Extreme Measures

by Elisabeth Naughton

  “You,” she managed in a raspy voice. “How . . . ?”

  “How is irrelevant, isn’t it?” His brow lowered, and a dark look crept into his eyes. “What you should be concerned with is the why. But then, you know the why, don’t you, Evie?”

  Memories of her phone call to Zane nearly a year before spiraled through her mind. As did the weeks and months they’d spent together on that op in Beirut.

  “Some of it’s coming back to you now, isn’t it?” He eased away. Behind him, dark wood beams came into sight. “I have to run out for something. I’ll let you think long and hard until I get back.”

  He leaned close again, and she sucked in a breath. Something sharp stabbed into her arm where it was pinned above her head. Metal jingled. His fingers rubbed the stinging spot on her arm, and then his face came into view once more. “This should work pretty quickly.” Before she could turn her head, he slapped duct tape over her mouth. “I’ll be back in a few, beautiful. Don’t get into any trouble while I’m gone.”

  Footsteps echoed. Keys clinked, followed by clicks. Three.

  A door pulled open but didn’t close.

  “By the way, sweetheart,” Archer said from a distance, “you look good. Better than I expected. Even banged up, you’re still beautiful. My damn luck, huh?”

  The door snapped closed, the sound echoing in Eve’s mind, followed by three clicks again as she was locked in. She didn’t know how she’d gotten here or why she was with Archer, but something in the back of her head told her she needed to remember before it was too late.

  She struggled, tried to sit up, still couldn’t. Metal clanked behind her head. Pain raced along her wrists. Her hands were cuffed above, she realized, and . . .

  Her vision grew dark along the edges. The wood beams above blurred once more. Her heart raced as she drew deep breaths through her nose and tried to calm herself. He’d drugged her. The son of a bitch had drugged her.

  Pay attention to your surroundings. Think, dammit.

  She was lying on a bed. The room was big. She could tell from the way sound echoed that it was larger than a regular apartment and that there were no carpets on the floor. Was she in a barn? A loft apartment, maybe? A warehouse?

  Before she could decide, darkness spiraled in, and that fuzzy, light feeling that signaled her time was almost up fogged her brain.

  She had no idea where she was, but one thing was clear. If Archer was here, it was someplace she shouldn’t—couldn’t—be. Her stomach twisted, hard. Considering how much he hated her, she’d be safer with a group of jihad terrorists than she was now with him.

  Zane wanted to give the drug time to work. And he needed to get away from Juliet—shit, he had to stop thinking of her as that and call her by her real name—before he forgot what the hell he needed to do next.

  Evelyn. Eve. Fitting name considering a temptress with the same name had been Adam’s downfall in the Garden of Eden.

  His leg throbbed as he leaned against the dreary hallway wall, tugged a bag of M&M’s from his pocket, and ripped off one corner. Shaking a few into his hand, he popped them in his mouth and chewed. Not the pain pill he wanted, but enough. For now. And at least out here he didn’t have to listen to those sex-kitten mewing sounds she’d been making when she’d awakened. The ones that reminded him way too much of the sounds she’d made when he’d been inside her. God knew, the last thing he needed to remember right now was how good that had felt. How tight she’d been. How—back then—she’d been the only thing he’d wanted.

  The familiar anger he’d lived with the last year rippled through his veins. He shoved the bag back in his pocket and chewed. Man, he’d been a class-A pussy back then, hadn’t he? He’d fallen for her ruse like a teenager ramped up on hormones. Even with all the training and instruction and the knowledge that he shouldn’t trust anyone. He just hadn’t expected the “anyone” to include his colleagues in the CIA, living in his own fucking house.

  His phone rang, and he pulled it from his back pocket without looking at the screen, hit Answer, and pressed it to his ear.

  “Archer?” a familiar voice said. “Is that you, you dumb shit?”

  Fuck. Zane tipped the receiver away from his mouth and rubbed his aching forehead. If not bothering to check his cell screen before answering wasn’t proof Eve was fucking with his head again, nothing was.

  He was just about to quietly end the call when Jake Ryder added, “Are you in Seattle, you moron? I’m staring at a news report right now that’s got your name written all over it. Goddammit, Archer. Fourteen injured? Are you fucking insane?”

  Zane’s temper flared. Of course Ryder, his ex-boss—although technically the guy wasn’t an ex anything since he’d refused to accept Zane’s resignation from Aegis six months ago—would assume he’d had something to do with that little explosion.

  “I’m sorry,” Zane said, working not to clench his teeth, “but the party you’re trying to reach is unavailable. Adiós.”

  “Archer, you son of a bitch, don’t you dare hang up on—”

  Zane hit End, powered down the phone, and shoved it back in his pocket. Fuck Ryder and his intel. Fuck Ryder telling him not to go after Eve in retaliation for what she’d done to their team in Guatemala. To Ryder it wasn’t personal. To Zane it was everything.

  He checked his watch, knew he needed to give the drugs a few more minutes to work, and moved over to the dirt-streaked window at the end of the corridor. It looked out over the construction site of a waterfront warehouse next door. Thirty feet separated this building from the naked beams of the next, and a tower crane between the two loomed above like an ominous threat. Zane leaned forward and glanced to the end of the building, toward the parking lot beyond, and noticed a man dressed in black, looking from one building to the next as if searching for something. Or someone.

  Zane’s already tightly strung nerves kicked up a notch. His spine stiffened as he watched the man take three steps into the construction chaos, look up and around again, pause for several seconds, and then jog back to the street and disappear from sight.

  One of Eve’s lowlife partners? The terrorists she’d pissed off who’d blown up that street? Or just a dumbass schmuck who didn’t realize what the hell was going down around him?

  Zane waited to see if the dipshit returned, the SIG Sauer cool and heavy where it was holstered at his lower back. When several minutes passed and the guy didn’t return, Zane told himself to stop being so jumpy.

  Jumpy, however, had saved his life on more than one occasion, so he didn’t push the incident totally from his mind. He remembered the look of the man. And the location of the crane. And the fire escape on this building. And the empty floors of the one next door.

  He headed back down the hallway toward the loft he’d rented, slid the key into the first lock, and turned. It opened with a click. After repeating with the other two, he pushed the heavy steel door open and stepped back inside.

  The building was used mostly for storage. This loft was nothing but a wide, empty room consisting of a handful of pillars holding the ceiling up and a bank of windows that gazed out to the parking lot. There was one small bathroom off to the right that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in a year, and a table that held Eve’s gun and all the supplies he’d need. There was also a bed. A bed where Eve lay snoozing.

  He crossed to the bare mattress and stared down at her. Her head was tipped to the side, resting against her updrawn arm, her eyes closed, her chest rising and falling with her shallow breaths. Her face was bruised along one side, and small nicks and cuts marred her perfect complexion, but they didn’t take away from her beauty.

  Man, he hated that she still got to him, but even he couldn’t deny the woman was gorgeous. The shoulder-length curly blonde hair wasn’t bad, but he missed the straight chestnut locks she’d had when they’d been together in Lebanon. Had loved to wrap the strands around his hand when they’d made love.

  Fucked, he corrected himself, that familiar sense of be
trayal whipping through him the longer he stared at her. There’d been no love on her side. And on his . . . just a stupid-ass fool’s gullibility.

  He unlocked the cuffs from the rusted bed frame and brought her arms down by her sides. Her breasts pushed against the dirty, white button-down blouse she wore as he slipped one arm under her back, and the familiar scent of peaches wafted to his nose.

  He used to love peaches—peach ice cream, peach cobbler, peach preserves. Hell, he was from Georgia. Peaches were practically a food group where he was from, and before his mother had died from breast cancer, her specialty had been peach pie. But ever since Beirut, he couldn’t stomach peaches. And he hated that now, even after all this time, just the scent of that peach lotion she still obviously slathered all over her body fresh from a shower brought a host of memories he’d rather forget.

  He clenched his jaw until it hurt and hefted her into his arms. As he carried her to the chair he’d set up earlier, he ignored the toned muscles in her arms and legs and the tightness of her ass where her body pressed against his. Reminded himself—again—that she wasn’t the sweet and innocent California girl she’d pretended to be.

  She was a traitor, one who’d let a known arms dealer walk when they’d been in Beirut, a man who’d gone on to kill innocent women and children. A traitor who’d set his team up to be killed in Guatemala. Who even now was plotting with terrorists—for what he didn’t know, but he’d soon find out.

  How many other guys had she fucked to get what she wanted? How many others had died trusting her? How many more lives would be lost—civilians, soldiers, children—before she was done?

  He set her in the plastic folding chair and made sure she was propped up. Her head fell forward as he hooked her arms around the back of the chair and cuffed them together. Using zip ties, he strapped each foot to the chair’s legs, then pushed to his feet and stared down at all that curly blonde hair hiding her face.

  A sliver of guilt crept into his chest. If there was a hell, he was surely headed there. But he didn’t care. Someone needed to put a stop to her. And it looked like that someone was now him.

  “Stupid fucking son of a bitch!” Jake Ryder slammed the phone down on his desk. “Marley! Get in here!”

  The door to his office at Aegis headquarters pushed open just as he was tugging off his tie, and Marley Addison, his assistant, stuck her head into the room.

  “That doesn’t sound like happiness to me,” she muttered.

  Jake threw the tie onto the corner of his desk, scrubbed his hand through his hair, and then leaned both palms on the aged mahogany, ignoring her sarcasm. Seven years with SEAL Team Six had taught him plenty about patience, but all that training was currently flying through the window as his mind raced over what to do about Zane Archer.

  He had a soft spot for America’s best. Though Archer had left the CIA for his own personal reasons, his track record there had been stellar. Jake had enough contacts within the organization to know who was worth recruiting and who wasn’t, but had he known then that Zane was going to be a major thorn in his side, he’d never have hired the son of a bitch. He hadn’t spent years building Aegis into the best black ops security company in the world for nothing, and he’d be damned if he was going to let Archer fuck it up for him now.

  In the corner of the room near a grouping of leather couches, CNN flickered with images of the Seattle bombing and updates on the number of injured, but he ignored those too. “Who do we have in the Pacific Northwest?”

  Marley moved fully into the room. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a neat tail, and the wire-rimmed glasses Jake was used to seeing on her face were pushed up to the top of her head. The door snapped shut behind her as she paged through screens on her smartphone, knowing better than to comment on his mood. “Landon Miller just finished an assignment near Bellingham. He’s scheduled to be off the next two weeks.”

  “Get him on the line. ASAP. His vacation’s been canceled until further notice.”

  “That’s not going to go over well,” Marley said as he turned to look out at the rolling Kentucky hills lined with neat white fences. “What do I tell him is the reason for this callback?”

  Jake watched a stallion race across the field. He’d set up Aegis’s headquarters here, in one wing of the twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion he’d inherited from his louse of a father when the bastard had finally keeled over. Partly because the scenery always relaxed him. Partly because it reminded him of where he’d come from and where he was going next. But mostly because he got a sick sense of satisfaction knowing he was dancing on his good-for-nothing father’s grave.

  The view today, though, didn’t help. It only pissed him off, because being here meant he was too far away to wrap his hands around Zane’s fucking neck. “I want Archer brought in before the Feds get a hold of him.”

  “You think Zane’s involved in the bombing in Seattle?”

  Jake turned toward Marley. The black slacks were standard for her. The red blouse was new. He’d thought about mentioning it earlier but had decided not to. Their relationship was structured and professional and had been for going on four years now. She was the best damn assistant he’d ever had. The woman monitored his team of operatives better than Central Command, and she put up with his ass on a daily basis, which, he knew, wasn’t easy to do. If he started tossing out compliments now, it’d all turn to shit. And he’d had enough shit relationships with women to span a lifetime. He wasn’t going there with Marley no matter how pretty she might look today.

  “I think Archer’s thinking with his dick and not his brain. And even if he didn’t set that bomb—which I hope to God he didn’t, because it’s going to fuck Aegis if he had anything to do with it—I have a feeling he’s knee-deep in the shit. Send Miller Archer’s last GPS location and have him pick the son of a bitch up before he causes any more trouble.”

  Marley was already dialing as she stepped toward the door. “You got it, boss man.”

  She left the door open in her wake, and in the silence, Jake’s headache kicked up to the beat of a marching band. He reached into the pocket of his slacks for the bottle of Motrin he kept there, flipped the lid, and shook the contents over his palm. When nothing spilled out, his frustration shot to a whole new level.

  “And get me some more grunt candy before my fucking head explodes!”

  A small white bottle flew through the open door and nearly nailed him in the head.

  “Come on, beautiful, naptime’s over. Wake up.”

  The tapping on Eve’s cheek brought her around. She jolted.

  “That’s it. Open those pretty amber eyes for me.”

  Lifting her head, she tried to see through the haze. Confusion mixed with the grogginess. “Saw-Sawyer?”

  “There’s my girl. Can’t have you sleeping on the job, now can we?”

  What was Sawyer doing here? And where was here anyway? She looked around, narrowed her eyes, couldn’t see anything more than fuzzy shapes that seemed to bounce back and forth as if the world had been set on spin cycle.

  “Over here, baby.” She followed the sound of his voice. “That’s it. Yeah, I think things are working well enough for us to get started now.”

  Get started? Eve had no idea what he meant. Or what was going on. But a niggling thought in the back of her mind warned, Be careful.

  Metal scraped the floor. Eve focused long enough to see Sawyer’s fuzzy shape pull a chair in front of her and sit. “We’ll start with something easy. Tell me your name.”

  Her name? He knew her name. “What is this? What’s going—?”

  “Your name, beautiful. And where you live.”

  “J-Juliet.”

  “No, not your CIA cover, sweetheart. Your real name.”

  Eve’s mind spun, and before she thought better of it, she said, “Ev-Evelyn Wolfe. I live in . . .” Crap, where did she live? “Monterey. I live in Monterey.” That was right. On the beach. She had this great bungalow that overlooked the Pacific. It was smal
l and had cost a fortune, but it was so worth it. “In California.”

  “Good,” Sawyer said. “Very good. Now, how about who you work for?”

  Why was he asking her these questions? Eve couldn’t seem to think straight. “I work for . . . the CIA. You know that.”

  “Wrong.” Sawyer leaned forward. A snap echoed in the room, followed by a whisper of air across Eve’s skin and the soft clink of something hitting the floor. “Try again, Evie.”

  Eve blinked twice, tried to clear her watery vision. Sawyer was sitting in front of her, and in his hand he held something silver. A knife? Eve tried to see through the fuzziness.

  No, not a knife, a pair of scissors.

  Scissors? What the hell would he need scissors for? He—

  She looked down, and even though everything still seemed to be moving as if underwater, she noticed the top button of her blouse was missing. Her breasts all but spilling out of her once-white top.

  Her gaze shot back to his face, and inch by inch, it came into view. Dark hair in need of a trim, several days’ worth of beard on his sculpted jaw, a thin scab across his forehead, and piercing, unfriendly, more-brown-than-green familiar hazel eyes. “Try again, Evie.”

  She swallowed. Hard. Tried to make sense of what was happening. Couldn’t. Couldn’t seem to stop herself from talking either. “I . . . I work for the CIA. Counterintelligence. I’m—”

  “Wrong.” Sawyer leaned forward again. Another snip. Another whisper of air across her stomach. Another clink as the button hit the cement floor. “I’m not interested in your lies.”

  Eve’s stomach tightened. The venom in Sawyer’s words was new. And bone-chilling. She tried to move, to get away, but her hands were locked behind her. She tried to stand but couldn’t because her legs weren’t working. Too late she realized he’d tied her to a chair.