“Naw, I’m too old to be trainable as a sex slave,” she assured him. “If it’s his associates, then they simply want vengeance. I killed Sorrel and his son Raven, and helped to all but destroy the organization. Why would they care now, more than eight years later? It doesn’t make sense.”
“And you think they’ll simply kill you?” His blue eyes seemed brighter, harder. “Tehya, these are men that Sorrel funded, that gave him their loyalty. The same men who were determined to capture you and your mother for all those years. These men aren’t out to thank you, baby. They’re out to torture the hell out of you and make you beg to die because you destroyed the man and the organization they were so fanatically devoted to.”
They hated her because she had killed Sorrel and Raven, men she knew as her father and her brother. She hoped they were burning in hell.
“I’ve been running since I was five, Jordan.” She sighed wearily, exhaustion crashing in on her at the thought of even attempting to live again as she once had.
The last two weeks had been harder than she had realized. She hadn’t slept well; the fear that she was being stalked, that she had been found by her father’s friends, or his enemies, had weighed on her, she realized.
“Tehya, there are other places besides the operational base. Just let me hide you until we can reset your identity. We’ll do a full facial reconstruct and fingerprint alteration. When we’re finished, no one will find you, I swear it,” he said. And perhaps, if there had been a hint of emotion in his voice, the thinnest vein of desperation, she might have considered it. But that was all she would have done, considered it.
“The fingerprint alterations rarely work, and there’s still DNA. I’m tired of running,” she whispered, staring back at him as the heaviness weighing at her soul threatened to weaken her knees and take her to the floor. “I’m tired of losing everything I’ve worked for because some entity out there has decided I have no right to live, no right to freedom.” No right to love or to have the rest of her life to regret what couldn’t be.
“So you’re just going to sit here and wait for the bastard to strike?” He crossed his arms over his chest, which was never a good sign.
Jordan was possibly the most arrogant, most domineering man she had ever met in her life, and she had met a lot of men. When he took that stance, he was impossible to sway. Even his men knew better than to confront him at such times.
Fortunately, Tehya wasn’t one of his men, and confronting Jordan was something she had perfected over the years.
“I killed my father and my brother.” She shrugged, knowing that waiting for the strike would be easier than trying to run from it, easier than never having friends, never having a place to belong. “And I haven’t had a single nightmare over it. But if I have to start running again, Jordan, then my life will become a living hell again. I simply can’t survive that way anymore. And they’ll find out, I won’t be as easy to capture as my mother was.”
Her mother. Delicate, fragile Francine Taite. She had been tortured to death in Nicaragua when Sorrel’s men had finally chased her down, ten years after she had escaped with Tehya. Francine had refused to reveal where Tehya was hidden, had given him no information about where he could find the daughter he had chosen to breed.
Her father’s family was obsessed with bloodlines. It ruled everything, and nothing was allowed to taint its purity. Huge sums of money, land, and power were made in exchange and sometimes, there was even force. Her father’s family occupied a very dark corner of their superbly rich, exclusive world and for the right price, a blue-blooded daughter could be forced into marriage. Her mother was one of those women. Her father had repeatedly raped her until she had become pregnant with Tehya. It was a fate Francine did not want for her daughter.
Sorrel had still managed to find her, though. Through those hellish years he had murdered everyone who had tried to help her, cut her off from all possibility of peace, and in his demented mind he believed she would actually willingly return to him.
“Goddamn, Tehya.” Frustration filled Jordan’s voice now.
“You trained me well, Jordan,” she reminded him. “At the least, I’ll have a chance. They won’t be expecting someone able to fight back.”
She had learned a lot during her years with the Ops. Enough to believe she had a chance.
“I didn’t teach you to be fucking stupid,” he snarled, those blue eyes darkening to deep sapphire as he glared back at her. “Tehya, you can’t face these men alone. Hell, you’ve seen the merciless cruelties they inflict on their victims. Do you think I’m going to let you become one?”
Damn, she’d never seen him this pissed off at anyone, especially her so quickly. He was, but for that one night, always calm, cool, and fairly unemotional when dealing with her. No matter what she had done to prick at that wall of self-control he possessed.
“Maybe I just learned that one on my own.” Giving him a tight smile she turned on her heel and headed back to her bedroom. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to shower and go to bed. Just because it’s a weekend doesn’t mean I don’t have things to do tomorrow.”
Jordan watched as she stalked through the bedroom door, her head held high, those damned curls making his fingers tighten with the need to sink into them and hold her in place for a kiss that would rock them both to the soles of their feet. A kiss that would ensure she was too weak to fight him.
Son of a bitch.
His fingers plowed through his hair before he jerked his satellite phone from the holster at his hip and keyed in Killian’s number.
“I assume you found her,” Killian answered on the first ring. “The protocol on her phone has been disengaged. How did you know it was there?”
Jordan felt his jaw tighten to the point that he wondered if it would crack. Had Killian been standing before him, he might well have killed the fucker. “I didn’t, Killian. I tried to call her to give her advance warning of the danger that was already stalking her, only to learn she wasn’t getting my calls.”
How Killian could have done something so insane Jordan couldn’t imagine. He knew that Killian, possibly more so than anyone else, should have known better than to leave her so vulnerable.
“They’re already there? They moved faster than you expected then,” Killian mused as though he hadn’t heard even a hint of the anger in Jordan’s tone.
“Why did you fuck with her phone?” Even he heard the animalistic growl in his tone now, the unmistakable fury.
All he could see was Tehya lying in a pool of her own blood, destroyed before he could get to her because he’d had no way of warning her of what was coming.
And that was Killian’s fault. The bastard had dared to mess with her only means of communication with the team. Her only way of contacting him if she was in trouble.
Killian didn’t answer for long moments. “She’s a risk, Jordan,” he finally explained, his tone reserved, as though he were carefully choosing each word. “I was merely keeping tabs on her.”
Keeping tabs on her? He’d been spying on her calls, tracking her movements, blocking her ability to receive a call from her former unit operatives.
“And when I called requesting your help to protect her, you didn’t inform me of this, why?” It was all he could do to keep his tone low, the ice from disintegrating into full, fiery fury.
“I saw no reason to tell you,” Killian answered bluntly. “I was only tracking her, nothing more.”
“The team’s numbers were disengaged and blocked from receipt,” he snapped back. “She couldn’t have received our warning of the danger if her life depended it, and it just may well have.”
“That was unintended,” Killian answered carefully. “I didn’t deliberately change those features. Sometimes, the secured numbers already programmed in become disengaged for receipt after the tracking protocols are set. She could have called you, though, as you well know. I didn’t set those protocols and the default doesn’t disengage the ability to call out to any
of the programmed numbers. It does however sometimes block the incoming features as well as track them.”
He hadn’t thought Killian could be so fucking cold, so merciless. Jordan prided himself on being able to anticipate the moves of every man he worked with. It was one of his strengths as a commander, and one that had saved his and his men’s asses more than once.
He could count on one hand the number of times he had been wrong about an agent he had worked with and each time that failure had resulted in someone’s death.
Had his inability to anticipate Killian’s actions gotten Tehya killed, then Jordan knew he couldn’t have borne the guilt. Or his fury. He would have killed Killian. Hell he was ready to fly back to Texas now just to take his rage out on the other man. He hadn’t lost such control of his emotions since he was a fucking teenager.
He had known Killian didn’t trust Tehya, but he hadn’t expected him to have actively moved to do something so drastic as to have placed a tracking and security protocol on her phone. For nine months Killian had known where she was every minute of the day. He had listened in on her conversations, possibly known every detail of her life, and it was information he hadn’t volunteered to Jordan when she became endangered.
“When this is cleared up, and I have a minute to beat the fuck out of you, then I’ll be back to base,” Jordan said, the violence swirling just beneath the surface leaking into his voice.
It was a promise, and one Jordan intended to stand by. Even better, Killian knew he would stand by it. Killian would be lucky if he could walk for a week.
“Your emotions are involved here,” the other man told him coolly, and Jordan listened, just for the sheer pleasure of allowing the man to dig his own grave deeper. “Once this is over, I trust you’ll see things more clearly.”
Jordan breathed in slowly. “If she had been taken, Killian, if she had been harmed … How long do you think she could have held out before she broke and revealed the Ops? Think about that. Think about the danger you placed not only my men in, but also your own.”
Not that Jordan doubted Tehya’s ability to withstand things that would break most men. Even her mother had had a spine of steel, one that had kept her from revealing her daughter’s whereabouts despite being drugged and beaten, and her feet burned to the bone, her fingers broken.
“Look, I agreed to let her into my unit, didn’t I?” Killian snapped. “I wasn’t trying to get her killed or captured. I was simply trying to keep tabs on her. Look at it this way, if she had been taken, finding her would have been a hell of a lot easier because of the security protocols on her phone.”
“Why did you agree to protect her in the first place, Killian?” Jordan asked, suspicion suddenly slamming through his brain. “What was your intent once she got to the base?”
There was a long pause.
“What do you mean by that?” Killian’s voice hardened.
“Exactly what I said. How long before you would have tried to send her on a mission that she couldn’t have returned from?”
The short laugh that came across the line was cold and bitter. “You think I would have actually made her operational?” Killian asked with a sneer in his voice. “When did you start taking me for a fool, Jordan? She would have sat on her ass in her suite and kept it there. I have no use for her on any of my missions or in my unit. I can think of much kinder ways to commit suicide here. You’re so fucking irrational where she’s concerned that you would have killed me if she’d gotten even a scratch. God forbid anything more serious had happened.”
A lifetime of friendship had just been shot to hell, Jordan thought. In all the years they had been friends Jordan had never asked him for a favor, just as he had never denied Killian any help he needed.
Killian had destroyed those years in a single, thoughtless act. He had refused Tehya the protection Jordan had once extended to Killian’s wife without so much as a request from the other man. They were friends; and that had made Catherine’s life just as valuable to Jordan as Killian’s had been.
Catherine had died anyway. Shot down by Sorrel. He had killed not just Killian’s wife, but also their unborn son. A child Killian hadn’t known she was carrying until the autopsy. And now, Killian thought he could make Tehya pay for her father’s sins, despite her innocence and the hell she had lived through because of her father as well?
“Then it’s a damned good thing I didn’t send you one of the best communications and logistics agents that I’ve ever worked with, isn’t it?” Jordan said. “I’ll contact Elite Command for any help I may need from here on out. I won’t bother you again.”
“Dammit, Jordan, what the fuck are you talking about?” Surprise filled Killian’s voice now. “I’ve always had your back. That hasn’t changed.”
“Yes, Killian, it has. It changed when you endangered her life because of your own grief and inability to see past who fathered her to the agent she’s become. If that’s what you call having my back, then I think I’d prefer to have Sorrel alive and watching it. At least I knew what to expect from him.”
There was nothing but silence on the other end. Jordan waited, wondering if the other man would even attempt to present a decent defense. Not that Jordan could think of one, but sometimes the truth had a way of knocking a man on his ass.
“You’re making a mistake, Jordan,” was all Killian had left to say.
“God forbid I should see you again in this lifetime,” Jordan stated icily, “because you may not survive it.”
He disconnected the call before Killian could say any more. The rage building inside him didn’t leave room for regret over a lost friendship. A friendship that had spanned almost a lifetime, he thought as he contacted one of the only men he knew who could cover him at this point.
“We’re on our way to Maryland,” John Vincent, a.k.a. Heat Seeker said as soon as he picked up. “Bailey refused to wait for your call. She’s been too damned worried.”
Bailey Serborne, the heiress John had married, had taken a liking to Tehya during an operation Tehya had worked on with her and two other Elite Ops agents. It had been one of the few operations Tehya had worked off base, and Jordan remembered the nights he had paced the floor worrying while she had been in the field without him.
“Have you contacted Travis?” John asked. “He and Lilly have been just as concerned. They should have landed at JFK earlier and will be waiting for your call.”
His men were coming together without being called into operation because Tehya was one of their own. Because they trusted her.
“Call him.” Jordan ordered. “The situation here has changed. Too many watching eyes. Tehya’s refusing to hide.”
“And you really thought she would agree to it?” John questioned in amusement. “Even I doubted your ability to pull that one off Jordan.” And here John had taken to calling him the “Miracle Worker” in the past few years.
“If Rawhide makes contact, he’s to be considered unsecure,” Jordan told him coolly. “Relay the message to Travis and Lilly.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“That doesn’t surprise me.” John finally sighed. “Killian can’t let Sorrel go, and our girl is all that’s left of him. She’s all Killian has to punish, if that’s his frame of mind.”
Both John and Travis had warned him, Jordan thought. When they learned Killian was heading the new Elite Operations unit out of Texas, John had said he hoped that Tehya would never need a haven at the base, as they had all been offered. If she did, John had been certain the doors would be closed to her. Jordan had hoped he was wrong.
“I’ll fill you in when we meet,” Jordan promised. “Until then, I’m with her, but I don’t think she can be convinced to hide.”
A moment of silence filled the line before John spoke again, his voice heavy with regret. “After running her whole life, it would get damned old, don’t you think?”
Jordan could only shake his head. “Contact me when you meet up with Travis and Lilly. Security is well
in hand here for the moment. It should hold until we come up with a workable plan.”
Until he could figure out where to stash Tehya and how to convince her to go along with it.
Hell, she was going to turn her protection into a battle, he could see it now.
What he understood, though, was that it wasn’t a deliberate battle and it wasn’t even a battle he could blame her for. She was thirty years old, and there hadn’t been a day in her life that she could be assured of her safety and security other than the years she had spent at the Elite Ops base in Texas.
Disconnecting the call, Jordan moved to the living room closet where he pulled out the bags he had brought in, then secured the door and returned to the central seating area.
The heavy, padded duffel carried a multitude of weapons, just in case. The other carried clothing, while the smaller padded bag held a selection of electronic devices he hoped he wouldn’t need.
He had checked the security in and around the house before breaking in earlier. Jordan knew he would have never made it inside without alerting her if it wasn’t for the fact that he had more or less built the system with her.
They had installed it at his nephew’s and father’s homes the year before the Elite Ops disbanded. She had added a few extra sensors he hadn’t thought of and a few traps for the unwary that he could only shake his head at. At the very least, she would have a hell of a warning if anyone attempted to break in.
Opening the weapons bag, he lifted another handgun from inside and laid it aside, before breathing out wearily. God, he should have never let her out of his sight nine months ago. If he had kept her with him, kept her in his bed, then he would have known exactly what he was facing.
He carried the duffels to the bedroom and set them carefully on the side of the bed he’d chosen as he tried to figure out the best way to protect her here.
Thankfully, Tehya usually slept on the side of the bed opposite from the one he preferred. If he was going to be forced to protect her here, then he was making damned sure he could protect her effectively.