When a Man Loves a Weapon (31 page)

Violations that would cost Poly-Ferosia millions.

He meant to cost them more. He meant to take this fight to their door. Eleven fucking
years
and his wrongful death case on Chloë’s behalf was so mired in the court system, nothing was going to happen. Nothing. He could see it, he knew it, and all of that effort wasn’t fucking
good
enough to nail the bastards for her death.

There was nothing on the news channel on the TV in the corner of the room. Nothing except the casino and the
explosion at Bobbie Faye’s house, her photo splashed on every station. There should have been photos of the plant exploding.

He found himself at his sink again, rewashing his hands. He didn’t remember walking over there, starting the burning hot water, using the grit-laden soap again, the kind that scrubs away the oil and the grime, the kind he’d used so many times after Chloë. . . .

He turned off the faucet, grabbed a shop towel, and dried his chapped hands as he watched the news, his heart beating triple time.

The Irish.

The Irish
.

He’d forgotten. How the fuck could he forget?

He stared at that channel, where Bobbie Faye’s house burned, and he knew. He
knew
what they were going to do. It had to be the same Irish, the ones who’d been in the paper, who’d been after Bobbie Faye back in June, which was two months before they’d contacted him. He’d just gotten the word from his attorney that his latest effort had stalled on appeal, that it was going to take another round, another year.

Some perfect fucking timing.

He should have seen this. With his military training, he should have asked more about their motives.

Oh, dear God. He pulled Chloë’s rosary from his jeans, and his hands flashed over the beads, second nature. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t let the Irish hijack his bombs.

He felt Chloë’s disapproval. Felt it as if Chloë were standing in the room, her hands on her slim hips, her blue eyes flaring, feet apart in that fighting stance she’d get whenever she’d taken him to task, the same sort of fighting stance she got whenever she dealt with people who wanted to play fast and loose with the law for their own benefit.

Lucidity. He felt, for the first time in years, lucid. Really fucking clear, and holy hell, Chloë would kill him. She’d refuse to sit by him in their forever that he’d fantasized. He’d
lost her, and he was going to lose her all over again, the part of her he’d kept in his heart, that he’d hung onto for years, because there was no way she’d have loved him through this.

He had no idea how to stop the Irish. Were the bombs even
in
Poly-Ferosia?

He dialed the Irish again, planning on a confrontation with the man, planning on getting him to slip up, to give a hint as to just what the hell they were up to. Threaten to go to the police. Threaten whatever he could.

The phone chirped that the number was no longer in service.

“Bobbie Faye will have no comment until we have time to review the entire indictment.”

—Kathy Sweeney, Counsel to Bobbie Faye

“Izzy,” Trevor said into his phone, “I need a ninety-second burst. Mark: 4:35. Can you do it?” Bobbie Faye watched him frown. “We are
not
talking about Mom now. No. Izzy, give me the fucking burst.” He hung up the phone.

“Izzy?” she asked him. “Isn’t she the sister who runs the family business?”

She needed something to think about, instead of the dead panic she felt over Nina being held, with the seconds ticking away.

They had set up in a perimeter around the building—Riles taking the east stairs, Cam the west, and she and Trevor taking the employee elevator. The poor security guards would be napping awhile—and would probably have a headache later from where Trevor and Riles had knocked them out. Trevor had noticed their check-in pattern with the head of security and planned an entry during a quiet interlude, hoping to buy them a few minutes before anyone in that clubhouse knew something was wrong. All of the access points, though, had security cameras, and Trevor wanted some sort of satellite doohickey to do something impressive that was going to take them down for a minute-and-a-half.

“An electronics business?” she added, remembering he hadn’t given her a lot of details about the family business; she had assumed it was some sort of mom-and-pop store.

His eyes stayed glued to his watch, counting down to 4:35. “It’s a pretty big electronics business.”

He was annoyed—clearly not wanting to talk about something that focused back on his wealth, and from the anger simmering in his voice, she had a niggly feeling that “electronics business” should mean more than . . . She stared at the brand logo on his phone and
sweet fucking pink and yellow unicorns
, she just realized. “You’re kidding me. Cormi-Co Telecommunications?” They were one of the largest, fastest-growing telecoms and had taken over her cell phone provider.

A multi
billion
-dollar company.

“I have absolutely nothing to do with running the company, Sundance. Or with the hundred other things my sisters and my parents run—that’s their thing. This is mine.” He watched the time and said, “Go,” and they sprinted to the service elevator security box. As Bobbie Faye plugged in the code Nina had given her over a year ago, Trevor stood near her—but not near enough. Not the way he’d have been standing the day before. His arms were folded, his hands weren’t reaching out to touch her; it was as if he had completely withdrawn until he knew what she wanted—until she knew for sure and drew the line.

He wanted words. In the middle of this, Trevor wanted
words
.

The doors opened, they stepped inside, and he leaned against one wall, staring somewhere off into space, somewhere light years away from her, and she hated it.
Hated
this place between them.

“Your family—they have—”

“I don’t want it.” The elevator jerked upward as he met her gaze, flint shearing off him. “I have
every
thing I want in this elevator.”

“You’d just walk away from all of that—”

“I already did. Many years ago. I’ve got my life. They don’t like it, and there’s a lot of pressure for me to participate, but I’m not going to. Izzy wants it; I hate it. And all I want is right here.”

Her body heated to Inferno with just the sweep of his gaze, and still he held back. He didn’t touch her, and it was wrong and empty and it made her angry, all over again.

He had not trusted her.

Still didn’t. Not really.

She started to tell him just exactly what she thought about his stupidity when he put a hand up . . . the elevator stopped and the doors slid open.

“Thirty-two seconds ’til we have cameras again,” he said, and eased out of the elevator into a beautiful kitchen area, his gun drawn, keeping her behind him.

They scanned the room—glancing into open doorways and pantries—and it appeared they’d interrupted meal prep. An Italian sauce simmered on the professional chef’s stove and pasta boiled in a magnificent pot. Bobbie Faye noted clean dishes set out for a dinner—it was getting late in the afternoon—and there were six plates. She touched Trevor on the arm to direct his attention to the dining table, and with just her hand on his bicep, the electricity between them jumped and hummed low in her body.

He nodded, all business, moving away from her and purposefully toward a hallway. According to the blueprints, there was a large living room in the center of this penthouse “club.” As he toed open the door, he hesitated at first, then he reached behind and slid his hand along her arm, tucking her closer behind him as if he needed the reassurance that she was there and safe. There were complete layers to the man that she couldn’t fathom. The room they entered seemed empty and the whole place felt hushed—too quiet where there ought to be normal noises of people going about their day. Whoever had been cooking in the kitchen ought to be somewhere nearby, and the fact that the place seemed empty meant someone in the S&M club had seen them enter.

Trevor motioned her to follow and eased into the living space. From across the room, Bobbie Faye saw Cam and Riles enter from two different hallways, both shaking their heads—the hallways had been empty.

Trevor tapped his watch and motioned to his eyes—the
cameras were back up. There was one last area of the club to search, and as the four of them eased from the living room into what Bobbie Faye would have loosely described as the “work quarter,” Trevor took point.

The door was locked. Definitely the pasta-cookers’ refuge. Trevor backed off, taking one side of the door with her while Cam and Riles took the other. Trevor glanced at Cam, and they nodded: ready.

“Police,” Cam shouted. “Come out. Hands up!”

Bobbie Faye jumped at the visceral, barking order—so definite, it made her want to put her own hands up.

An intercom snapped static into the room, and their eyes went to the panel next to the door, where a computer screen displayed a small, very young woman in an expensive suit leaning toward the camera projecting her image; her face was bowl-shaped and distorted.

“ID please?” she asked.

Cam held up his shield.

“Okay, we’re coming out. We are not armed. And you’ve just violated more laws than I can count, so you stand still.”

The door opened and a tiny wisp of a girl emerged. Bobbie Faye had a hard time thinking she could be more than twelve, but she wore an expensive business suit and carried herself with a rigid comportment that made Bobbie Faye wonder if the stitches had healed yet from the stick up her ass. It was the five women behind her which made Bobbie Faye bite the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning, though she noticed Riles did not have any such reluctance. They were all decked out in S&M gear—Amazon women in their high platform heels and leather outfits that had more . . . accesses . . . than actual coverage.

“Ohmygoodness,” the small woman said as soon as she made eye contact with Bobbie Faye. “I can’t believe we almost shot you! Nina would have kicked my ass.” She saw Riles then, and practically started to drool. “Oh. Wow. You’re. Wow. You’re Mr. Rilestone. Wow. So great to meet you, sir.”

If the twit genuflected, Bobbie Faye was going to bean her.

Riles barely nodded and the woman could hardly tear her
gaze away from him to look back at them. It was the worst case of crush Bobbie Faye had seen since elementary school.

“We’re here about Nina,” Trevor said. “We had to make sure this site hadn’t been”—he was gazing past the women and around their inner sanctum, and Bobbie Faye realized he wasn’t sure if they were agents or just employees—“compromised.”

The woman assessed him, glancing from Bobbie Faye to Trevor and back again. And then something miraculous happened.

She seemed to age a dozen years, right in front of them, going from twelve to twenty-four or -five or so, instantly. It was a transformation of posture: a different way of holding her body, her facial features, relaxing into an expression that was more wordly, more jaded, less enthusiastic. It was the damnedest thing Bobbie Faye had ever seen.

“We’re operational. I’m Gilda,” she said. “What do you mean, you’re here about Nina?”

“Nina’s been kidnapped,” Bobbie Faye said. “And she sent—”

“What!” Gilda said. “God
damn
it.” And she spun on her heels, motioning them to follow her. “I’ve been GPSing her all day. She broke off communication last night, but I knew she was going in to find you—and I also knew that she couldn’t reveal who she was,” and with that, she glanced back at Bobbie Faye, “but obviously, you’ve figured that out.”

“Not exactly with any help,” Bobbie Faye said. She didn’t have to see Trevor’s scowl to know that it was a direct hit.

“We’ve got video,” Trevor told her. “Your CO should have called, they should have gotten the word to you an hour ago.”

There was a weird pause from Gilda. “I’ve been a little unable to work the computer.”

They filed into a large computer room where everything appeared to be in perfect working order as far as Bobbie Faye could see—there were no blue screens of death on the monitors, and no actual smoke.

Trevor, on the other hand, studied the equipment like a pro and frowned at Gilda. “What’s the problem?”

Gilda gave him a meaningful frown that Bobbie Faye couldn’t quite parse, and Trevor’s expression changed from confused to comprehension. They seemed to be having an entire conversation with only subtle eyebrow movements. It annoyed the living hell out of her.

“What’s going on?” Bobbie Faye asked.

“Gilda here,” Trevor explained as he watched the young woman’s face, “has been actively avoiding contact with her CO because she’s afraid that Nina’s disappearance would imply that Nina’s been compromised.”

“Compromised? She’s been taken hostage. Of course she’d been compromised.”

“No, not just ‘at risk,’ but actually suspected of traitorous behavior.” Before Bobbie Faye could protest, Gilda put up one hand to stop her and then went back to clicking on keys and pulling up screen after screen of video. “In our field, looks are deceiving. We’ve had a hard time finding the information we wanted, and our bosses began wondering why. There have been a couple of leaks”—and there, Gilda stopped and nodded toward Bobbie Faye—“this would so get me fired, if they knew I was telling you this, but you’re with Trevor and she’s your best friend. I think you can be trusted. Anyway, double agents have been known to stage their own deaths—or kidnappings—in the past. Our bosses had been wondering if she was the source of their problems, the leaks, and with this new kidnapping, if she wasn’t creating an ‘exit’ strategy—a way to ‘die’ or ‘disappear’ without any of us having actual proof of traitorous acts.”

“You’re fucking kidding me?” Really, Bobbie Faye was going to have to get a whole new vocabulary to express
how flipping insane are you people?
Because clearly, she was wading waist-deep in cuckoo here. “You cannot possibly believe Nina would be a double agent.”

“You’ve known her most of her life,” Gilda pointed out, “and yet, you didn’t know she was an agent. She’s that good, so yes, it was a possibility.” Gilda stopped Bobbie Faye from
interrupting. “I don’t believe she’s anything other than loyal, but right now, her situation’s precarious, and not just because MacGreggor’s a sociopath.