by Mary Calmes
Table of Contents
Blurb
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
More from Mary Calmes
Readers love the Marshals series by Mary Calmes
About the Author
By Mary Calmes
Visit Dreamspinner Press
Copyright
Twisted and Tied
By Mary Calmes
Marshals: Book Four
Deputy US Marshal Miro Jones finally has everything he ever wanted. He’s head-over-heels in love and married to the man of his dreams, his partner Ian Doyle, he’s doing well at work, and all his friends are in good places as well. Things are all tied up nicely… until they’re not.
Change has never been easy for Miro, and when situations at work force the team he’s come to depend on to break apart, and, worst of all, when his and Ian’s individual strengths put them on two separate paths, he’s pretty certain everything just went up in smoke. But before he can even worry about the future, his past comes for a visit, shaking his world up even more. It’s hard to tell what road he should truly be on, but as he learns some paths are forged and others are discovered, it might be that where he’s going is the right course after all. If he can navigate all the twists and turns, he and Ian might just get their happily ever after.
Again, and always, my constant thanks to Lynn West, without whom I would be in BIG trouble.
To Lisa Horan, who holds my hand.
To Jessie Potts, who was there in a crunch with the title.
And to Rhys Ford and Jaime Samms, who checked in every day to make sure I wasn’t dead.
And lastly, but never leastly, to my wonderful, amazing readers, who have taken Miro and Ian to heart. XXOO
Chapter 1
SURREAL.
My day had gone from being moderately normal by deputy US marshal standards to insane in a matter of seconds, all because the one person I counted on to always make rational choices had done the exact opposite.
He wasn’t supposed to jump off buildings.
In the movies people always talked about seeing their whole lives flash before their eyes when they thought they were going to die. I always sort of figured that for bullshit, but the moment I saw my boss, the chief deputy marshal of the Northern District of Illinois, Sam Kage, leap after a suspect into nothing, there it was, whoosh, me in a freaky-fast montage that brought me to the moment where I was sure I had no choice but to follow the man into the sky. Who knew that shit actually happened?
It all started that morning when SOG, the Special Operations Group—the marshals’ version of Special Forces—led the way into an enormous warehouse on 48th Place. They were followed quickly by TOD, Tactical Operations Division—our badass SWAT-style guys covered in body armor and Kevlar, toting serious firepower—with the marshals behind them, then uniformed Chicago Police Department bringing up the rear. Just with that many guys, the opportunity for a clusterfuck was already a possibility.
The point of this operation was to apprehend or stop Kevin and Caradoc Gannon, neo-Nazi pieces of crap who had gotten their hands on a small quantity of VX gas, and so the SOG was deployed to execute the men responsible for threatening the civilian populace of Chicago. With TOD there was a good chance of survivors, and nine times out of ten, everyone came out in one piece. The SOG guys would make the decision right there on-site whether to put people down. It didn’t happen often. Unlike how it was in the movies, capturing a fugitive normally went fairly smoothly. The marshals rolled up somewhere, and some of us went around back while the rest of us went in hard through the front. Sometimes we even knocked.
My partner and now husband, Ian Doyle, went in with the first wave alongside the SOG—how, I had no idea—because we’d rock-paper-scissored for who would take point in our group and who would hang back and keep an eye on our boss. Ian and I were stuck watching him because we were last on the scene. That was the agreement among the investigators on Kage’s team: whoever rolled up behind the big man had to babysit. Not that we would ever say that to his face, none of us being suicidal or insane, but it was simply understood.
So Ian was inside the warehouse with the rest of the guys and the tactical experts, and I was keeping an eye on my boss. When Kage saw a guy drop out of a second-story window onto the top of a delivery truck and then down onto the pavement, he shouted and gave chase, and I followed.
This was not supposed to happen.
There were good and bad things about being Kage’s backup. The positive part was if I was the one charging after him, then I was in the best position to protect him. I would be the one to guard him, and make sure he went home to his family that night, and stayed at the top of the food chain in charge of an entire team of deputy US marshals.
The flipside was exactly the same. Being his backup meant if I fucked up, not only was I screwing up the life he shared with his family, but also luck of the draw said the next man in his job would be worthless by comparison. Kage carried all of us on his shoulders, above the shit of red tape and politics, and he also provided shelter and protection, so losing him was not an option. For that reason, I liked him safe in his office. But Kage was on-site because it was his circus. He was the top stop of information for the marshals service in Chicago, as his boss, Tom Kenwood, had to travel back and forth a lot to Washington as well as all over the great state of Illinois. So when something big went down and the press got wind of it—as they always did—then Kage had to be there to do his voice-of-God thing and give short answers to reassure the public without confirming or denying squat.
At the moment, however, the man in question was flying down the sidewalk in front of me, his long legs eating up the concrete in pursuit of an escaped felon.
I had no idea Kage could run like that. He was fiftysomething, definitely not the thirty-three I was, so I was honestly surprised that not only could he run, but run pretty fast. Plus he was six four, with massive shoulders and a lot of hard, heavy muscle, really big, so his speed was even more shocking. He not only kept pace with the much younger fleeing fugitive but was gaining on him as well.
A parked car didn’t stop our suspect; he did an impressive parkour leap over it, completing a maneuver that had him using his hands to go down on all fours for a second before he vaulted the ancient Oldsmobile. Kage didn’t stop either, doing the classic Dukes of Hazzard slide over the hood that all the men in my life had perfected.
Ridiculous.
“Why is going around the car so difficult?” I roared after him.
“Jones!”
Because apprehending the fugitives was a coordinated strike, I had a stupid earpiece in from when the breach happened, and we were all connected. But after things got squared away afterward, everyone else dropped off except the guys I worked with on a day-to-day basis. Normally I was the only person in my head, but because I was chasing Kage and they were all thinking they were being helpful, I had my entire team of deputy US marshals not only checking on me but shouting directions at the same time.
“Can you see him?” Wes Ching yelled.
“Pull your gun, Jones, just to be on the safe side!” Jack Dorsey suggested loudly. “But don’t shoot him, for fuck’s sake.”
He was being a dick. “I’m gonna shoot you when I get back!” I growled. We never ran with our guns out. That was a rookie move.
“You gotta stay right with him!” Chris Becker barked into my ear.
Like I didn’t know that?
“
If he slows down, don’t leave him!” Mike Ryan insisted with a snarl.
Because I couldn’t stop or mess with my momentum in any way, there was no time to reach up and pull out the tiny earpiece to silence them. “Will you guys quit with the screaming already? Fuck!”
“Yeah, don’t leave his side, Jones!” Ethan Sharpe demanded, ignoring me.
“I know,” I roared to everyone in general. “For fuck’s sake!”
“Make sure you yell for people to get out of his way!” Jer Kowalski instructed.
“Really?” I snapped. “‘Yell for people to move’ is your advice?”
“Somebody’s pissy,” he commented snidely. “I suggest more running, less talking, Jones.”
“Keep up with him!” Ching cautioned.
I needed all these orders because clearly I’d only been a goddamn marshal for one day.
“Are you close enough to shoot anyone who tries to touch him?” This from Chandler White, who normally didn’t try to boss me around but was clearly making an exception this time because, again, I was apparently some kind of newb who couldn’t tell his ass from a hole in the ground.
“You have him in your line of sight, right?” Eli Kohn wanted to know.
“Fuck, yes!” I shouted.
“You gotta get close, but not too close,” Sharpe felt the need to tell me.
I growled.
“Try and get in front of him. That would be better,” Kowalski suggested.
“I swear to fuckin’ God, you all—”
“You know he can’t do that,” Eli objected. “Since Kage is the first one in pursuit, Miro can’t—”
“Kill the chatter,” Ching broke in angrily. “You’re all lucky Kage doesn’t have an earpiece in, or we’d all be dead.”
It was true, but since Kage was in the command center during the initial breach and was only allowed to come out when we got the all-clear, he never put in an earpiece like the rest of us.
I saw the guy turn into an apartment building and Kage follow right behind. “No, no, no,” I grumbled under my breath.
“God fucking dammit, Jones, you better not let any—”
“Will you guys all lay off!” Ian warned gruffly, and his rough whiskey voice was a welcome relief. “You know Miro’s got this covered. He’s not stupid; he knows what he’s doing. Give the man a little fuckin’ credit!”
It was good to have someone on my side who didn’t doubt my mental or physical ability and who would champion me to the others. But that wasn’t surprising; I could always count on Ian. The moment of silence that followed his outburst was soothing.
“But you can see him, right?”
“Ian!” I howled, utterly betrayed.
“I’m just asking!” he yelled back defensively.
“You can all go straight to hell!” I bellowed before I tore through the front door of the apartment building after Kage, going up the stairs right on his heels, one level after the next, Ian in my ear the whole time along with everyone else.
“You’re very sensitive, M,” Eli commented.
“Kiss my ass,” I said, careening around a corner as I followed Kage up and up.
Funny how much Eli and I had changed in the past five months. From November to March, Thanksgiving to St. Patrick’s Day, our friendship progressed, and he’d evolved from Kohn to Eli, a permanent shift in my head.
“And Ian, you can—”
“Are you still on the street?” Eli pressed.
“Where the hell is Ian?”
“He’s offline. The SOG team made the secondary interior breach,” Dorsey informed us. And while I wasn’t crazy about that, he was one of many, not leading the rest of the men.
“Miro, where the fuck are you, because GPS is showing you now at—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Dorsey griped at Eli, who’d spoken. “Miro, did you turn in somewhere? Because it looks like we lost you on the last corner.”
“The fuck do you mean, you lost—Miro, where the hell are you?” Becker yelled.
But I’d run flat-out after Kage for at least eight blocks, and we were on the fifth floor now. I was done being able to form words.
I heard Kage hit the door that led to the roof—it had a panic bar, and that sound, like a giant rubber stamp, was hard to miss—and charged out into the open after him. From where I was, maybe ten feet behind him, the sound of leather-soled shoes scraping over the rough concrete sounded like nails on a chalkboard, and the noise added to my quickly ratcheting fear the closer they got to running out of roof.
I thought Kage was going to stop.
There was no way he wasn’t going to stop.
As many times as he had said to me, “Marshals don’t jump off buildings, Jones,” I would have bet my life on the fact that when the other guy took a running leap toward the next building over, Kage would come to a stop. He didn’t. He followed, and I was so astonished that I found myself sliding awkwardly, my feet slipping on the gravel, arms windmilling for balance, out of control for a moment as I finally came to a bracing halt at the edge of the building I too would have had to hurdle as I’d just watched Kage do.
And then came that second, my life in a blur up to that moment when I realized the one person I knew I could always count on… was gone.
No one but Ian could ever understand what Kage meant to me. It was cliché, yes, but I’d never had a father; there was never an older man who took me under his wing, never one who was both mentor and guardian, not just because he had to but because he wanted to. I would never be the same from this second on.
What was worse was that I knew him even better after just one awkward, ridiculous, scary dinner in February. One weird Valentine’s Day, and everything was different. It wasn’t like we were buddies or that I understood at all how his mind worked, but I did know how much he loved his husband and what lengths he would go to keep him safe. It wasn’t every man who took a bullet for someone he loved. Ian and I knew a secret others didn’t, because he hadn’t even told the rest of the team he’d been shot. Instead he simply showed up for work the following Monday, having taken the two days of vacation already on the books, like nothing remotely interesting had happened. Since he liked to look bulletproof, Ian and I saw no reason to muck around with that perception.
I knew the loyalty I saw him give his men, give me and everyone else who worked for him, extended to his friends as well. He worried about his family, his friends, his team, and honestly, just seeing him grounded me. But now….
My heart clenched, my stomach sank, and my breath caught as I closed my eyes for a second and tried to reconcile what I believed in—his invincibility—with what I’d just seen—his death—before I stepped up to the wall and peered over the side.
There, braced on a thin lip of what could only be called an ornamental flight of whimsy on the architect’s part—no more than molding on the building—was Kage, dangling by a one-handed death grip over a fifty-foot plunge, holding on to the guy he’d been chasing with the other.
I nearly dropped dead.
“Take him,” Kage growled while heaving the guy up to me.
I couldn’t have done it. Ian couldn’t have done it. It required muscles neither of us possessed and the ability to deadlift at least two hundred pounds. And he was doing it from basically the shoulder alone.
I was strong, but not like that, and I couldn’t imagine the concentration needed to keep the guy from falling in the first place.
I grabbed the fugitive, realized I was looking at none other than Kevin Gannon—which was why, of course, Kage took off after him in the first place—hauled him up over the edge, and then cuffed him. “Don’t move,” I warned. Normally I put a knee on a suspect’s back when I had them on the ground, but this guy wasn’t fighting or squirming. He just lay there, limp.
“No,” he said between gasps, “not moving.”
Bending back over, I saw Kage had both hands on the top edge of the roof. I leaned forward to offer him a hand.
“Secur
e your prisoner, Jones,” he ordered gruffly before he pressed himself onto the ledge, turned to sit and swing his legs around, and then stood.
I stepped back, watching as he gave himself a quick dusting, straightened his navy suit, adjusted the tie, and then faced me.
I couldn’t stop staring.
He scowled.
I had no clue what to say.
“Don’t tell anybody,” he instructed before turning for the door of the roof.
Don’t tell anybody? Was he fucking kidding? I could barely breathe!
Holy motherfucking hell.
I had to concentrate on not hyperventilating.
Once I could move air through my lungs again—because Jesus Christ, I thought Ian was good at stopping my heart—I finally turned to look at my prisoner.
“That man is insane,” Gannon said.
I nodded in earnest.
“But, yanno,” he said on a sharp exhale, “kind of awesome.”
He got a wan smile from me that time.
Kage waited for us at the bottom of the last flight of stairs and then opened the door to seven uniformed CPD officers. Because his face was now recognizable, along with those of the mayor, the police superintendent, and the state’s attorney, they straightened, holstered their drawn weapons, and waited for his order.
He only glowered and told them to move so we could get through. When we got closer to the warehouse, I saw Ching and Becker waiting for us along with Dorsey and Ryan, plus Sharpe and White. I didn’t see Ian anywhere, which didn’t concern me since the area of operation was swarming with law enforcement. Kowalski and Eli weren’t there, instead back at the office on desk duty, running warrants and playing liaison to those of us in the field. Technically it was Ian’s and my day to do it, but Eli had his cousin Ira coming in from San Francisco, and he didn’t want to be stuck in the field when he was supposed to be picking the guy up at O’Hare. I understood. With our job, it could go off the rails at any time. It was best to simply not engage than to try to get away.
“—secured, and all the VX gas canisters have been recovered.”