His Last Breath

by S. M. Butler

  “Our time is up,” he said. “Come with me. Meet your father.”

  She glanced up at him, his hand outstretched toward her. She shook her head. “I can’t. I don’t have any clothes. I don’t even have shoes on.” Her shoes. They were in Chris’s apartment. The card was in her shoe. The one that kept her alive.

  “I’ll get you anything you need. It’s now or never,” he replied. His hand wasn’t shaking. It was steady and firm as he waited for her. This was her shot.

  Slowly she took his hand, sliding her fingers into his warm palm. Chris stirred to life as Claude helped her step toward him. They were almost to Claude’s car at the end of the drive when Chris called her name. She glanced back, the hurt and betrayal plain on his face. She almost walked back to him, but Claude’s hand tightened on hers, not much, but just enough to let her know it wasn’t a good idea. She had a feeling Claude wouldn’t take no for an answer either.

  “Chris, I have to go.”

  “Don’t, Abigail. Don’t do this.”

  She smiled at him. God, she loved that stupid man. “Do me a favor. Take care of my shoes for me. They’re my favorite. I’m gonna come back for them.” If he got her stupid obvious message, he didn’t show. His eyes raged into a hurricane, complete with lightning and thunder streaking across his irises. She didn’t wait for an answer. She let Claude open the door and lead her into the passenger side of the car.

  As they drove away, they didn’t speak. She glanced in the rearview mirror. No one chased them.

  Maybe she’d read too much into what she and Chris had shared. Maybe he didn’t really care enough.

  ~*~*~

  Chris’s chest felt like there was a piano sitting on it. Watching her walk away from him left him completely numb on the outside while pain slashed its way through his insides. What the fuck would possess her to do that? To just let a man take her away?

  He growled. And that thing about her shoes. Jesus, she was so not a spy. He was lucky there wasn’t a contingent of armed men bearing down on her shoes right now. He pushed himself to his feet and ran back to his apartment. Addison and Murphy were there, but he ignored them as he went into his bedroom and found where she’d left her shoes.

  They looked ordinary. White with blue trim. Blue shoelaces. He looked over the entire shoe, then the other one. It wasn’t until he was about to put them down when he noticed something off with one of them. The arch was forming some kind of square outline.

  “Chris, what are you doing?” Addison asked from the doorway.

  “Hold on,” he said, absently as he lifted the insole, revealing a small SD card. “Hmm.” He lifted it out and frowned. What would Abigail need to hide a memory card for?

  “Chris!” He nearly growled as he stood and turned, fisting the card in his hand as Addison scowled at him. “You’re acting weird.”

  “Trust me, Addy. I wish I could tell you all about it,” he replied. “But I have to go. I’ll be back.”

  He all but ran next door into the garage and down into the belly of the lair. There had to be some clue on there as to what the fuck made Abigail get into a car with a complete stranger when she had a very fucking big target painted on her back.

  He grabbed his laptop and inserted the card into the side slot. He opened the file list and browsed through them. They all had default images names. He’d have to open every damn one of them to see what they were.

  If one of the senator’s security team made his way here, there would be more shortly. They had a very short timeframe to work with. Right then, he had not just Abigail to protect, but now his sister and Murphy were here. He couldn’t let them get stuck in the middle of this.

  He opened each file, realizing each one was an image of a document. Abigail’s documents. Her real ones, not the ones Senator Lewis had when he adopted her. Her Giroux files. He scanned over a few. There were payoff documents where Senator Lewis had gone to government agencies to fix her records, probably making her harder to trace. Surveillance pictures of Giroux, of his family.

  Jesus. There was enough here to put Lewis behind real-life prison bars, not just some cushy white collar prison. He’d thought Abigail had run because she wanted freedom. That was only part of it. She planned to put a lot of distance between her and Lewis. She would have had to because she was going to blow the top off of him.

  So who had Abigail now?

  “Sierra, pull the tape in the back of the garage. About thirty minutes ago.”

  “Yes, Agent Hardy,” the computer purred at him.

  He shook his head. Sometimes, he wasn’t sure if that computer was hitting on him or not.

  A few seconds later, the video played. He fast forwarded to the point where the new guy entered and stopped playback. “Sierra, that guy. Run his face through our database. I need to know who he is.”

  “Absolutely, Agent Hardy. I’d love to do that for you.” Oh, boy.

  The results popped up on the screen a few minutes later with a match. Chris’s eyes widened.

  “Jesus, Abigail,” he whispered. “You don’t do anything halfway, do you. Sierra, open this file on the mainframe and call the gang down.”

  A few minutes later, his team was collected in the briefing room, staring at him in various unhappy ways. He’d completely obliterated the whole no contact rule at this point and he knew it. None of them were all that happy with him. He couldn’t blame them.

  “Nathan wants to talk to you,” Scott said as he leaned back in his face. His face was impassive, but Chris saw the hint of fear in them, something only Nathan brought out in people. Bea and Jack looked like identical ends of the spectrum, both sitting with arms crossed and scowls on their faces. The difference was Bea was five foot two, her frame small, at about a hundred pounds soaking wet, and Jack was six foot three with a huge chip on his shoulder that probably weighed a hundred pounds. Jordan seemed nonplussed, waiting patiently for whatever was about to come.

  Dread filled Chris’s veins as he sat down in front of the screens, and Nathan’s face appeared on his normal screen on the side. “I understand we have a bit of a family issue, Mr. Hardy.”

  “A small complication.”

  “Family appearing is hardly a small complication.” Chris looked up. Nathan didn’t appear angry. His face was calm, almost benevolent, but there was a streak of dangerous violence beneath that facade. “Did you forget about our deal?”

  “No, Nathan. I remember.” He didn’t want to have this conversation now. Abigail was getting further away by the second.

  “So explain to me why your sister and her fiancé are sitting in your apartment right now?”

  “They just showed up. I’ll take care of it.”

  “See that you do, Mr. Hardy, or I’ll be forced to cleanse the situation. I will not risk the team’s exposure.”

  Chris clenched his fists to keep his body from shuddering with real fear. No one wanted Nathan to cleanse anything. Typically, his cleansing involved people disappearing. He wouldn’t let Nathan kill his family. He’d worked too hard to keep them safe already.

  Nathan continued on as if he hadn’t just threatened to kill his family. “What do we know about these men that attacked Miss Lewis today?”

  Chris took a breath. He pulled up both men’s pictures. “Abigail knew the first one from the senator’s private security team. Bradford Kinsley. He’s former Army, got out after two enlistments and four deployments. Never really settled after that. He’s basically been a hired gun for private security firms. No red flags. No known contacts with anyone on our bad boy lists. He doesn’t even have so much as a parking ticket.”

  “Completely clean?” Jordan mused. “So either his record was expunged, or it’s an alias.”

  “It’s pretty detailed to be an alias,” Chris replied.

  “Makes the kidnapping and killing easier,” Jack replied. “Alex used to do the same thing. He’d hire private security to watch the warehouses including a few specifically hired individuals with clean records that co
uld cover his illegal merchandise in the event of a raid.”

  “What about the other guy?” Bea asked, nodding her head toward the picture.

  “Claude Dupont,” Jack interrupted. “I worked with him a few times.”

  “What are we looking at with him, Mr. Allen?”

  Jack sighed. “He’s calculating. Intelligent. He doesn’t need to be coerced to do his job for Giroux. He loves the work. Beating heads in, killing, rape… it doesn’t matter what it is. He gets off on violence.” His eyes darkened, almost black all the way around. “I only worked with him a couple times, for small jobs. He was Jean’s lapdog. Alex was the one holding my leash.” He bared his teeth in a dangerous grin that looked more like a snarl.

  “One Giroux brother is the same as the next,” Chris grumbled.

  “No. Alex is a kid, trying to live up to his father’s name. What idiot puts a girlfriend in control of his assets like that? Jean… He’s the real deal,” Jack said.

  “How would you know that?” Chris asked.

  “I know a monster when I see one, Hardy. I see one every day in the mirror,” Jack snarled back at him.

  “So, Abigail decided to go straight to Giroux.” Jordan smiled. “She’s going through with our mission, leading us straight to him. Smart girl.”

  “Not so smart. She’s not a spy, and she’s got no backup. We have no idea where they’re headed.” Chris growled.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Jordan said, a trickster grin sliding up his face. “I may have planted a tracker on her bra when we were taking pictures for the passports.”

  Chris stared at Jordan. “How the hell did you even get near her bra?” He couldn’t even remember Jordan being within two feet of her.

  Jordan snickered. “Trade secret.” He tapped a couple buttons on the control console in front of him, and a map appeared. A red trail blazed along I-35, heading south. “It’s a Nathan Hawk special design. Long range GPS tracker. Micro-tech, and about the size of a fingertip. I attached it to the back of her tag, by the hooks. It’ll stay, and it’ll look like the ink from the tag blotted due to wear.”

  “Okay, so we can find her. Then what?”

  “We follow her to Giroux,” Jack said. “She’s giving us an opportunity to get to Giroux. We can’t pass this up.”

  “What if Lewis’s men find her?” Chris asked. “We can’t take that chance. She could die.” He glanced at Nathan, who’d been quiet as they talked. This was what he did. He let the team talk it out, and then he made a decision that either supported their discussion or overruled everything.

  “People are dying every time one of his bombs explode, Mr. Hardy.” Nathan sighed. “She said she would help us get to Giroux. I believe she’s doing that.”

  “That’s not all,” Chris said. He tapped a couple buttons and the files from Abigail’s memory card flared to life on the screen. “Abigail had an SD card in her shoe. I found a shitload of dirt on Senator Lewis’s dealings with Giroux, with her kidnapping as a child, bribery of government officials, and half a dozen other crimes. I think she was planning on blowing the whistle on him.”

  “How could she do that?”

  “She’s America’s Princess,” Chris said. “She would have the media’s attention in a heartbeat. The problem would be guaranteeing her safety. She knows how much pull Lewis has. He’d try to block her, maybe even try to kill her.”

  Jordan’s face lit up as he realized what Chris was saying. “She wanted to go to Giroux as a safety precaution. She was betting that Giroux wouldn’t want her dead like Lewis would and being out of the country, she’d be away from the senator’s influence.”

  “I don’t think she’s wrong,” Jack said. “Jean was fanatical about his family. All Giroux are, honestly. Simon Giroux drilled family together as a unit into them from a very young age. Losing his family would have devastated Jean.”

  “Alright, Mr. Allen and Mr. Hardy, you continue following Miss Lewis’s trail. Figure out where she’s headed and I’ll make sure you get there.” Nathan’s voice carried out over the speakers as if he were in the room with them. “Mr. Levi, Miss Li, I want you to follow behind that car. Mr. Muldoon will monitor from here.”

  As everyone stood, ready to get to it, Nathan’s cold face turned toward Chris. Even through the screen, shivers ran down his back. “Mr. Hardy. I’m giving you two days to make peace with your family. When this mission is over, Christopher Hardy will die.”

  “Nathan—”

  The screen went black. No discussion then. Okay. He should have seen this coming. In fact, maybe he should have been thankful Nathan didn’t decide to sanitize the entire breach. He was giving him a chance to say goodbye on his own terms. When he signed on to this life, he knew he had to say goodbye to everyone he ever loved, but somehow it had been easier when they just thought he was an asshole who didn’t call.

  Chapter Twenty

  Abigail stared at the small motel room. Claude had gone to get food, and she was stuck hiding in this roach motel. Though she hadn’t seen one yet. Otherwise, she’d not be listening to Claude and would wait for him outside. They’d been driving for hours until they’d reached DFW. They found a nice crappy motel and now she was sitting in a room with one bed. How was that going to work, because she sure as shit didn’t trust that man in a bed with her.

  She heard the beep of the card key lock and hid behind the door with the gun Claude had given her. She took a breath as it opened and she held it out until she recognized her new… what was he? A friend?

  He shut the door, barely even acknowledging the gun. He held Chinese takeout in his hands and grinned at her. It wasn’t a nice grin. “You are jumpy.”

  “I almost shot you.” She glowered at him.

  He shrugged. “Would not be the first time I’ve been shot by a beautiful woman.” He set the bags on the table. “Sit. Eat. We will fly out in the morning.” Dusk had fallen now, and soon, it would be completely dark. She didn’t want to sit around in the dark and wait for the senator’s men to kill her.

  “Why not now?” She asked, taking one of the bags.

  “Mr. Giroux sent his own plane for you. It arrives in the morning at a private airfield.”

  So it was really happening. She was going to meet her father. Her biological father. She hoped that Chris had found the card, in case something did happen to her. Because she’d been stuck with being discovered by Lewis’s security teams or walking away with a stranger that promised protection while she stood over an unconscious Chris. She picked the lesser of two evils because she was fairly sure this Claude guy might have resorted to killing Chris if he had to. Violence radiated from him, barely leashed.

  “How come it’s just you?” She asked.

  Claude smirked. “Mr. Giroux believed it might spook you if I brought a team. Also, I do not require a team.” He flashed a grin that promised danger and brutality. It sent shivers down her spine.

  When they finished eating, Claude cleaned up and laid out two guns, one of which he started taking apart to clean. He glanced at her. “You should rest. I’ll wake you in a few hours to leave. There are clothes in the bag there if you would like to change.” He nodded to the other bag he’d come in carrying. “The plane will have a better selection for you tomorrow.”

  She nodded and grabbed the bag, taking it to the bathroom. Like hell, she could sleep, but she did need to get her head on straight. She’d been barely keeping her head above water since they left Jubilee. She turned on the faucet, letting the water run freely and leaned over the faucet. She stared at the mirror. Dark circles were beginning to form beneath her eyes. She swallowed hard. What the fuck was she even doing? She wasn’t trained for this. She could barely even keep herself out of Lewis’s hands.

  She let the water pool in her hands and splashed it on her face. She’d been running on high alert for hours. Now, her body was stiff, sore, and feeling every bit of her frustration and fear. She toweled her face dry and pulled out a plain blue t-shirt from the bag. It was sm
aller than the one she wore, but this one was Chris’s. She didn’t want to change out of it.

  She kept the shirt on but decided to wear the jeans inside the bag. They fit a little snugger than she was used to but she managed to button them. There were new sneakers in the bottom too, and socks. She was at least glad of that. Running around without shoes was wearing on her.

  ~*~*~

  When Chris returned to his apartment to grab his stuff, both Addison and Murphy waited for him. Murphy stared hard at him, and Chris resisted the urge to hide in his room. He knew that look on his best friend. He’d seen him level it at many bad guys in the past when they’d interrogated them together.

  He was blown and he knew it.

  He had to get Murphy and Addison out of Jubilee before Nathan decided to change his mind about cleansing the situation.

  “No more lies,” he told the two of them. “I’ll answer your questions.”

  “What are you doing here?” Addison asked.

  “I’m a member of a five-person team. We report to a man named Nathan. He gives us missions and intel to support that mission.” He blew out a breath. “I’m doing good things here.”

  “This is like Addy all over again,” he said. “Except now with you.”

  “Hey, I’m right here.” She elbowed him in the side.

  He pressed a kiss to her temple. “You know it’s true, babe. You were a pain in the ass.” She glared at him but didn’t deny it.

  “How are you managing it? Physically?” Murphy asked.

  Chris shrugged. “Honestly, I have no idea. He told me it was a surgical procedure combined with a medicinal treatment. And it worked. It took me only a couple weeks to recover.”

  “You were walking with a cane at your sendoff party,” Addison pointed out. “That was a year later.”

  “That was a lie. I was completely healed up by then and doing missions for Nathan. I had to cover it up. It was part of the contract.”

  Realization dawned on Murphy’s face as he put what he’d just been told and what Chris had said earlier. “Part of the contract was not talking to family.”