by S. K. Lessly
And her eyes were mystical. It was the first time I’d actually seen the true color of them and I couldn’t formulate a syllable. The wind blew her hair all around her face, but it never impeded my view of her. The preverbal mask that usually shielded her from the world was gone, and now sitting before me was the unguarded Grace Michelle King.
I picked up my pace as I moved, the tension in my body tightening with each step. “Misty, what’s wrong?” I asked again just in case she didn’t hear me the first time over the crashing waves. She held my gaze for a moment longer, watching me, and making me feel very uneasy. She then gave me a small smile before she turned and looked out into the coming darkness again.
Once I was close enough to hear her, she said, “Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine. Just thinking. That’s all.”
Her voice made my heart drop into my stomach. I knew of course that she was lying, but I still couldn’t get my brain to formulate a damn word, much less a sentence. Hell, I couldn’t hold an intelligent conversation to save my damn life at that moment. So, I didn’t try. I nodded my head in affirmation, climbed up, walked around to the other side of her, and sat down.
The shit that had been bothering me before was no longer a factor. It had been replaced by this new foreign emotion that I never thought I would have in a million years. I looked to my right and watched the woman next to me for longer than I was supposed to. I knew she felt my eyes on her, but she didn’t turn to meet my gaze nor did she utter a word. What she did do was move closer to me and rest her head on my shoulder.
That simple gesture from her, that breath of a second was when I knew that I was in serious shit. The emotions that had garbled my mind a minute ago, suddenly came in as clear as the sky above us. All of the questions, uncertainties, and desires I’d had in the past came crashing down with the force of a giant tidal wave hitting the ocean’s shore.
I wanted her.
That was it; simple and beyond a doubt. I wanted her in the worst way. I wanted to touch her, to feel her. I wanted to kiss her and hold her in my arms. I wanted her to belong to me. I wanted to protect her and fight for her. I wanted to love her. Shit, I think I fell in love with her right then and there on the rocks watching the tide roll in. The feelings between us electrified the air around us and sent sparks throughout my body and maybe even hers too.
Instead of diving in head first, I hesitated. It wasn’t because I was scared of what I was feeling, it was just my way. I needed to be sure about everything; about her and about us. As I said before, Misty was like family. If things didn’t work out for some odd reason, I was afraid that it would mess up our family dynamic. It was crazy, though because the more I held back for her, the more I wanted her. But I had commitment issues. The idea of commitment wasn’t a problem for me, it was usually the person who wanted the commitment. It was the reason why Casey and I only dated for as long as we had.
I was looking for that spark, that undeniable feeling that you got when you knew you’d met the woman of your dreams. Pops had told me that was what he felt the second he saw Ma. Josh had said the same thing happened when he first met Sweets. I wasn’t a believer, though. Being with Casey was great, but I didn’t feel any sparks between us, not like what my father and Josh had described.
But then it happened. That night on the beach when I looked into Misty’s eyes, I felt that pull, that need for only one woman, and she was sitting right beside me. The other night, I finally said ‘fuck it’ and dove in head first. I had found the woman I was meant to be with, so there was no need to deprive myself of her any longer.
Feeling the need to hear her voice, I went to grab my phone to call her. Just as I found her number, my phone started to vibrate.
Shit!
I answered it on the third ring. “Tell me you have something, Jacks.” I demanded, using the Bluetooth feature in my truck to answer his call.
“Mate, does hair grow on a horse’s arse?” Jacks asked me, his voice coming through loud and clear through my speakers.
“Well, I don’t know about Great Britain, but here in the States hair grows everywhere on a horse, Jacks. What do you have?”
I could sense the shift in Jacks’ demeanor as he exhaled through the phone. “Unfortunately, you’re not going to like what I have. It’s going to give you more questions than answers.”
I inwardly groaned. Looks like my day was going to hell in a hand basket.
I sighed deeply and said to him. “All right, tell me.”
He took a deep breath himself and gave it to me; his report thorough, precise, and to the point. He was right, as he spoke, I did come up with more questions that I knew he wouldn’t be able to answer.
When he was done, I asked, “What’s your take on everything? Do you have any leads on who she was looking for, what her plan was, or in light of what you found, was the information we retrieved solid?”
“Our information was solid. I at least know that. And I have some leads, but there’s not much,” he replied, his English accent stressing the words, proving he was just as frustrated with everything as I was.
“Okay. Damn it, I was hoping we’d have more than jack shit. No pun intended.”
“I feel the same way. Here is the thing, mate: I do not think we should let this go. I want to track down some of the leads I discovered anyway as well as look into the information Nickels gave me. Also, there are some people I want to track down, talk to them, and things to that effect. There is something here. I can smell it. Let me work this, turn over a few rocks, and see what crawls out. Regardless of what happened to her, I think we still need to look deeper into the reason why you sent me out here in the first place.”
I agreed and told him so. I lapsed into silence, thinking hard about what to do from here. I hated the fact that I had to lean on someone else to handle this. I was one of those people who needed to be in the thick of shit in order to feel that things were being done right. Not to say that Jacks didn’t know what he was doing; I just needed to be in control.
The problem for me was that I couldn’t do the shit myself. This investigation had already taken two weeks from Jacks’ life and he still had nothing. I had too much going on here, running this team, keeping its members out of trouble, and carrying our ever-growing caseload. Spreading myself too thin wouldn’t help this situation or my team. Still, something had to give. We needed to figure out what the woman was up to before it was too late.
“Listen, I have a few meetings today to wrap up the Simon case. Once I’m done with that, I’m going to grab the next thing smoking out of here and make my way to you. I want to see what you’ve come up with, walk through the steps you took, and even work the leads Nickels found with you. Together we can overturn those rocks.”
Jacks was quiet for a half a second before he asked, “So you agree that there is something here?”
I grunted. “I do, and that’s why I sent you there. I don’t think her resurfacing after all of this time was because she was lonely. She’s been living in the shadows quietly for years. Now she just pops up out of the blue? No, I’m not buying that one bit. She’s up to something or rather she was. We need to find out what and fast. I have a bad feeling about this, Jacks. That woman was very careful with her life. She wouldn’t have allowed this to happen unless she didn’t see it coming. You and I both know that.”
“Yeah, I agree. But maybe it was just karma.”
“I have no doubt that it was and she probably deserved it, but still…”
I let Jacks formulate his own thoughts as I stayed silent, inching through traffic.
“Yeah, well, I’m glad we are on the same page with this. Just let me know when you are coming in-country, and I will pick you up.”
“No, that’s not necessary. I’ll meet you. We don’t want to draw too much attention to ourselves; at least not yet.”
Jacks and I talked a little more about a strategy for when I arrived in Russia like where we should meet up and a few other things before I hung up.
My mind drifted to the things Jacks had been able to dig up in Russia. He’d been there for two weeks now looking for Diane Deonatti. She was the CIA agent directly responsible for Sweets’ kidnapping some years back.
Back then, she escaped our clutches. Actually, the CIA hid her from us. They knew Josh wanted her to pay for setting up Sweets as bait to lure a Mexican cartel out into the open. My guess was that this cartel was into more than just drugs and gun running for the CIA to take notice. As I was sure you could surmise, the agency didn’t share any information about what their agent was doing. However, it wasn’t hard to guess.
Here’s what I thought went down. Diane was desperate. She had tried everything to nail this cartel, but nothing she did worked. She tried to enlist help from a U.S. based shipping company that had dealings with this cartel as a way to double cross whomever she wanted. When that also failed, she decided to get dirty. The CEO of the shipping company Diane enlisted help from, happened to be Sweets’ ex.
Next Diane put a plan into motion that placed Sweets in the crosshairs of the cartel. She had hoped to grab the members of the cartel when they went after Sweets, but that didn’t happen. Her idea backfired, and Josh and his team along with Malcolm, a few others, and me had to jump in and save Sweets from hell.
Josh wanted his revenge spree to start with Diane, but the CIA told us that they preferred to handle their own mess. In fact, they assured us that they would handle Agent Deonatti their way. They further assured us that she would never surface again and they expressed their deepest sympathies on her actions. I didn’t trust the CIA for shit. I didn’t believe a word that they said. The reason why they couldn’t produce Diane was because she was gone.
That woman, feeling the heat coming up on her ass, had vanished the second she knew she’d fucked up. Josh told me that he’d warned Diane not to fuck with Sweets, and although I didn’t believe Diane was that afraid of my brother, she disappeared anyway. I didn’t believe for a second that the CIA was on top of this. So, the second we left their headquarters, I got Nickels, Sweets’ friend, on Diane’s scent. Under no uncertain terms was Nickels to let up until he found her.
For a while Diane remained in the dark. Nickels couldn’t find any traces of her. There were no bank records, her credit cards were quiet, and she hadn’t placed any phone calls to her known associates. The CIA remained strong in their claim that they had everything under control. What started to alarm me wasn’t the lack of sightings, but more so the rumors that were floating around in our world.
I had heard a little noise from few people within various counterterrorism units throughout America’s clandestine family and abroad, that Diane was very displeased with how she’d been treated by the agency. At first, the word around was she was pissed at the CIA and their disloyalty. Why she was surprised by that was a mystery to me. The CIA was all about numero uno. Their agents were loyal to themselves and sometimes their devotion included the agency itself, but never to anyone else.
About three months ago, Nickels finally caught sight of her. She was found on video footage at a train station in Kharkiv, the second largest city in the Ukraine. What led me to believe something wasn’t right was how quickly the rumors stopped. I even asked around, wondering if anyone had heard from her, was she still pissed at the agency, and shit like that. All I received was a bunch of back-pedaling and down-grading the rumors they had heard.
I kept Nickels on Diane, telling him to keep an eye on her. It was strange to me that all of a sudden those that were in charge of the rumor mill suddenly grew quiet. I instructed Nickels to track any of her known associates. She knew how to keep hidden, but her contacts however, would be sloppy. Our due diligence paid off. A couple of weeks ago, Diane reached out to an old contact of hers.
He was a general of Russia’s Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye. The GRU happened to be Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency. It was larger and more powerful than their rivals, the Foreign Intelligence Service and the Federal Security Service. They were as ruthless and as cold as any agency known in the world and definitely worked under a set of rules that were their own. Be that as it may, we didn’t have an idea on what was said or why she’d gotten in contact with him, but for her to reach out to a man like that, something big was about to go down.
I went back to one of my sources in the CIA on this news, and that’s when they told me that Diane was on a revenge kick and that her sight was not on the CIA. Another contact of mine from a neighboring agency, which was a part of Britain’s clandestine operations, told me that they got wind that Diane was looking to put a contract out on someone she felt was the reason for her fall. A contract on someone’s head equated to a hit. She wanted to have someone killed and was looking for a professional to carry out her wishes. There were a lot of people around, top assassins that had no problem taking the job for the right price.
With that information, I felt it was time to hunt her down and eliminate her. It wasn’t clear who her target was, but I had an idea and I didn’t like it. Nickels stayed on her trail and told me that Diane, was out in the open staying somewhere in Kiev, which was the capital of the Ukraine. I had sent Jacks to Diane’s last known location to pick up her scent. Again, that was two weeks ago, and from the update he’d just given me, he wasn’t even close to figuring out if the information we had received was legitimate or not.
Diane had it out for Josh. This I was certain of. There were some facts I needed to know before I told him about Diane, though. I first had to confirm the threat. Secondly, I had to find out who posed the threat and where they were. Then we would have to formulate and plan to exterminate the threat. Josh would ask me details about all of this and so much more, and instead of giving him a lot of possibilities, I wanted to provide facts.
Josh was going to lose his mind. He had a family now; a wife, an infant, and a baby on the way. It was going to be tough, but we had to make sure he stayed calm and in the States. He would want to go hunting, but that wasn’t going to happen. He needed to stay put and protect his family.
Just thinking about his situation took me back to the conversation I’d had with Misty last night. Her fears were valid. I didn’t want to downplay it. I just knew that endangering our family exposing our identities to someone who wanted us dead wasn’t going to happen.
Diane was different. She knew how to get to Josh indirectly because she knew his weakness was Sweets. This was why I wanted to find her. I hated loose ends, and she posed a danger to my brother and his family, which was my family. Just thinking about what she was capable of made me very uneasy.
I reached for my phone and called my assistant, a staff sergeant by the name Ramirez.
“Major Cooper’s office,” Ramirez answered after the second ring.
“Sergeant, it’s me. I need to get to Russia by tomorrow. Book me a flight with the fastest route there for later today.”
“Yes, sir. Will do.”
“Bring me up to speed on my agenda for today.”
Chapter Twelve
Josh
“Hey, baby.”
I leaned into my wife and rubbed her belly. Kenya jumped slightly from my touch.
I frowned. “You all right?” I asked, concern etched in my voice. I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer to me.
We were sitting in the conference room with the majority of the team waiting for the one o’clock meeting that Shane had scheduled early this morning. Kenya seemed tense from the moment I walked into the room and sat next to her. She had left early this morning to go to the gym, so we didn’t drive into work together, which was something that we hadn’t done in a while. I ended up dropping Jay by t
he daycare this morning and had some follow-up on a few cases I was working on so I hadn’t seen my wife all morning.
“Is it your back?” I asked remembering the last time she‘d experienced back pain when she was pregnant. She had sat around on the balcony of our home, not realizing that she was in active labor. She wasn’t anywhere near her due date now, but you never knew.
Kenya shook her head and brought her hand underneath her chin to the front of her neck. “No, I’m fine just tired.”
She didn’t meet my eyes when she spoke, which told me a lot. I tilted her head to face me and leaned back. “Are you sure?”
I studied her eyes, looking for the truth in her face. I had explained to my wife on multiple occasions that she couldn’t hide her emotions from me no matter how hard she tried. I could read her like a book, which was what I was doing now. She was trying, though. I’d give her that.
“Yes.” She tried to throw me off with a smile. “I’m fine, really. I’m thinking about a case. That’s all.”
Now that was the truth. I let her chin go. “Oh yeah? What case is that?”
She shrugged. “It’s one that Shane had asked me to look into.”
I nodded. “Yeah, the financials for that son of a bitch, Simon. What about it? Did you find something?”
Just saying that sick, twisted fuck’s name made me seethe with rage. The scene I had walked into that night at the warehouse we hit, where I saw all of those frightened children who had been tortured and violated by that fool, invaded my memory. The horrific visions of their faces terrified with fear alone, made me want to find a way to bring that bastard back to life so I could kill him again. It was also the reason why I was so pissed at Misty. She had no business going into that building by herself. It didn’t matter how skilled she was. Arrogance was a recipe for disaster, and that woman thought she was invincible.
