Maggie had been secretive this morning about where she wanted to visit and why she wanted to leave the warehouse. Sully had just thought that she needed a break. But clearly, her disappearing act meant that she had something to hide.
After twenty minutes of searching, Sully walked back to the food court to sit and wait, hoping she'd make her way back. He'd tried her cell phone numerous times, but she hadn't picked up or responded to his texts.
When he reached the food court, Maggie was sitting at the table they'd previously occupied, with a chocolate-dipped ice cream cone in her hand. Anger boiled up in his chest. She'd scared him to death, and here she sat eating ice cream as if she didn't have a care in the world.
"Where the hell did you go?" he barked at her as soon as he reached the table.
She cut her gorgeous blue eyes up at him and had the nerve to smile at him. "I came out of the dressing room, and you were on the phone, so I told the lady to tell you that I was heading to another store."
He was calling B.S. on this excuse. "I'm not buying it. The lady said you went out the other side of the dressing room. She said nothing about where you went."
"Well, that's odd."
"Yes. It is. Where did you go?"
"I told you, I went to some other stores. Nothing fit me there."
"And you couldn't have texted me or answered my phone calls?"
She pulled her phone out of her purse and looked down at his missed calls and texts.
"I turned my phone on silent earlier today. I guess I forgot to turn it back on."
"Likely excuse," he muttered. "Did you find what you were looking for?"
She shook her head. "Nope. Didn't find anything I liked. Except this ice cream cone."
Maggie smiled, and it lit up her entire face. Grilling her was getting him nowhere. She didn't even have the nerve to be sorry for running off and making him worry.
"I thought something had happened to you. Don't run off like that again."
Sully turned to go and heard the chair slide away from the table as Maggie followed after him.
They drove home in silence. Sully knew he was brooding. But something felt off. Maggie was hiding something, and he was determined to find out what it was.
Chapter 3
Sully stood in his office, looking at the pitiful financial report for the last two months. Being involved in an FBI investigation for treason wasn't exactly good advertising. Most of the population hadn't even heard about the investigation, but the kind of people Castle Investigations catered to would have heard about it. They knew.
And now his business was in jeopardy.
He sat down heavily in his chair, trying to think of a way to pull them out of this black hole. A knock sounded at the door, and he lifted his head to find Maggie standing there. She even looked slightly remorseful.
"Hey," she started.
He just nodded back.
"I, uh—I wanted to apologize for running off back there. I didn't mean to worry you."
"And yet you did."
"Right. I'm trying to say I'm sorry."
Sully didn't know what got into him. All of a sudden, he just needed a place to put his anger. Needed something to yell at.
"Maybe sorry isn't good enough. What would have happened if you'd been kidnapped? Or worse, what if I'd stumbled upon your lifeless body in an alley? Did you ever think what that might do to me?"
With every word, he stalked closer to her, expecting to see fear in her eyes. He was a big guy, and she was this tiny, pixie-like woman who didn't even reach his shoulders. Most people cowered back out of his way when he was in this mood.
But, of course, Maggie wasn't most people. She stood her ground, lifted her chin, and glared at him.
"Did you ever think to ask me if I wanted your protection? Did you ever think that I might not want to be a prisoner here? I didn't ask for this mess."
"No, you didn't. Which is why I'm trying to keep you safe."
"I'm not yours to keep safe!" she yelled.
"Yes! You are!"
They were standing chest to chest, toe to toe. Their breathing fast and ragged. Their hearts pounding. Sully's hands were gripping Maggie's upper arms. Time seemed to stand still as he looked into Maggie's eyes. He didn't see fear. And surprisingly, he didn't see anger.
What he saw was so much more dangerous.
Desire.
Sully's eyes fell to her lips, and her tongue flicked out to moisten them. He remembered what she'd tasted like two months ago. Cake, champagne, and a spiciness that he knew was all Maggie.
It would be so easy to lean in and kiss her now. So easy to take what she was clearly offering. Herself.
"Do it," she said softly, her voice penetrating the trance he was in.
"Do it," she repeated, leaning in slowly and lifting herself onto her toes. She still didn't reach his shoulders.
"I dare you."
He wanted to. Oh, how he wanted to.
But he wouldn't. He owed it to her to keep her safe.
He took a step back, dropping his head into his hands.
He heard Maggie's frustrated sigh, and when he looked up, she was gone.
He knew she was disappointed. Hell, he was, too.
But better to be disappointed than dead.
* * * *
Damn stubborn man!
Maggie wanted to hate him. She wanted to despise him for all his high-handedness, but she couldn't. It was easy to understand why he wanted to keep everyone around him safe. Even toward his team members, he was kind of a mother hen.
And Isabel? She was constantly going toe to toe with him. Even though she'd taken a back seat on all the dangerous cases, working for Castle now strictly as a profiler and not an operative, she frequently had to remind Sully that she’d been trained by the FBI and could hold her own on this team.
Unfortunately, Maggie didn't have Isabel's skills. She didn't know how to fight or hold a gun or scope out a room. She was a waitress turned office administrator. Not much to write home about there.
She was walking towards the elevator to head up to her room and put her things away, when her phone pinged with a message from Zach. Team meeting. Now.
She changed her direction and was the first person in the conference room. Maggie didn't always attend the team meetings, so this one must be a doozy if he was asking her to attend. Sure enough, not only did the Castle team members waltz in right after her, but their wives did as well.
Zach was the last to enter the room, and he brought with him his computer equipment. He plugged it into the projector that shone on the far wall and sat down.
"What have you found?" Sully asked, his voice gruff. That gruff sound did things to her insides. If only he weren't so damned hard-headed.
Zach pulled up a picture of Charles Kingston, secretary of state and overall terrible person. He had probably once been a complete hottie, and now had gray hair cut military style, a square jaw, and sharp, intense, ice-blue eyes. You could tell he was fit, still working out even though he had to be in his early sixties. In the picture, he was staring at the camera, and those eyes seemed to penetrate into her very soul.
"I've gone back through our most intense cases from the very beginning, but especially those from the last six months. I can tie each one to Kingston."
Zach brought up a picture of Damon Lopez, the man who'd tried to kill Scarlett and had kidnapped both her and her sister in order to sell them as sex slaves.
"Damon was a pawn. A small fish in a big pond. He was working his way up through the ranks, trying to prove himself to his older brother Bruno. Luftar, the man we took down in Puerto Rico, however, is another story entirely."
Scarlett had shared only the bare minimum with Maggie. What she had told her had made Maggie's skin crawl. She was so grateful that Lucas had rescued them.
"Luftar was part of a human trafficking ring and gun trafficking ring serving Albania and other parts of the world. His operation in Puerto Rico was the largest and most prof
itable. He was able to fly under the radar because of Kingston's protection. But Luftar had a flaw," Zach said.
From Maggie's point of view, the man had many flaws, but no one asked her.
"He was greedy. Kingston was getting a certain percentage of the sales from the guns and the girls. He was also determining which countries Luftar could sell the weapons to. Luftar wanted to branch out, and Kingston disagreed. Enter Castle Investigations team. We took Luftar and his entire operation out in Puerto Rico."
"How did you find all this?" Sully asked.
"The dark net. I found a guy who hadn't been present when everything went down. He was a guard and had fallen ill during the operation. He'd had to stay back in the States. When I examined the pictures we took of all the people involved, I realized we were missing a guard. Some well-placed comments on the dark web led me straight to him.
"Is he still involved in criminal activity?" Sully asked.
"He wouldn't be on the dark web if he wasn't." Zach lifted an eyebrow. "I put out an ad for a security team. He answered it. This all came out in the 'interview.'" Zach made air quotes with his fingers around the word “interview.”
A picture of Andrew Haney and Michael Sutter flashed onto the screen.
"Andrew Haney and Michael Sutter created the sex parties in order to allow Kingston to filter women through them on their way out of the country, but also to provide blackmail opportunities. Hidden cameras throughout the houses recorded everything. For every person who attended, Kingston could use that information to gain votes, money, whatever he wanted. No one wants their names to be linked with the society."
"Dare I ask how you discovered this?"
"I paid a visit to Sutter. I knew Haney was too loyal, but Sutter's whole family was destroyed after the exposé was published. He lost his position and his wife, and his adult kids won't have anything to do with him. He was more than happy to help bring down the man he credits with his downfall."
"Nice," Ethan drawled from across the table. Maggie had always felt a kindred spirit with the fellow Southerner. It felt like having a little piece of home around her.
A photo of Bruno Lopez popped up.
"Here's where we get to the good stuff," Zach said. And Maggie inwardly chuckled at the glee in his eyes. Zach was all about the thrill of the hunt. His geekiness had just hit an all-time high.
"We thought Bruno was a low-level thug operating under someone else's authority. In most ways, that was true. In Vegas, he fell under Tobias Winters's thumb. But here in the city, he had amassed quite the following. We were lucky to get him while he was there operating the hotel and casino, and growing his skanky club. We wouldn't have had such an easy time here."
Ethan scoffed, and Isabel held up her hands. "Easy? You think what we went through was easy?"
Zach flashed her a grin. "Nah, I'm just messing with you." He winked. "But in all seriousness, taking him out in D.C. would have been very difficult. Bruno had developed some relationships with key individuals. Unfortunately, he made someone here very angry, which led to his exile from the city. His plan had always been to come back and take his throne as the king of crime here in D.C. We were able to get to him before that happened."
"Let me guess—Kingston is the man who exiled him," Sully stated.
"Yep. And Kingston still had plans for him, from what I can tell. He sent him to Vegas to work under Tobias Winters in order to learn from him. Bruno's nosedive off the side of the hotel was quite inconvenient for Kingston."
"And Tobias?" Ella asked. She'd almost been killed by him near an abandoned mine in Arizona while trying to keep the files from the thumb drive out of his hands.
"I haven't quite figured out how he's connected to The General except through his own reputation. Winters seemed to stay on his side of the country. Sure, he dabbled in quite a bit, but he'd amassed so much money through his legal businesses that the illegal stuff was more of a hobby."
Maggie cringed at the idea that someone would consider selling women to the highest bidder a hobby.
"Fortunately for Castle Investigations, all of the cases we were involved in dealt with real scumbags. Those that died at our hands, or were arrested, deserved their fate. One less predator on this earth preying on the less fortunate."
"So, what's his end game? The General? What is he hoping to accomplish with these connections? Now that we know how he was involved, and how we were all pawns in his sick and twisted game, what is he doing?" Sully asked, the anger radiating off his body. It was clear that Sully did not like to be played, and Maggie wouldn't want to be the person on the receiving end of all that anger.
Zach looked up from his computer, his face grim.
"Building an army."
* * * *
A freaking army? Sully swiped his hand across his face. The stress and burden he carried was overwhelming some days.
"What kind of army?" Maggie asked, and all heads swiveled in her direction.
She shrugged as if to say, What? I can ask questions with the best of them.
Sully had wanted her in here. He wanted her to hear how dangerous their situation was so that she'd stop trying to leave the compound without him, and quit pulling a disappearing act when he escorted her somewhere.
"A criminal one," Zach answered. "The rumor is Mafia involvement."
"D.C. has never had a consistent mob presence. What makes him think he can change that?" Cate asked.
"Blackmail. Power. Money. He's pretty much got it all. And a direct line to the president. No one would suspect a five-star general of treason. His reputation, although peppered with a difficult personality, is stellar."
"But why the mob?" Lucas asked, drumming his fingers on the table. Scarlett reached out and stilled them.
"Control. You control the crime; you control the people in power," Sully stated matter-of-factly.
"Exactly," Zach agreed. "When you control the businesses, the businessmen, the politicians, the criminals…you control it all. Forget being the president of the United States. That power is limited. But when you're pulling the strings of every person of importance in the most powerful city in the U.S., that is true power."
"Why limit it to law-abiding citizens? This way, he's a god," Cate said.
"Precisely," Zach said.
"What a narcissistic bastard," Gabriel stated.
Megalomania at its best, Sully thought. It all made sense now.
"We were his army," Sully said quietly. "Doing his bidding. Taking out those who opposed him. We flew under the radar in the name of doing good, and he used that for his gain."
Their military careers and training, the experiences they'd had since the day The General had pulled them out of D-town and set them on their paths, had all been for his gain. Not the good of their country or rescuing those in need. It had all been to serve the almighty power of The General in his quest for world domination.
"Dammit!" Sully shouted, his fist coming down hard on the table. He saw Maggie flinch out of the corner of his eye. He wasn't trying to scare her, but his anger was like a living, breathing thing inside him, trying to claw its way out.
"I can't believe this man served his country," Izz said.
"He did. But even then, he used those deployments to make connections with the wrong kinds of people. The General hasn't done a single thing by accident. It has all been meticulously calculated and executed," Zach answered.
"So what's our next step?" Ethan asked.
"Get enough information on him to put him away for good. Our family needs to be safe." Sully said our family because every person at this table, and even Emery away at school, was a part of his family. And it was his responsibility to keep them safe. He wouldn't fail them like he had his mother. Like he almost had with Isabel. He'd protect them all, even if it killed him.
"What are our informants saying?" Sully asked.
"There's a new guy. Now that Bruno is out of the picture, The General has shipped in some guy from Atlanta rumored to be the head bo
ss of the mob presence there. He's already been hitting up the local businesses, charging them a fee for his protection."
"Who does he think he is? The damned Godfather?" Lucas asked.
"In many ways, yes. Three people have already been murdered. Shot in the back of the head, execution style. The message is clear. Pay or die."
"Why haven't we heard more about this?" Sully asked.
"No one's talking. I suspect there are some cops and other politicians already on his payroll. This is far bigger than Bruno and Damon's reign here in the District. This is potentially life-altering," Zach finished.
A silence fell over the room like a weighted blanket.
"Lucas, call the police chief. See what information you can get on the murders, and whether or not he's heard about the new guy. Zach, find me his name and any information you can uncover about him." Sully paused and took a deep breath. "I'll call the grand jefe himself."
"Who?" Maggie asked quietly.
"The president of the United States."
Chapter 4
When the meeting adjourned, Maggie walked with shaky legs back to her tiny office. Sully had given her the space when she'd started, and she wasn't convinced that it hadn't been a broom closet before her arrival. Nevertheless, it was a cozy space that housed her desk, a filing cabinet, a comfy chair, and a couple of bookshelves. If only she had a window, it would be perfect.
Plopping down in the comfy chair across from her desk, she curled up and tucked her feet underneath her. Surely it couldn't be him.
Mob connections.
Atlanta.
It wasn't Anthony.
And if she just kept repeating that to herself, maybe it would turn out to be true.
He couldn't know where she was. She'd been careful. Planned every detail of her escape meticulously. All the years she'd been away. It couldn't all come crumbling down around her now. There was too much at stake.
Maggie took a big swallow of water from the bottle sitting next to her on the floor. She scattered them all around her office and room. That way, there was always one available to her when she needed it. She’d laughed when her brother had told her she'd be ready for an alien invasion if one ever happened. Plenty of water lying around to take them out.
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