a Touch of Revenge (Romantic Mystery - book 6): The Everly Gray Adventures

by L. j. Charles

  He lifted his shoulders in a half heated shrug. “Fred’s a legend. I might be able to find him.”

  I bolted upright, stopped by the sudden stranglehold of the seatbelt. “Where? Probably Washington, DC. Maybe we should fly home today, then come back to finish up with Connor and Eamon Grady. If your Fred has a CIA-wide reputation, or military…whichever…and he was my mom’s handler, he must have inside knowledge of the Megiddo project.”

  Pierce steered for an exit ramp. “Fred’s not the talkative type.”

  Loosening the seatbelt, I thumped my head a couple times against the headrest. Sometimes Pierce was so frustrating. “I sort of get that, but how can you be sure he won’t talk? And surely any information about Loyria Gray isn’t classified. Not after all this time.”

  I got the raised eyebrow. “The formula hasn’t been contained, and there’s a chemical warfare threat attached to it,” he said, pulling into a petrol station.

  I blew out a frustrated sigh. “When you put it like that…”

  Pierce got out of the car, then leaned in through the open door. “I’ll handle gas. Get us some drinks?”

  “Yeah. Diet Coke?” I rolled the folders and stuffed them in my hoodie pocket.

  He nodded, then shut the car door and started pumping gas. “Watch your back.”

  I stretched tall, working out the kinks in my back. “Will do.”

  No one looked suspicious inside the petrol station, so I made a stop in the loo. Big mistake. It had a mirror over the sink. I scrubbed my hands, then attacked my face with fists full of suds. I had to wipe out the fear and guilt that ravaged my expression. I’d shot someone. Okay, so it wasn’t the first time, but Chad Burr shot Mitch before I fired. And killed him. It was a clean kill. Justifiable, especially since I was Burr’s next target.

  But Connor had only threatened to shoot Pierce, and I wounded her. It had been a conscious choice to let her live. I shrugged at my image in the mirror. It was a fine line, but I wouldn’t change my actions in either case—except maybe to shoot both of them sooner. I tamed my hair into a loose braid, then nodded at myself the mirror. It was time to move on.

  When I got back to the car, Pierce had already settled behind the wheel. “You make peace with yourself?”

  I put his drink in the console holder. “Yeah. Guess I’m not a killer at heart.”

  Pierce started the engine and merged into traffic. “Connor is.”

  His words erased any remaining trace of guilt. “No question about that. She’s purely evil. Still, it turns out that revenge is more complicated than I originally thought.”

  He tapped my hoodie pocket. “What’s in the other file?”

  I wrinkled my nose. “We’re not moving on until there’s a definite plan in place to locate and talk to Fred. Seriously. You didn’t think I’d just let that go, did you?”

  “I can’t move on it until we’re stateside.” He gave me a full-on stare. “You’re gonna have to trust me, Everly.”

  Pierce had his attention back on the road before I answered. “I do.” It sounded like a commitment, and scared the flippydoodles out of me. I cleared my throat, lifted his cell phone out of the drink holder, and dropped my plastic cup in.

  Images from the phone started to form on my internal video system, but were blown away when the phone vibrated and buzzed in my hand. I jumped, and nearly dropped it. “Your cell never rings.”

  Damn, but I hated losing the images that had started to form. Which reminded me, I still hadn’t found the right moment to touch Pierce with the intent to trespass. There just hadn’t been an opportunity…yet.

  He glanced at the name on the screen. “Answer it. One of my team will tell you what he pulled from Nolla’s phone.”

  “Pierce’s phone. This is Everly Gray.”

  A strangled guffaw echoed over the line. “Nice to finally meet you Ms. Gray.” His voice was scratchy, like he didn’t use it much.

  I wrinkled my nose at Pierce and mouthed, “How does this dude know me?”

  He lifted his left shoulder in a lazy shrug, then winked at me. “Everyone on my team has been briefed. Would know you on sight.”

  I’d become infamous. I cringed. It wasn’t an accomplishment I’d aspired to.

  A static crackle came over the line, then the scratchy voice. “I dumped everything from the phone onto my computer, came up with a few interesting messages.”

  I yanked one of the folders from my hoodie pocket and fished a pen from my handbag. “I’m ready for the details.”

  “Nolla and Connor shared a series of messages about a bomb Connor was building, and it had your name on it. I’ll send a transcript of the conversation, but the quick and dirty version is that Connor had attempted to blow you up when you were four, failed, and when Nolla described the red-headed woman to her, Connor immediately went to work on a new, improved IED.”

  My breath caught somewhere in my gut, and a sharp pain tracked from the base of my neck into my skull. “She planned to blow me up?” My voice rose with every word.

  Pierce maneuvered across several lanes of traffic, shot down an off ramp, and parked in a convenience store lot.

  Wide-eyed at his jaw-dropping maneuver, I barely had time to suck in a breath.

  “Phone.” He held out his hand.

  I handed it to him, fingers shaking.

  “Talk.” It was as much a bark as a demand, and I was relieved not to be the guy on the other end.

  While Pierce was busy getting details, I rubbed at the pain in my head, and tried to make sense of why Connor tried to murder a four-year-old. How the hell was I a threat to her?

  Pierce powered his cell off and tossed it on the dashboard. “Sounds like Connor had some experience with IEDs, and blowing things up. She was a demolition expert during her early years with MI6.”

  I couldn’t hold back my exasperation or curiosity. “Why me? Seriously, how much of a threat could a little kid be? Unless she just wanted to indirectly destroy my parents by killing me.” I thought for a minute, images of our family time flashing through my mind. “It would have worked. They loved me and were…really protective.” I dug my fingers into the painful knot at the base of my neck. “I don’t remember being four, but our life in North Carolina is definitely part of my memories. Sketchy for the first few years we lived there, but does anyone remember time before, say, first or second grade?”

  Pierce’s gaze was bleak. “Sometimes.”

  It took everything in me to stifle my curiosity and bite down on the questions threatening to escape. Was it compassion that silenced me? Or fear? Was I ready to hear about Pierce’s childhood? It was silly, but it didn’t seem possible that he’d had a life before I met him.

  He sighed. And it was all wrong. The man had an entire dictionary of grunts that he normally used in place of conversation, but I’d never heard sighs until the past few days. And this was the second one today. It made me twitchy. “I’m at a loss how to interpret her actions.”

  “My best guess—you’re connected to Loyria Gray’s formula. Don’t know how yet.” He nodded toward the file on my lap. “Start reading.”

  “Okay.” There were no more leads, so I opened the Kaimi Maliu folder. “There’s some basic information about Kaimi Maliu. Hawaii was her birthplace, and my grandparents her parents. No surprise there…except that no one ever mentioned the rather important fact that Loyria’s birth name was Kaimi.”

  An ugly bite of betrayal clamped down on my heart. I sort of understood why my parents had never mentioned it, but… “After Mom and Dad were killed, why didn’t Aukele tell me about my mother’s childhood? A whole different name is a huge secret. Or Millie and Harlan? Why didn’t they tell me? We lived in the same house, and they grew up with my mom. Surely they knew her birth name.”

  Pierce tipped his head to the side. “Think, Everly. Millie and Harlan love you. Keeping you alive and safe was their primary goal, their only mission after Loyria and James were killed.”

  My breathing e
ased. “Yeah. I can see me doing that if it was Madigan in danger. But what about you? Did you know my mother’s childhood name, Pierce?”

  He stared at me without so much as single eyelid flutter. “No. My people have been on it for a while, but if Kaimi Maliu disappeared as part of a joint CIA and military mission they won’t find a trail.”

  “But we might locate Fred. He has answers, I’m sure of it.”

  Pierce stabbed a finger at the file. “Keep reading.”

  “It’s a thin file and most of it we know about. The three of them worked together, Fion, Eamon, and…Xola. Are your people searching for information on Xola Muerte?”

  Pierce nodded.

  I sighed, frustrated with all the dead ends closing in around me. I flipped through a couple pages, and a smaller sheet of paper fell out. I scanned it, shoved it in the folder, then noticed something written on the back. “Holy shit!”

  “Found something?” Pierce—totally calm.

  “Says here the CIA faked Kaimi Maliu’s death when the Volkswagen bus she was driving exploded. No cause for the explosion was listed anywhere.” I shivered, and the chills wouldn’t stop. “It’s how—”

  “Take a minute, Everly. Let your mind settle around the information.”

  I closed my eyes and shut out everything but the whine of tires on cement. Didn’t work. My heart was pumping blood at jackhammer speed. “It’s how Connor killed them.” I dug my fingers into Pierce’s thigh. “Their car caught on fire. Exploded. Connor made bombs.”

  He worked my fingers free, a question in his expression.

  “I didn’t see anything. Too much of my own emotion blocking the images.”

  He closed his eyes, exhaled.

  I reached for his cell, but didn’t touch it. “Can we find out if the IED diagram from Nolla’s phone matches the one used to blow up my parents’ car? You’ve seen those reports, haven’t you? I’m sure they’re classified, but you have ways of doing things…and…”

  We’d exited the highway and Pierce was negotiating London traffic. He didn’t look at me. “They match.”

  My world shattered into a million shards of pain. “When were you going to tell me?” I whispered, harsh, then twisted to stare at him dead-on. “You weren’t, were you?”

  He drove into a car park near the Yard, shut off the engine, and pocketed the keys. “I didn’t tell you because Eamon Grady killed your parents, not Connor, and I haven’t worked out the details of the connection yet.”

  Logical. Pierce was nothing if not logical. “But Connor said their deaths were necessary.”

  “But she didn’t say she killed them.”

  A screwed-up wad of emotion rammed into me, and I replayed the scene at Connor’s estate. “That’s why I didn’t shoot to kill. There were other reasons, more imminent, like I wasn’t sure if I could heal the damage to your aura without Connor’s help.” I looked at my hands: palms, back, palms, back. “But there was a running commentary fogging up my mind, telling me stuff. Warning me, maybe.”

  “And?” There was a quiet insistence behind the word. It shivered down my spine.

  “Revenge is turning out to be complicated. For my quest to be effective, to be genuine, I would have to be ready to die.”

  I captured his gaze, held it. “I’m not ready to die, Pierce.”

  SEVENTEEN

  MY PLANS FOR REVENGE HAD been flipped on their ass. I wasn’t ready to die. It shocked me. Left me at odds with my life, because, really, when I’d lost Mitch I believed I would die—either at the hands of Chad Burr, or from grief. And it had been okay with me. I’d always been comfortable with the danger inherent in ensuring that justice was done, and had figured it was a fair trade to see the three people I’d loved most in the world avenged.

  But now every cell in my body rebelled. Maybe my mind had been ready to cash in, but the rest of me was totally against the idea. And didn’t that just put a crimp in things?

  Pierce snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Hey. You’re alive and we have an appointment in there.” He jabbed a finger toward the tall structure with lots of windows.

  “You do realize it’s not even dawn. There’s barely a promise of sunrise on the horizon, and they’re probably not open yet.”

  He squinted at me. “They don’t close.”

  I unfastened my seatbelt, craned my neck, and looked up. “With all that glass a sniper could pick them off one by one.” A chill slithered over my skin.

  Pierce got out of the car, circled around, hitched a hand under my arm, and jerked me out of the Citroën. “Time to function, Hot Shot. My attorneys are the best, but there are some damn fine officers in the Yard. You need your head in the game. Now.”

  Fear had latched on and was making an ugly mess of my thoughts. Function, Everly. Damn it! Sure as I stood there in the Scotland Yard car park, my eyes had to be glazing over. Shock from the weirdness of the past twenty-four hours had slammed my brain into a no-function state.

  “Fuck.” Pierce swooped in and planted a hard, demanding kiss on my mouth.

  When he stepped back, I sucked in deep breaths until my vision cleared. The earth tipped back into place, snapping me into the present moment with a jarring thud. “Okay. Ready. Let’s take on Scotland Yard.”

  The inspector handling our case had been friends with Pierce “back in the day,” so things went…not as smoothly as I’d expected. Pierce’s attorney was excellent, my statement had been prepared perfectly, and the still pictures and videos we’d taken on-scene were self-explanatory.

  It was when the Yard version of an FBI profiler led me to his office for a “quick chat” that things went a bit skewy. I’d shared the pictures I took of Fion Connor’s secret room, and apparently the inspectors were concerned about my reaction.

  I answered their questions honestly. Yeah, it was damn scary. No, I hadn’t realized Connor had been stalking me all of my life. Yes, I thought she was mentally ill. No, my parents had never mentioned her. And the ringer: yes, I’d shoot her again in the same circumstances.

  The inspector tapped his pen against pursed lips.

  Reliving the scene had kicked my sanity back where it belonged. I scooted my chair back, stood. “I’m done here.”

  He got that wild-eyed, startled look I seem to bring out in men, so I simplified the facts. “Connor was pointing a loaded Glock at Pierce, for God’s sake. And she said he was expendable. Expendable, my ass.” I exited the office, and maybe closed the door a titch more forcefully than necessary. Expendable. It pissed me off.

  Halfway down the hall I came to a dead stop. Well, then. Apparently I cared about Tynan Pierce. Oh, I’d always loved him. As an interesting friend. As a man who could teach me so many things about covert life that I’d need in my quest for revenge. Things no one else knew, much less would be willing to teach me. I even loved him as a damn-but-you-make-my-hormones-happy kind of guy, not that I’d considered indulging said hormones.

  But this was different. My soul had noticed him. I locked that bit of newly-minted intel away and poked my nose into the office where I’d left Pierce with his Yard buddy and the attorney. “You ready to go?”

  Pierce gave me a quick once-over, eyes narrowed, and then his pupils dilated.

  Did I look different? Was it visible, how he’d wiggled his way into my soul?

  “Yeah. Ready.” He stood, shared a complicated handshake with his buddy, kissed his attorney on the cheek, and escorted me out of the building. “We have a ten-hour drive,” he said. “You okay with taking over when we hit M6? It’s a straight shot for about eighty miles.”

  I stopped, caught his hand. “Where are we going?”

  “Ireland. Eamon Grady.” The color had leached from his face again.

  Not ready to confront whatever was knocking the stuffing out of Tynan Pierce, I tried to keep it light. “There’s water between here and there. Lot’s of water.”

  He grinned. “Ferry.”

  We took turns sleeping and driving. We each sto
pped once for gas and to get coffee and snacks while the other one slept. Finally, about forty miles south of Dublin we were both awake and coherent at the same time, and my curiosity took full advantage. “Do you know where Eamon Grady is?”

  Pierce nodded. “Yes.”

  “That sign said we’re heading for County Cork.”

  “They got the sign right.”

  “Does Grady live in Cork?” My patience was thinning, and my curiosity was about to flash-fire.

  “Yes.”

  I slapped his arm with the back of my hand. “Do I have to touch you?”

  Silence.

  “In this situation, shutting me out is dangerous. You know that, so why are you—?”

  He flung his arm across my body. “Just do it.”

  A shiver settled at the base of my spine, and I knew, just knew, that touching Pierce was going to change my life forever. It wasn’t logical. There was no reason that this was different from any other time my fingertips had trespassed into his private world. Except for the gray tint to his skin, and the secrets he was keeping from me. Okay. This was different. In the past, he’d been hiding super spy stuff. This time he was knee-deep in personal angst of some sort.

  Pierce shot me a glance. “It’s not that bad, Belisama. It’ll just be easier for both of us if I show you.”

  My breath hitched. “It’s not something that can be undone, Pierce. My fingers, no, it’s really my mind that can’t erase what my fingers see.”

  “Got that.” His hand fisted, relaxed. “We’re a few hours from…home. Better get to it, because you’re gonna want time to process.”

  “Flippydoodles.” There wasn’t anything else to say, so I closed my eyes and rested my fingertips on his arm.

  Images flashed, some blurry, some clear, all of them intimate. Pierce as a kid, in a schoolroom with a few other children, in his childhood bedroom, with his parents. “Your mother, at least I think it’s your mother, is stunning. Black hair and your blue eyes.”

  “Her name is Siofra. Means sprite. Máthair is petite.” There was a grin underlying his words.