DEADLY GAMES Jaycee Clark 1
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All he needed was time, and he’d find them.
She was Darya now. A new life. A new beginning, leaving the pain and old
memories behind, as much as she could. He and Rori were looking into child
psychologists. Gavin gave him the name of the one Ryan saw. He’d have to check the
woman out first before he let Darya see her.
Darya Lenora Kinncaid, so her adoption papers said. He smiled out over the
winter scene beyond the window, cold and grey, the clouds low, the trees bare.
Rori and Darya were around the house somewhere.
“Oh, there ye are,” Becky’s voice drew his attention from the window and his own
musings.
“What can I do for you, Becky?”
She tossed a package to him and he caught it one handed. Becky muttered about
cooking and mail service. He didn’t quite catch it all.
Across the front of the Express envelope was his name and this address.
Something prickled under his skin.
He took the package to his father’s office to open it in private.
Damn good thing too. Glossy photos slid out and into his hands. Not what anyone
wanted to see caught forever on a freeze frame. The photographs were not for the faint of
heart. There were four eliminations in all. Three males and one female. Two of the males
DEADLY GAMES Jaycee Clark 229
matched those in the crime video they’d taken the night they’d found Darya. The two men
who murdered her sister and went after her.
Eliminated.
The other male he didn’t recognize, but the woman he did. Darya’s aunt.
Anger licked its way through him at being denied his own justice.
Ian shook the envelope and a paper fluttered out.
He sighed, pissed and yet strangely enough, through the anger, flowed a current of
relief. The note only read. “Take care of my daughter and granddaughter.--N”
The notorious Nikko. Who Ian suspected was none other than Nickolas Morano.
British Italian who worked the Cold Wars, only to drop off the scene to become more of a
shadow than he was before when he was paid to not be seen. Morana had so many kills
marked to him, Ian could safely say, in comparison, he was an amateur. He had yet to
meet Nikko, though he’d talked to the man twice in the last month. Nikko was always
cordial, polite and yet warning at the same time. Ian rather liked him.
Great.
Hell.
He picked up the phone and dialed John.
“What?” Johnno asked.
“You know that search I wanted you to continue to work on?”
“To which particular search would you be referring?”
“The one where I wanted you to find the men who killed Darya’s sister and the
people who sold her to begin with.”
“Ah, yes.”
He looked at the gruesome black and whites on the desk, picked them up and
shoved them in the envelope. After he showed them to Rori, he’d destroy them. “Forget
it.”
“Do what?”
He blew a breath out and raked his hand through his hair. “It’s a done issue. A
wedding present.”
“Who the hell from?”
“Rori’s father.”
A movement from the doorway drew his attention.
“What about my father?” she asked from the doorway.
He shut the phone, hanging up on Johnno, and turned to her. “He took care of our
ongoing argument.”
She frowned. “Ongoing argument?”
“Darya, her past, closure.”
Those perfectly arched brows rose. “Oh.”
“That’s all she says? Oh?” He pulled her to him and kissed her. He figured for
them, this was as normal as it got.
THE END