by LENA DIAZ,
Even the rocky cliffs that surrounded the town were unstable, crumbling at the worst possible times, sending several enforcers to their deaths during training missions. Ten men had paid the ultimate price for Cyprian’s arrogance before he’d reluctantly agreed to shut the place down and create a new, safer facility miles away from Boulder, its existence just as closely guarded as this one’s had been.
But even this many years later, the attributes that had made this one-street town with its Spaghetti-Western storefronts and wooden boardwalks so ideal remained. It was isolated, deserted, difficult to find unless you knew about it, and untouched by technology—almost. Even cell phones wouldn’t work out here except in a few, select spots, like this old jailhouse. But most of the rest of Enforcement Alley had high concentrations of minerals in the soil that interfered with signals, and most electronic equipment, making it secure from electronic surveillance. All of that combined to make it the perfect spot for meetings.
Or anything else that went on behind these walls.
Do it.
Yes, he would. But the word “it” had so many connotations, so much wiggle room, so much . . . freedom for interpretation. And this time, there’d be no toss of a coin to decide the result. The result had been decided the moment that Cyprian had given him that terse command. Or, rather, what he was about to do had been decided a long time ago. It was only the timing that had been decided this morning.
He carefully folded the letter with Cyprian’s signature on the bottom and set it aside. Then he turned around. The man lay in the corner, naked, asleep thanks to the drug whose dosage had been carefully calculated to ensure it would be out of his system long before authorities found him. Because he couldn’t die yet. Not until after she did or the setup wouldn’t work.
Her yellow dress was decorated with little blue flowers. Her face was smooth and pale except for a smattering of orange freckles across her cheeks. Thick, burnished red curls hung past her full breasts to her narrow waist, teasing the zip ties around her wrists. Her moss-green eyes stared at him above the gag across her mouth, filled with desperation and terror.
It was a shame to kill her. She was quite pretty. And she’d been nice to him in the moments before she’d realized he was a threat. But it couldn’t be helped. He had his instructions. And sometimes progress required a few sacrifices along the way, unfortunate collateral damage.
“It will be over soon. I’ll make it quick, and as painless as possible,” he promised her.
A gurgled sob sounded from behind her gag.
He glanced at the second man, also gagged but fully dressed, bound to a chair on the other side of the room, studying him with hate-filled, resentful eyes. His time would come as well, but not today. Not until his usefulness was over.
After pulling out his cell phone and checking the screen, he smiled, pleased that the old jail still had reliable reception. It was time for the Watcher to check in. He crossed to the man in the chair and pulled out his gun.
Chapter Seven
Melissa paused at the top of the stairs and smoothed her hands down the jeans she so rarely wore. But since she’d decided not to go into the office today, dressing comfortably seemed the thing to do. Her only pair of jeans had seen better days. The hem was ragged and tended to shed threads. But they helped her distance herself from her usual persona as the president of EXIT. Because she needed that distance today, more than any other time, just to survive the next few minutes.
Not going into the office was a calculated risk. Her father would certainly wonder why she wasn’t there and might not believe the lame excuse she’d given Jolene when she’d called her a few minutes ago. But it was a risk Melissa was willing to take if not working this one day could get her closer to the truth.
Morning light poured in through the back wall of windows, revealing the golden tones of Jace’s skin as he perched on the couch, watching the local news. No jeans for him. He was freshly shaved and painfully handsome in navy-blue dress pants and a crisp white dress shirt unbuttoned at the throat, no tie. His suit jacket was draped over the arm of the couch, and beside it, on the floor, sat his duffel.
When she stepped off the bottom step, music signaled a breaking news bulletin. A live shot showed a reporter standing in the parking lot of a motel at the edge of town, with flakes of snow drifting down onto his perfectly styled hair. Behind him, yellow crime-scene tape cordoned off a section of the parking lot. The camera zoomed in on the open trunk of a blue Cadillac where a coroner’s assistant was shaking out a white sheet, then quickly jerked away when a policeman yelled something at the reporter and ran to block the shot.
But not before Melissa saw what the camera had seen.
A young woman, obviously dead, in a yellow dress almost the exact same shade of the crime-scene tape, with her long red hair tangled around her face. Melissa shivered and rubbed her hands up and down her arms.
The TV switched off. Jace pitched the remote onto the couch and stood, watching her with an unreadable expression. Melissa noticed the gun holstered on his hip. Guns didn’t scare her. They were a symbol of strength. And safety. It was the people behind the guns who scared her. And right now, she was about to bet everything on the man behind that particular gun. She was pinning everything on her instincts and her belief that the words in his background report were true. Honorable, brave, loyal, trustworthy.
The trustworthy part was the one that was giving her fits and had kept her up so late last night. Because she was convinced he was lying to her, about that incident with the van, about why he’d suddenly shown up in her life, probably about why he’d gone upstairs yesterday at EXIT. But sometimes it took a lie to do the right thing. Like the lies she’d been telling her father.
She had to lie, to protect herself, to protect others. And she believed, she hoped, that Jace wanted that as well. So she was rolling the dice, placing her trust in him, betting that he wanted what she wanted—to do the right thing.
Even if it was the most painful thing she’d ever done.
“Good morning.” Her rarely used sneakers squeaked on the floor as she crossed to him. “Did you sleep well?”
“No. Neither did you.”
She self-consciously smoothed her hair, wondering if she looked as tired as she felt. “Why do you say that?”
“I heard you pacing in your room most of the night.” He shrugged. “Light sleeper, especially during a mission. I wasn’t trying to listen.”
“Mission. Seems like an odd choice of words.”
Something flickered in the depths of his eyes. “Assignment, mission, job . . . it’s all semantics.”
Maybe. Maybe not. She smoothed her hands down her jeans again, then clenched them at her sides to keep from advertising her nervousness. She drew a deep breath and fired her first shot. “I want to know who you really are.”
He arched a brow. “You ran a background check. Jace Atwell isn’t a stage name.”
“I want details, real details.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “Let’s see. I’m single, never married. Love kids, want a handful of my own someday. My mom and two brothers live in Savannah, where I’ve lived my whole life until I moved here. I love cats. Dogs are okay, but cats have attitude. I respect that. And my favorite color? Black.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“You said you wanted details. I gave you details.”
“That’s not what I . . .” She clenched her hands at her sides. “Things aren’t adding up. I want to know how you knew that I needed help upstairs at EXIT yesterday.”
His brow wrinkled in confusion. “Didn’t I answer this already?”
“You gave me an answer. But I don’t believe it was the right answer.”
His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t say anything.
“Did you know my father before you met him on that mountain road?”
“Never met him before. And, again, answered this already. What’s going on, Melissa?”
They faced each other with a mixture of truth and lies between them. But what was the truth? And what was a lie?
She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, unable to dispel the chill that had settled inside her from the first moment that she’d begun to suspect something was terribly wrong at EXIT and hadn’t left her since. “Your background report didn’t tell me why you decided to move to Colorado. It certainly wasn’t for a job that you already had lined up since you were interviewing for one when I met you.”
“I needed a change of scenery.”
“You just said that you lived in Georgia all your life. Something significant had to happen to make you move.”
His jaw tightened. “I moved here to get away from the daily reminders of my biggest failure.”
“The client you lost?”
He nodded curtly.
“You said you would tell me about that . . . if I hired you.” She searched his eyes, waiting, hoping.
Level with me, Jace. Trust me, so I can trust you.
He let out a ragged breath. “It was my last mission as a bodyguard. I protected a woman for three months from her abusive boyfriend. There were a few incidents in the beginning, when he tried a few tricks to get around me. But he quickly learned I wasn’t letting him anywhere near her. Things settled into a routine.”
He paused, the barely suppressed anger and self-recrimination in his voice too raw to be faked.
“I should have known something was up,” he continued. “She was acting happy, as if she’d suddenly gotten over her boyfriend when she’d been struggling with missing him the whole time. She was stuck in the cycle of abuse, blaming herself for what had happened instead of placing the blame where it belonged—on her abuser. She’d been seeing a therapist, and had struggled with depression. But those last few days . . .” He shook his head.
“She’d been sneaking notes to him through a friend who had no idea of the kind of danger she was inviting. He wrote telling her he loved her and that he was sorry, that he’d never meant to hurt her. When she didn’t come downstairs one morning, I went up to check on her. She wasn’t there. She’d snuck out of the house to meet him.” His jaw worked, his skin turning pale. “They found her body—”
“Oh, no,” Melissa whispered.
“They found her body,” he continued, obviously struggling to finish his story, “at the bottom of the pool behind her boyfriend’s house. She’d been raped, beaten, drowned. And that’s why I quit. That’s why I had to get out of Savannah, to escape those memories, my biggest failure.”
She lifted her hand toward him but thought better of it and dropped it to her side. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cause you pain. And I’m sorry to keep pressing this, but it’s important. I need to know why Colorado, why Boulder specifically.”
He shrugged. “There wasn’t anything specific about it. I put most of my belongings in storage, packed the bare essentials in my car, and took off for Seattle.”
“Seattle? As in Washington state?”
He nodded. “I wanted to get as far from Savannah as I could. But after two long days of driving, I decided there wasn’t much point in going any farther. The memories I was trying to escape had come along with me. Continuing on wouldn’t have made a difference. So I rented an apartment for a few months until I could decide what I wanted to do long-term. I’m still not sure that I’ve decided. But I could have picked a far less beautiful place to land.”
She looked past him toward the snowcapped mountains framed in the windows along the back wall. It wasn’t hard to believe his story when she agreed with his sentiment. Colorado was home. She couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. But Boulder wasn’t exactly a stop off a major highway. People came here because they wanted to, not because they were passing by on the way to somewhere else and happened to pull off an exit ramp. That part of his story didn’t ring true.
“So you thought Colorado was a nice place to stop. I can see that. But Boulder isn’t exactly easy to get to.”
He gave her a wry smile. “No. It’s not. I did the tourist thing at first, trying to keep my mind off . . . what I’d left behind. Drove around the state, visiting the major cities and seeing what Colorado had to offer. But once I saw this place”—he waved toward the back windows with the gorgeous mountain view—“I lost the desire to leave.”
She nodded. His story was certainly plausible. And the edge of pain in his voice, his eyes, reassured her that he was telling the truth about one thing, the client that he’d lost. He was opening up to her, and she regretted dredging up such a tragic memory.
“I’m sorry, for what happened to your client. But it sounds like it wasn’t your fault. I hope you can stop blaming yourself someday.”
His jaw worked, but he didn’t say anything.
This time she didn’t try to stop herself from touching him. She flattened her palms against his chest. “I have complete faith in your abilities as a bodyguard. Your client, the one who died, that’s on her. Not you.”
His eyes closed briefly. Then he closed his hands on top of hers, lightly squeezing before letting her go. “Thank you.” His voice was quiet, barely above a whisper.
She reluctantly dropped her hands. Touching him, however briefly, was an unexpected pleasure. But it was also distracting, and she needed to focus. There was too much riding on this conversation for her to allow physical attraction to interfere with what was important.
“I’m confident that you can protect me, or rather, help protect me. I do know how to handle a gun. I’m not helpless. But what worries me is whether I can adequately protect you.”
He laughed, but when she didn’t laugh, too, he sobered. “You’re serious.”
“I am. When you rescued me from the driver of the van, then met my father a few minutes later, I saw something in the way he looked at you that . . . concerned me. I think he saw you as a threat.”
He didn’t say anything. Because he was a threat? Guilt rode her hard, as it had last night. If Jace was dangerous to her father, she should stop. Right now. She shouldn’t share her fears, the things she’d learned, the things she suspected.
But how could she live with herself if she didn’t? If more people died because she stayed silent? She wanted to protect her father, but she also had to do the right thing. The trick was to try to find a way to do both.
“I need to show you something, Jace. But before I do, I need you to promise that you’ll keep an open mind. Or at least try, until I explain everything. Can you do that?”
“I’ll listen to what you have to say. That’s all I can promise.”
“Then I suppose that will have to be enough.”
JACE WAITED BY the back windows for Melissa to return. After her mysterious interrogation of him, she’d gone upstairs, saying she’d be right back. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but seeing her lugging some kind of rectangular board covered in a sheet wasn’t it. He rushed to the bottom of the stairs and reached for her burden, but she pulled it away.
“I’ve got it, thanks.” Her knuckles whitened as she tightened her grip. “It’s not heavy. Just cumbersome.” She stepped to the couch, lifted the board onto the seat cushion, then hesitated. “You mentioned I was up late last night pacing. You were right. I was thinking and debating my next steps. And I convinced myself that I would only show you this, that I would only involve you, if I felt at peace with your answers to my questions this morning. Well, I’m not completely at peace with your answers. I’m convinced you have a hidden agenda for being here with me. I think that you do know my father, from before the attack by the gunman. And I believe that my father might be the real reason that you came to Colorado.”
“Melissa—”
“No, please. The time for lies is over. My point is that it doesn’t matter whether I believed your answers this morning. Because whether you realize it or not, you’re a part of this”—she thumped her hand on the sheet—“and your life is in danger. So I don’t have a choice. I have to tell you
everything that I know. I have to make sure that you take the risk to yourself seriously and take the necessary precautions.”
“I told you, I can take care of my—”
“Let me finish, please.”
He crossed his arms.
“There’s another reason that I decided to show you these boards. As pathetic as it sounds, I’m desperate. Probably not a surprise after what happened on that mountain, and yesterday at EXIT. Everything is crashing down around me, and I need someone to help me navigate through it, to help me decide what to do—someone independent of my father, someone who won’t be influenced by him. I’m hoping that this ‘someone’ is the former Navy SEAL standing in front of me. And I’m betting both my life, and my father’s life, that this man is as honorable, brave, loyal, and trustworthy as his former CO thought he was.”
Her faith in him was making him uncomfortable. She made him sound like a saint. And he was far from that. “You’re not making sense, Melissa.”
“Close your eyes, please.”
“No way in hell.”
She sighed. “I don’t suppose it matters anyway.” She whipped the sheet off.
And what was underneath changed everything.
Chapter Eight
Anger burned through Jace, and he gave silent thanks that he’d searched the house last night and found the two handguns Melissa had hidden in her office. Because what he was looking at now didn’t seem like the markings of an innocent woman, or a woman he should have trusted enough to have closed his eyes and slept in the same house with last night.
He stared at the pictures, the names, the red lines linking them all together. In the middle, beneath a picture of Cyprian Cardenas, beneath the label “Enemies,” were pictures and the names “Mason Hunt” and “Devlin Buchanan.” And beneath those was another name. His.
“What the hell is this, Melissa? Half the people on these boards are marked as ‘dead.’ And why is my name listed under ‘Enemies’?”