On Her Master's Secret Service (36 page)

“You’ll tell him I did good?” Her hands came up, but she was so weak.

Adam fell to his knees, pulling off a hefty piece of thin plastic. He caught Alex’s eye and nodded.

Alex brought his hand up, and Adam immediately moved in, closing the wound. He brought the heel of his hand right over the bullet hole in her chest, and a low moan came out of Kristen’s throat. Her eyes flared and then she passed out, going utterly limp in Alex’s arms.

But her breathing sounded better.

“Can you take her?” Alex asked, his voice tense. Eve was gone and he’d very likely been sleeping in the home of his enemy. He needed to get to Sean. He needed to talk to Chazz. A nice little chat that would end with Alex’s gun up
Chazz’s
anus and hopefully bring him some answers.

Adam moved into position. “What was she talking about?”

“I’m not sure, but she might be aligned with Evans.” Although it didn’t make sense. He tried to wrap his mind around it.

“No.” Adam held his hand tight to her chest. “She cares about us. I don’t know why, but she gives a damn.”

She’d thrown her body in front of his, but someone—the same someone who had taken a shot at him—had taken Eve. If Evans was the one who had taken Eve and Evans was the one who wanted him alive, why would he have taken that shot?

Something else was at play and it had to do with that missing file.

He heard the sirens in the background. He needed to clear out or he would end up spending hours at the police station. He glanced to Adam. “Can you handle this?”

Adam nodded. “Yes. Call Serena and Jake. The police will try to take me in as a witness, but I have a plan to stay out of it. Tell Serena to get her sweet little self down here, and have Jake watch your back. Once I’m back up at the condo with my pregnant wife, who is likely going to need to lie down after all the trauma, I can get you the information you need. I walked out and found her this way. I’ll handle the cops and I’ll be back at my station before you know it. You need to go because there’s blood on your shirt, and they will ask questions. Go and clean up. If Jake’s not here by the time you need to leave, just take my car and he’ll go to the club. Find Sean. I’ll get you the info on the car and anything else I can find. She won’t be gone long, Alex. You have a new team now.”

“I want everything you can find on Carmen Garcia and my old team.” He stood up, his gut somewhere in his knees. “Call Ian. Get him out here as soon as you can.”

Ian would drive if he had to. If there was one thing he trusted in the world, it was that Ian Taggart had his back.

He glanced down at the woman who had just saved his life and wondered if she would pull through. The sirens were closer now and he let himself in the door, hopping on the elevator before the ambulance pulled up. Adam was right. He had very little time, and he couldn’t get caught up in a police investigation. Kristen might have given her life to save his, and he wasn’t going to question it right now.

Later he would ask all the relevant questions, but until she was conscious and able to talk, there was nothing she could do to help further. He had to make sure her sacrifice hadn’t been in vain.

When he got to the condo, he changed and cleaned himself up. He called Jake to meet him. Sean was already in place.

They needed to talk to Chazz, and he was pretty sure Chazz wasn’t going to be happy with how they talked to him.

As he waited impatiently, he glanced down at the notes Adam had pulled up on Carmen Garcia.

Just another victim, like his Eve. Just another life Michael Evans had wasted. She’d been a Georgetown student, chasing a career in the law and politics, working on political campaigns and going to parties.

Maybe getting pregnant by someone who had a lot to lose.

His fists clenched. Garcia had been young and attractive and a volunteer on campaigns. Which campaigns had she worked for? Who had the most to lose?

And who had ties to a man who could make it all look like an accident?

A new anger rolled in Alex’s gut because he’d just figured out who had truly betrayed him.

* * * *

Pain. Her head ached as she started to come back to life. She groaned a little. Where was she? She tried to move her right hand, to bring it up to ease the pain in her skull, but it was tethered to the left.

She opened her eyes. How long had she been out? Light streamed in through a window, but it was a bit murky, the glass opaque. There was a couch under her, but she was pretty sure it had seen better days.

It was so quiet. So unlike the condo where she could always hear the ocean. The condo where she’d last seen her husband.

Everything came back in one horrific flash. He’d tied her up and then left her in the backseat of her own vehicle, and he’d moved into position to gain a kill shot. She’d heard one blast and then another.

“Please don’t try to move. It will only make it worse,” a now familiar voice said.

Jesse Murdoch. The man who had murdered her husband.

“You killed Alex.”

Jesse stood over her, his hands held out. “I’m not so sure about that. I checked the police radio and monitored the hospital admissions. No male gunshot victims. I’m pretty sure I hit Kris.”

And he didn’t look happy about it. His eyes were sunken as though he hadn’t slept for days. There was a grim line to his mouth and his face was marked with stubble. He ran a hand through his hair, and then his whole body twisted as he screamed.

The sound reverberated through the room, making Eve flinch back, but there was nowhere to go.

He finally stopped that tortured sound and his hands shook. “I’m sorry. I just fucked up again. I can’t stop fucking up. Why can’t I stop?”

He was a little bit crazy with a side of fucking nuts. And that was a professional opinion. But Alex was alive. She hoped she hid her smile. If Alex was alive then he would come for her, and she had to be ready. She needed to do anything she could to make his job easier, and that included talking Jesse Murdoch out of whatever plans he was coming up with now.

“Are you upset that you missed Alex or that you hit Kristen?” She scooted around, trying to sit up. He’d adjusted her, and now her hands were zip tied in front of her body. He seemed to have gotten rid of the one on her legs. She could move them freely now.

He moved toward her and for a minute, she was sure he was going to hit her, but he merely shoved a hand under her elbow and helped her to sit. A striking man, Jesse had sandy hair and blue eyes that went dark when he was emotional. She’d noticed it before. When he’d talked to her in the hallway that first day, his eyes had been almost like sapphires, but the day of the luncheon, they’d gone dark when one of the men had made a remark that he wasn’t surprised to see Jesse at the club.

Because the man knew his past and thought he’d turned, she’d reasoned.

Jesse paced, still wearing a big hoodie even though the heat of the day was upon them. “I didn’t mean to hurt Kris.”

She hoped Kris was fine, but god, she was so glad it hadn’t been Alex. “But it’s fine to hurt Alex.”

“He’s a soldier. Soldiers get hit. It’s what happens.”

“This isn’t war.” She said the words, but then wondered if the war had ever ended for Jesse.

“You say that because you’re a civilian.” He took a long breath and seemed to attempt to gain some control. “I wonder if I killed her. I never killed a woman before. Not intentionally.”

Oh, he wore his guilt right there on his sleeve. She needed to bring it out even more. Though it pained her, she needed to manipulate him. Something was off, and she had to find out what it was. “Are you talking about the woman in your unit?”

His eyes flared. “How did you know about that?”

“It was all over the news, Jesse. It was hard to miss. There was a woman who was captured with you.”

“
Alannah
Tally.” He whispered the name like it was a blessing, or perhaps a curse that had been following him.

He’d been close to her. “Was she your girlfriend?”

He shook his head, rubbing the scruff of his beard, his eyes far off. He glanced down at his cell phone as if it might save him. Not once did he react as he should, Eve noted. He was in the position of power. He could tell her to shut up or walk away, but once he decided he didn’t have a handy excuse, he gave up. “I liked her a lot.”

It was so lucky she spoke male. “So you slept with her, but you weren’t in love with her.”

He was a big man, but she noticed that he hid much of his bulk in the slump of his shoulders. “Yeah, something like that. She was a nice lady. She wasn’t some slut.”

And he was still defending her, as though the very act of sleeping with him put her at risk. Deep insecurities. She needed to play on them and soothe them. He was obviously a man who needed a soft voice in his life. And he responded to women. “I would never use that word, Jesse. Women don’t often merely sleep with a man to scratch an itch. We tend to sleep with men we admire. She must have admired you.”

His breath hitched. He stood again, that anxious pacing beginning. Two steps one way and then another three the other. Over and over, as though the pattern was ingrained in his head.

He was walking the length of his cell. She would bet that he’d paced that small enclosure so often during his imprisonment that now it was ingrained in him, a habit he couldn’t break.

She could pull him back from Evans. She could bring him to their side.

“She didn’t admire me in the end. She hated me. Did you see the video?” He stopped and seemed to force himself to be still. He patted his jacket down and came up with a cigarette and lighter. “I fucking hate these things, but it was the only thing they let me do. Did you see the tape?”

She shivered a little as he lit up, and the smell of cigarettes filled the air. “The one where she died?”

He took a long drag. He was twenty-seven, but she would have sworn he was fifty in that moment. “Yeah.”

“Part of it.” It had been all over the news, but they had cut out just before the killing blows had been delivered. Major news networks carried the story, but declined to show the grislier parts of the video. Of course, nothing was ever really contained on the Internet. She knew Ian had watched the video after the Agency had asked him to consult.

“They made me watch,” Jesse explained. “They would get me high on heroin and then they would stand me up and force me to watch as they beheaded my brothers.”

No wonder he was a little cuckoo. But he was still the reason she was tied up and he’d still tried to kill her husband. “They gave you heroin so you would look passive, as though you didn’t really care or were even involved in the process.”

“Yeah, I got that. I don’t think
Alannah
did. None of them did. They all thought I’d turned. They hated me. I just wanted to make my dad proud, you know. I thought I could go into the Army and make something of myself.”

She needed to make connections. He’d just given her a big one. “My husband was in the Army.”

Jesse’s brow furrowed. “Are you talking about Master A?”

And she needed to try to establish a little trust. “Don’t prevaricate, Jesse. I suspect you know a lot about my husband. His name is Alex.”

“Yeah, McKay. I figured that out.”

“Did you know he was a decorated soldier? He served his country just like you.”

His blond head shook shortly. “Not like me.”

“Not exactly, but there are a lot of similarities. He’s been trying to bring down your boss for a long time. Do you want to know why?”

Jesse’s eyes narrowed, and he put the cigarette out. “How do you know about this? He talks to you about his work?”

Otherwise known as the “maybe you’re not so innocent” question. She stepped lightly. “He values me.”

“He beats you.”

She was so done with this crap. Impatience got the best of her. “Mr. Murdoch, you seem to kill people for a living, so I don’t think you have a right to look down on me for my sexual choices. What my husband and I do together is our business, but I will tell you he’s never hurt me in a way I didn’t find pleasurable. We’re not all the same. We don’t all enjoy vanilla sex. Some of us need more, and it doesn’t always have to do with something that went wrong in our childhoods. I was built this way and there’s nothing wrong with me. I enjoy dirty games and a certain level of pain when it comes from the man I love more than my own soul. I make no apologies for the love I make. I will not beg forgiveness for my differentness. I celebrate it. I fight for it.”

He’d blushed a little the minute she’d mentioned the word sex. He ignored all but her last words. “Fight for it?”

Here was where she would get him. Evans had obviously been lying to him. The man had issues with women being hurt. The thought that he’d killed Kristen—god, she hoped that wasn’t so—had torn him up. It was time to give him the truth about his boss. “I was raped and tortured by a man who used my lifestyle against me. He hurt me over and over and told me what a pervert I was, what a whore I was to want what I wanted.”

He flushed again, running a hand through his hair. “I’m so sorry to hear that. I…I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. I would think you would stay away from it.”

“That was what he wanted. He wanted to take something precious from me, and I wouldn’t let him.” A well of strength seemed to have opened up inside her. She’d been a psychologist studying the human mind for most of her life, but she’d learned that while she could empathize, sometimes things had to be experienced to be fully understood.

She was only his victim as far as she allowed herself to be. She hadn’t been in control of what Evans had done to her, but she was in control of how she reacted. She’d let that monster take too many years from her. She wasn’t going to allow him to take her husband, too.

He nodded and seemed to come to a decision. “Why is your husband doing this?”

Was it time for honesty? “He’s been searching for the man who hurt me for years.”

Jesse’s fists clenched, his eyes tightened. “And this man is here?”

Yes, it was definitely time for honesty. He was on the hook. She just had to reel him in. He could be turned. She could make him an ally instead of an enemy. He could possibly lead them right to Evans. “Yes, Jesse. Your boss kidnapped me and raped and tortured me. Michael Evans did that, and he’s hurt a lot of women. I don’t know what he’s told you, but he’s lying. Alex was the FBI agent who took him down. He’s working in the private sector now, but he still has connections. When we catch Evans, if he’s alive at the end of it, we’ll turn him over.”