DRAGON SECURITY: Volume 2: The Complete 6 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

  I guess now we had something like an answer.

  Chapter 23

  Hayden

  It hurt like a fucking son of a bitch. But what hurt even more was the terror as I swept the room with my eyes, searching.

  Amelia tightened the tourniquet around my arm and I hollered, forgetting for one brief second that I still didn’t see her … that she might not be okay.

  “Sorry,” Amelia a muttered it. “We have to stop the bleeding.”

  “You’re going to cut off the circulation to my fingers!”

  “I’ve got it.”

  My head jerked to the left at the sound of the familiar voice. All the tension within me let go in a vaguely uncomfortable sensation that someone more romantically inclined would probably have described as melting.

  Waverly walked over, whole and alive. I feasted my eyes on her as she pushed Amelia aside with her hip. Her hands, so soft during other activities, were firm and capable as she retied the piece of cloth and twisted it, knotting it in place as the bleeding visibly slowed

  I wanted to pull her into my arms and tell her I was relieved she was okay. I wanted to say that if she’d been injured or died, that I would definitely not have been fine. I needed her to know that things between us, in spite of my hesitancy, were quickly deepening. But the words fled my lips and I had to resort to brushing her wrist with my uninjured hand, in a clumsy gesture of gratitude.

  She nodded, walking away nonchalantly, like none of it mattered. Amelia, on the other hand, stuck around, sitting beside me, touching my fingers from time to time to make sure they were still warm.

  Megan was bleeding from cuts on her palms and her face. I watched as Luke carefully picked each piece of glass out of her hands, whispering something in her ear that kept the pain under control. I wanted to punch him, he looked so pleased with himself. Like the cat who’d finally caught the canary.

  “Where is Xander?” Luke asked.

  Rhett was pacing, her right leg limping decidedly painfully.

  “Gray Wolf. They were going to have him see a doctor, to make sure his memories were coming back at a good rate.”

  “Would he be willing to do this exchange?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I stood up, pain shooting through my arm as I did. “They want Megan, too.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “He’s just going over all our options, Hayden,” Megan said.

  “He’s discussing the possibility of handing you over to people willing to kill for what they want.”

  Megan nodded, paling a little as Luke dug out another piece of glass from her palm.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Peter spoke up.

  He was working on Vincent, who’d taken a bullet to his thigh. There was fire in his eyes, fueled by memory, I was sure. He remembered what it was like to be held captive. He didn’t want that for his sister.

  “We can’t let them hurt Rhett’s sister.”

  “But we can’t give them what they want,” Rhett said, still pacing, not really looking anyone in the eye.

  “Then what do you suggest?” Luke asked.

  “We know where they are,” Rhett said. “We could just go get her.”

  “That would be a very involved operation,” I said, pressing a hand to my wound as blood continued to seep out. “It would take a lot of careful planning. They only gave you an hour.”

  “So we give them what they want and then stage a rescue for all three,” a voice in the doorway said.

  Rhett turned and froze, her eyes falling on Xander King’s face. He was there with several other people, one of whom I recognized as Kipling McKay, a former resident of Houston whose wife had been brutally murdered in her own home.

  I did a lot of reading about murders in the Houston area after Sam’s death. It was oddly comforting.

  “I had to come, Rhett,” Xander said. “You know that.”

  She nodded, crossing the room quickly to fall into his arms. They kissed, a passionate kiss that made even the worst cynics in the room—me, in particular—look away.

  An operative becoming involved with her client was a bad move. But I didn’t think this moment was the right one to chastise her.

  Kipling stepped around them and came right up to me, his hand outstretched.

  “I’m Kipling McKay. These are my associates, Ingram Porter, Knox Adams, and Alexander Garcia.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” I said.

  “We’d like to help with whatever operation you have planned, or are planning. Mr. King’s case is as much ours as it is yours.”

  “We appreciate the offer.”

  Kipling turned and looked around the room. “It seems by the debris downstairs that our friends have already come to leave a message.”

  “They have.”

  “Would you like us to deal with the police?”

  Megan moved away from the desk where Luke had just finished putting bandages on her hands. “We can handle that. What we need from you is some help in planning a rescue mission to come for Mr. King and myself after we surrender to the kidnappers.”

  Kipling inclined his head. “We’d be more than happy to help.”

  “Megan,” I said in a low tone of voice, “you don’t have to do this.”

  “I do.”

  She dismissed me with that one phrase, gesturing for Kipling to follow her into her office down the hall. Luke shot me a look before he followed, joining them in their meeting.

  Pissed, I marched across the room and called downstairs to the night clerk’s office and had him call the police, leaving Brian to deal with that mess. Then I organized everyone else into one of the conference rooms to wait for Megan and Kipling to come back with their plan.

  It was an ingenious plan if I said so myself. I only wished I’d thought of it.

  Chapter 24

  Xander

  I pulled Rhett back, slipping into a small alcove off to one side of the hallway.

  “Don’t ever do that to me again.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t … I can’t let you do this, Xander. I can’t let you put yourself in this position.”

  “The thing is, I put myself in this position all by myself. Eighteen months ago.”

  “What do you mean? Do you remember?”

  I nodded.

  I was out of the business for nearly three years. But life was not what it should have been. My former colleagues were still investigating me, going over everything I did while I was with the CIA with a fine tooth comb, like I was the criminal.

  I did everything I could. But we were deep undercover, so deep that we couldn’t even talk to anyone about what we were doing, not even our supervisors. It was all I could do to figure out what side we were working on. But I was right. When it was all said and done, I knew I was right. I was tired of them telling me I wasn’t.

  I wanted to finish it for once and for all. That’s why I created the software and contacted Olsen. That’s why I set this whole thing in motion.

  Made them think I was bad. Made them think I worked the wrong end of the deal. Made them come after me.

  That’s when the threats began. That’s when everything went wild. But I was in control.

  Until the accident. I didn’t know why I didn’t see that coming. There was something still missing, something more there. But I knew what I was doing now.

  “I’m going to make this right. And then we’ll be free. We’ll be safe.”

  She kissed me, her lips lingering on mine. “If anything happens to you, to Megan, or Jess, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen. Trust me.”

  I could see that it wasn’t easy for her to trust. But she nodded, her eyes refusing to leave mine.

  “I won’t hurt you, Rhett. You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I won’t hurt you and I won’t leave you. Ever.”

  “I’m going to hold you to that.”

  “You better.”

  ***


  We left twenty minutes later, Megan Bradford-Murphy and I in an SUV that looked just like the half dozen other SUVs I’d been in over the last few days. She was nervous, playing with her hands as I drove. I would probably be doing the same thing if I didn’t have the distraction of driving.

  I knew who these people were. They had the same training I had. They knew the same things I knew. They had the same instincts. I wasn’t sure I could be successful against them. The only thing I could hope was that Porter and Dubois and the others were able to keep to their end of the bargain.

  “They won’t kill us right away,” I told Megan, thinking it might cheer her to know. “They’ll want to torture us, to make us pay for what they see as our betrayal.”

  She glanced at me, fear bright in her eyes. “I know they blame me for getting Olsen arrested in the first place. What do they blame you for?”

  “I bragged that I could get him out of prison, but then I sent him right back.”

  “Why?”

  “To draw them out. To show the CIA who the real traitors were. But apparently these guys managed to escape the trap I set.”

  “What trap was that?”

  I glanced at Megan. “I left a trail a mile long the CIA could follow, computer code that they should have been able to decipher that had the names, places, and targets of all of Olsen’s remaining men. I wanted them to find these people, to put them in jail once and for all. I was tired of being the target of their investigation when I wasn’t the bad guy.”

  “The whole thing is such a mess. It’s hard to know who the bad guys and the good guys were.”

  “Ask your brother.”

  Megan looked sharply at me. “What?”

  “The computer code he wrote during his time with Olsen? It had names, dates, places. Everything you need to know about Olsen’s actions.”

  “The CIA confiscated that stuff.”

  “Yeah, but if Peter’s anything like me, he has a backdoor into the system. He could find it if he wanted to.”

  Megan just nodded. “I’ll ask him.”

  We pulled up to the hotel a moment later. A valet came to the car, his smile a little too polite.

  “We’ve been expecting you, Mr. and Mrs. King.”

  I glanced at Megan. She nodded, taking a deep breath before stepping out of the SUV.

  We were escorted into the building and taken to a small storeroom off to the side of the front desk. We were frisked for weapons, tracking devices, or listening devices. When they deemed there were none, they led us to the elevators.

  “Where’s Jesse Dennings?”

  “Safe and sound, as promised,” the valet said.

  There was just one. That meant there were more eyes on us. They’d probably cut into the hotel’s security feed. And there was probably a man on each floor with a gun, ready to kill us the moment we made a move. I took Megan’s hand, holding it tightly in my own.

  I’d seen her man say goodbye to her, seen the way he touched her, the affection in his caress. I also saw the other man, the one with the angry eyes, watching from across the room while no fewer than two women watching him. What a triangle.

  I wondered if Megan knew what her husband had done during the Olsen debacle.

  The elevator opened on the top floor, one of those exclusive floors that required a keycard to get to. The valet walked us to the end of the hall, knocking once on a set of double doors. They were wrenched open and a man I knew from my days in Afghanistan opened them wide.

  “Welcome, Xander. Mrs. Murphy.”

  We stepped inside his room, the opulence of it almost a joke when considering what I knew about him. Like me, he’d grown up in a trailer park, the son of a crack whore and her pimp. He managed to graduate high school and joined the army when he was barely eighteen. And then the CIA, after three tours of duty in Iraq. He was quite the patriot. Until he wasn’t.

  “Nick,” I said politely. “Haven’t seen you since Paris.”

  “You went home much too soon, my friend. Before all the real fun began.”

  “Before Olsen went insane, you mean.”

  Nick smiled. “Before his genius came out and he decided to share it with a select few. Too bad you weren’t one of those. You would have enjoyed yourself.”

  “I don’t think so. I was a patriot.”

  “So was I. And then I realized what having money meant. Sometimes loyalties change, friend.”

  I shook my head, but I didn’t respond.

  “Olsen is not pleased with you, Xander. He could taste his freedom and then you fucked everything up. Why would you go and do that?”

  “Because the man deserves to rot in prison.”

  “You deserve to rot, but not in prison. That’s too good for you.”

  Nick’s anger was finally showing, his face twisted into something horrific as he moved close to me, his nose a hair from mine.

  “You made everyone think you were playing ball, but then you went and stabbed him in the back. Why did you tell that goddamn idiot what Olsen was doing? He was working so well, stopping this bitch from figuring things out. Then you slip him a note and the man is suddenly making appointments with Olsen, marching in there like he’s some sort of John Wayne or something.”

  “He had to know who he was working for.”

  Nick slammed his fist into my belly without breaking a sweat. The air burst from my lungs, burning my chest as my body struggled to regain its much needed oxygen. And then he hit me again just as I was about to take a good breath.

  I fell to the floor, pain rushing from my lower belly to the top of my skull.

  “What are you doing?” Megan cried.

  “Shut up, bitch!” Nick backhanded her, tossing her out of his way as he bent over me. He grabbed my collar and was about to bury his fist in my nose when the windows suddenly burst with gunfire and the main door splintered as a couple of CIA agents with a battering ram busted it down.

  What more brilliant plan could there have been than to call our formal associates in the CIA?

  I crawled to Megan and touched her face.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded. “Do you think Luke and the others had as much luck as us?”

  “One way to find out.”

  Chapter 25

  Hayden

  I ran around the side of the house, my injured arm throbbing under the bandages and clean shirt I’d put on over it, needing stitches, but not right now. I wasn’t about to let my operatives handle this without me having their backs.

  I spotted Kipling up ahead of me, crouching against the brick wall. Dominic was on the other side of the house with Amelia, waiting for our signal.

  I moved up over Kipling and peeked around the corner. There was one man in the backyard, pacing as he smoked a cigarette in the dark. One shot from my silenced gun and he went down, hard. We moved in tandem around the building, Kipling keeping low and close to the building. I moved out into the yard, looking up at the windows. There were lights on in three of the upstairs windows, one in the downstairs. That fit with our information.

  There were police in riot gear less than a mile away. Ingram Porter and Knox Adams were at the front of the house, ready to blow the front door. And Alexander Garcia was relaying information from his perch across the street where he was sitting in a darkened room, watching everything going on behind the windows of this house.

  We’d originally believed that Jesse Dennings was being held at the hotel where the kidnappers had instructed Xander and Megan to give themselves up. But the call the kidnapper made to Rhett at the office was closer than that. It pinged off a cellphone tower in this neighborhood.

  After that, it didn’t take much to find them. Amazing the kind of surveillance a private security company could engage in. We weren’t restricted by the same rules the cops were. But, ironic enough, the cops could use our information to get a warrant. And that’s what they were doing, waiting down the street with a warrant in their hands. They’d simply agreed to give us fi
rst shot at getting Jesse out of the way.

  I moved closer to the house, nodding to Kipling. He spoke a single word into his microphone and we heard the front door explode. Kipling kicked open the back door and we rushed in, moving through the house quickly, but cautiously.

  Ingram and Knox met us halfway through the front hall, Dominic and Amelia behind them. I gestured for Dominic to follow me upstairs while the others were given different sides of the hall in order to check the rooms there.

  Dominic and I were barely halfway up the stairs when we heard footsteps above us. That spurred me into a sprint. I found one guy crouching in a hall bath, hiding behind the commode.

  “Get out of there, asshole!”

  He glanced around the porcelain throne, holding his gun out where I could see it.

  “It wasn’t my idea, man. Nick made us do it!”

  “I don’t fucking care! Get out!”

  He climbed out and I tied the cable ties onto his wrists, throwing him back down against the toilet.

  “Stay put.”

  I headed back down the hall, catching Dominic in the middle of cuffing another asshole.

  “Where is she?” I demanded.

  The guy shook his head. “They took her out of here an hour ago.”

  “Liar. Why are you still here if she’s gone?”

  The guy just looked up at me like he was too stupid to understand the question. Maybe he was.

  I went back out into the hall and searched everything that moved. Nothing.

  “All clear down here!” Kipling called up.

  “She’s here somewhere. She has to be.”

  We walked back through the house, searching every crevice. We got word that Megan and Xander were safe. At least one part of this plan had gone right. I was about to give up when I found myself staring at a shadow on the wall that shouldn’t have been there. The light wasn’t quite right to make the shape it made.

  “What the …?”

  I touched the wall. Amelia came up beside me and began feeling the wall, too, looking for crevices, some sign that there was a trap door there or … or something. And that’s when I felt it click.