Rules in Blackmail

by Nichole Severn

  Sullivan hissed behind her, the machines he’d been hooked up to going haywire.

  The look on Anthony’s face as he lunged for the hospital bed spun her around. Ripping out the catheter and leads, Sullivan fought to stand beside the bed. His weapons expert offered a hand, but the stubborn SEAL brushed him off.

  Her eyes widened, but Jane couldn’t close the space between them. She’d fought too hard to get even this far. “Sullivan, what are you doing? You’re going to rip your stitches out.”

  “Then I’ll rip them out. I’m not letting you do this alone.” He used the bed for support and shuffled forward. The hospital gown molded to him, a little too tight and too short for his musculature. “If that means we need to leave now, then we leave now. Anthony, go get the SUV. We’ll meet you at the front.”

  “No. You’re not going anywhere.” The constant beeping from the machines would call the nurses and doctors in here in a few seconds, but even with their medical orders, Sullivan wouldn’t stop until the job was done. Wasn’t in his nature. She had to admire him for that, given that was exactly why she’d blackmailed him in the first place, but this time, Jane wouldn’t stand by helpless when whoever hunted her caught up. And she wouldn’t let Sullivan risk his life for her again, even if she had to go to extremes to stop him. “Do you remember what I said back in your office when you refused to help me?”

  Fire consumed his gaze, almost hotter and wilder than when he’d taken on Christopher at the cabin. He fought to stand on his own, leaning against the bed rails, but Sullivan had lost a lot of blood. He wouldn’t get far. “You wouldn’t.”

  Jane stepped backward toward the door.

  “Jane...” He pushed off from the bed, the muscles in his jawline ticking away with his erratic heartbeat. “Don’t do this.”

  “You did your job, Sullivan. This is the only way to keep you safe. I’m sorry.” She ripped open the door and shouted down the hall. “Police!”

  Two uniformed Anchorage PD officers spun toward her from the end of the hall. She’d known they’d be there, waiting for her to give her statement. Both sprinted toward the room, hands on the butt of their guns, and hurried inside. “Ma’am?”

  “This man isn’t who he says he is. His real name is Sebastian Warren.” Jane maneuvered closer to the door as they came inside the room, dread pooling at the base of her spine. This was the only way. “There’s a warrant out for his arrest for murdering his father, the Anchorage Lumberjack, nineteen years ago.”

  The officers moved in, but Anthony constructed a barrier of hardened muscle before Sullivan set a tense hand on his weapon expert’s shoulder and pushed him back. Fluorescent lighting glinted off a pair of handcuffs as the officers moved Sullivan back into the bed, but the SEAL only had attention for her.

  The fire in his eyes had simmered, the remaining ashes full of...heartbreak?

  A tight knot of hesitation spread through her, but Jane shoved her arms into her jacket as the officers started questioning Sullivan, and she slipped out the door. The cell phone she’d stolen from one of the officers was in her hand, her eye on the exit. She fought back the tears blurring her vision as she dialed the number she’d memorized for circumstances like this a few months ago. Never could be too careful. Off the grid. Leave everything behind.

  “Jane!” Sullivan’s voice echoed down the hallway, but she wouldn’t turn back.

  She unburied her own phone from her jacket pocket and tossed it into the garbage can against the wall. First thing Sullivan would do after posting bail would be to track her through her phone. He wanted to help, but she wouldn’t lose him. Not the man who’d given her a reason to fight.

  Keep moving. Don’t look back. Bringing the stolen phone to her ear, she counted off the rings on the other line. Two. Three. The line picked up.

  “Hey, it’s me.” Jane checked over her shoulder to make sure Sullivan hadn’t ordered Anthony to follow her. Two nurses bolted into his room behind the Anchorage police officers as he shouted her name over and over again. She clutched the keys she’d taken off Anthony as he’d rushed to help Sullivan stand and focused on the double glass doors leading to the parking garage. Tears welled in her lower lash line, but Jane pushed them back. Turning him in might solidify her reputation, but her leaving ensured the safety of the one man she couldn’t bear to lose. Sullivan. He was all that mattered now. “I need your help.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “How didn’t we see this coming?” Sullivan threw all of the team’s research into a file box and shoved it across his desk. Pain shot up into his shoulder and across his rib cage as the box hit the floor and scattered the files from Jane’s case across his office. The phone rang for the hundredth time in the last hour since he’d been released from Anchorage PD custody, intensifying the headache at the base of his skull. He pointed a finger at Elliot with the hand not strapped into a sling. “You’re the private investigator. You’re the one who should’ve been able to uncover Christopher Menas’s true motive before this all blew up in our face.”

  “The guy was good at his job, Sullivan. I don’t know what else you want me to say.” Elliot collapsed back in one of the many leather chairs positioned in front of the CEO’s massive oak desk, cell phone in hand. The brightness of the screen highlighted the stitches in his forehead from the fire at Menas’s apartment, and regret flooded through Sullivan. In reality, they were lucky Elliot hadn’t been killed, considering what Menas did for a living. “Besides, I think we all learned something very valuable here. Never trust the system. Everything you need to know is in a person’s routines and daily life. Had we surveilled Menas before he’d tried killing us, I could’ve told you everything you’d needed to know.”

  “Who screwed up their job the most doesn’t matter right now.” Elizabeth Dawson, Blackhawk Security’s head of network security, tossed a handful of manila file folders onto the gleaming desk between them. “We’ve got a client on the run, one who’s probably scared out of her mind, and we have no idea who is after her. I’d say that qualifies as our first priority.” The former NSA analyst nodded toward the pile of research. “Here’s everything I could get my hands on for Christopher Menas. Phone records, emails, instant messages, bank accounts, payroll for his team, surveillance photos of Jane. I had to pull a few strings, so you owe me.”

  Every muscle in Sullivan’s body tensed at the sound of her name. Damn it. Now wasn’t the time to let emotion rule. His wrist still chafed where the Anchorage PD had cuffed him while they questioned him in that hospital bed for over twenty hours. The only reasons he’d been released after Jane’s attempt to keep him off her case were a heavily funded bank account and the high-priced lawyer Blackhawk Security kept on retainer. But the nightmare wasn’t over.

  He’d killed his father before the psychopath could hurt anyone else. Sullivan had known this day would come. He locked his jaw. But, despite the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison, he had more important things on his mind. First things first: find Jane. If he could talk to her—

  “None of it tells me who might’ve hired Menas.” Elizabeth leveraged her weight onto her hand against the desk, wide brown eyes only giving a hint of the off-the-charts intelligence behind them. “Either Christopher Menas was lying when he told you he’d been contracted to take Jane out, or the guy behind the curtain is one of the best shadow agents I’ve ever come across. And trust me, I know a few.”

  “He wasn’t lying.” Sullivan straightened. Head in the game. Get Jane to safety. “The entire reason he’d used his own name was to throw us off the scent of the real threat. Any word from Anthony?”

  “Jane hasn’t gone back to the town house, and there’s no report from her CO either.” Elliot held up his phone, waving it from side to side. “I went back through her bank records. No activity on her credit or debit cards, no withdrawals from her account. She has to be getting some kind of help to stay off the
grid this long. As of right now, she’s gone.”

  “Not acceptable.” He’d never lost a mission or a client in all his time on this earth, and he wasn’t about to start now. “We’re just going to have to find the threat responsible for the price on Jane’s head—” Sullivan ground his back molars, her name still sweet on his tongue “—before he finds her.”

  “This woman turned you over to the police and endangered the entire company. She doesn’t want you on the case anymore, Sullivan.” Vincent Kalani turned around from the other side of the office, uncrossing his arms. The forensics expert hadn’t said another word this entire meeting, keeping to himself in the corner, but Sullivan read the resistance across his dark features. Shadows crossed Vincent’s stern expression. Of all the men and women Sullivan had hired to create the Blackhawk Security team, Vincent had the uncanny ability to bring him back to earth when he was in over his head. But not this time. “Are you going to put yourself—put us—back in this guy’s crosshairs to save someone who doesn’t want our help and who sold you out?”

  “Yes.” Because a man never gave up on the woman he loved. Sullivan ignored the burn of pain down his side. He inhaled deep, hoping to catch her vanilla scent in the air, but disappointment gripped him. Jane was running from whoever’d hired Menas, but also from him. She didn’t want him in a position that would get him killed, but she didn’t understand. He’d been in that position his entire life. First with his father, then the SEALs, now as part of the foremost private security consultancy in the United States. All of those moments had forged him into the man he was now, the man who could save her life. She’d just finally made the risk worth it.

  “I built this company—and hired every single one of you—to save lives, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Save a life. Doesn’t matter if we trust our clients. Doesn’t matter if we like them. We have a responsibility to the people who walk through those doors, and today I only have attention for one of them. Jane Reise.” Sullivan shifted his attention to Vincent. “But if you won’t do the job I hired you for—” he nodded toward the double glass doors on the other side of his office “—there’s the door. I don’t have the time to question whether I can rely on you right now.”

  The phone rang again, attempting to break the tense silence descending between him and his team. Sullivan picked up the receiver and slammed it back down. He didn’t have time for distractions either.

  “Well, you got my vote, boss.” Elliot stood, slapping his hand into Sullivan’s. “But mostly because I’m terrified you’re going to send me back to the prison you found me in if I don’t comply.”

  A laugh rumbled through Sullivan’s chest. “Don’t you forget it, con man.”

  Elizabeth collected the files he’d tossed onto the floor and reorganized them across the desk. “I’ll start combing through possible suspects in Jane’s life again, targeting military personnel. Do you want me to call in Kate for another profile?”

  “No. We can handle this without her.” Blackhawk Security’s profiler deserved all the time she could get after losing her husband to a random shooting two months ago. Sullivan wouldn’t ask her to come back until she was ready. He ran over Elizabeth’s words a second time. “Why target military personnel?”

  “Someone this good at hiding his identity is a professional. At first I thought whoever hired Christopher Menas might’ve been former NSA, maybe current, but that doesn’t add up. You said Jane was stalked in Afghanistan. The NSA hasn’t had any assets there in over a year.” Elizabeth brushed a piece of short brown hair behind her ear. Not quite as short as Jane’s, but it accentuated her heart-shaped face and warm brown eyes, where Jane’s gave the angles of her face more of an edge. “Without contacts within the intelligence community, our target wouldn’t have been able to hire a mercenary team. On top of that, he knows her, he knows every detail of her life and has been following her across the globe. She doesn’t have any relatives she’s close to, so I’ve narrowed it down to three possibilities.” Elizabeth ticked them off on her fingers one by one. “Our suspect is either her commanding officer, another lawyer who’s worked with her or a criminal who’s been prosecuted by her. All military.”

  “That’s still a giant suspect pool, and Jane swore her CO didn’t have anything to do with this when we first brought him up.” Sullivan swiped his uninjured hand across his face, then focused on the hundreds of photos of Jane staring up at him from his desk. She’d disappeared twenty-four hours ago. She could be anywhere in the world. And so could her stalker. Hell. Sullivan curled his fingers into his palms, needing the small bite of pain to keep him focused. They didn’t have time to make any more mistakes. “It’ll take us weeks to sort through them all.”

  “I’ll take her commanding officer.” Vincent stepped close to the desk and motioned for Elizabeth to give him the file. The tribal tattoos climbing up his neck and down his arms stretched with the action. “He’d know her routine, her close friends in the JAG Corps and which defendants might want to take revenge. It’s as good a place to start as any.” He lifted his toffee-colored gaze to Sullivan.

  “Thank you.” Didn’t matter that Jane had sworn up and down her CO had nothing to do with this. They’d run out of leads. Slapping his hand across Vincent’s back, maybe a little too hard, he nodded. He rounded the desk and picked up one of the many photos Elliot had recovered from Christopher Menas’s apartment before it’d been burned to the ground. “Now that only leaves about fifty more people we need to dig into, and any one of them could already be three steps ahead.”

  He didn’t like those odds.

  Sullivan studied the photo in his hand, his eyebrows drawing inward. It was a photo of Jane in court. Her hair was a little longer, nearly brushing her fatigues emblazoned with the JAG Corps insignia pinned to her chest. The walls were simple, bare, only two flags standing tall on either side of the judge. The American flag and the US Army flag. No other American insignia on the walls, which meant it probably wasn’t an American courtroom. Could’ve been Afghanistan. There was no way to tell for sure, but Christopher Menas hadn’t taken the picture. Jane would’ve recognized him in a heartbeat if her ex-college-boyfriend-turned-mercenary had sat a few feet from her.

  “Boss?” Elliot asked. “Everything okay?”

  From the angle of the photo, the picture had to have been taken by the defense’s side of the courtroom. But why would a defendant or an attorney snap a picture in the middle of court, and where had Menas gotten the picture in the first place? Jane stood near the witness stand, not looking at the person who’d taken the photo. A surveillance photo. His stomach sank, but Sullivan rotated the photo in order to get a good look at the papers sprawled across the desk, any evidence that could point them in the right direction. A name. An official charge. A rank.

  Something else caught his eye.

  He brought the photo closer. The pen on the desk. Dread pooled at the base of his spine. He’d seen it before. But...

  His cell phone chimed, and he read the incoming message from Anthony.

  Subject has returned home.

  He put the screen to sleep and shoved the phone into his pants pocket.

  “I know who hired Christopher Menas.” Sullivan snapped his head up. It didn’t make sense, but he wasn’t about to second-guess his instincts. Setting Jane’s photo back onto the desk, he pulled his top desk drawer open and shoved his favorite Glock into his shoulder holster. There wasn’t any time left. They had to get to Jane’s town house now. “And I know why he’s doing this.”

  * * *

  CHRISTOPHER MENAS HAD gotten exactly what he’d wanted.

  Captain Jane Reise of the United States JAG Corps no longer existed.

  She stared down at the new passport, birth certificate, driver’s license and Social Security card on her lap, not sure why she hadn’t gotten out of the car yet. The photos had been taken from her old passport, but the name,
date of birth and address beside it had transformed her into someone completely different, thanks to a friend in the FBI’s witness protection program. Sliding the airline ticket out from behind the thin leather, she memorized the information all over again. Her flight out of Ted Stevens International Airport to LAX left in two hours. Enough time to collect the cash she’d stashed beneath the floorboards under the right side of her bed. She couldn’t use the money in her accounts. Too easy to trace. With that money, she’d have a fresh start. And there’d be no trace of her old life to follow.

  The dropping temperatures were showing her breath, but Jane sat there, surveying the street for the hundredth time. No sign of an intruder, of a mercenary waiting for her to open the door. No sign of another Blackhawk Security vehicle either. Jane exhaled hard as pressure built behind her sternum. Sullivan hadn’t come after her.

  She pulled back her shoulders. She recalled the details of her new life. Now she was Rita Miller, a criminal defense lawyer from Los Angeles, California, who worked for a large firm right in the center of the city. She had no idea how her friend in the FBI had managed to pull that off, but did it matter?

  She craned her head over her shoulder toward the town house again. So, in reality, the rental wasn’t even hers anymore. All of the furniture, her clothing, the small possessions she’d collected from her travels over the last few years would be sold off in some estate sale. Her father and his new family wouldn’t want them and Jane wasn’t allowed to pack and ship them to her new address in California, according to the rules. Leave everything behind. Leave everyone behind.

  The rules. A small burst of laughter had her setting the crown of her head against the headrest. Frayed wiring dangled from the control panel centered above the rearview mirror. Sullivan really should’ve been more careful about concealing the tracking devices he’d installed in his vehicles. Or at least have a backup. Staring up at the SUV’s ceiling, she closed her eyes. She’d worked her entire life sticking to the rules, bending them to fit her or her clients’ needs, but never breaking them, and she’d done a good job.