Chapter Thirteen
AXEL fidgeted in the seat of his rented sedan parked on a rise of the dirt road and behind the tree line, out of sight from Mystery’s aunt’s farm. For the hundredth time since Mystery had taken off—again—he wondered what the fuck had happened. One minute he’d been sharing mind-blowing sex and turtle cheesecake with the woman he felt himself falling hard and fast for. The next minute, he’d been preparing Sweet Pea to meet Stone before suddenly being plunged into darkness. Once he and Zeb discovered that someone had tampered with the electrical panel and the two of them had restored the lighting, Axel had gone on a frantic search for Mystery.
He’d known in less than sixty seconds that she was gone. Since her personal items and suitcase were absent, too, he didn’t think anyone had taken her from the club against her will. But Heath was missing, too. Axel had no doubt the Brit had planned their escape. The question was, had he dragged Mystery out or had she left with the other man of her own free will?
Axel felt as if someone had gutted his insides with a chainsaw. What if he never saw her again? What if he’d failed to protect her from a man she’d mistakenly trusted? Or, Axel wondered, what if she’d scratched her itch for him and simply moved on?
Apprehension brewed in his belly.
The minute he’d realized that Heath, Mystery, and her luggage had all escaped out the back door, he’d hopped on his bike and sped like a wild man down the streets, onto I-35. Mystery wanted to visit her aunt, and Axel suspected the pair would head to Marion, Kansas, about an hour west of Emporia, where the woman lived. But the duo’s head start had been too big, and Axel hadn’t been able to track them down.
Thanks to Javier and Xander Santiago’s plane, he’d instead jetted north and arranged a car so he could reach the middle-of-nowhere farm quickly. That left him plenty of time to worry that his hunch about Mystery’s destination wasn’t right and to call Joaquin to have him gather some essential facts about her aunt Gail—and her bodyguard, Heath.
The aunt’s story checked out. Gail Leedy was a spinster, born and raised in Marion. She’d worked as a nurse for a local doctor for the past twenty years. After a failed attempt at Hollywood fame with her sister, she’d returned to Kansas and taken up residence in the farmhouse that had once belonged to her parents, though she’d sold off the land more than a decade ago. Deeply involved in her church, she sang in the choir and organized the bake sale for their annual Sunday school fund-raiser. She sounded like a lovely lady, and Axel would have simply walked up to the woman’s door and introduced himself, then waited for her niece. But Mystery’s aunt hadn’t been home when he’d arrived. At that point, he’d tracked down Marshall Mullins and explained that his darling daughter had run off. The famous director had blown a gasket, then launched into a tirade about Mystery’s safety. They’d both tried to call her and come up empty, so Mullins had promised to ring Aunt Gail and let her know that she should make up another guest room.
Axel had been satisfied on that score but he still wanted dirt about Heath Powell, like, yesterday. Not knowing exactly who had Mystery at his mercy made Axel itchy.
Right on cue, his phone buzzed in the console of his rented sedan. Joaquin called, according to the display.
“What you got for me, man?” Axel asked, skipping the typical greeting as he continued to scan the dirt road for any sign of headlights in the dark.
“A lot, and none of it very good.”
“Fuck.” Why didn’t that surprise him? Axel sighed. “Lay it on me.”
“I’ll start with your buddy, Heath Powell. Naturally, most of the good information about him is classified. MI5 won’t confirm his employment, but I called Sean Mackenzie”—Joaquin spoke of the former FBI agent who had recently married Callie—“and Hunter Edgington. The intelligence community can be small. Lots of people know lots of others. It didn’t take long for them to tap into their individual sources and come back with similar stories.”
“After I hear this, am I going to want to kill him?”
“You might. But you might also want to give him a hardy slap on the back. Tough call.”
Axel had a hard time picturing that. At the moment, the murder scenario sounded far more plausible. “What did you find?”
“Heath Powell and a team he’d been assigned to warned of Islamic extremists planning something in the Underground system before the July 2005 attacks. Their theory was dismissed. After the incident materialized, the agency backtracked and offered him a promotion. He stayed a few more years, thwarted a few more terrorist plots, then someone shot his wife in broad daylight in a London market. The murder had the earmarks of a public retaliation for putting a douchebag—they’ve never proven exactly who—behind bars. After that Powell resigned, and a few key criminals wound up gruesomely dead over the next few months. No one pursued their deaths too hard, but whoever took them out was a real pro, so you do the math. Powell then took a few odd bodyguarding jobs, sometimes for the sort of lowlifes and thugs he’d once hunted down. Then Marshall Mullins jetted to London with his young, still-traumatized daughter and hired Powell almost immediately. By all accounts, the guy has been Mystery’s devoted shadow since.”
Axel gripped the phone, his thoughts racing. Yeah, he didn’t like what he heard. But he had to compartmentalize his worry and pray that son of a bitch was too devoted to Mystery to kill her. He understood why she trusted her bodyguard, but Axel would bet she had no idea the Brit had gotten in bed with the enemy for a paycheck and more than likely had committed cold-blooded murder.
“Thanks for the info,” Axel grumbled.
“Don’t thank me yet. Now we come to the worse news. I did some digging about Julia Mullins’s killing and talked to the detective originally assigned to her case. He’s retired now. Once we established that I wasn’t a pesky reporter looking for a scoop or a college student hoping to write a paper that would blow this whole Hollywood drama open again, he admitted that the sheriff’s department hid a few things from the media.”
That happened more often than not, so Axel wasn’t surprised. “And he was willing to tell you about it?”
“Not at first. But we shot the shit over the phone for a while. I had to stretch the truth a little and say that I was helping to protect Mystery while she’s on U.S. soil.”
“If you get me information, then you are, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Well, he hemmed and hawed a bit, checked out my credentials. I guess he’d met Caleb Edgington in the past and finally decided anyone working with or for my stepfather was okay.”
“And?”
“At first, he thought Julia Mullins jumped. The trajectory of the body over the cliff suggested some force behind her fall, rather than a suicide leap, though. And Julia’s actions just before her death didn’t match up.”
“Like calling a divorce lawyer and planning a move to Kansas?”
“Yeah. You knew about that?”
“Mystery told me earlier,” Axel supplied. “I don’t think she knows much else, though.”
“The body placement also ruled out an unintentional fall, which left them thinking murder. But the sheriff couldn’t positively place either of their only two suspects at the crime scene with her. So the case went unsolved. For some reason, the sheriff didn’t publicly classify her death as a homicide.”
“Why the hell not?” Axel demanded.
“To cool speculation in the press maybe. The detective I spoke to said they were under a lot of pressure to figure out what had happened. Calling it a murder would only have turned up the heat.”
That sheriff had done Julia Mullins and her loved ones a really crappy disservice, in Axel’s opinion. “So that’s it?”
“Not exactly. Fast-forward about four months,” Joaquin went on. “Campers in the valley below took some last-minute pictures before heading out, hours before anyone knew there’d even been a death. They finally got the film developed in their camera—remember, this was before everyone had a digital camera—and they
spotted something interesting. I’m sending it to you now.”
Within a minute, Axel’s phone dinged with a text message. He put Joaquin on speaker and opened the message. Mountains, some snowcapped, filled the landscape, dotted with a thick forest of trees. The shot was panoramic and showed the majesty of the area. Then something to the left of the shot caught his attention. He peered more closely and expanded the view on his phone. But the old picture pixilated the more he tried to zoom in. Still, two things looked very clear: The date and time stamp on the photo coincided with Julia Mullins’s murder and on the mountain in which she’d met her doom stood not one figure—but two.
“I see a man and a woman on the mountain in the left side of the background,” Axel pointed out. “She’s definitely Julia Mullins. That’s probably the last picture of her alive.”
“Exactly.”
“Who’s that man standing with her?” Though the snapshot only showed the back of a man wearing a navy blue suit, Axel already knew that couldn’t be Mystery’s father. “The guy in the photo is too short and has too much gray in his hair to be Marshall Mullins.”
The man in the photo also wasn’t Heath Powell. He would have been too young at the time of the murder, and school records put him squarely in the UK at the time of Julia Mullins’s death. Axel had checked.
“He’s also too tall to be Akio Miharu, the Asian Mafia enforcer Mullins hired to consult on a movie and, according to rumor, to kill his wife. With their only two suspects most likely eliminated, the sheriff had nothing else to go on. The quality of the photo isn’t fantastic, and the negative is long gone, so we can’t improve the clarity.”
Which meant that using anything fancy, like recognition software, was out of the question. “So she was definitely murdered, and we have a new suspect we can’t identify.”
“Pretty much. The sketchy notes here indicate that the detective asked Mullins if he recognized the man with his wife. He claims he didn’t.”
“Why didn’t they ever release this photo to the press? Get it on the news and see if anyone could identify him?”
“Isn’t that a good question?” Joaquin asked cynically.
“What about records of people entering and leaving the park? Are any kept so we can cross-reference whoever entered that day with anyone Julia Mullins knew?”
“You need a parking pass for some locations within the forest, but nothing if visitors stay on the roads maintained by Los Angeles County. As far as I can tell, no one checked for a record of the parking passes issued that day.”
That was damn fishy. Axel sighed heavily as another question crossed his mind: If Mullins knew his wife had been murdered, why hadn’t he told his daughter that fact? Granted, Mystery would have been a child at the time, but he hadn’t come clean since she’d grown up. Axel suspected he’d have to break the news to her. He wished to hell the director would hurry up and make the connection between his wife’s murder and his daughter’s abduction. If Mullins did, he might try harder to help solve the case, which could end the danger to Mystery once and for all.
“And sixteen years later, I wonder if those records even exist anymore. That sucks,” Axel growled.
“Big, hairy monkey balls, yes. And the detective had nothing else useful in the file, so that’s all I’ve got.”
“I’ll have to run this photo past Mystery . . .” Once he caught up to her again and paddled her ass a glowing shade of red. “I’ll ask her aunt, too. Maybe one of them will recognize this guy.”
“I hope so. Otherwise, this is another dead end.”
No shit. “Thanks for the update. Let me know if you find anything else.”
Joaquin paused. “Logan and I are prepared to back you up, man. Just say the word. Hunter can’t get away with Kata due any day, but since Bailey is already busy with rehearsals because she won the lead in that ballet this summer, I’m free. Logan and I will come out there and help.”
The offer surprised him, especially since he and Joaquin weren’t really pals. “That’s damn nice of y’all.”
“Well, it might also be avoidance,” Joaquin admitted. “We inherited Caleb’s team of operatives when he gave us his business—a half-dozen psycho misfits. One guy is a former army sniper. He won’t even let us call him by name. He insists we call him One-Mile, an homage to his longest kill shot. I’d ten times rather deal with your shit than mine.”
Axel forced a laugh. “I might take you up on it. Once I get the lay of the land here, I’ll let you know.”
They rang off, and Axel resumed waiting for Heath to deliver Mystery to her aunt. He only hoped that his gut was right—that Heath wanted her for himself more than he wanted to kill her.
To pass the time so he didn’t go insane with worry, he picked up his phone again and texted Sweet Pea. How did the meeting with Stone go? Sorry I couldn’t stay. Did Zeb watch over you?
She wrote back almost immediately. Yes. I like Stone. We talked a lot. He wants to see me again and he’s going to talk to you.
How do you feel about that? he asked quickly. But he knew Sweet Pea well.
She hesitated, then tapped back. I don’t know. A little excited and scared.
She wasn’t ready for a Dom she barely knew. Hell, Axel didn’t even know if Stone was actually in the lifestyle. Jack Cole vouched for the guy professionally, but that wouldn’t cut it in a dungeon with a sub as fragile as Misty.
We’ll talk when I get back. Be safe. Call if you need me.
She sent him a winking face and a heart emoticon. Take care of your girl.
With a grimace, Axel tucked his phone away. He didn’t bother trying to call “his girl” again. If Mystery hadn’t answered the first fifty times, she probably wouldn’t answer now. Would she answer tomorrow? Next week? Ever? If Heath hadn’t nabbed her with dangerous intentions in mind . . . then what? Axel frowned. Had her post-coital glow worn off because he didn’t mean a damn thing to her, and he’d been too busy falling for her to notice? He had a lot of practice with sex . . . and not much with relationships.
This mental jaunt down Maudlin Street bored the shit out of him, so he trekked off this beaten path and glanced at the time. If they’d come straight here, she and Heath should be driving up any minute. Then? He expected fireworks.
Wouldn’t his presence here shock the shit out of Mystery? She might not want him around forever, but he’d damn well make her explain that to his face before he let her go. No way would he sit around morosely and wonder why she left him, not after the way Dad had when his mother had taken off for a new life.
Finally, twin lights bobbed up and down the dirt road, coming toward Axel at a careful clip. He held his breath, beyond relieved that Heath had delivered her as promised. If the Brit had wanted her dead, he’d had her alone for nearly seven hours. The man could have snuffed her out and dumped the body anywhere along the road.
At least he knew Heath wanted her alive. As much as Axel didn’t like the other man, he had to rule him out as a suspect in Mystery’s death threat, damn it. He’d love a reason to pound the asshole’s face.
As the lumbering black vehicle headed closer to the little farmhouse in the distance, Axel made sure the headlights were off, started his rental, then pulled forward to block the road. No way would Mystery have another chance to escape without a conversation.
Finally, Heath parked in front of the house, just in the circle of the cheery light from the front porch. He helped her from the car, and she stretched before making her way to the little porch, complete with a rocking chair. Even at a distance, Axel could see Mystery slumping her shoulders and bowing her head, exhaustion evident in every line of her body.
Heath took her by the elbow toward the porch as Aunt Gail opened the door. Axel shut off the engine and exited the rental. He locked it manually so it didn’t beep and shut the door softly, grateful the spring breeze muffled the sound.
Mystery hugged her aunt, a tall, thin woman in her fifties with ashy blond hair in a bob and wearing a blue bathrob
e. Axel jogged down the lane toward them.
Heath heard him first and turned, gun in his hand. He cursed when Axel stepped into the porch light’s glow. “Oh, bloody hell. You’re here? Why did you follow her?”
“Did you think I wouldn’t?” Axel shot back.
Out of his peripheral vision, he saw Mystery pull from her aunt’s arms and turn his way. Her eyes widened when she caught sight of him.
“You.” Axel pointed at her. “We’re going to talk. Now.”
“She has nothing to say to you,” Heath answered for her. “Didn’t her leaving you indicate that she’s had enough?”
“Who is this man?” Aunt Gail asked nervously. “Should I call the police?”
“That would be brilliant.” Heath smiled.
“I’m Axel Dillon, ma’am. Mr. Mullins called you about me.”
“Of course.” She smiled. “Please come in. I hope everyone is hungry. I made cookies.”
Heath cursed.
The woman’s gesture was a kind one but Axel actually agreed with the Brit just now. Fuck the cookies. “I’m sure they’re delicious, and I’ll be happy to eat one after I’ve spoken to your niece.”