Normally, she would have questioned her level of drama, but the ski masks just made them look ten times scarier than anything she’d ever seen in her life. The hold the guy had on her was painful and so hard, she felt it bone deep.
And then, relief was washing through her, the pain lessening as thinking began to elude her.
“Ease up on her,” The first man said. He popped a cap back onto whatever it was he’d used on her and replaced it in his vest pocket. “She’ll be out in a moment.”
The certainty in his tone sent her into a panic.
Right.
Wrong.
Hopeless or not.
She jerked and strained against the hold on her.
But she was weakening again.
She felt like her muscles were losing strength, becoming limp. She gasped, trying to draw in enough breath to fend off the fog clouding her thoughts.
Helpless …
It was by far the worst feeling she’d ever experienced. Like being caught in the doors of an elevator and aware of every second while those unfeeling doors crushed her.
The man behind her eased his hold as she wilted right in front of him. He reached out and caught her arm, controlling her fall to the floor. Their gazes locked.
Devil back eyes.
It was the last bit of information her failing senses could grasp.
* * *
“I would have called you something a little more sordid.” Greer said.
“Our window is closing,” Dare reprimanded Greer.
Greer shrugged and turned to return to the kitchen. “Your eye is swelling shut, too.”
It was a parting jab.
Dare was used to them from Greer and the rest of the team. Shadow Ops wasn’t for the thin-skinned.
He knelt down beside his captive and felt something unique. She was petite. From her delicate nose all the way to her slim fingers. Perspiration was coating her, telling him how frightened she’d been.
It wasn’t the first time he’d scared someone during a case.
Wouldn’t be the last either.
Working with scum meant he had to meet them on common ground. Bad guys played rough, so he did, too.
What was unique was, today, it bothered him.
He drew in a stiff breath and stood. The mission goal was what needed his attention.
As in, undivided attention.
Whoever she was, he’d deal with her after the house was wired.
* * *
“How much did you give her?”
Greer McRae was standing in the doorway of the bedroom Dare had carried their unexpected guest into.
“Those trigger pens don’t allow for choices in the dosage.” Agent Thais Sinclair added her opinion from the hallway behind Greer. “As slight as she is, don’t expect any answers until morning.”
“She’s tougher than she looks,” Dare said. He left her lying on the bed, reaching out to pull on the frame. It held steady as he tried to shake it.
“I wouldn’t secure her.” Thais was still feeling the need to offer her opinion. Dare wasn’t in the mood for it, but his frustration gained his attention because Thais was his fellow agent.
In short, there was no reason for him to have his jockstrap in a twist.
They worked together, in each other’s back pockets.
He looked at Thais. “We finally have Kirkland’s house wired. Team resources need to be focused on the mission, not making sure our detainee doesn’t slip out the window and go screaming to the local police. We don’t need anyone
running their mouth about a federal investigation going on in the area. Kirkland might have a few of the local cops in his pay.”
The set of shackles in his hands jingled as he dropped one cuff on the bed next to their detainee and unlocked the second one before securing it around a section of the bedframe.
“That drug nauseates a lot of people,” Thais continued.
Dare had picked up the second cuff, intending to secure it around Jenna’s wrist. He stopped and looked at Thais.
“We’re working here.” Thais stated the obvious. “If she throws up all over this room, because she can’t make it to the bathroom, we’ll be the ones enjoying the scent.”
“But if it makes you feel better to cuff her,” Greer said, choking on his amusement, “we can see why.”
Greer winked, while Thais made a soft, delicate sound of approval. Dare felt his jaw aching.
His eye was swollen, and it was going to be a nice shiner come morning. His teammates left him, but he heard them laughing in the hallway before they turned and went back to where their command center was set up in the living room of the house.
The Shadow Ops teams used personal property to avoid being tracked in a world where operating off-grid was becoming more and more of a challenge.
Houses in probate, ones that belonged to recently deceased accident victims, those were the places they liked to set up in. It would take the locals a few weeks to question if they were new residents or not, and by then, they’d move on.
He looked down at Jenna Henson.
She shouldn’t have become a factor. It was an odd twist of fate that the owner of the catering company had a friend with a security clearance who also had chef skills.
Dare didn’t let his guilt gain any further hold on him than that.
No, it wasn’t fair.
Neither was life. And Jenna wasn’t dead, unlike the Asian girls who were lying in cold storage.
His team was doing their best to make sure countless others wouldn’t have to come face to face with just how harsh reality could be when men like Kirkland were willing to kill to gain what they wanted.
Okay, he still felt a twinge of guilt as he looked at his detainee.
Jenna had a delicate bone structure, just like the two bodies that had been fished out of the Los Angeles riverbed. Kirkland liked pretty girls, lots of them. He also seemed to like doing business with the same sort of criminals his father had. Dare had pictures of Kirkland meeting with crime bosses and underworld thugs. But no evidence linking him with any crimes.
Yet, anyway.
It would come. There was too much money flowing. Kirkland’s legitimate businesses didn’t account for all of it.
He dropped the shackle on the floor and left Jenna behind. That was the way it had to be. The only comfort he could offer was letting her have the dignity of not being chained if she did wake up nauseated.
Someone would hear her or he would be getting a new team.
* * *
Her mouth was dry.
Like she’d slept with her mouth open and a squirrel had decided to sleep on her tongue.
But that wasn’t the only thing off. Waking up was taking a serious amount of effort. Half her brain didn’t want to respond, but her bladder was screaming for relief. Jenna reached up and rubbed her eyes. They burned, feeling gritty.
But it was the sight of the ceiling above her that really made her break through the fog holding her down.
It wasn’t a very interesting ceiling. Just some shade of white, which wasn’t too glaring. There was some crown molding running along the edges of it, too. And a nice little arched opening to a bathroom.
Crown molding her bedroom didn’t have.
She sat up and cringed as her body protested. Pain raced along her nerve endings, but it sort of got shoved into a back corner of her mind as she looked around the room and didn’t recognize anything.
Her memory decided to reengage. Offering up a perfect recollection of those moments in the kitchen.
Fuck.
And double fuck.
In fact, fuck, just wasn’t a dirty enough word for her circumstances.
She looked at the door but scooted off the bed and made a dash for the bathroom first. Wetting herself while escaping didn’t seem a very wise choice. Halfway through washing her hands, she realized she needed to prioritize. Getting out of wherever she was had to rank higher than clean hands.
Peeking back into the room she took it in as she tried to decide on a course of action. It was still dark outside, the air had the morning chill feeling to it. She was cold from lying on the bed in just her clothing. The comforter was mussed where she’d been placed.
Someone put you in that bed …
A someone strong enough to carry her.
Yeah, like a guy wearing a ski mask she’d recently encountered.
She shouldn’t have flushed the toilet.
The sound of the water running was like fingernails on a chalkboard. Her heart accelerated as she decided the window was a good bet for getting out of the house.
She made it only halfway across the room before the door opened.
“Welcome back, Ms. Henson.”
Jenna jumped back into a fighting stance. She tried to quell the thought going through her brain about how ridiculous she must look.
Still … stupid looking or not, she wasn’t going down without a fight.
The light was on in one of the rooms in the house. It gave her a strange illumination of the guy, while leaving his face in shadow. What it did grant her was a very clear picture of how he completely filled the doorway.
He was huge and muscled beyond the normal civilian man. The sight sent a strange twist through her belly because she realized his body was by far the most deadly weapon at his disposal. The gun strapped to his chest in a harness was only one option he might utilize.
“I am Special Agent Servant.”
As much as she’d been struggling with believing her circumstances, the introduction took a moment to sink in. She wanted to be relived, but it was hard to come out of her flight mode and really think about what he’d said.
Okay, and the needle in the neck thing was still sticking in her brain.
“You were wearing a ski mask,” she mumbled, her thoughts just spilling past her lips because of how fast her brain was running.
He tilted his head to one side and shrugged. “You’re being detained.”
“Excuse me?” she demanded. “I don’t see a badge.”
He came through the doorway, his stride too full of confidence for her dwindling confidence. “You can show it to me from right there.”
At least she managed to sound more together than she felt.
Fuck, she really didn’t need to lose it.
He reached down and pulled something off his belt. The meager light had her squinting to get a real look at it. He moved a little closer while she was trying to read the badge.
It was a fatal miscalculation on her part.
He dropped the badge and clamped a hand on her wrist before she realized what he was doing.
“That thing doesn’t say police on it,” she argued.
He twisted her around and pushed her back toward the bed.
“Special Agent,” he clarified.
His strength was flatly amazing. He moved her where he wanted with the hold he had on her arm. A moment later she heard a click as he secured something cold and hard around her wrist.
“We’ll talk more in the morning.” He was moving back to where his badge was lying on the floor. One easy motion and he’d plucked it up before turning to look at her while he clipped it to his belt. “You’re not in any danger.”
But she was chained to the bed with a length of chain. “I want to call a lawyer.”
He turned and contemplated her. What bothered her the most was the pity in his eyes. It reminded her of the way someone looked at a pigeon with a broken wing. He might not like the situation, but it wasn’t going to change the f
act that things weren’t going to end well for the pigeon.
For her …
“There is a reason you’ve never seen a badge like this one, Ms. Henson. We’re a covert team. Settle down. You aren’t going anywhere until we decide you aren’t part of the case.” He went through the door and started to pull it shut. “Trust me, this is more comfortable than most detainees get. I suggest you enjoy it while you can.”
The warning was clear as a fog horn.
“You were the one breaking into someone’s house,” she argued as she jerked on the shackle.
“I know what I was doing,” he muttered. “What concerns you is what you were doing there and what you saw.”
It wasn’t the first part of his sentence that concerned her. She knew she was innocent of any crime.
But she had seen him and his buddy.
That was a cold, hard, jab of something she wished she’d never seen. An ignorance-is-bliss sort of moment. She was left dealing with the very bitter realization that knowing too much had killed the cat.
At the moment, she was cast as the cat in life’s little drama.
He shut the door as she sunk onto the edge of the bed and blinked because her night vision had been disrupted by the encounter. She was left in the dark, waiting for her eyes to adjust while time limped by like a lame tortoise, letting her soak in just how helpless she was to do anything but wait.
The shackle on her wrist was like one she’d seen in reality prison shows. It had a two-foot length of silver chain between two cuffs. One was secured to the heavy bedframe and the other around her wrist.
She was scared.
Fuck that!
She growled at herself and turned around, trying to push the bed. It was a heavy iron frame that didn’t budge. Hell, the thing didn’t even rock.
Fuck.
You’re repeating yourself …
Yeah? Well that was sort of low on the priorities list at the moment and fuck was working for her.
The chain was solid, and she didn’t have enough strength to break the frame.
There was a nightstand, but it was a basic one, no drawers. The room was just as spartan.
She didn’t want to quit.
But circumstances left her with nothing but the fact that he’d said he was an agent to keep her from descending into panic again.
