DRAGON SECURITY: The Complete 6 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

  The clear sound of the call disconnecting filled the room a moment later. I was about to turn the file off, but then Sam’s voice spoke again.

  “It’s him, Megan. I wasn’t sure at first. I didn’t think anyone could actually pull that sort of thing off in the real world. It seemed like something out of a bad novel. But, I knew the moment I saw Dante there was something familiar about him. He checked out. He did a good job covering his tracks. But he couldn’t fudge everything.”

  She laughed, pure glee in her voice.

  “Dante’s Luke, Megan. I know it. I know you know it, too.”

  The file ended. I just sat there, numb.

  And then the door opened.

  “Megan?” he said, that familiar voice, deep, but silky. Like chocolate pouring over the edges of a fountain.

  Dante.

  Or was she right? Was that Luke?

  ~~~

  MEGAN

  Prologue

  Luke

  Two years ago…

  I watched her walk down the aisle, and it was as though every moment we’d ever spent together played through my head all at once. The first time I saw her, she was four and I was six. It was a memory that stuck out in my head. She had this wispy blond hair that fell softly around her face, like a halo. I’d never really seen anything beautiful until that moment. I think that was the moment I fell in love with her.

  Our first fight was when I was nine. She wanted chocolate chip cookies; I wanted sugar. We argued for nearly an hour before my mom presented us with bowls filled with our chosen dessert batter. We were best of friends again before we’d even filled a single cookie sheet with spoonful after spoonful of the decadent sweets.

  Our first date was when we were in high school. She was barely fifteen and I was seventeen. I couldn’t put two words together without stammering and sounding like a complete fool. But she was just as elegant and sophisticated as ever. Just walking into a room with her beside me made me feel like a king.

  It never crossed my mind that we wouldn’t make it to this moment. Everything we did together, everything we experienced, it was always with the understanding that this was where it would lead us. I’d never been so ready for something in all my life. You hear grooms talk about the cold feet that come in the days, hours, and minutes before the I do’s, but I wasn’t feeling a single one. I wanted this. I’d wanted it from that moment when I was six and she was four.

  She was laughing as she walked toward me, a bouquet made of paper plates and toilet paper in her hands. Her jeans fit her like a glove, and her blouse showing just a hint of the curves that lived underneath. She was almost more beautiful than the wedding gown I knew she had hanging in the closet of the house we were about to share together.

  Everything was coming together.

  “Congrats, brother,” Peter said, his hand resting on my shoulder as we both watched.

  “I wish this was the real thing rather than just a rehearsal.”

  “Twelve hours.”

  I nodded, finding it nearly impossible to remove my eyes from Megan’s laughing face. Even when Sam moved up beside her and whispered something in her ear, distracting her from the game she’d been playing, I couldn’t stop watching.

  Everything brought me here. I couldn’t imagine anything that could pull me away.

  When she was sitting beside me at the rehearsal dinner, laughter all around us, I just wanted to take her home, lock myself away with her, and never emerge again.

  “Just one more night,” she whispered in my ear.

  One night. So much could happen in one night.

  “You break her heart, you know we’ll have to come after you, right, Luke?” Cole called from across the table. “As much as we like you, she’s our blood. We’ve got to avenge our blood.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”

  But then my cellphone rang and everything turned upside down. I glanced at Peter as I took the call. I wished he hadn’t gotten involved in the mess he was in and that he hadn’t come to me about it. I wished I could change the past and shape the future a little better—that none of it even existed. But the voice in my ear made it pretty clear that the chance for that had passed.

  “I’ll be back,” I whispered near Megan’s ear.

  She looked up, concern in her eyes. “Everything okay?”

  “Fine.” I kissed her, a soft, gentle kiss. “I’ll be back.”

  I slipped out the front door, hoping I would be back and that things would be fine. But I knew better than that. It wouldn’t be. The voice on the other end of the phone was one I knew far too well. And I knew his calls never came with a happily-ever-after ending.

  I’m sorry, Megan.

  Chapter 1

  “Dante is Luke, Megan. I know it. I know you know it, too.”

  I just sat there, numb. I couldn’t move—not to shake my head, click on anything else in the file, or even do something as simple as take another breath.

  And then the door opened.

  “Megan?” he said, that familiar voice, deep, but silky. Like chocolate pouring over the edges of a fountain.

  Dante.

  Or was Sam right? Was that Luke? Was he my Luke?

  My heart was pounding so hard I thought he might be able to hear it in this tiny office. I wanted to look at him, but I was afraid he would see it all on my face.

  I quickly closed the open window on my computer and pretended that I was reading through my emails.

  “What can I do for you, Dante?”

  He stepped into the office and closed the door behind him.

  “You haven’t been answering my calls. When I come to the house—”

  “I was grieving, Dante. It takes time.”

  “I know. I just want to help.”

  “With what?”

  I glanced at him then, my eyes moving quickly over the wide jaw, the low brow. There was always something about him that reminded me of Luke, but I’d told myself it was my pain that saw those things. That it was my loneliness. Luke had been the only man I’d ever loved. I was fifteen when we got together in high school. I knew then that he would always be the only one for me. And when he went off to the Navy and left me that first time, I knew he would come back to me. There was a connection between Luke and me that I knew was unbreakable. No one would ever come between us.

  And then he was gone; a note suggesting he wasn’t ready for a commitment to me was the only thing I had left. When Amber was kidnapped, a group of men who were still on the loose grabbed her and held her in an empty house down by the university. I knew one of them was Luke. I didn’t know what his role in her kidnapping was, or why he would be one of the two men who interrogated her about Peter, but I knew he was there. I found a note in his handwriting, telling me he would forever be with me. That was when I first knew he was involved in whatever had caused Peter’s death.

  And then his name was in Emily Greene’s notes. But, just as we were about to find out why, the virus corrupted everything. Only Hayden, Sam, Dante, and I were there. We were the only ones that would find that information useful.

  Did Dante do that? Was he trying to stop me from discovering what Luke’s role was in all this bullshit?

  Was Dante Luke? Was he trying to protect me from something? Or was he trying to protect himself?

  I didn’t understand. But now I couldn’t pull my eyes away from his face; I couldn’t stop picking out all the similarities.

  You can’t change the eyes, and Dante’s were the same color as Luke’s, and they held the same emotional intensity as Luke’s.

  His hairline was slightly different, but it was the same color, the same thickness. It felt the same between my fingers. And that deep brown color—how many Americans alone had that color hair?

  His shoulders were just as broad. He had tattoos in the same place Luke had a single tattoo with a quote from Inferno that had meant something to the two of us. But lots of people have tattoos on their chest.

  His l
egs were similar, but lots of men have powerful thighs. And the scar wasn’t there. But if they removed it…

  “I miss you,” Dante said, coming around the desk. “I know you’re hurting. It kills me that you won’t let me help you.”

  “Hayden—”

  “Hayden’s grieving, too. He can’t hold onto you and expect to deal with his own grief properly.”

  He touched my face, his fingers gentle on the curve of my jaw. He always knew just right where to touch me, like there was some sort of manual he’d read cover to cover.

  His nose was broader than it’d been. Hayden must have broken it because there was a little knot in the center that hadn’t been there before. The change made his face look different—like a distorted version of the Luke I’d known.

  It wasn’t possible. If this was Luke, why hadn’t he just told me? Why would he hide behind some plastic surgery? And, if he was hiding, why come here? Why come to the people who knew him best?

  I just couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

  “Is there something between you and Hayden?”

  I looked up, the shock of what he was asking biting through the shock of everything else.

  “No, of course not! He and Sam were together.”

  “I know. But…”

  “Just because of what happened between the two of you? That doesn’t mean that he and I would… That’s just disrespectful to Sam. To Hayden!”

  “Okay.” Dante studied my face for a minute. “I just, you didn’t answer my calls.”

  “I needed to be with my family and friends.”

  “I’m not your friend?”

  He leaned into me, his hand moving over my face again. He kissed my cheek lightly, his lips lingering there on my jaw. Then he pulled back.

  “I care about you, Megan. I wish you wouldn’t push me away.”

  He kissed me, the touch so familiar and so new all at the same time. I couldn’t help but move into him and kiss him back. I loved the feel of him, the heat of his lips, and the taste of his skin. There was something about him that’d drawn me in since that first meeting. His voice was so much like Luke’s. His smile. His patience.

  He pulled away, walking around the desk to the door.

  “Call me when you’re ready.”

  And then he was gone and I…I was a fucking mess.

  Chapter 2

  Dante

  I sat outside and watched the building, waiting for Megan to come out. When she did, I ducked down so that she wouldn’t spot me in the front seat of one of a dozen basic black SUVs that belonged to Dragon. She’d chosen these cars because they were common and could disappear in a crowd. I was counting on that now.

  I followed her through the familiar streets of downtown Houston. I knew where she was going before she’d gone far.

  Sam’s house.

  She’d found something.

  I cursed under my breath, wondering what it could be. I tried to get close to Sam to figure out what she was doing with the corrupted hard drive and the virus-infected notes. But Sam kept me at arm’s length, always careful about how much she said to me. There were messages on my phone from the day she died. She’d been trying desperately to get ahold of me, but I didn’t get any of the messages until it was too late. I had no idea what she wanted, but the fact that she reached out to me in that way made me wonder what she knew. Obviously, it was something—probably something I could no longer protect them from.

  And now Megan was headed to her house after avoiding it for a month. That meant she’d discovered whatever it was Sam had, and she was on her way to check it out. And that could be a problem.

  That could be a huge problem.

  I moved around Megan and weaved through a few side streets, taking the longer route so that she wouldn’t spot me. I was parked half a block from Sam’s condo when she pulled up, parking her Mercedes in the driveway. She sat there for a long time, both hands on the wheel. I could see her. There was tension in her shoulders, in every inch of her body. I knew her. I knew what that tension meant.

  This wasn’t good.

  What the fuck am I going to do?

  I couldn’t let her see what Emily Greene had been working on or the emails on Peter’s hard drive. If she learned the truth, all my planning, all my work would be for nothing.

  I started to get out of the SUV, but then another just like it came around the corner. I watched as the new SUV pulled into the driveway behind Megan. Hayden and Dominic climbed out, walking almost casually to Megan in her car. As I watched as Hayden reached in and helped her out, tugging her into his arms like he had every right to hold and console her.

  My chest burned as I watched. It took everything I had to keep my emotions in check.

  They walked into the condo, and I knew then that it was too late. This thing was unraveling. It was time to move on to Plan B. Or was it C? D? Probably more like Z.

  Chapter 3

  Megan

  I had to keep my head on the task at hand or my grief would overrun me. Just being in her condo, the smell of her surrounding me, made what was left of my heart shatter into a million pieces. I rushed through the living room to the little office tucked under the stairs. This room was more Sam than any other. This was where she did all her computing stuff; it was where Sam was in her element. I could almost see her there, sitting behind the bank of monitors, laughing at something she’d done or something she’d seen. That was Sam the way I would always remember her.

  “She was working on Emily Greene’s notes,” Hayden said. “She thought she was close to figuring out how the virus corrupted them so that she could undo the effects.”

  I nodded as I studied the dark monitors. Sam had shown me once how to turn the computers on and off. I wasn’t as good with computers as she was. I could use a machine to read and write emails and documents and to surf the internet. But, in my mind, that’s all a computer was good for. But Sam embraced everything else about them.

  I pushed a button and all the screens came alive. The emails that I’d read filled one screen. Some sort of process filled the other two screens. Hayden leaned over my shoulder, reading the emails.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s from Peter’s hard drive.”

  “And these,” Dominic said, tapping another screen that was slowly revealing some document I’d never seen before. “These are from Emily’s notes. This is an official CIA communiqué.”

  The three of us fell quiet for a long time as we read slowly through what Sam had spent the last weeks of her life trying to clean up and reveal to us. What we saw was almost overwhelming.

  “The CIA,” Hayden said under his breath, his eyes jumping from the computer screens to me.

  I shook my head. “This isn’t possible.”

  “Emily thought that there was something going on with her handler.” He pointed to the screen where names of the CIA agents that Emily had accused of being behind a terrorist cell operating out of France were listed. “That’s him.”

  “Do you really think it’s possible that the CIA created their own terrorist cell?” Hayden asked. “Why would they do that?”

  “To operate in other countries without anyone tracing it back to the American government,” Dominic said.

  Silence fell again. It was hard to believe that our own country would do such a thing. Emily had connected this terrorist cell with attacks in France, England, Italy and half a dozen other countries all over Europe. Innocent people had died. It just didn’t seem right.

  And what really didn’t seem right was the fact that Luke’s name was on Emily’s list. She accused him of being one of the primary forces behind the formation of this group. She implied he was the mastermind behind several of their attacks.

  That was not possible.

  “That man—the one who killed Emily?” Dominic hesitated for a second. “He was about to tell me something about the CIA when Dante killed him. I think he was going to tell me all this, that the CIA was behind this terrorist cel
l.”

  “Dante?”

  Dominic nodded. “He came up behind me while I was interrogating the man. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t hurting anyone. He was sitting against a tree, bleeding out, telling me about the terrorist cell, when Dante came up and shot him without warning.”

  I remembered that night. Dominic and Amy were hiding out at a safe house when they were attacked by a killer. The man was bold, chasing them through the city until he forced them off the road. By the time Dante and I got there, Amy was bleeding in the car and Dominic was locked in battle with the killer. I’d sent Dante to Dominic while I went to the car. If I’d gone after Dominic instead, would this thing have ended sooner if that killer had been allowed to tell us what he knew?

  Why would Dante stop the killer from telling us what he knew we’d been searching for for months?

  It kept coming back to Dante.

  Dominic leaned close to one of the monitors. “What’s this?” he asked, flicking his nail against an audio file not unlike the one Sam had left for me about Luke.

  I clicked it and a woman’s voice filled the room.

  “My son? Of course I’ve seen him. He comes weekly.”

  “Does he look the same, Mrs. Murphy?”

  Hayden flinched at the sound of Sam’s voice. He backed away, leaning against the wall, his eyes low as he listened.

  “He’s had a rough life. Been in the military. His face is…but it’s because of the surgery.”

  “What surgery?”

  There was a long silence. “I don’t remember. But that’s what he told me.”

  “When did you last see him, Mrs. Murphy?”

  “Yesterday.”

  The file ended, but my heart was pounding.

  “What was that?” Dominic asked.

  “Luke,” Hayden said, his voice something of a croak. He cleared his throat, and then tried again. “Luke’s mother has suffered early onset Alzheimer’s for a couple of years. She’s in a nursing home across town.”