The Sabrina Vaughn series Set 2

by Maegan Beaumont

  She could hardly wait.

  They retrieved their bags from the carousel, Sabrina wheeling her stupid designer luggage that probably cost more than a mid-sized car, while Church lugged her appropriately travel-battered suitcase and mismatched carry-on.

  She missed her duffle bag.

  Letting Church lead the way, Sabrina followed her through the solitary terminal. Though the mirror-tinted glass she could see the dark, tri-level parking garage. Even from where she was, she could see the lot wasn’t even close to full. No one comes to Yuma in August. Not without good reason.

  Stepping outside was like stepping into a blast kiln. Hot, dry air blistered against her face and sear her newly exposed nape. Sweat blossomed between her skin and her tank, soaking it instantly, making her want to strip it off and wring it out. She thought of the clothes she’d packed—pantsuits and silk shirts—and suddenly wanted to kill herself.

  Church lifted the key fob in her hand and pressed the button, an audible sigh escaping her lips at the answering beep from the dark sedan a few cars ahead.

  As soon as Church popped the trunk, Sabrina spotted the requisite metal case stowed inside. Lifting it out, Church spun the dials and the lid clicked open. Inside, on top of the standard FSS fare of cash, pre-paid cells and maps, was another manila envelope. Reaching for them, the woman beside her shut the case. “Here you go, agent Vance,” she said handing her the package. Sabrina opened it, pulling out a fully stocked wallet, a cell phone and a set of FBI credentials. It took her a few moments to realize it was real. The badge, the identification that accompanied it. Her picture, as she looked now, was embossed into the ID, along with a raised, official-looking seal that looked authentic. Looking at the image, Sabrina barely recognized herself.

  “It’s fully backed. Iron-clad. Transcripts. Commendations. Evaluations.” Church tossed the case back into the trunk, along with their suitcases. “For all intents and purposes, you’re the real deal,” she said, slamming the trunk closed. “We both are.”

  They headed away from the airport, the A/C on full blast. “Is it as hot as you remember?” Church said it like she didn’t know how awkward and strangely vulnerable the question made her sound. She was making an honest-to-God effort at conversation. She could hear Val hissing in her ear.

  Be nice.

  “It’s the same,” she said to the tinted window, watching the steady whip of patchy brown dirt and faded green scrub brush pass by them. “All of it.”

  She experienced exactly one Arizona summer before Wade had kidnapped her. One seemingly endless stretch of days that broke triple digits well before noon and didn’t let up until the sun had been down for hours. Kids with parents too poor to own swimming pools running through sprinklers or playing in the hose—or if they were really lucky, getting dropped off at the public pool. She’d bought Jason and Riley one of those sprinkler attachments—the one that looked like a ladybug with spaghetti hair—you hooked up the hose. As soon as she turned it on, the water pressure sent the bug’s mop of mini-hoses squiggling and spraying water in every direction. They’d loved it, running and squealing through the water in the little patch of grass in front of their apartment.

  Happy. They’d been happy here. Safe before he’d found her and taken it all away. Before he’d killed her… and just like that, her memories of this place, of that summer, turned sour.

  She felt it. She felt him—Wade—a sudden, heavy weight in her head. A niggling itch inside her skull, like fingers digging into the bone of it, trying to touch her. To find his way out.

  It was only a matter of time before he did.

  15

  Berlin, Germany

  As far as days go, this one had been for shit.

  Usually, his days were just boring. He woke up in his opulent, penthouse suite and ate an exquisite gourmet breakfast prepared for him by a Michelin-starred chef. Then he showered before donning a suit that cost more than some people made in a year and rode his private elevator to his corner office. There he’d greet his agonizingly proficient assistant and pretend to listen while she gave him the rundown of the day’s appointments, nodding appropriately when she handed him a stack of papers that needed his signature.

  Most days, he managed to extract himself from her grip without too much fuss before holing up in his office until she buzzed him to tell he was late for a meeting or that he’d missed a video conference.

  In other words, Benjamin Shaw was living in hell.

  He had no illusions what he did every day held any sort of importance. No way his control-freak father put him in charge of anything real. No meeting he attended or paper he signed held any real significance. It’s only mattered in the fact that it kept him busy. Out of the way.

  Trapped.

  It should have been Mason. He was the heir. The one who mattered. The one their father had hung all his hopes on. If not for his older brother’s death, Ben would have been allowed to fade into oblivion. This was not the life he’d chosen but it was the only one he had.

  No use bitching about it now.

  “Mr. Shaw,” his secretary’s voice fill his office via the state-of-the-art intercom system. “Your father would like to see you.”

  Ben instantly shot a glance at his desk clock and did a quick calculation. It was just after ten AM in Arizona. Sabrina and Church would have landed by now. When Reese left them last night, they’d been getting reacquainted. Hopefully that didn’t involve shooting each other.

  “Mr. Shaw—” His receptionist sounded nervous, like she was afraid he’d taken a header out his window rather than spend one nanosecond in his father’s company and she’d have to be the one to break the news.

  “Okay, Gail,” he said, kicking his feet up onto his desk. “Tell Mein Führer I’m on my way.”

  Despite the late hour, his father’s receptionist manned her desk, watching him with pale blue eyes as he cut across the expanse of blood-red carpet stretched along the floor. “Good evening, Mr. Shaw,” she said in slightly accented English. Unlike his own assistant, who looked like Mrs. Doubtfire, she was gorgeous and, he knew from personal experience, more than accommodating.

  “Good evening, Celine,” he said without glancing in her direction. “This shouldn’t take long. Why don’t you get naked and meet me in my suite in say…” He rolled his wrist to take a look at the face of his Jaeger-LeCoultre. It was well after seven o’clock. He’d purposely kept his father waiting for nearly an hour. “Fifteen minutes.”

  The door directly in front of him popped open. “You presume too much, Mr. Shaw,” she said in an icy, dismissive tone that never failed to make him smile. They’d been sleeping together casually for a few weeks now. He liked her well enough and she was an invaluable source of information where his father was concerned.

  “I presume nothing.” He shot her a smirk over his shoulder before passing through the open door and shutting it with barely a whisper.

  His father was where he always was, sitting behind his large, imposing desk. He had an unopened file in his hand. As soon as Ben walked in, his father’s head came up and he pinned him with an irritated glare before setting the file aside, flashing the red band of tape that sealed it shut. Whatever was in it was important and he’d just interrupted his father’s reading of it.

  Maybe today hadn’t been a total bust after all.

  He took a seat and waited while his father placed the unopened file on the desk between them. “Where is Reese Harrison?”

  The question was meant to rattle him. Coming from Livingston Shaw, if he’d been anyone else, it probably would have. Instead of making him sweat the question made him smile, gave him a hint of what was inside the file. “Reese?” He shrugged, leaning back in his chair. “Fuck if I know. Haven’t needed him since I flew to Georgia for that meeting with—”

  “Dispense with the theatrics, Benjamin.” His father placed a hand on the file he’d been reading. “I know he’s in the US and that he’s doing something for you, so why don’t you save
us both a lot of time and trouble and tell me what it is.”

  The file could be anything. It could an alphabetized list of his father’s favorite animals. It could be the wine list from his favorite restaurant. It could also be a detailed report on everything Reese had been doing for the past 72-hours. Where he’d been. Who he’d been with. If that was the case, Sabrina was finished before she even had a chance to get started.

  “Doing something for me?” He quirked his brow, giving his father a WTF-are-you-talking-about-now kind of look. One that never failed to get under his skin. “Like what, exactly?”

  Instead of answering, his father picked up the file and opened one of the drawers in his desk. “I had hope, Benjamin,” he said, dropping the sealed file inside. “That with you finally agreeing to a leadership role here, that you and I would, at long last, find a common ground.” He fit a small brass key into the drawer’s lock and gave it a twist, securing the file inside. “That we would begin to heal as a family.”

  Ben leaned forward in his seat, every ounce of humor drying in an instant. “Hope? Healing? Are you for real?” The sound that followed could have been a laugh if it hadn’t tasted so bitter. “Let’s get a few things straight. I didn’t agree to be your little sock-puppet because I wanted to. I agreed because if I hadn’t, you would’ve killed an innocent woman and her baby.” He could still see Val, Sabrina’s best friend and her infant daughter. Lucy was nearly two-years-old now. He remembered that whenever he began to regret his decision. “And the only common ground between us is the 3x8 plot where I buried Mason. There is no hope and there sure as fuck won’t be any healing.”

  “Still blaming me for your brother’s death…” he murmured. “There was nothing I could do for him, Benjamin.” His father sighed. “What they were asking of me would have compromised—”

  “He was your son.” The words sounded flat. Heavy.

  “Yes he was… and then he became a liability.” His father blew out an exasperated breath. “Mason would have understood and accepted that. He would not have wanted me to do what they were asking me to do, merely to save him. Unlike you, he saw the bigger picture.”

  “Maybe, but he would’ve wanted you to save Tess.” He shook his head. Tess had been his brother’s wife for exactly twenty-two days. She’d been Ben’s friend considerably longer. “You could’ve let me go.”

  Now his father laughed. The sounds he made were no longer ones of annoyance. Now he sounded amused. “Benjamin…” He looked at him like he was a kid who’d insisted wearing a red cape instantly made him Superman. “What could you have done?”

  He gripped the edge of the desk in front of him to keep himself from launching across it. “I could have tried.”

  “And you would have failed.” His father waved a hand at him, his tone as dismissive as Celine’s had been only minutes ago.

  He thought of the pair of Desert Eagle .40s he used to carry. He hadn’t worn them in months. Hadn’t had a reason to. If he’d had them right now, his father would be dead. “I really, really need you to stop talking now.”

  Incredibly, his father fell silent for a few moments before changing tactics. “Is that why you’ve developed such an affection for Michael O’Shea? Why you insist on hiding him from me? Because he reminds you of your brother?”

  “I’m not hiding anything,” he lied smoothly. “O’Shea was just a guy. Now he’s a dead guy at the bottom of the ocean.”

  “And Sabrina Vaughn? Is she just some woman?” Not was. Is.

  He stood. Being the son of Livingston Shaw, he learned very early to recognize when he was being played with. Usually it amused him to play back but not tonight. There was too much at stake to keep engaging in his father’s games.

  “Sabrina who?” he said, feigning puzzlement for a moment before shooting the cuffs on his hand-tailored shirt. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…” He glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes after seven. Celine should be settled in and naked by now. “I have other, better things, to do.”

  “You’re forcing my hand, Benjamin,” his father said tipping his head slightly so he could look him in the eye. “Michael and Sabrina may not be within my grasp but there are others. Expendable others that—”

  Panic slammed around inside his chest, knocking against the rage that always nested there, shaking it loose, and he nearly choked on its bulk. Valerie. Her husband, Devon Nickels—their baby. Jason and Riley, Sabrina’s brother and sister. Her partner, Strickland… Mandy Black, the medical examiner who’d been her friend. Incredibly, he’d assumed responsibility for them over the past year. Him—the guy who didn’t give a fuck about anything or anyone, suddenly found himself at the helm of a lifeboat, filled to capacity. “We have an agreement,” he ground out. “I’ve kept my end of it.”

  “Barely.” His father tented his manicured fingers under his chin, giving him a sympathetic smile. “Which is why I’m renegotiating the terms of our agreement.”

  “No, you’re not.” He shook his head. “You won’t touch them—any of them.” Ben leaned over his father’s desk, slamming clenched fists into hardwood, glaring down at him. “Not. One. Hair. Not if you want me to keep playing show pony.” He straightened himself, still looking down at his father because he knew how much he hated it. “You even think about them and I’ll blow it all. It’ll be over before it even gets started.”

  “Think about what you’re saying, Benjamin,” his father said quietly. “And who you’re saying it to.”

  “I know exactly what I’m saying, Dad—dead or alive, Michael and Sabrina are gone. You lost. Get used to it.”

  “It should have been you instead of Mason.” It was the closest his father had ever come to admitting he regretted his decision to let his brother die. It didn’t even hurt, knowing he felt that way. Hearing his father tell him he wished he was dead.

  He didn’t feel anything at all.

  Ben smiled, the frost of it turning his lake-blue eyes to ice. “Finally, something we agree on.”

  16

  Yuma, Arizona

  The police station hadn’t changed much. Two-story brown stucco with long, narrow windows. Wide enough to offer a slight view of the barren landscape that surrounded the building without being wide enough to allow the oppressive heat outside to seep its way in. She’d come here once with Valerie and her mother to pick up her younger sister, Ellie. She’d been fourteen at the time and caught with a bunch of other kids who’d been out in the fields, busting watermelons. Senseless, petty vandalism but to Val’s mother, who’d spent nearly forty years in those fields alongside her husband, it’d been much more than that.

  Sabrina could still see her standing over a surprisingly sullen Ellie, hands planted on her hips, mouth a hard, bloodless slash cut across her dark brown face. “What were you thinking, Elena? How could you be so cruel?”

  “They’re just watermelons,” Ellie said, shrugging to cover the wavering in her tone. “You act like we were caught strangling puppies or something.”

  Before her mother could react, Val stepped in, pulling Ellie out of the chair she’d been sitting in. “You ungrateful little snot,” she said, giving her little a sister a brief shake. “How many of those watermelons do you think mom had to pick to feed you? Buy those ridiculous designer jeans you begged her for, huh?” Val was tiny. Barely topping out at five foot, the top of her chin scarcely met her chin. In that moment, glaring at her sister, she looked like a giant.

  Ellie scoffed, jerking her arm out of Val’s grip. “I don’t know—how many do you think it took papi to pick before it killed him? A thousand? Ten thousand?”

  It was the first and last time any of them mentioned Val’s father or what had happened to him. Until then, she’d suspected he’d left them. Gone back to Mexico to start a new life. One that didn’t involve the responsibility of a wife and children. It probably would’ve been easier if he had.

  It’d turned out to be an isolated incident. Ellie hadn’t been in trouble, before or since. She’d left Y
uma directly after high school, earning a partial academic scholarship to ASU.

  “You ready for this?”

  She looked at Church, still seated behind the wheel. She hadn’t killed the engine yet, unwilling to give up the cold blast of air from the A/C unless it was absolutely necessary. Was she ready for this? No. She wasn’t. A week ago, the only thing she had to worry about hunting was a solitary wolf stalking a few head of cattle. What she was hunting now was far more cunning and infinitely more dangerous. She didn’t want this. She didn’t want any of it.

  She wanted to go home.

  “Let’s just get it over with,” she said, kicking her door open and stepping out into the blazing heat.

  Their reception wasn’t a warm one. The uniform behind the information desk took one look at their credentials and barely managed to stifle the sneer that teased at his mouth. “Major Crimes is on the second floor. I’ll phone it up and let Santos know you’re here.”

  “Santos? Will Santos?” she said, struggling to keep her tone light and curious. Santos had been the lead detective on her case nearly twenty years ago. In his early thirties then, he’d be in his fifties now.

  “Yeah,” The uniform said, cradling the desk phone against his shoulder, his gaze focused and razor sharp on her face. “You from around here?”

  She shook her head, silently thanking Michael for insisting she memorize her cover story so thoroughly. “I was plugged into the Phoenix field office straight out of Quantico,” she said, the lie so effortless for a moment, it felt like the truth. “A couple of cases led me down here—must be why I recognize the name.”

  “Yeah, Detective Santos is a minor legend around here. He’s the one who—” he said before he was cut off. “Hey, detective—the suits you ordered are here.” He laughed at his own joke before giving them both a look. “Yes, sir,” he said before dropping the handset back into its cradle. “He’s on his way down.”