by Laura Kaye
His face still set in a deep scowl, the guy gave a single tight nod. Jeremy wasn’t surprised at how angry Ike seemed. He’d always been protective of Jess.
“I’m sorry you got sucked into this mess,” Nick said, bending down to peer in her eyes.
“Thanks,” Jess whispered. And the civility of their exchange—when they usually drove each other crazy—proved just how serious this situation was.
Ike crossed to Dare, and they clasped hands. “When Jess called, I came into the city early. But the rest of the guys will be down by eleven.”
Dare nodded, and looked to Beckett. “That’ll give us time to set up those lookouts.”
“Roger that,” Beckett said.
“Hold up a minute,” Nick said. “Before everyone scatters, I want Marz to show y’all something he’s been working on. Marz?”
“I’m going to project some images on that wall,” he said, pointing to the stretch of brick that ran along the side of his desk. Easy, his girlfriend Jenna, and Beckett moved out of the way. “These are stills I grabbed from the video surveillance footage during yesterday’s attack.” Marz was the team’s computer expert, and the guy among all Nick’s teammates that Jeremy had gotten to know the best. He was hilarious, dedicated to the point of pulling multiple all-nighters to get done the research they needed, and almost always upbeat.
Grainy images appeared on the wall next to a giant whiteboard filled with maps and questions and lists of information.
“Well, that wasn’t too bright an idea, was it?” Marz said, chuckling to himself.
The brick obscured the images so that Jeremy couldn’t really make out what they were. But it was more of the same all around, all the way up to the tall ceilings. “How about this?” Jeremy said, coming around to Marz. “Can I borrow your chair?”
“Sure, hoss. What do you have in mind?” Marz asked as he rose. The slight limp he had was the result of the prosthetic he wore. The ambush that had killed so many of the guys on Nick’s SF team had claimed the lower half of Marz’s right leg, too.
Jeremy climbed up on the chair, grabbed the small cube of the projector, and shined it down at the light-colored concrete floor right in the center of the group. Much clearer.
“Genius, Jeremy,” Marz said, grinning.
“But, of course.” Jeremy waggled his eyebrows and lifted the projector higher to enlarge the image. Everyone gathered around, those in the front taking a knee so people behind them could see.
“Okay, these first ones show that the license plates of the three Suburbans are all blacked out,” Marz said, switching among images. Each one showed a version of the last—their attackers had smeared something dark over the plates. “So there are no leads there. Just an FYI.” Marz glanced over his shoulder to Emilie. The pair exchanged some sort of silent communication and, finally, Emilie nodded and averted her gaze. “This image,” Marz said, switching again, “shows the moment the attackers fired on one of their own.” A flare of light was just visible on the far side of the middle Suburban.
“Manny,” Nick said quietly, his tone full of regret. For Emilie. Even though her brother had been their enemy, they’d all gone out of their way to express their sympathies to her. Not only were she and Marz together now, but Emilie hadn’t had any knowledge of Manny’s criminal activities until Marz and the team told her.
Marz nodded. “Yeah. So it was clearly an execution.” From what Jeremy understood, both the authorities and the Church Gang were hunting for Manny after he’d gone on a spree and killed a cop and several Church-Gang henchmen, so these guys had apparently decided he’d become a liability. Scary to imagine what they’d do to Nick and the team if this was what they did to one of their own. Marz switched images again. “Now, this is the best thing I found in reviewing all the footage.”
The image showed a man firing from the rear passenger seat of one of the Suburbans, an automatic weapon in his hands.
“If you look at the guy’s bicep, you’ll see there’s a mark,” Marz said. “I spent at least an hour trying to enlarge and clarify it, and this is what I managed.”
The new image that appeared featured a detail of that mark. Everyone leaned in. It appeared to be a silhouette of a man’s head.
“I know it’s not great, but when I pair the enlargement with this image—” A logo of a knight’s helmeted head in profile appeared next to Marz’s photograph. “—I think it becomes clear what we’re looking at.”
Murmurs rose up from among Nick’s teammates.
“A tattoo of the company logo for,” Nick said. “Sonofabitch.”
“That’s some of the best evidence we have, right there,” Beckett said, leaning in to compare the images, “that Seneka was behind yesterday’s attack. Which only makes sense if they were also involved in what happened to us in Afghanistan.”
Running his dark hand over his close-cropped hair, Easy nodded. “Yeah. Because, otherwise, what would’ve motivated Seneka to attack?”
“Exactly,” Marz said. “So now we’ve identified Manny as a Seneka operative and at least one of the other attackers, too.”
“Finally we’re moving past purely circumstantial evidence to the hard stuff we can use to nail them,” Shane said, anger making his southern accent a little more prominent than usual.
Marz nodded and rubbed his hands together. “Now what we need to put all the details together is the information on the colonel’s chip.” Nods all around. “So Charlie and I will get to work on networking the machines and I’ll set up an organizational system to keep track of which files have been read.”
“Do it,” Nick said. “For everyone else, if you don’t have an immediate task this morning, rest up. Between reading those files and the watch rotation, there might not be much of that in the coming days.”
The group broke up into side conversations, and Jeremy continued to hold the projector as a few people from the back came in for a closer look. When they were done, he finally returned the projector to the desk, dropped his hands to his sides, and shook them out. His shoulders had started to ache from holding the position for so long. Looking down, his gaze snagged on Charlie, who was giving Jeremy’s body a good, long look.
Jeremy felt it like a physical caress as Charlie’s blue eyes seemed to latch on to Jeremy’s hips, groin, thighs.
Holy shit. So much desire radiated off the other man that it took everything Jeremy had not to climb down from the chair, pull Charlie into his arms, and kiss him until neither of them could breathe.
Charlie’s gaze snapped upward and collided with Jeremy’s. The blond man’s face turned beet red and he made himself suddenly busy with some papers on the desk. Blood rushed southward through Jeremy’s body, and he jumped down before his erection became obvious to everyone in the room.
There was only one person he would like to have made his erection obvious to. If he didn’t find a way to get Charlie alone soon, he was going to lose it. He really was.
Jeremy scrubbed his hands over his face. When he dropped them, he found Jessica standing right next to him, her gaze glued to the computer monitor and her mouth hanging open.
He glanced from her to the screen, still filled with the image of the enlarged tattoo next to the Seneka logo, then frowned. “What’s the matter?”
“Um, I don’t . . .” She shook her head. “This can’t be happening.”
Icy dread snaked down Jeremy’s spine. “What, Jess?”
Ike appeared on the far side of the desk. “What’s going on?” he asked.
It was right then that Jeremy saw something he’d never seen before—Jess’s cheeks filling with a bright pink heat. What the hell would make her blush, of all things?
“I, uh . . . I hooked up with a man who had a tattoo like that,” she finally said.
“What?” Ike nearly roared. “When?”
Jeremy’s stomach made a slow slide
to the floor. Please say it was a long time ago. Please say it was—
“Friday night,” she said, the words nearly a whisper.
Chapter 4
CHARLIE’S STOMACH KNOTTED as Jeremy groaned. In the time he and Jer had spent together, Charlie had heard a million stories about Jess—about how she and Jeremy had met, pranks she’d played or that he and Nick had played on her, and countless funny hookup stories. He talked about her enough that Charlie had at first assumed that Jeremy had something going with her, but when he’d asked, Jeremy had laughed and said he thought of her like a sister. Nothing more.
But that was a little hard to keep in mind when he hugged and held her like he had a few minutes before, and when he pulled her into his arms, like he was doing just now.
“Jesus, Jess,” Jeremy rasped. “There’s no fucking way this is all a coincidence.”
“I didn’t know,” she said, her voice tight.
“Of course not. Don’t you worry. Hey Nick?” Jeremy said, beckoning him with a wave.
Frowning, Nick cut through the group to them. “What’s wrong?” Nick asked.
“This is so freaking embarrassing,” Jess said, burying her face in Jeremy’s neck. And hell if Charlie didn’t feel like a little bit of an ass for the jealousy slithering into his gut. But, damn, what he wouldn’t give to stand in the tight embrace of Jeremy’s arms . . .
Nick, Ike, and Jeremy formed a circle around Jess, such that Charlie couldn’t hear everything that was being said. But he heard enough to get the gist that a guy with a Seneka company tattoo had hit on her at a local bar on Friday night, they’d had a few drinks and talked, and then she’d brought him home. Which was how she’d seen his tattoo.
“So, you could identify this guy if you saw him again?” Nick asked.
“Of course,” Jess said.
“Which was probably why they came looking for her last night,” Ike said. “In the wake of the attack on Hard Ink, they were tying up loose ends.”
A rock slid into Charlie’s gut, and he felt even worse about his jealousy from moments before. Jess was in real trouble.
“Jesus.” Nick tugged a hand through his hair. “Sure as fuck what it sounds like.”
“I’m getting her out of here,” Ike said after another moment.
“But she’ll be safe here,” Jeremy said. “With all of us.”
Ike shook his head. “You’ve got enough noncombatants here as it is. And they’re actively looking for Jess. I’m not taking any chances.”
Charlie knew exactly what it felt like to be targeted, pursued, chased. After he’d hacked into the Singapore bank where his father had an account worth twelve million dollars and tried to learn who or what the depositor WCE was, he’d realized someone was searching for him in return. He’d packed up that night and went on the run. He’d spent the better part of a week moving from one hole-in-the-wall motel to the next until they finally caught up with him, stuffed him into the back of a van, and dumped him into hell.
“Shit,” Nick said. “Maybe it’s time we face this question once and for all.”
“What question?” Jeremy asked.
Nick dug his hands through his hair and blew out a breath. “Whether or not to send all the civilians away until this is over.”
“What?” Becca said, coming up behind Nick. “If I fall into the ‘civilians’ column, I don’t want to go anywhere.”
Her words drew attention, because the room quieted all of a sudden.
“What’s going on?” Shane asked, his arm around Sara’s shoulders. With the help of the whole team, Shane had rescued Sara and her sister Jenna from the clutches of the Church Gang a little over a week earlier, and now Shane and Sara were inseparable.
“We’ve got a situation and a decision to make,” Nick said as everyone gathered around Marz’s desk again. “Looks like Seneka has been targeting Jess for a few days now and last night’s break-in at her place was yet another kidnapping attempt. This situation is getting more and more dire. Ike wants to take Jess out of here ‘til the dust settles. Which makes me wonder if we shouldn’t send all the civilians away. Just ‘til this is over.”
Charlie’s stomach tossed. Would they consider him a civilian? Or would he stay since Marz needed his help with the cyber side of their investigation? One thing was for sure, Charlie didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to leave the group that had saved him. And he sure as heck didn’t want to leave Jeremy, the truest friend he’d had in a long time.
Silence stretched out for a long moment, and then everyone started talking at once.
“I’m not leaving as long as there’s a chance any of you will need medical treatment,” Becca said. She was an ER nurse and had been working with Shane, who had medic training from the Army, whenever any of them got hurt. Which was often. Hell, Shane and Easy both still wore bandages from gunshot wounds they’d received in a shootout with Emilie’s brother at her house two days before.
“We may be civilians, Nick,” Kat said, “but we can still help. You’re going to need bodies to man the snipers’ roosts, for one.”
Sara pushed her long red waves behind her ears. “I don’t want to leave. I thought the purpose of Detective Vance’s roadblock was so that we could all stay here. Together.”
Among both the men and women, a chorus of agreement rose up in support of staying.
“Okay, okay,” Nick said. “I don’t want to split us up either, but it was worth the discussion.” He pulled Becca against him and kissed her forehead. Relief flooded through Charlie at Nick’s words.
“Well, I don’t mind going,” Jess said, looking from Nick to Jeremy. “I’m sorry. But last night really freaked me out. I was so sure they were going to find me, and then . . .” She shook her head. “I can’t even imagine what would’ve happened if they had.”
“But where will you go?” Jeremy asked, taking her hand.
“To my place outside of town,” Ike said. “No one besides the Ravens knows about it, so it’s a good safe house.”
Jess nodded. “You’re sure you don’t mind, Ike?”
His gaze narrowed and his jaw ticked. “Let’s go. Now.”
Jess turned to Jeremy. “Be careful,” she whispered as she threw her arms around his neck. She did the same with Nick.
Ike crossed to Dare, but Charlie couldn’t hear their exchange. And then Ike and Jess said their final good-byes and took off.
“Jesus,” Jeremy said, rubbing his forehead.
Charlie wished he was brave enough to go to the guy and offer him a hug, because he looked like he was starving for it. “I’m sorry,” Charlie said, staring up at Jeremy’s handsome face.
Jeremy gave him a nod. “Thanks. It just doesn’t end, does it?”
Charlie rose to stand in front of Jeremy, and he had to ball his fists against the urge to rest them on Jeremy’s chest or wind them around his neck. “It will. Don’t give up.”
Jeremy’s pale green eyes met Charlie’s for a long moment, and then he took a deep breath and nodded. “I won’t. Thanks.” Jeremy gave him a look that seemed like he wanted to say something more, but instead he just clapped him on the shoulder.
The heat of Jer’s touch, casual as it was, lit a slow burn all through Charlie’s body. After getting so close to kissing Jeremy, he couldn’t seem to rein in his desire where the other man was concerned.
“All right, go chill out for a while,” Nick said, pulling Charlie from his thoughts. “Marz and Charlie will let you know when they’re ready for people to dive into the documents. And Beckett, Jeremy, and Dare will get the snipers’ roosts set up.” Nick raked a hand through his hair. His other arm remained around Becca.
For the first time, Charlie envied what they had—how easy it was, how natural, how open. As much of a hard-ass as Nick was, he never hesitated to show her affection in front of the other guys.
Charli
e wanted that. He wanted that acceptance, that desire, that togetherness. Just once in his life.
The room finally cleared out except for Marz, Emilie, Nick, and Kat, who lingered on the other side of the desk.
“Hey, Charlie?” Kat said. “Do you have a minute?”
He had to resist the urge to look around and make sure she was really talking to him. He couldn’t imagine what Kat wanted. “Uh, sure.” Charlie rounded the desk, but she beckoned him to follow her toward the other side of the room where they were more alone.
“I just wanted to ask you if Jeremy is okay,” she said, concern filling her eyes. They were a brighter green than her brothers’, and heat crawled up Charlie’s neck at the comparison.
“I think he is,” Charlie managed.
“Is he blaming himself for the Ravens’ deaths when the roof collapsed?” Charlie wasn’t sure what his expression gave away, but then Kat frowned and said, “Shit. He is, isn’t he?”
“Yeah. I tried to talk to him down, though. And I’ll keep at it,” Charlie said.
Kat squeezed his arm. “Please do. Thank you. You’re good for him.”
“What? Why would you . . .” He shook his head as the walls seemed to close in on them.
“Aw, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I just thought . . .” She shrugged.
“What?” he asked, heat filling his face.
She looked at him a long moment, and then stepped closer. “If you two are interested in each other, I’d think that was pretty awesome. That’s all.”
Twin reactions coursed through Charlie. Excited surprise at her approval and acceptance, and bone-deep embarrassment that she’d noticed his interest. Had everyone? “Uh. Okay.”
“You’re too cute,” she said. “No wonder he likes you.”
Why didn’t the floor open up and swallow him already? Except, then he couldn’t hear the answer to the question he was dying to ask. “Why would you say that?”
