Risky Love

by Stacey Kennedy

  Then there was a bang.

  The camera shook and went dark.

  A scream tore through the night.

  “Jeff, an ambulance. Now,” Ryder roared, moving closer to the monitor. “Higgins? Higgins?” When only silence greeted him, Ryder snapped at Alex, “Get me another body cam and some goddamn communication.”

  Rowan settled in front of the monitor of the storage unit seeing nothing but smoke. He squinted, trying to find bodies…anything.

  A second that felt like a lifetime later, Alex’s fingers flew across the keyboard. “I’ve got Colter’s body cam.” She hit enter. Hard. “Now.”

  A shaky view popped up on the screen, revealing thick smoke and a bloody body.

  “Colter,” Ryder called. “Report.”

  Colter’s voice was rough and erratic through the speaker. “Higgins is down. Blown into the unit behind us.” Through the monitor, Higgins moved and blinked, his face covered in soot.

  “The blood?” Ryder demanded.

  Colter ripped off Higgin’s helmet, revealing a gaping wound at the base of his neck. “Deep laceration. Burn on the side of the neck.” Colter dragged Higgins to him to sit up, placing a cloth from his pocket onto the back of his neck. “Hold that,” he said to another guy. “He’s gonna be pissed off later and feeling like shit, but he’s stable.”

  Alex’s shoulders sank, and Rowan moved to her, cupping her shoulder. He expected her to lash out at his hovering, but instead, she placed her hand over his and looked at him. Relief weighed heavy in her eyes.

  “Flanagan,” Ryder said, drawing Rowan’s focus. “Show me that unit.”

  “Closing in, sir,” Flanagan said.

  Alex hit another few keys and another body camera came on the monitor. The thick, heavy smoke wafted out of the unit, while Flanagan kicked at the debris. “Explosion seems to have come from the computers themselves.”

  “Fucking Lewis,” Rowan growled.

  “Fucking FBI,” Ryder shot back.

  Rowan let that jab roll off him. He understood Ryder’s frustrations. Lewis had access to technology an everyday criminal would not. The drone couldn’t detect the bomb in the computers, and as much as the FBI took down criminals like Lewis, it also gave Lewis all the protection he needed from getting caught.

  Ryder finally turned around and picked up the phone off the desk and dialed a number. “It’s Ryder Blackwood. My team hit a location. They need the bomb unit before we search the unit. I’ll send you the coordinates now.” He paused. “Yes. Yes.” Another pause. “Thank you.” Then Ryder hung up and said to Jeff, “Send the location.”

  Jeff accepted the order with a nod then his fingers moved quickly across his keyboard.

  Rowan had no idea who Ryder spoke to, but if he took any guesses, it was someone high up with the NYPD.

  Flanagan carefully stood just outside the unit, waiting, while loud coughing echoed through the speaker on the phone.

  “Get out of the smoke and hold,” Ryder ordered. “The bomb unit is on its way.”

  “Roger,” Flanagan said.

  Sirens off in the distance sounded as Alex rose and moved closer to the monitor. “Can you ask Flanagan to move to the right a little?” Ryder did so. “One step closer.” When the video feed moved in tighter, she straightened, “They won’t need to search the unit.” She turned back to the silence greeting her. “Flanagan wasn’t wrong—those scraps of metal there, those are the hard drives. That bastard blew up the evidence.”

  Rowan ground his teeth. One step forward, a dozen steps back.

  CHAPTER 9

  The tension in the room hadn’t faded in the passing hour. Ryder’s team returned to their headquarters in New York City. Higgins needed stitches to his head wound from being slammed into the storage unit and the burn on the side of his neck needed treatment, but he would recover, and that was a much-welcomed relief. Ryder had been on edge, pacing around the command center until Alex told him to get lost for a while before she called his wife. She needed to think and work, and having all that testosterone hovering around her became an annoying itch she couldn’t scratch. Ryder eventually listened and left for his office in the main area of the headquarters, which housed normal offices and meeting rooms and a receptionist out front.

  Alex wasn’t even sure how long had gone by since she’d first sat her butt in her chair, working on more secured files on Lewis’s hard drive, but she knew she wasn’t getting out of it until she had something. Anything that was a step forward. She cleared two files that had financial documents when she noticed Ryder next to her again. “I told you to go away,” she said without looking up.

  “Do you want to explain to me what happened in Seattle?”

  For a brief moment, her mind stuttered. “Seattle?” But then she looked into Ryder’s amused eyes, and her memory rebounded. “Oh.”

  His mouth twitched. “You also have a visitor.”

  “Damn. Heath Lennox?”

  “Ah,” Ryder commented with a grin at whatever crossed her expression. “So, you do know him?”

  Oh, yeah, she knew the billionaire out of Seattle. She’d once named him as a possible suspect before they closed in on Lewis.

  “Who do you know?” Rowan asked, entering the command center carrying a tray full of coffees and a bag full of sugary pastries that suddenly made Alex realize how empty her stomach felt.

  “Heath Lennox,” Ryder said.

  Rowan froze unnaturally still. “What about Lennox?”

  “He’s here to talk with Alex,” Ryder said, obviously knowing something happened when it came to Lennox.

  Rowan pinched his lips shut, clearly fighting his smile.

  That jerk. Alex narrowed her eyes and pointed at him. “I told you this would happen. This is your mess. You go clean it up.”

  Ryder glanced between them. “How about one of you fill me in on what Lennox wants from you?”

  “Oh, he wants me to be his submissive,” Alex said breezily.

  Ryder’s eyebrows shot up. Yeah, it was pretty laughable. She didn’t have a submissive bone in her body. “Go on,” Ryder said.

  Rowan set down the coffee and the bag of pastries behind Alex’s desk, his shoulders shaking with silent laughter, as Alex explained, “I originally thought Lennox was a suspect. One of two actually. The other guy was a pilot, who flew Rowan and I to Seattle to attend a masquerade ball that Lennox was putting on. Well, there, I pretended to be a submissive to lure Lennox in.”

  “You. Pretended. To. Be. A. Submissive?” Ryder asked, his eyes wide with surprise.

  “She was very believable,” Rowan replied with a grin.

  “What I almost did was barf all over his fancy shoes,” Alex said, feeling the heat rising to her face. “But I got the job done.”

  Ryder stared at her. Hard. Then said, “Were you so believable that he’s come to claim you?”

  Alex tipped her head back and laughed so hard, her belly hurt. “That’s highly unlikely. Rowan punched him in the face and then I drugged him. I can only imagine he’s here to get answers.”

  Ryder arched a slow questioning eyebrow at Rowan.

  “He kissed her,” was Rowan’s hard reply.

  Ryder’s mouth twitched. “Explains the black eye.” He gestured toward the hall. “He’s waiting in our meeting room. I don’t care who deals with him, but I want him gone from my office in the next ten minutes.”

  Alex turned back to her monitor. “Rowan’s mess,” she said firmly. “He’s the one who punched him.”

  “I thought we were in this together,” Rowan said from behind her.

  “Nope, not for this,” Alex said. “You broke the rules, and I will legit vomit on him if I have to play that act again.”

  Ryder chuckled.

  Rowan cursed then grumbled, “Where is he?”

  “I’ll show you the way,” Ryder said.

  Alex kept her attention on her monitor, even though she could feel Rowan’s irritation behind her. Heath Lennox was devastatingly h
andsome. Tall, dark, and handsome, with a body made of hard muscle. She wasn’t a CIA agent, and if she had to admit she totally manipulated him, she’d feel like shit. Besides, had Rowan not been jealous and punched Heath when he kissed her, they wouldn’t be in this predicament. She had planned to get him drunk and then be there the next morning, pretending they’d both fallen asleep, drunk out of their minds.

  Rowan broke the rules. His problem to clean up.

  She had one last file to look into on Lewis’s hard drive. The one file that had been the hardest for her to crack. Lewis had quite a few of those, but so did everyone in high-level positions in the FBI. And she was nearly there.

  Long minutes went by.

  She dug deeper, pushed harder. But Lewis was good, and she couldn’t even break the firewall. She smiled at her monitor. Too bad for Lewis, she was better than him. Every time his system blocked her, she reworked her code, until her program finally broke through his security, and then she deciphered the password into the file.

  With one click of her mouse, she opened the file, and her heart leapt up into her throat. Only disappointment sank in deep when she found a single photograph of a little boy with brown hair standing in a forest next to a large rock formation that looked oddly familiar, though she couldn’t quite place it.

  “Is that Lewis?”

  Alex gasped and pressed her hands against her chest, snapping at Ryder behind her, “You know better than to sneak up on me like that!”

  Ryder laughed, as did Jeff.

  She didn’t. She swirled around back to her monitor. “I don’t know who it is.”

  “It’s Lewis,” Ryder said, leaning in and studying the boy’s face. “It’s in the eyes.”

  Alex never had the same perceptiveness that Rowan and Ryder had. The kid looked like a kid she’d never seen before. “If you say so.” She leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes, glad she hadn’t thought of putting mascara on this morning. “Regardless of who it is, it’s the last thing I’ve found on the hard drive.” She dropped her hands and spoke her frustrations. “I don’t know where to go from here, and you know how much I fucking hate that!”

  Ryder inclined his head, frustration etched deep into his frown.

  “What’s with the picture of Lewis as a kid?”

  She spun around, finding Rowan standing next to her with his arms crossed, looking unscathed. “I see Lennox didn’t kill you,” she said with a smirk.

  Rowan snorted a laugh. “He got the explanation he needed and the promise of a decent-sized donation to his charity.”

  Alex couldn’t fight her smile. “Did you tell him the truth?”

  “What truth is that?”

  That you were 100 percent jealous. “That punching him had never been the plan?”

  Rowan arched an eyebrow. “Who says it wasn’t my plan?”

  Heat and something so much richer than that burned between them. Things that made everything so confusing now. She wanted Rowan. She knew that five years ago. But there was that deep sinking feeling in her chest that reminded her that love hurt. That love always hurt.

  She turned away from him and the conversation that hung between them. “As for this picture that you both think is Lewis, it’s just a picture I found on his hard drive in an incredibly secured file.”

  Rowan said, “Must have some significance if he put so much security around it.”

  “Yeah, but it’s finding out what that significance is,” Alex pointed out.

  Ryder nodded, right as his cell phone rang in his pocket. He had it to his ear in a second. “Blackwood.” A pause. A heavy one. He glanced at Alex and then at Rowan, and his expression became unreadable.

  Never a good sign.

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” Ryder said, then ended the call, returning his cell to his pocket. “There’s been a development.” His voice was tight when he grabbed the remote and turned on the television along the wall.

  The TV sprung to life and a reporter from the news station where Ryder had a contact said, “Twenty-eight-year-old Jane Bellamy has been missing for twelve hours now. While investigators won’t confirm this is another victim taken by the Casanova Sadist, our sources tell us, they suspect that’s the case.” The newswoman turned to the man next to her. “Malcom, can you tell us what sources are saying?”

  Ryder muted the TV then turned back to Alex and frowned. “Time is against us now.”

  Alex understood. Desperation made killers act reckless. Sometimes that got them caught. Other times it made them even more dangerous. Lewis was likely in the latter category. So far, he’d been smart and ruthless, and Alex knew they had to be the same, which presented her with an idea. She had one last move to play. One that Lewis would never expect.

  “You’ve got an idea?” Ryder asked, obviously reading Alex’s mind.

  She mentally cringed then looked at Rowan. “Where does your loyalty sit right now, with us or with the CIA?”

  Rowan frowned. “Why?”

  “Because I’m about to go into the gray place where I might do something illegal, but it’s for a very good reason.” She waited for Rowan to shut this down right after he put two and two together. He was a CIA agent. He had taken an oath not to break laws, and agreeing to any part of what she was about to do went against everything he’d stood for and everything he’d sworn to protect.

  A beat. Then Rowan asked, “Will this catch Lewis?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  Another heavy moment passed between them as Rowan’s eyes searched hers. Then he moved in close, and obviously didn’t care that both Ryder and Jeff were in the room. He leaned down to her, his one hand on her chair, the other on her desk, leaving no room between them. She flushed wickedly hot as he stared deeply into her eyes and said, “I’m with you, Alex. Always you. Do what you have to do.” He straightened and then left the room.

  Alex reeled, staring after him, her heart somersaulting in her chest.

  Ryder chuckled.

  She finally blinked out of the spell Rowan put her under and glared at Ryder. “Problem?”

  “No problem.” He winked at her. “It’s just nice to see someone getting under skin I thought was impenetrable.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Outside standing in the parking lot, Rowan battled within himself. Clouds had infiltrated the sky and rain dropped steadily onto him, giving a break to the heat. Rowan had fought for his country, and he was proud of that. But Lewis needed to be taken down, and when Rowan realized that no one would bring him down with conventional methods, he knew this was one of those situations where it was better to ask for forgiveness later than for permission that he knew would be definitely shot down. Settled about standing by and watching Alex break the laws that Rowan swore he’d always uphold, he reentered the command center, finding everyone in the same spots they’d been when he’d left fifteen minutes ago.

  Alex’s fingers typed fast on the keyboard. Jeff was mirroring her, working on something that Rowan didn’t know. Wanting to be caught up, he moved in next to Ryder and asked, “Do I even want to know the plan?”

  Ryder gave Rowan a long look and then nodded. “They’ll forgive you for this if Lewis is caught.” He paused then shrugged. “If he isn’t caught, they won’t know she’s been in their databases.”

  “But they knew before when she hit their systems,” Rowan pointed out. That’s the reason they originally were pointed to Lewis, because he had brought her in to question her.

  “Yes, but I didn’t know I was trying to break into the FBI at the time,” Alex said. “They won’t see me now. I’m a ghost.”

  Ryder looked on with pride as he continued speaking, “At the moment, Alex is intercepting an email from inside the FBI.”

  “And I’ve just got that email,” she said, keeping her attention on her monitor, her fingers moving fast over her keyboard. “It’s an email from FBI security indicating Lewis must read and accept the new security policies,” she explained, then gestured next to her. “Jeff’
s recreating the webpage now to look identical to this one. I’m changing the URL to point to a custom page on their server so that when Lewis clicks the link to accept the new policies, it’s going to download a virus that will create a backdoor that gives me access to his computer.”

  “Fucking brilliant,” Rowan said, unable to stop himself.

  “She is a force,” Ryder agreed.

  Alex flicked her hair over her shoulder. “Keep it coming, boys!”

  Rowan chuckled, fighting against sliding his fingers over the soft strands of her hair, pulling her in close and kissing her until she felt every bit of his pride. “You think you’ll find something on his work computer?”

  “I know I will,” she said, all playfulness gone from her voice. “He used his work computer to go onto the dating app SiR to begin with. There is no greater security he will have than his work computer. I suspect that’s why he hunts his new victims from there.”

  It made sense. No one would suspect Lewis as being the Casanova Sadist.

  Silence filtered into the room while Alex and Jeff worked as a team, and Rowan watched the code being written, until suddenly Alex stopped typing. She rose, placed both hands against her desk and stared down at her monitor.

  Jeff leaned back, sending his chair squeaking beneath him. “And now we wait for him to be stupid enough to let us in.”

  “Will he be that stupid?” Rowan asked.

  Alex finally turned to him and nodded, dark circles under her eyes. “Unless he looks into the URL, we’re good, but no one ever looks into the URL unless you’re people like us.” She gestured at Jeff. “It’s not something he’ll expect.”

  “Why is that exactly?”

  Jeff scoffed. “Because the FBI doesn’t know anyone can hack into their databases like this. It’s simply never been done.”

  Rowan’s gaze fell to Alex, and she went very still. Mickey Finch’s teachings, no doubt. There was a time in Rowan’s life when he would have used whatever means and methods to find out everything she knew and what she could do on behalf of the CIA. He had already known Alex was good, but he had no idea she was this good or who’d she been mentored by. His duty to the CIA meant he should tell his superiors of her talents, but something stopped him.