DRAGON SECURITY: The Complete 6 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

  “Surely not everyone she ever worked with was working Friday.”

  Hayden shrugged. “Like I said, it’s a tight-knit community. They use the same people over and over again. The only possibility I can see is maybe a former actor who has a beef against Quinn. But everyone I talked to said that Quinn was a sweetheart and they never saw her argue with anyone.”

  “Another dead end.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know what to tell you. The only thing I can figure is that it’s a crazed fan who somehow put it all together.”

  I nodded, forced to agree with him. I couldn’t see any other possibility.

  “Okay. We’ll get back on it in the morning. If we’re lucky, this guy will show his hand at some point and we’ll nab him that way.”

  “Police aren’t being terribly helpful,” Hayden said. “The moment they found out she was a porn star, they pretty much stopped caring.”

  “Ridiculous, isn’t it?”

  I stood up and gathered my things. “Go home, boys. Get some rest. Maybe something will occur to one of us tomorrow.”

  Hayden turned and opened the door to my office, sauntering in that way he had to Sam’s desk. She was still there, squinting at her computer through the glasses she was supposed to wear all the time, but only wore when she was working on the computer. She’d been trying to get access to a hard drive I took from my brother’s computer at his office for weeks, but she wasn’t making much progress. She thought that someone got to it first and corrupted the files so that she could not extract anything from them. But she was determined to try.

  She was a good friend.

  “Hey, grandma,” Hayden said, causing Sam to glare at him. But she took off the glasses first.

  “Go home, loser,” she grumbled.

  “Ah, don’t be like that, Sammy. You know I love you.”

  “Yeah, that’s why you make fun of me every chance you get.”

  “Not making fun. Just admiring the 80s era sweater sets.” He slipped his finger under the shoulder of her pink cardigan. “I think my mom had one like this.”

  Sam smacked his hand away. “We can’t all dress like supermodels, Hayden.”

  “But what a world that would be!”

  Dante rammed his shoulder into Hayden’s. “Let’s go get a beer, brother.”

  Hayden glanced back at me. “Join us?”

  I shook my head. “Go on. Blow off some steam, but be back here at nine, okay?”

  “No problem.”

  They walked out the door, but Hayden glanced back, his eyes moving over Sam. I don’t think she noticed. She was staring at the computer screen again, squinting because she forgot to put her glasses back on. I picked them up and handed them to her.

  “Any progress?”

  “Not really.” She sat back and looked up at me. “I’m sorry, Meg. I was really hoping to figure this out for you.”

  “I know. It’s okay.”

  “Has Hayden found anything new?”

  “I think he’s stopped working on it ever since I lost my temper last week. Can’t really blame him.”

  “If anyone can find anything on this, it’ll be Hayden.”

  “Maybe.”

  I squeezed her shoulder lightly before heading out myself.

  I drove home, thinking about everything that had been going on these last months. The last two years, really. First Luke, my beloved fiancé, disappeared the morning of our wedding. He left a note telling me that he’d changed his mind about his ability to commit. But the thing was, we’d been together since our junior year of high school. Ten years. We stayed together through high school, through him going to the Navy, me the Marines. Through SEAL training and then the CIA came calling for him. He disappeared for months on end, trying to make the world a better place he’d tell me. We both were. I went to Afghanistan and fought beside my fellow soldiers, ending up in a hospital in Germany during my second tour after an IED exploded under the Hummer I was traveling in. Luke wasn’t there, but he came as quickly as he could. Then I started Dragon with Peter’s support and Luke continued to fight the good fight with the CIA. Finally, six months before he disappeared, he told me he’d taken a desk job, that he was ready to settle down, to make a life with me. We planned the wedding…everything. And then he was gone, and I didn’t hear anything more from him until Amber Zavalas came walking into our lives nearly a year ago.

  Peter, my beloved older brother, was killed in a car accident three months after Luke disappeared. I thought…we all thought it was just a tragic accident. But then Amber, this little waitress working a diner in the middle of nowhere, showed up pregnant, telling a story of how Peter came to the diner several times a month, apparently investigating some stolen software. She was being followed—even kidnapped at one point. It all seemed connected to Peter, causing us to take a closer look at his accident. I no longer believed it was an accident. Someone killed Peter to shut him up. For what reason, I wasn’t sure. But I knew Luke was involved.

  After Amber was kidnapped, when it was all over and she was safe, I found a note one of her kidnappers had left in the empty house where they took her. It was for me…a note with words that only I would understand. It was Luke. He was still alive.

  But then six months passed and nothing.

  We couldn’t prove Peter’s accident wasn’t an accident. We couldn’t figure out what his investigation revealed beyond some sort of connection to a terrorist plot in France. We couldn’t figure out who would want to kill him or why.

  But I knew deep in my heart that when we figured out what Peter was up to, I would find Luke. And that was what kept me holding on. That was what got me out of bed in the morning. I’d lost so much when I lost Luke and then Peter. I needed to believe that I would find Luke again, that we’d eventually live out our happily ever after. I had to believe it.

  I grabbed a bottle of wine out of the kitchen, went into the master bath, and ran a hot tub of bubbles. I sank under the water up to my neck, thinking about Cole and Amber. They’d been living together for nearly a year, since the baby was born. He’d just returned from taking her on a trip to Europe, a sort of engagement trip. When he told me he planned to propose, I was torn between sheer joy and a blinding jealousy. I was supposed to be the one who was happily married, the one bringing babies into the world with the same dark eyes their father had.

  Would I always see the world through the warped lens of heartbreak?

  The doorbell rang just as the bottle of wine was about to run out. I glanced at the time on my phone, frowning. It was after midnight. Who the hell rings the doorbell this late at night?

  I quickly dried off and wrapped myself up in a thick bathrobe Luke once stole for me from a luxury hotel in San Francisco. When I wrenched the door open, I was surprised to find Dante standing on my front stoop.

  “What are you doing here? How did you know where I lived?”

  “I wanted to talk to you in private, and this seemed to be the best place to do it.”

  “What about?”

  “Your brother’s accident.”

  I tilted my head slightly. “What do you know about that?”

  “I know you’ve had Hayden working on it for months. And Sam’s working on his hard drive, right?”

  “How do you know that?” I repeated, studying his face a little closer.

  “It’s a small office. You pick up a lot.”

  I stepped out of the way, gesturing for him to come inside. He did, striding into my house like he owned it. I watched him move into the living room, his eyes moving to the collection of framed pictures I kept scattered on the walls and shelves throughout the room. He paused to study a photograph of Luke and me taken just weeks before he disappeared. I walked up and slipped the picture out of his hands.

  “What do you want, Dante?”

  “I still have friends at the New York Police Department. One of them is a guy who runs the accident reenactment department.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He coul
d use the local cops’ investigation into your brother’s accident to reconstruct it. Prove that another car was involved.”

  “We already know another car was involved.”

  “Yeah, but from what I’ve been able to gather, your information is based on assumption and circumstantial evidence. My friend can give you something more concrete.”

  He was right that we didn’t have proof that another car was involved beyond the paint scrapes found on the side of Peter’s car. Concrete evidence might convince the local cops to take another look, maybe even begin a search for the other car. Hayden, however, didn’t think that would ever happen.

  “There’s not enough information in the investigation to point to another car. What would your friend use?”

  “Tire marks on the street. The location of the paint scrapes on the side of Peter’s car. Damage to Peter’s car.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if we should be sharing what we have with other departments.”

  “It could help.”

  “Why would you want to help me?”

  “Because you’re my boss. Because I want to show you I’m a team player.”

  I studied him a minute, those caramel brown eyes making my heart do something it shouldn’t. He was a good-looking man, but there was more to it than that. He reminded me of Luke. He didn’t look a thing like him, but he sounded like him. Every time he opened his mouth, my soul stood up and sang. And there was something about those eyes…lots of guys have brown eyes. But Dante’s were so much like Luke’s that it killed me to look at them.

  I’d never been drawn to someone other than Luke. But Dante…

  “Why did you leave the NYPD?”

  “Wasn’t that in my file?”

  “Yes. But I want to hear your version.”

  He turned away slightly, looking around the room again as though he had every right. “There were things they wanted me to do, loopholes in the law that they wanted me to take advantage of. I wasn’t comfortable with it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like arresting a nice old lady simply because she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like ruining some teen’s life because he wouldn’t snitch on his buddies.”

  “They didn’t respect your morals?”

  “They didn’t respect anyone’s morals. You have to follow certain rules in this life, or you allow yourself to become too bogged down in dirt and you pull everyone else down with you.”

  Now he sounded like Peter. My brother had always believed that everyone had a responsibility to society as a whole to behave within a certain code.

  But look where that got Peter.

  “Okay. I’ll get you a copy of the files. But this is to be kept between you and me only. Understand?”

  “Understood.”

  He turned to me again, his eyes moving slowly over the bathrobe I was wearing. I thought I saw a touch of amusement in those eyes. But then it disappeared behind this mask Dante seemed to wear the majority of the time.

  “I’ll see you in the morning, then, boss.”

  He walked past me and his scent enveloped me for a second. He smelled like a woodshed in the summer. And I thought I saw a tiny, silver chain just under the collar of his shirt. I wondered what it was, what was important enough to him that he wore it around his neck. But then he was gone, and I was alone once again with my ghosts.

  An overwhelming sense of loneliness suddenly overwhelmed me.

  Would I forever be alone?

  Chapter 12

  Quinn

  I woke as the sun began to peek through the thin blinds, not quite sure where I was for a moment. But then I felt Vincent shift beside me and it all came flooding back, the heat of his body against mine, the whispers we’d exchanged late in the night, the story he told about the girl he once loved. We were lying tangled on the couch, never bothering to pull out the sleeper hidden inside, my fingers brushing against her name and date of death on his chest. I knew what drove him to do such a thing. I’d done the same, years ago, marking my inner thigh with the tinniest blue heart with a crack down the center. It’d hurt like hell—especially after it got infected—and the pain was almost a catharsis against the man it symbolized.

  But it was a bitch for Susie to cover for every movie I did.

  I leaned close and kissed him over the tattoo, then slipped out of bed. I didn’t want Olivia to wake up and find my bed unslept in. But I shouldn’t have worried. She was sound asleep still, curled up on her side, her hands tucked under her head. I stood there for a long minute, never able to drink her in enough. She was the best thing I’d ever done. My masterpiece. The idea that someone could hurt her…I was putting a lot of trust in Dragon Security. In Vincent.

  I showered quickly and was downstairs making breakfast before either Olivia or Vincent woke. But then it was chaos as Olivia rushed around searching for her schoolbooks, Vincent teasing her as he tried to help. I barely got a pancake down her throat before she was mumbling under her breath about the homework she should have done instead of playing on the beach all weekend.

  Was she ten or sixteen?

  Vincent trapped me against the sink as I tried to rinse the dishes, tugging my hair out of the way so he could drop a kiss on my neck.

  “Morning,” he whispered against my ear.

  I leaned back into him for a long second, but then we heard Olivia running back down the hallway, her bare feet slapping against the bare wood floor.

  “Can you help me with my writing assignment, Mommy? I have to turn it in as soon as I get to school.”

  The doorbell rang just as I settled at the table to take a look at what we were doing. It was simple paragraph, something Olivia could do completely on her own in about five minutes, but I helped anyway as Vincent went to answer the door. He came back a second later with Cole in tow.

  “Olivia, this is Cole Bradford. He’s my friend that we told you about last night.”

  Olivia looked up from her homework and politely held out a hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  Cole smiled, his attractive features turning into something brighter and even more pleasant as a dimple appeared low on his left cheek.

  “Nice to meet you, too, Olivia,” he said in a warm, deep voice.

  Olivia blushed a little before turning her attention back to her homework.

  “There’s coffee and pancakes, if you’d like.”

  “Thank you, but my fiancée got up early and fixed me breakfast before I left.”

  I looked up just in time to catch a look of amusement on Vincent’s face.

  “You’re engaged?” he asked.

  “As of three days ago.”

  “Well, congrats, brother!”

  They did this fancy handshake that I lost track of after the first smack, and then they were doing that stupid bro hug that guys do, the thing where they slap each other on the back so they aren’t accused of actually showing any kind of affection for one another.

  “Congratulations,” I said when an awkward silence began to fall.

  “What’s engaged?” Olivia asked.

  “It means that Cole’s getting married.” Vincent shook his head, pure amusement on his face. “And that, in itself, is a miracle. If you’d known this guy the way I did, you would not believe it.”

  “Hey,” Cole said, a little color coming into his face, “I wasn’t that bad.”

  “You were worse. Do you remember that leave we took in Germany? All those girls—”

  “If I recall properly, you were right there beside me, brother.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not engaged.”

  His eyes jumped to me almost the second the words dropped from his mouth. I wasn’t sure what it was about the way he was looking at me—if he was wondering if there was hope that he might one day be engaged, or if he was remembering the story he’d told me last night—but I felt like someone had doused me in ice cold water. I got up, suddenly remembering that I’d left my cellphone upstairs.

  “Qu
inn,” he said as I walked past him, reaching for my hand, but purposely not grabbing it.

  “I’ll be back. Can you help her finish that assignment?”

  If he said anything else, I didn’t hear it.

  I ran upstairs, taking the stairs two at a time, nearly tripping once or twice because my legs weren’t quite long enough for such exercise. My phone was on the dresser in my bedroom. I stopped just inside the threshold, my eyes moving to the bed across the room. It was a new bedspread. No one mentioned it, not even Vincent when he said they’d be cleaning the mess the intruder had made in here. He never even gave me details of the mess that was made, just the mention of the message on the wall—which had been covered with fresh paint that I could still smell. But I knew it was a new bedspread because mine had a slight tear on the bottom left corner that had happened late one night when Olivia was sick and I was trying to get her to the bathroom, but my bracelet caught on a loose thread. The tear wasn’t there anymore.

  I was creeped out by the idea that some stranger had been close enough to my bed to require the cleanup crew to replace my bedspread.

  I grabbed my phone just as it began to vibrate with a call.

  “Quinn, thank goodness! I thought you were never going to answer the phone.”

  “Coleman?”

  “I’m at the studio. You need to get down here as soon as you can.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s been a break in.”

  I cursed under my breath, my mind already spinning. “Can we film?”

  “No. It’s bad, Quinn. Really bad.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there as quick as I can.”

  “Should we call the police?”