Submission is Not Enough Kobo

by Lexi Blake

  It was as sacred a vow as Ian Taggart could make.

  Had he loved her that much? The ring he’d found would seem to prove that theory. Should he take that as evidence? Should he honor who he used to be and throw himself in?

  How could he do that when he could still hurt her?

  “I’ll think about it.” Was she hating him right at this moment? She was likely in Liam’s car being driven home to deal with her problems. That had been a cowardly move on his part. He owed her protection and he hadn’t given it. He’d allowed Liam and Avery to act as her family. He was supposed to be the one she turned to. He’d been the one to turn her away.

  He could still see how upset she’d been at him for staying behind.

  “Come on.” Ian turned away with a long-suffering sigh. “We do need to talk about the fact that Hope McDonald’s shown up again. Nick got some intel earlier this evening. He says it’s significant.”

  He followed Ian out of the room. God, how had it all gone to hell? One minute he’d been so close and the next he was back in purgatory.

  The answer was clear. Hope McDonald. The bane of his existence.

  “Where did she surface? Does she have her other followers with her?” He called them followers but they were victims. Victims like him and Robert. Victims with their minds wiped and their loyalty stolen.

  The heavy thud of industrial music had stopped, replaced with quiet. Sanctum was closing up for the night. Ian’s boots rang against the metal of the stairs. “I’m not sure. I spent more time on the phone with Derek than I did talking to Nick. I had to prioritize my nephew.”

  His son. TJ. Theo Jr. “Is he really all right?”

  “According to Kai, but I’m sure Erin will let us know. I suspect she’s going to stay with Li tonight and tomorrow we’ll send the boys out to secure her house. Bear and Boomer are going to stay there tonight to watch over the place until we can get the glass reset and figure out what happened with the security system.”

  He followed Ian down the final set of stairs. To his left a few of the subs were cleaning the lounge area.

  A vision of her laughing with a group of subs flashed through his brain. She was standing with Charlotte and Avery and Serena. She wasn’t dressed in fet wear, but she wasn’t wearing her typical utilitarian pants and plain button-down either. She was in a stunning emerald cocktail dress, her hair up but with the sweetest tendrils flowing around the graceful curve of her neck. She laughed at something Charlotte said and then the women held up shot glasses and slammed them back with a holler.

  Someday that would be their wedding.

  “You lost again?”

  Ian’s question made him shake his head and come back to reality.

  “Whose wedding was held here?” He needed to know it had been real and not something his brain was making up to fill in the empty places.

  Ian frowned. “We’ve never had a wedding here but we’ve done some collaring ceremonies and a couple of receptions.”

  “She was wearing a green dress.”

  Ian’s lips curled up. “Ah, that was Jesse and Phoebe’s wedding. She was a bridesmaid. After the ceremony we came back here for the party. If I recall you hit on her pretty hard and she shut you down. She might have actually punched you in the face that night. She gets mean when she drinks too much tequila, but at the time I thought it was progress. Back then Erin was a little like the playground bully. She hit the people she cared about, ignored the ones she didn’t. I don’t think she was hugged much as a child.”

  He didn’t like her being referred to as a bully. She wasn’t like that. “I read your report on her as an operative. She’s competent and smart.”

  “She’s brilliant with amazing instincts,” Ian agreed.

  “She was better than me in the field. Why would a woman like her ever want me?”

  Ian wagged a finger his way. “Because she wasn’t very smart, brother. Women get weird ideas in their heads and we have to jump on the chance. If you want that woman, your best bet is doing anything you can to stay close to her. You don’t even have to wear her down. You already managed that. I don’t think you’re taking proper advantage of the situation. Dude, you died like right in front of her. That’s going to buy so many Sundays where you don’t have to run errands or go to church or do anything but sit in your chair with a beer in hand, watching whatever sport happens to be on that day. Also, I bet you could get a real increase in the amount of blowjobs offered. Don’t expect that to last though. They get super embarrassed when they have to go to the doc for jaw pain. Yeah, stick to the football plan. Every time she asks you to go grocery shopping on Sunday, kind of put your hand to your heart and wince a little as you agree. It’ll work every time.”

  His brother was such an ass. “I can’t even call her Erin without a pain going through my head.”

  Ian stared for a moment. “You hid that one well.”

  Theo touched his hand to his head. “That didn’t hurt. Erin. Erin.” He winced as the pain shot through him. “Maybe it’s because I’m overthinking.”

  “Or it’s because nothing that woman did to you is permanent and you’re going to come out of this.”

  “You believe that?” He wasn’t sure he did.

  Ian nodded. “I do. You’re a Taggart. She can’t beat you. She can’t break you. She sure as fuck can’t remake you. You relax and let nature take its course. You were meant to be with Erin. The biggest obstacle you face right now is her worry and your fear. When you both let go and let yourselves be, you’ll find your way home. But you have to try, Theo. You can’t keep sitting in Case’s apartment playing video games and hiding from the world. Say her name. Take the goddamn pain because there’s something amazing on the other side. Now stop reliving your love affair. We’ve got a meeting to attend and a crazy, creepy doctor to take down. Can we do that without you weeping or bursting into some mangina song?”

  He shot his brother the finger. That was Ian to a T. He gave him the most amazing advice, brought up his spirits and made him believe, and then capped it off by being an ass. It was his way. “I think I can handle it.”

  “Ian, did he run?” Case rounded the corner. He caught sight of them and took a deep breath, as though relieved to see Theo was still there. “Good. Nick is changing and Robert just got here. We should be ready to go in thirty minutes or so.”

  Was his twin still worried he was going to up and disappear? How much had he cost Case?

  He’d been living at Case’s place, letting his brother handle the load while he disappeared into a world of video games and TV shows and tried to forget what had happened to him. Case had gotten married and Theo hadn’t bothered to get to know Mia. He’d decided he didn’t know anyone, so why should he know her?

  He’d discounted them all because he was so fucking angry.

  “I’m ready,” he told his brother. “And I’m not going anywhere. I’m here to stay.”

  Case nodded, but didn’t look like he believed it. “Go and get changed. You can take a shower if you need to. I’m going to get everything ready for Nick.”

  Theo followed Ian into the locker room to change.

  Thirty minutes later, Theo stared up at the screen and felt sick to his stomach. There she was.

  Hope McDonald was stepping out of a limo, her eyes covered by designer sunglasses. The sun glinted off her blonde hair and she looked like a pretty socialite, like some rich lady who was probably attending tea with her friends.

  She was a sociopathic monster who believed she was owed the world.

  After everything I’ve done for you, why can’t you give me this? I’m not really your mother, you know. I’m only a few years older than you. Can’t you see? I want you to be my prince, Theo. We belong together.

  He reached out and grabbed the water in front of him.

  “Don’t,” his sister-in-law said. She passed him a can of lemon-lime soda. “Drink this. It’ll settle your stomach better.”

  He gripped the can and flipped the t
op open, sending Mia a nod. “Thank you.”

  She smiled back at him, her hand slipping over Case’s. “No problem.”

  Well, that was one thing he now knew about the woman Case had married. She was kind. He took a long drink, the cool soda easing him. It was enough to ground him and allow him to focus on the picture again.

  “She looks good.” Robert’s voice was flat, his eyes unwavering.

  “She looks psychotic,” Charlotte shot back.

  Robert turned to her, shaking his head. “Oh, but she doesn’t. When she wants to, she can look as normal as anyone. She can smile and you believe her. It’s only when you’re alone with her that you realize she doesn’t care about anyone or anything but herself. Ask her sister. Faith thought Hope cared about her. That’s how she gets you. You think what she’s doing is kind, but she does nothing at all that doesn’t serve her agenda. Trust me, if that woman smiles your way, it’s because she’s thinking of how she can use you.”

  “I promise not a single person here is going to underestimate her,” Ian assured Robert. “Nick, where and when was this taken and do we have eyes on her?”

  “It was taken by Kayla Summers of the London office. She works under Damon Knight. She and Owen Shaw were tracking her around Asia when they got a tip from a reliable source that she was making her way to Europe. This was taken outside the Parisian offices of a pharmaceutical company with Collective ties. I also have tracked your man Hutch to the same city, but I lost him again.”

  “I knew he was going after her,” Case said.

  Alex shook his head. “We can’t be sure of that. Paris is a big place.”

  “I think we can.” Eve ran a hand over her husband’s. “I told you what I thought he was doing. He’s going after her, but he’s ashamed. He doesn’t feel like he can come home until he’s made things right.”

  “Why would he be ashamed?” Case asked. “No one blames him.”

  In this, he was an expert. “He blames himself. I assure you of that. I know because I blame myself. It’s not rational or right, but it’s true and it’s not something he can stop. He was made to feel weak. He’s gone to a place where he’s in control again. She didn’t take his memory, but she did give him to Tony for training. Tony used pain to ensure cooperation.”

  “Is he why you have four broken bones you didn’t have before?” Case asked, his voice tight.

  Theo shrugged. After he’d gotten back to Dallas he’d been subjected to numerous tests. MRIs and blood work and CT scans of every part of his body. It had told a story he hadn’t fully remembered. He’d been brutalized. “I don’t recall and now I think that might be a good thing. Maybe. I don’t know. Do you want to remember Hell, or is it worse that it sits in the back of your brain and you can’t quite catch it? You can’t remember why you’re so fucking afraid of a baseball bat sitting in the corner of your brother’s apartment. Would it be better if I knew it had been used to break my bones? That’s where Hutch is. He knows what happened to him. He can’t forget.”

  Robert held a hand up. “I’m totally glad I can’t remember. I think it would suck ass. So I salute whoever gave me the DNA that enabled that fucking drug to take over so easily.”

  He wasn’t mentioning the fact that he woke up screaming in the middle of the night, fighting invisible demons. Theo had to hold him down sometimes until he was fully awake and back to being Robert. But Theo wasn’t going to mention that. They all dealt with the same thing in different ways. Robert denied it. Theo pushed away everyone who cared about him.

  And it looked like Hutch was out for vengeance. “I think this information could have come from Hutch and that means we might have a shot at finding him and getting some good intel from him. We can convince him to come home and he can tell us everything he knows. If he’s been following her for a while, he likely knows what she’s up to.”

  “Are you sure you can trust him?” Nick asked. “He could be angry. You left him there for a long time. The operation to retrieve Theo was a long game. Don’t look at me like that. I understand it, but I’m not the one who was left in that woman’s clutches for months.”

  “I know Hutch,” Eve said with surety. “I believe Kai would back me up. It’s not in his character to hurt the men and women he considers his family. His father wasn’t around much and from what I can tell he and his stepmother never got along. From his psych reports he felt out of place while he was growing up. He was the only child his mother and father had. The dad remarried after she died and there was definite preference shown to the children he had with the new wife. I believe Hutch found his place in the world when he joined the CIA team. He might not be willing to face them right now, but he wouldn’t ever hurt them.”

  “So we have to figure out why and how he needs our help.” Ian sat back in his chair, his fingers coming up to steeple in front of his chest.

  His brother’s I’m thinking face.

  God, was Ian right? Had he fought so fucking hard and it was all going to come back at some point and he would have lost everything? His mind was making connections faster and faster when he didn’t try to force it.

  Had he lost her tonight because he was so afraid he wouldn’t even look at his son?

  Nick began talking about the pharmaceutical corporation and who Kayla and Owen thought McDonald had been meeting with. Theo let it all sink in. The meeting went on with discussion of how and why she would be working with The Collective again.

  He was useless here. What was he going to tell them? She had been very careful about hiding her “boys” when The Collective came around. At the time, their connection had been through a pharmaceutical company named Kronberg.

  He didn’t know anything, but maybe Robert did.

  He turned to his friend, who had kept his mouth shut after his initial advice. That was kind of Robert’s way. Maybe being quiet was a protective measure, or perhaps it had simply been a part of who he’d been before. Either way, Theo thought Robert might know more than he thought he did. “Do you remember when the money ran out?”

  Robert frowned. “She didn’t talk about that kind of stuff around us.”

  “But think back. Why did she say we were leaving Argentina?”

  “The second base?” Robert asked. “That’s kind of how I thought of it. The first base was her dad’s place in the Caymans. At least that’s the first one I remember. I woke up in the outer building.”

  They’d gone over all of this when they’d first gotten back. Eve and Kai had spent hours with both of them going over everything they could remember with a fine-tooth comb.

  “Did she not say anything when we suddenly moved to Colombia? I get flashes of doing it at night sometimes. Like we were on the run.”

  Robert sat back. “I overheard Tony talking to Victor. I think Kronberg wanted one of us. I think they wanted some proof the drugs and the therapy were working. She wasn’t willing to give anyone up.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Ian said. “According to everything we’ve discovered, Kronberg cut off her funding over that. It’s precisely why she had you robbing banks a month later. She also had another stash of experiments in Asia. Why not give them one and continue on? Nothing was more important to that woman than her research.”

  Robert’s eyes came up. “That’s not true. Tomas was. I mean Theo. He was her favorite. I think they didn’t want just one of us. They wanted him.”

  “Why would Kronberg insist on Theo?” Case asked.

  Ian had gone a little pale. “They knew it was you. They knew you were my brother. This is a smart group. They know all the major players. Kronberg wanted to know if she could turn a Taggart, a Navy SEAL, a former CIA team member. They wanted to see if she could turn the best.”

  Robert nodded. “I think that’s what happened. She wouldn’t give him up. She knew if she let them examine Theo, they would find out he wasn’t as perfectly controlled as the rest of us. It would have fallen apart.”

  “And they probably would have terminated
the experiment,” Charlotte concluded. “So instead she decided to run. The question is, what has she got now that would tempt The Collective to take her back into the fold? They were looking for her pretty hard for a couple of months.”

  “Every agency in the world has been looking for her,” Ian murmured. “I wonder what I could get out of Fain if I shared this information with the Agency.”

  Nick turned on Ian. “You’ll get us in the back seat of this op, Tag. That’s what you’ll do. I know you have your brother back but I’ll never get Des back. She’s not coming home to me. Don’t even think about passing this off to the Agency.”

  “I wouldn’t be passing it off.” Ian was using his most patient voice. It was the one that sounded only slightly annoyed. “I would be sharing intel to get intel. Do you trust me? Because if you don’t, I’m not sure why you’re here.”

  “I trust Knight and he trusts you,” Nick allowed. “I can’t get left out of this.”

  “You won’t, but Ezra Fain is a different kind of agent. He proved that when he didn’t storm the building and try to take Theo,” Case said.

  “There was a lot of pressure on him to do exactly that, according to Chelsea.” Charlotte looked up at Nick. “I would go to her, but we try to keep a wall up. She works for the Agency. I can’t put her in a position where she has to choose, but she thinks Ezra is trustworthy. He seems more interested in actually serving his country and the Constitution than he is in moving up in the Agency.”

  “Which is why he’ll get his ass fired and show up on my doorstep with his hand out eventually,” Ian complained. “Let me get some use out of him now before he turns into Adam 2.0.”

  Charlotte’s hand moved out, slapping at her husband’s chest. “What are you going to do when Adam leaves? Who are you going to kick then?”

  The rumors were Adam and Jake were almost ready to start their own business. Not that they would get far. They intended to lease space in the same office building and work cases in tandem with the main company. Adam had developed a facial recognition software that was supposed to make him an incredible amount of money. He was already joking about how much he was going to charge Big Tag for use.