DRAGON SECURITY: Volume 2: The Complete 6 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

  “I might need you to back me up,” I said, leaning over to look in the rearview mirror. My face was clean, unmarked, until I lifted my heavy bangs. Just to the left of my forehead was a cut that hadn’t bled much, probably because of the piece of glass still sticking out of it, the edges reddened and swelling.

  “Fuck,” I whispered, wondering how many other injuries I had. Did I have any other marks that someone might have noticed at the coffee shop and might be able to use to track us? Stupid. I should have checked myself over before pulling my little tricks. The only reason those things worked was because of anonymity. Something noticeable, something out of the norm, would ruin that.

  We needed to pull over and get a new vehicle. But we also needed to put space between us and the enemy. My next decision could mean the difference between safety and death for my client.

  What to do?

  McGregor had sat back, his arms crossed over his chest. He was unmarked as far as I could tell, despite the debris that clung to his hair and clothing. We’d have to clean him up again and get him some new clothes. We’d both need new clothes. A shower. Some first aid.

  But distance was the best thing. We’d keep moving.

  The van had a full tank of gas. We could make it to Mississippi before we’d have to stop. Maybe. At least halfway through Louisiana. We’d drive until we couldn’t anymore. That was the best we could do right now.

  Chapter 4

  Hayden

  I stepped across the open threshold, hardly able to believe I’d only been here a short time ago and so much had already happened. The police were in the kitchen, stepping over chunks of debris. There were shattered plates, food dripping from the top of the table, glass, wood, parts of appliances, all of it scattered over what had been a pristine laminate floor.

  “It looks as though someone stood out in the parking lot and took an automatic to the front of the condo,” Wallace said to me as she came to stand at my side.

  “Who? Why?”

  She shook her head. “The cops have no clue. There are no fingerprints, no marks of any kind, no note attached to the front door that explains everything. Just this mess and a missing murder suspect and his bodyguard.”

  “How did they know where to find them?”

  Wallace shrugged. “It wasn’t a leak from my office. One from yours?”

  “No one knew they were here except for me, you, and your technicians.”

  “Someone else had to have known.”

  “No.”

  I turned away, crossing the living room to get out of the cops’ way. Wallace followed, coming up close behind me to hiss near my ear, “You think my people are behind this? What would I gain from that?”

  “You tell me.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she stared at me. “You realize I had to burn a lot of favors trying to get your guy a deal. I didn’t have to do that.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Yet you accuse me—”

  “Someone came after him. I need to know who and why before one of my operatives finds herself in a situation she can’t handle.”

  Wallace’s face softened. “I realize you have someone with him …”

  “She’s going to need our help, so I need to find out as much as possible as quickly as possible.”

  “I don’t have any new information, except …” She hesitated, glancing over her shoulder at the technicians moving around the kitchen. “He was drugged. It was a variation of GHB.”

  “Where did he get it? Did he drink it at the party?”

  “My people tell me this particular type of drug would have had a fast reaction, so it almost had to have been administered in his home if his story is true.”

  “But there was no one else there that night.”

  “So he says. But he could have lied.”

  “You interrogated him, Wallace. If he didn’t break under your questioning, he’s got to be a psychopath.”

  She nodded, meeting my gaze for a long second. “Either that or it was in his toothpaste, and the chances of that are almost astronomical. Someone would have had to break in while he was at the party and exchange the tubes without him noticing. And then they would have had to know that he would use it before he went to bed, which required intimate knowledge of his private habits. And they would have needed a way into the house that didn’t require breaking and entering or causing him to become aware of their movements.”

  “It would have to be a very complicated plan.”

  “Yes. And, in my experience, most criminals don’t bother.”

  I turned away, realizing I’d just sent one of my best operatives on the lam with someone who was likely a murderer. And I had nothing I could give her that would be of any help. I didn’t even know if I was safe sending one of my operatives after her because I still didn’t know where the leaks were coming from. Who had found McGregor here? Who knew we’d sent them to Amelia’s place?

  This was the third time one of our people had been compromised because of some information that got to a place where it shouldn’t have. Kevin and his girl were found in a safe house. Kasey’s girl was found in a hotel suite we occasionally used as a safe house. And now this.

  I intentionally sent them here to keep McGregor’s whereabouts out of our database. And the only people who knew they were here were trusted members of Dragon: me, Amelia, Peter, and Megan. Maybe Mag down on the operative floor. And Wallace and her team.

  No one else knew.

  Who was the fucking rat?

  I left Amelia’s, leaving Kasey to lock things up and board up the windows for her, and drove across town. Waverly opened the door, her eyebrows raised as she studied me.

  “Twice in one day. This must be some sort of record or something.”

  “Is it possible for someone to use a phone to listen in to conversations and things? Or plant a bug that’s not identifiable by the detectors we use at the office?”

  A new curiosity came into her eyes. “Anything’s possible with a little patience and the desire.”

  “Can you check me? I need to know who’s compromising my agents.”

  Waverly gestured for me to enter her home. I immediately slid my cellphone out of my pocket. It’d crossed my mind that I was the one constant in all three information leaks. I was part of the team that flew to the Florida Keys to rescue Kevin and his girl; I was with Kasey and his target in California when it was decided she needed to be moved to Houston. And I was the one who asked Amelia to take McGregor to her house.

  The first two followed Dragon protocol, but the last was just between me and Amelia. Even McGregor didn’t know where he was going until he got there. If there was a personnel leak, it had to be me or Megan, and that simply wasn’t possible. If it was a virus … I never put anything in the computers about McGregor going to Amelia’s.

  Waverly took the phone over to her computer set up in the back corner of the living room, plugging it into the side of one of her towers. I paced the length of the room, thinking about Amelia and the damn cup of coffee she brought me every morning, about the crush she innocently believed I didn’t know about.

  She was a good operative. She’d come to us less than a year after she was honorably discharged from the Navy, young and fresh, but seasoned enough by four years at sea on a battleship. She’d done well for us, working each of her cases with the right amount of professionalism and maturity. We had clients come back and ask for her again and again. I hadn’t exaggerated when I told her she was a real asset. Dealing with her crush was just a minor irritation when compared to the full body of her work.

  And now she was on her own, running from something we were far from identifying. If it was my fault …

  “What’s going on?” Waverly asked.

  She came around her desk, gesturing for me to follow her into the kitchen at the back of the house, far from the phone being tested on the desk. The moment we were alone, she pushed me up against the wall and began running her hands along the collar of my sh
irt, the hem of my jacket, the edges of my tie, looking for anything unusual.

  I held my arms up and let her do what she needed to, remembering all too well how good it had felt to have those same hands touch my flesh, her fingernails scraping over the edges of my tattoos, the rim of my bellybutton. I watched her, wondering if she missed our brief affair as much as I did.

  Having a woman come marching into the job a year ago—four years after my love’s death—strutting her stuff like the position was made for her, killed my soul a little more every day. To realize I was also attracted to her only made things more complicated. I’d never intended for the affair to last, but ending it had been harder than I’d imagined it would be.

  I’d begun to care and I couldn’t live with that.

  If Waverly missed me though, she never alluded to it. She was very professional in her search, her touch not lingering anywhere longer than was necessary to establish that my clothing didn’t hide a bug of any kind.

  “I think you’re clean,” she said.

  “My phone?”

  “It’ll take a while to establish if there is anything on it. I’m downloading a copy of the hard drive to my computer so I can check it out without alerting anyone to the fact that we’re messing with it.”

  “What happens if there’s something on it?”

  “I’ll find it, and I’ll figure out what we can do with it.”

  “Will they know?”

  “No. I’ll give you your phone back and they’ll continue to monitor you as they were doing before. Just make sure you don’t say anything within fifty feet of your phone that you don’t want leaked.”

  I nodded. “Thank you.”

  She shrugged. “I cross-referenced the names we got from the Coronado murder with the cities you told me about, where the other murders had happened.”

  “And?”

  “The name Gina Collins came up again. A woman by that name was checked in the same nights of the murders in the same hotels where they took place.”

  “Gina Collins? The woman who owned the house where Rosalie Matthias was taken?”

  “Yes. So, unless it’s some odd coincidence, that name ties all four murders together.”

  I frowned, wondering why that name. Everything else had had some sort of tie to the murders of my parents when I was six. But I didn’t know anyone named Gina Collins.

  Almost six months ago someone had killed a couple in a hotel room in the town where my father grew up. The couple were visiting the area and they were tortured before they died, the woman raped and the man forced to watch, just as had happened to my parents more than thirty years ago. Then it happened again, the same scenario, the same modus operandi, in a hotel in the town my grandparents moved me to because of the notoriety of the murder trial.

  Then, a month ago, one of our operatives was looking for a Houston-based woman who had disappeared from a small town outside of San Diego. The woman was found murdered just twenty-four hours before another couple was murdered in a hotel in Coronado, the island where I went through training to join the Navy SEALs. And the murdered woman? She had tattoos placed all over her body that were the emblem of the hotel where my parents were killed.

  Four murders, each one related in more than one way to me and my parents’ murders. It couldn’t be a coincidence. At the same time, a leak was exposing our operatives.

  “How does it all connect?”

  It was a rhetorical question, but Waverly took it differently. “Why are you obsessed with these murders? There has to be a reason.”

  I didn’t want to answer her. I wasn’t ready to address all this with someone else. My silence clearly irritated her. She turned away from me, but she didn’t leave the room. She walked to the door then hesitated, glancing back at me with her beautiful eyes barely slits as she glared.

  “One of these days you’ll figure out you can’t do everything alone.”

  “I think I’ve already figured that out. That’s why I’m here.”

  “But I can’t help you if you don’t give me enough information.”

  “And I can’t protect you if I give you too much!” I stepped forward, grabbing her wrists because I needed her to understand. “Whoever is doing this is getting closer. I moved to Houston when I left the SEALs, so unless the next murder is going to be in some hotel in Afghanistan, whoever’s doing this is getting close. I can’t expose the people around me or let them see who matters to me because those people will be the next targets. Do you understand that?”

  “What if it’s not about you, Hayden? What if it’s about something else? Won’t you give me the chance to help you figure that out?”

  “No.”

  I let her go and brushed past her, but she wasn’t having it. Waverly never seemed content with anything I wanted. She grabbed my upper arm and yanked me back, catching me off guard so that I had to plant my hand on the wall over her head in order to catch myself. I stared into her eyes, anger burning so hot that she could probably see the flames in my eyes. But I could see them in hers, too.

  “I won’t let you do this. I won’t let you go running off, playing some game whose rules you don’t know. I won’t—”

  I kissed her.

  Her arms immediately came around my neck, her body molding to the length of mine. She felt more familiar than she should have, like a missing part of me, a limb that had been amputated. I didn’t want to like the way she felt, didn’t want to be made whole by her touch. I didn’t want to need her as desperately as I knew I did. But this kiss … it was doing things to my soul I couldn’t ignore.

  I lifted her just enough until her hips opened and mine fit right inside. I slid my hand over her perfect handful of an ass, my fingers seeking out places that I knew would make her sigh against my mouth, that would make her respond to me in ways that made promises her body would be sure to keep. How I could go from zero to everything this quickly I wasn’t sure, but I needed her. I craved her.

  I laid awake at night thinking about her. I whispered her name in my sleep. Once there had been dreams of Sam, memories that were as much a comfort as they were fringed with grief. But now it was Waverly. I knew that I was supposed to move on, that it was normal to want someone else. I just wasn’t ready.

  Five years and I wasn’t ready.

  I extracted myself from her and ignored her sharp, startled intake of breath. Storming across the room I snatched up my phone, pulling it free of the cord that connected it to her computer.

  “Call me when you know.”

  And I walked out, like the coward I was.

  Chapter 5

  Amelia

  We arrived in New Orleans and my head felt like it was about to split open. It was late, almost midnight, so there weren’t a lot of people around when I pulled into a gas station.

  “Go to the bathroom. Clean yourself up a little.”

  “What are we going to do now?”

  I studied the narrow street on which we’d stopped, a small two lane highway that would eventually take us to Biloxi. There was a motel down the street and a diner that looked like it might still be open. A little food might not be such a bad idea.

  “We’ll get cleaned up, get some food and some sleep. Then we’ll decide what to do.”

  McGregor nodded, not bothering to argue as he climbed out of the minivan. I followed him, slipping into the ladies’ room. He hadn’t spoken much since we left Houston. He stared out the window, clearly caught up in some drama in his mind. I knew he had some information that would help us, but I couldn’t worry about that right now. I had to find us a safe place to disappear. Once we were safe, then I could grill him and find out exactly what mess he’d gotten me caught up in.

  I stood at the sink after using the facilities and washed my hands, laying the teeny first aid kit I’d snatched on the way in next to the faucet. I pulled the hair back on my forehead and revealed the thin piece of glass that was embedded in my head. I grasped it with my fingers and wiggled it, wincing at the pain t
hat sliced through me. Another few wiggles and it slid out, congealed blood making the sight nastier than it really was.

  The wound began to gush blood, running down the edges of my nose and along my cheeks. I grabbed some paper towels and stemmed the flow, slowing it before dabbing some antibacterial cream on and pasting a Band-Aid across it.

  I studied the rest of my body in the mirror, searching for other wounds. Other than some debris that fell freely from the folds of my clothes, there didn’t seem to be anything else to worry about. No blood. No cuts. Nothing that might have been memorable to the patrons of that coffee shop.

  Thank goodness!

  I washed my face, careful of my newly placed bandage, and shook out my hair, wishing for a shower and a bottle of good quality shampoo. McGregor was standing in front of the candy bar selections when I stepped out of the bathroom, studying them like he’d never actually seen any before.

  “There’s a diner across the road, if you folks are interested,” the rotund clerk called out to us. “They have a real good blackened chicken. And they’re open all night!”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I grabbed McGregor’s arm and dragged him toward the door. We parked along the back of the diner and walked inside, taking a booth tucked behind the front counter.

  “You look like you’ve just been shot at,” I hissed across the table at McGregor.

  “I was.”

  “Yes. But you shouldn’t act like it.”

  The waitress came over, a couple of paper menus in her hands.

  “On your way to the city?” she asked, a smile on her pretty face. “You’re just twenty minutes from the French Quarter.”

  “You read our minds,” I said with my own answering smile.

  The waitress didn’t notice my smile, however, because she was busy checking out McGregor. She set his menu in front of him and somehow managed to touch his hand even though the menu was nowhere near it. He looked up and suddenly seemed engaged, his eyes moving warmly over the length of her.