Raven (Kindred #1)

by Scarlett Finn

  Riled by Brodie snooping in her office and by this new person in her apartment, her anger grew. She didn’t want to be railroaded and had thought she and Brodie were forging a relationship of trust, now she wasn’t so sure. “What the hell have I gotten myself involved in?” she demanded, folding her arms around the book she’d stolen from Brodie. “Information! You said you wanted information, not to take over my life!” Color caught the corner of her eye and her mouth fell open at the sight of the curtains now hanging on either side of each of the windows that she’d been too distracted to notice before. “Window treatments?”

  “They save lives,” Art said. Brodie was behind him, doing a terrible job at concealing his amusement. Zara no longer needed to wonder who had mentored him in his life lessons.

  Touching her thumb to the tips of her first two fingers, she lifted her arm, but words failed her. These men had been in her apartment for God knew how long, cooking, building furniture, and hanging curtains… She was actually nervous to go into her bedroom and office for fear of what else she’d find.

  “Take your work off the table,” Art said, extending an arm to rest a placating hand on her shoulder. “We’ll eat and you can tell us what we need to know.”

  Art crouched to clear up his tools, then carried the box toward the front door, all the while she pinned the stink eye on Brodie. “This wasn’t what I signed up for,” she hissed at him.

  With one stride, he got close enough to snag the back of her neck and yank her closer so he could plant his lips on her hairline. “Art taught me everything I know,” he murmured to her. “And he’ll be the one looking out for you when I’m not around.”

  As if this was enough of an explanation, he turned her around and smacked her ass to urge her toward the table. Gathering up her things, Zara used the time to absorb this turn of events. She put everything away and went into her bedroom to change her clothes. Thankfully, nothing in there appeared to be any different.

  When she came back out, the curtains were all closed and the men were seated at the table with food piled on their plates. They were eating and talking in hushed voices that she couldn’t hear until she got up close, except when she did, they stopped talking to look at her.

  “Where do you want to start?” Art asked as she lowered herself into the place set for her. “You know what the device is?”

  She nodded and looked at her plate. There was rice and chicken cooked in a sauce that smelled delicious. It had been a long time since someone had cooked for her. As tempted as she was to try the food, she didn’t have much of an appetite.

  “Eat,” Brodie said with his mouth full, pointing his fork at her plate. “It’s good.”

  “I’m sure it is,” she said. The men were hunched over their plates, scooping the food up in huge forkfuls that filled their mouths. This wasn’t a civilized meal to linger over; these men were using their fingers in place of knives and gulping from full water glasses. Pushing her plate away, Zara folded her hands on the table. Both men stopped eating and glanced at each other before focusing on her.

  “It’s a huge insult not to eat food someone has prepared for you,” Art said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s sheep stomach or monkey brains, you eat it. Some tribes will see their children go hungry just to feed new friends.”

  Dampening her urge to scream at them both for their boldness, she called on the professionalism she used at CI and made herself breathe until she could loosen her shoulders enough to be calm when she spoke. “Forgive me if I’m not particularly hungry,” she said. “And you’re one to talk about insults. You’ve come into my home uninvited and overhauled the place.”

  “Repaired damage done by us and improved your safety,” Art said, swallowing down his food. “Nothing was done to hurt you.”

  “I told you that you belong to me now,” Brodie said. “Once you’re in our inner circle there are no half measures. You’re in all the way.”

  “So trusting you means trusting your uncle and your crazy friend who commandeered my computer earlier?” she asked, losing grip of her temper. “Aren’t you pissed that they left all the hard work to you? What did you do? Survey women who had slept with you all to decipher which of you was best between the sheets? That’s a tough job you have, beau. How many assets do you have to screw your way through before they promote you to Chief Muff Diver?”

  “Zar—”

  “Let’s deal with our business,” she said, feeling a distinctive chill when she looked at Brodie. “You said that the right minds would have to be on developing the device and I can tell you who they are. Three weeks after Frank Mitchell’s death, there was a restructure of the Research and Development Department at Cormack Industries. Three of our best engineers were laid off and removed from the company payroll. Except they weren’t.”

  “What happened to them?” Art asked, discarding his fork onto his plate.

  “It took me a while,” she said. “But I traced them through a secondary funding scheme, set up as a fresh investment project to appear like a new subsidiary.”

  “Appear like?”

  “There was a huge injection of cash into a single account although each of the amounts was so small it would be deemed irrelevant. Cormack Industries does a lot of work with new energy initiatives. We have premises in the Arctic Circle, uninhabited islands offshore that research wave power and various plants throughout the country working with wind power. Pinning down which specific location these men had been relocated to was very difficult.”

  “But you found them?”

  “It’s called the Winter Chill Project, but it’s Game Time,” she said, fixing her attention on Art. “They’re based in a remote part of Quebec, on the east shore, which allows equipment to leave the docks here and travel up to them without having to worry about customs and such. CI has their own transportation and one of the engineers is a keen sailor. They bring in what they need in small batches, so that they can be transported on vessels small enough to come into the private slip they have near their facility.”

  “How did you put these pieces together?” Art asked.

  “At first it was a series of coincidences,” she said. “Today I found out that they had requisitioned a large quantity of chemicals cultivated by a lab we have in Florida.”

  “And that’s…?”

  “Enough to make me suspicious,” she said, maintaining a professional distance. “All of the vials are number coded. I haven’t yet deciphered what was in each of them. But I do know what the Florida lab does.”

  “What?” Brodie asked her and she slid her eyes toward him.

  “They work on vaccinations and the eradication of viral diseases.”

  “Fuck,” Brodie exhaled though there was little expression on his face.

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  Art lifted a hand to get her attention. “Can you be specific about where they are?”

  “I know their GPS location,” she said. “They’re so remote and well-hidden that you won’t find them on any map.”

  Art nodded and inhaled as he switched his focus to Brodie. “What do you want to do, Rave?”

  Brodie reclined in his seat to link his fingers at the back of his head. “Taking out the lab is an option,” Brodie said. “But I’d bet if they’re planning a demonstration on Saturday that whatever they need has already been brought into town.”

  “Agreed,” Art said. “We have to find out where it is.”

  “We know how it came into the country,” Brodie said to him. “Swift found nothing on the system. All traces of the project have been erased. He’s pulled up all the historic data, but that’s useless. There’s nothing new.”

  “Grant’s a smart motherfucker,” Art said. “He wouldn’t risk digitizing anything. Frank might have caught a whiff otherwise.”

  “He didn’t start working on this until after Frank died,” Zara said.

  Art glanced her way, wearing a frown. “He might not have moved on his ideas, but I’d bet he was developi
ng this plan since he first laid eyes on Game Time.”

  “Where would they be storing it in the city?” Brodie asked, leaning forward to rest his arms on the table. He twisted to address Art, and the older man shifted in his seat to face his nephew, making it obvious that they were done educating her.

  “It will have to be a dual strike,” Art said. “We’ll have to take out the storage facility here and the Quebec base at the same time or he’ll just regroup.”

  Brodie shook his head. “We can take out the base whenever we want, Chief. Grant has what he needs for the demonstration already. We have to think about what comes next. It’s Thursday now, I say we try to find the device he has here, whether we find it or not, I’ll take out the Quebec lab on Saturday. ”

  Her anxiety level had been increasing since she agreed to go with Grant to the Grand. Without knowing exactly what he planned, she couldn’t know what to expect. Accidents could happen and when playing with potentially live ammo, people’s lives could be at risk, including hers. And if Brodie was in Canada, he wouldn’t be around to keep her ass safe.

  “So we’re not even going to try to stop the demonstration at the Grand?” Zara asked, but neither man answered her question. It was as if she had ceased to exist. “We don’t even know what they’re planning, what this demonstration will be. It could be their intention to hurt people and I’m going to be there. I think I have the right to know if—”

  “Calm down,” Brodie said, barely offering her a glance. “We’re not going to let anything happen to you.”

  “You can’t guarantee that if you’re not going to be in the country,” she said. She didn’t like the way the men maintained focus on each other and dismissed her like an irritating gnat. They might be seasoned professionals, but she was the one walking into the fire. “What about everyone else at the Grand party?”

  Brodie’s eyes rose in their sockets as if he was counting to ten, or telling himself to ignore her because she only had to be tolerated for a short period. “Grant won’t hurt folks,” Brodie said. “He wouldn’t draw that kind of attention to himself. But we do need to figure out where he’s keeping the device here in town. It will be useful to monitor its movements.”

  Art nodded at his nephew. “Swift’s in town and ready to go.”

  “Yeah, but Falc is in Mexico with Wren,” Brodie said. “This is us.”

  “Swift has men.”

  “Who are not trained for this,” Brodie said with a deliberate look. “You know his position… I can take out the trio of scientists in the Canadian location. Dismantling their base will be easy after they’ve been eliminated, especially if it’s remote. I can do it in daylight if I have to.”

  “Swift and I will work on locating the inventory Grant has down here. We’ll destroy the compound when we find it and take down the targets.”

  “Leave the targets to me,” Brodie said. “Sabotage the device if you get the chance to do it without engaging or revealing yourself. Maybe if Grant fucks up the demonstration, his customers will lose interest. But just in case I’m wrong about his intentions, we’ll need to research how to destroy the virus and unless we know which one it is…”

  “We’ll patch Wren into the communications.”

  “Got it,” Brodie said. Both men nodded at each other and rose from the table at the same time.

  “Whoa, wait a second,” she said, leaping up and holding out her hands. “What was all of that?”

  “Preliminary planning of the op,” Brodie said. “We’ll nail down the specifics once we have a full briefing.”

  “An hour?” Art asked and Brodie nodded. “Excuse me.”

  Art left the table and took a phone from his belt, dialing it as he headed toward her office. Brodie went over to the couch to retrieve his jacket from the backrest.

  With whiplash at the sudden planning and abrupt action, Zara was trying to catch up. “You’re going to Canada?” she asked.

  “Yeah, write down the coordinates we need.”

  Too many possibilities. Too much potential for danger. She couldn’t let Brodie go on a mission that seemed like suicide. “You’re going up to Canada to take on three men? What if the virus is there? Are you going to attempt to destroy a toxic chemical that could kill you if you screw up?”

  Brodie nodded, but wasn’t looking at her. “And the device too, if it’s in production,” he said, putting his arms in his sleeves. “The schematics will still exist, but without his men and his resources, Grant will be slowed down. We’ll disable him once the imminent threat is dealt with.”

  Shocked at his detached implication, she blinked twice and tried to decide who she should be more worried about, Grant or Brodie. It didn’t take her long to decide who was the more lethal of the brothers. “Disable him? Disable Grant? What does that mean?”

  He was still aloof while his thoughts were clearly elsewhere, maybe on thinking up ways he could ‘disable’ his sibling. “We’re not gonna kill him… unless we have to.”

  Shaking her head, she cupped her chin and took a step toward him, wondering if he was insane. Despite his obvious proficiency, she couldn’t deny her feelings for him anymore because Brodie was still the one she was most worried about. “You can’t kill Grant and you can’t go up to take on this mission alone.”

  Oblivious to her apprehension, he was preoccupied. “Why not?” he asked, fixing the cuff of his jacket. “Is there more information that—”

  “It’s dangerous,” she said and moved another step in his direction in hopes of gaining his attention. “If you go up there, you could get yourself killed.”

  “Walk in the park,” he said, without considering her warning.

  Determined, she wouldn’t be ignored, Zara put herself in front of him. “No,” she said, grabbing the edges of his jacket when he began to sidestep her. “I can’t let you do this.”

  Now when he did look her in the eye, all she saw was focus, but it wasn’t on her. “We have to slow him down to give ourselves a chance to mobilize. If we don’t, Grant sells the device and people get hurt, is that what you want?”

  She was deflated and bewildered. “No… no, but there… there has to be another way.”

  “We’re open to suggestions,” Brodie said. But she was still trying to think of something when Art came out of her office.

  “Time to split,” Art said. “Swift will buzz Falcon.”

  Brodie removed her hands from his jacket and moved in time with Art in the direction of her front door. Except if they left now she wouldn’t see them again.

  In a last ditch effort to stop them from walking into harm’s way, she reached for the one thing that might make them think twice. “I’ll tell Grant,” she exclaimed. Both men stopped to turn and glare at her. “I will. I can’t let you do this. It’s insane.”

  “What did you think we were gonna do with the info?” Brodie asked. “Write it in a journal?”

  “There’s law enforcement and—”

  “Bureaucracy slows progress and doesn’t yield results,” Art said. “If you’re going to jeopardize the mission then—”

  “No,” Brodie said, opening a hand toward his uncle who was just behind him. “Baby—”

  “Oh no,” she said, shaking her head and backing up toward the couch. “You’re not going to sweet talk me into changing my mind. I gave you that information because I thought we were going to expose the danger. I didn’t think you were going to go all gung-ho and endanger yourself.”

  “I told you not to fall for me,” he said, losing the softness he had used in his attempt to placate her.

  “You think this is about us?” she scoffed. Their relationship was secondary to their lives. “This is about stupidity. What will happen when you all get yourselves killed? Am I supposed to finish the job on my own?”

  “We do this all the time, girlie,” Art said. “You don’t understand how highly trained all of us are. This is a piece of cake. It’s actually one of our less dangerous missions because it doesn’t re
quire direct contact with any of our targets.”

  “He said he was going to take out three of them,” she said, jabbing a finger in Brodie’s direction.

  Art’s mouth opened before he laughed a long hysterical stream that made him press his hands to his ribs. “You think he has to go near anyone to kill them? He’s a marksman. Do you know what that means? He can hollow out a dime from two hundred yards,” he said, approaching her. “The three of them will be dead before the first guy hits the floor. Then all he has to do is saunter over there and blast the place to high heaven.” Slapping a hand to Brodie’s shoulder, he gave him a yank. “Come on, Rave.”

  “You’re a murderer,” she murmured.

  “An assassin,” Art said.

  Brodie’s eyes stayed on hers and their darkness intensified. She had made so many excuses for him and believed him to be safe because he protected her. Zara had been alone with a man who was a killer for hire. A man she had been naked with and slept with had the ability to kill with impunity. While her connection to him seemed to strengthen every time they were together, she speculated on how a killer got rid of a woman when he was finished with her.

  “You’re not…”

  “What did you think I did with my time?” Brodie asked.

  She had to admit that his fighting skills and involvement in this situation suggested he didn’t live a wholesome life and he had stated that he excelled at killing. “Ok,” she conceded. “If you think you can do this without getting yourselves hurt then have at it. But Grant isn’t to be hurt… and don’t come to me for anything else. We’re through.”

  “You don’t get to walk away,” Brodie snarled and moved out of Art’s reach to come toward her. “You were warned that there was no exit once you were in.”

  Standing up to him, she remained steadfast. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “Shoot me? You have everything you need. I’ve told you everything. Destroy everything and then Grant will have nothing to sell and the world will be safe again.”

  “Kid,” Art said in a sedate tone and Brodie’s head snapped in his uncle’s direction. “Release.”