“That was merciful compared to what these guys have done to others who have crossed them.”
I couldn’t stop a shiver. And my heart constricted thinking about Sam.
My phone buzzed with a text—a string of question marks from Declan.
“I better go. When can we talk about the Russians?”
“How about we meet tomorrow?” Dimitri said. “Somewhere away from your fusion center, though. Too many cameras and digital devices inside that building.”
I felt strongly that the fusion center was safe from prying eyes and ears, but I found myself agreeing. “Okay. I’ll buy you breakfast. Julep Hill Inn. Eight a.m.”
With his free hand, Dimitri grabbed mine and placed a gentle kiss on the top of it. “Until then.”
I started for the road that would take me back to the main house.
“Brooke,” Dimitri said. “When Declan learns more about this organization, he’s not going to want you anywhere near this investigation.”
“Well, it’s a good thing I don’t need his permission. But if you do, I suggest you get it. Otherwise, I’m happy to bring you in for formal questioning. And Declan, too, if he knows anything about these mobsters.” I was walking backward toward the road. “One thing my father and others have failed to understand is that though not all state Homeland Security offices have law enforcement authority, mine does. The governor has given me permission to investigate the crimes committed inside my state, and that’s what I aim to do.”
Chapter 23
Declan
“You look more… energized,” I said when Brooke walked out onto the back patio. She was dripping with sweat, and her face was flushed.
“The run was good. Helped me work out some of my anger so that I can concentrate on the case.” She sat on the edge of a cushioned chair beside me. “Shall I shower first, or would you like to eat?”
I leaned forward in my own seat and let my knee knock against hers. “Let’s eat. It’s getting late, and it’s been a long day. After dinner, I have some ideas on how to relax you for a good night’s sleep.” I angled my head, letting my gaze capture hers. “One of those ideas involves a long, hot bath.”
“One of those ideas?” she said with a smile.
Grabbing her hands, I stood and brought her to her feet in front of me. “Did you enjoy getting to know our farm guest a little more?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Were you watching us?”
“Only at first, when I realized I had forgotten to tell you that he was there. But then you took a while.” I shrugged. “I got worried.”
“Well, to answer your question, yes, I talked with Dimitri for a bit. He’s… eccentric… and arrogant. And he has an incredible body.” She smiled as she leaned in and placed her lips on mine. “Surely you knew that already.”
“You think I’m jealous,” I said with zero humor.
“No, but if you are, it’s unwarranted.” She turned away from me, walked to the outside bar where I had a bottle of Pinot Grigio chilling, and poured herself a glass. She definitely looked more energized. Yet her mind was still reeling.
“So, you worked through some of the stress of the day on your run?”
“I did.” She sipped the wine. “And I’m ready to attack this case tomorrow. The governor hired me for a job, and he gave me full authority to investigate what happened with the power grid. I don’t need the FBI director’s permission to move forward.”
“No, you don’t. But Brooke?” I joined her beside the bar and poured myself another glass. “Do we need to discuss how dangerous these cyber terrorists are?”
She lifted a brow. “I think that’s the first time you’ve referred to them as terrorists.”
“Is it? Well, I won’t pretend to not be worried that you’re getting involved in this case.”
“You don’t need to hide your concern. I saw what they were capable of first hand.”
“You did. But—”
She placed a finger over my lips. “I promise to proceed with extreme caution, but I have to do everything I can to save Sam.”
“You feel responsible.”
“Of course I do. She’s only involved with this case because of me. She might not have filled out all the paperwork yet, but she was working for me at the time she accessed that file. They took her because she was an easy target, and now they’re holding her as leverage. The Russian who took me ordered me to deliver a message back to the federal government.” She paused and seemed to think about that. “Which was one hundred percent calculated. He knew who I was.”
“What do you mean?”
“When he heard my name—Ryan Saltzman spoke it. And he knew it. He’d heard it before. He must have known I could get the message delivered—directly to my father.”
“Which you did.”
“Yes, but surely these Russians know the US government doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. I don’t know how they’ll handle this situation. Hell, I don’t even know what demands the terrorists have made.”
“But you’re planning to find out.”
“I plan to find out everything I can about this Russian group. And I plan to get Sam back safe and sound.”
“Where’s Brooke?” Dimitri asked when I joined him by the wood plank fence beyond the swimming pool. I knew no one would hear us speaking there.
“She’s soaking in the bath.”
“I can’t help but wonder if she lets that mind of hers rest while she’s pretending to relax.”
I glanced up at the second story of my home, to the window of the room where I’d left a naked Brooke submerged in bubbles, sipping a glass of white wine. “What do you mean by that?”
“She’s not just thinking about this case.”
I turned back to Dimitri. “Romeo?”
He nodded. “She wants to ‘interrogate’ him. Her word, not mine.”
I closed my eyes. “She thinks Romeo knows what happened to her late husband.”
“Does he?”
I took in a breath and let it out as I said, “I don’t know.” I placed my hands on the fence and bowed my head. “But if the love of your life was killed, and her murder was still unsolved, would you rest, knowing someone out there might know what happened?”
“Not a chance.” Dimitri stared into the darkness of the fields. “She also wants me to tell her what I know about the Russians.”
“She’s trying to shut me out of it.”
“Not shut you out. Protect you.”
I scoffed. “Hmm. Maybe.”
“Brooke feels she needs to know that her identity is separate from the man she loves.”
I lifted my head and studied Dimitri’s profile. “Did she say that?”
He smiled. “No, she didn’t bare her soul to me and confess her love for you. But reading people is one of my strongest skills. And that girl uses the wheels of justice to run from other parts of her life.”
“Oh, sure.” I sighed. “You’re a regular mind reader when it comes to other people’s lives. And what? Now you think you can read Brooke?”
“Listen, mate. You’re the one tiptoeing around how to protect that woman up there in your bathtub, not me.”
“Tiptoeing? What are you talking about?” I closed my eyes, breathed in the night air, and attempted to stay calm. “Tell me what you know about these Russians.”
“That night after the fire… You told Brooke about the job we were on together, and how we were hired to protect Anna Simons.”
“Yeah, I did. Not all the details, but she got the gist of it. And I told her that that part of my life is over.” I sighed. “I left a life of intelligence work behind for many good reasons.”
“Yes, you did. And I get it. It’s a tough life to go from contract to contract, working for the rich and powerful. Sometimes jobs take bad turns. Sometimes you piss off the wrong people. And sometimes you find your former life coming back to haunt you.”
“A bad turn?” I said. “A girl took her own life, dammit. A girl we
were supposed to protect.”
“We did protect her.”
A heat spread across my neck. My shoulders were tense, and old feelings resurfaced as I curled my fingers into my palm. “Not well enough, or she wouldn’t have ended up dead.”
“She chose to take her own life. It’s sad, and I hated it, but we were up against something so much larger than we knew at the time.”
“Meaning?”
“Raoul didn’t kill himself.”
Raoul. Two days after Anna Simons killed herself, Raoul, the boy she’d tried to run away with, had also turned up dead—having killed himself as well. It was a regular Romeo and Juliet story.
Or so I had thought. If what Dimitri was saying was true, it was something else entirely.
“What are you saying?” I demanded. “And how do you know this?”
Dimitri’s face hardened; his lips squeezed into a thin line. “I know this because I continued to investigate long after Gerold Simons kicked us out of his German palace. And long after you left that part of your life in the rearview mirror.”
“You never said anything.”
“I didn’t have a need to. You had left it all behind, remember?”
“But you have a need to say something now?” I didn’t like where this was going.
He nodded. “Apparently, our pasts are coming back to haunt us. Raoul Charkov was the son of Sergei Charkov, head of the Russian mafia known as Kharkiv Bratva.”
“The Kharkiv Bratva?” I had read about them. “They’re mostly into trafficking European women into a Russian and Eastern Europe sex slave operation, right?”
“They were, until some of the higher-ups were busted, and Interpol took most of their operation down. I helped.”
“You?”
“Yes. You think you were the only one bothered by Anna taking her own life? I was devastated too, brother, but I didn’t have a fancy school and another profession waiting for me in the wings. So I dove straight into finding out about Raoul and what he’d been leading Anna into when we found her in that bar the night we rescued her.
“Declan… Raoul was no innocent kid. Anna only thought she and Raoul were in love and were going to run away together. In truth, Anna was Raoul’s final test. He was delivering her to the Kharkiv Bratva. But Raoul chickened out. He didn’t deliver her to the drop, and when we swooped in and rescued her, Raoul had to answer for it.”
“So they killed him.” I draped my arms over the fence. “Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”
“Would it have made you come back? Would you have helped me take down the Kharkiv Bratva?”
He knew I wouldn’t have. I was done with that life. “And you’re telling me this now because…?” I looked up, my expression darkening as I met Dimitri’s equally severe look. “You think this same group is responsible for taking down the Louisville power grid, don’t you? That’s quite a leap.”
“They’ve come a long way in the years since they were dealing in young girls. Soon after the organization was crippled, many of its key members regrouped and began learning new skills. They tried to get back into human trafficking, doing most of their deals over the dark web, and eventually picked up additional members with even more skills: hacking skills. It’s believed that the Kharkiv Bratva was behind the takedown of the power grid in the Ukraine. And the malware used in that attack was named Spider Lightning I.”
Spider Lightning. Now I understood the connection. “It’s a big leap, don’t you think? To go from attacking some failing Eastern European country to attacking the United States?”
“Not really. Not if they’ve perfected the malware and can successfully hide behind the computers to do it. And let’s face it, Putin would most likely kill them if they attacked another country under his thumb. But the US? Fair game, and much greater potential payoff in their eyes.”
“Did you tell the FBI any of this?”
“How was I supposed to tell them? The FBI doesn’t even know I exist. It was enough of a risk to call Tyler Jamison to give him what I knew about the warehouse. It was a greater risk for me to enter that warehouse and show my face to the Russian who took Brooke.”
“Which brings up another point: Why would this Russian risk showing his face here?”
“I’m not sure. But they are thugs, and they have a mob mentality. Someone screws up, they cut them off at the knees. Not everything can be done from behind a computer.”
“Like blowing up someone’s daughter,” I muttered. I paused, then asked, “What did Brooke ask of you?”
“To meet her for breakfast and tell her everything I know.”
I stared out into my fields for several seconds. “Do it. She needs to know.”
“If I tell her what I know, she’ll know even more about the kind of work you did. She’s going to have more questions. If you like, I could just give her information that would scare her away from this case. She could let the feds handle it.”
“Is that what you would do if you were me?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely. Someone I cared about? I would push them as far as possible from Sergei Charkov’s dealings.”
“No,” I said. “You’re not going to scare Brooke Fairfax away from the case that easily. Tell her the truth. Then monitor all communication channels. If the Russians’ threats are aimed outside of Kentucky, Brooke should be the least of their concerns. They’ll be going after bigger fish. But if there’s even a possibility that she might get sucked into that world, I want her to know what she’s up against.”
“You told me she and Ty Jamison were good at what they do.”
“What?” I asked, confused.
“When you met with me in Chicago, you told me they were excellent analysts and ruthless investigators.”
I rested my arms on the fence again, like Dimitri. “They are. They’ll dig deep, and they’ll discover everything. So tell her. I’ll deal with my own fears.”
Irrational or not.
I slipped back inside the house through the back door, then stopped short when I saw Brooke curled up on the living room sofa, asleep. She was dressed in a silk robe that was slipping open just enough to give my imagination a workout as intense as Brooke’s pre-dinner jog.
I sat on the edge of the couch and faced her. Her near-black hair had fallen across her face. I gently pushed it back and away from her eyes.
She moaned in her sleep, then stirred. “Hey. You never joined me.”
She was talking about the bath. “I’m sorry. I needed to take care of something.”
“Did Dimitri ask for permission?” She smiled. “I saw you two talking.”
“Permission?”
She laughed. “He said you might not want me talking to him about the Russians.” Her voice was tired, but not without humor. “I told him I didn’t need permission, but if he did, then he should ask you.”
It was difficult to get angry with her. She really did believe she was just doing her job. And I knew she was laughing, not because she found the case funny, but because she didn’t understand Dimitri’s and my relationship quite yet. She still viewed Dimitri as the eccentric and arrogant—and yes, good-looking—man who saved her life not long ago, not as the dangerous international contract security specialist I knew. If she ever got a true sense of why Dimitri and I were as close as we were, she would no longer be laughing.
I stood, then scooped her into my arms. “Let’s get you to bed.”
She wrapped her arms around me and buried her face in my neck. “What if I’m not quite ready to sleep?” she asked softly. Her breath was warm against my skin.
How could I ever consider pushing this woman away? But Dimitri was right. If it meant saving her life, I would do whatever I had to do.
For now, however, I would make love to the beautiful, complicated woman who had nestled her way into my life—and into my heart.
Chapter 24
As I strolled into the main dining room of the Julep Hill Café at seven thirty on Monday morning, the pl
ace was abuzz with talk of the bombing in downtown Louisville that had killed Blake Saltzman. I found Ty sitting at the front window, with Marti standing over him holding an enormous to-go cup of coffee.
“Good morning.” I sidled up to Marti.
“Hey.” Marti threw her arms around my neck. “I’m so glad you’re all right.”
I hugged her back. “Thank you, but I’m fine.”
“I was just on my way into the offices,” she said, pulling back.
“I’m glad I caught you. I’ll be in by nine thirty. I want you to be very careful on the phones. No personal information about anyone in our office is to be given out, not even if you know the person. If Jude or someone goes out to grab a quick lunch, you only tell callers that he’s not available. Nothing about his or anyone else’s whereabouts. If I’m not in, and the governor calls, you tell him I’ll call him right back. And then you call me. Treat all electrical devices like they’re being monitored.”
“You’re scaring me,” Marti said.
“She doesn’t mean to,” Ty said with a warning look at me. “We’re just being cautious.”
“Fear can be good,” I added. “The right kind of fear can make us vigilant. That’s all I want.” I sometimes forgot how naïve Marti could be. She’d been fairly sheltered in this small town. Up until I came into her life, she’d never had anything bad happen to her. Apparently, I brought danger with me like fleas on a stray dog.
“Okay,” Marti said. “Well, I’m sure I’ll be taking calls from the media as well. What should I tell them?”
“That the case has been taken over by the FBI. Direct them to Special Agent in Charge Erica Marshall of the Louisville office. The Kentucky Office of Homeland Security cannot and will not comment on ongoing investigations.”
“Got it. I’ll see you both in the office.” Marti hugged me again before heading for the door.
“It’s great that you hired her,” Ty said. He gestured for me to sit across from him, which I did. “I’ve heard her on the phone. She’s really good at handling people, even the most obnoxious ones.”
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