Chapter 10 #3
Gage’s friends believed her, even though doing so could seriously hurt their own careers. They were already trying to think of ways to help her and, amazingly, they even knew an FBI agent who might be willing to listen to what she had to say.
And then there was Gage.
She couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed with everything he’d said, but in a good way. All her life she’d been looked through as if she were invisible. But Gage saw her. Moreover, he seemed to like what he saw. It was crazy. Insane. But it also felt right.
From the first time she’d talked to him in Africa, Kinley had felt a connection with him.
It made no sense, and she’d never held even a scrap of hope that he might feel something back, which was part of the reason why she hadn’t messaged him after Africa.
She’d been trying to protect herself from another heartbreak in a long line of them throughout her life.
But now here she was. In his apartment. And he’d said she’d be sleeping in his bed. It was almost surreal. She wanted to be confident enough to tell him he could sleep with her. To do more than sleep. But she knew if she had sex with him, and he walked away afterward, it would destroy her.
She wasn’t a tease, at least not on purpose, but she’d never met a man—or woman, for that matter—who she’d felt as if she could trust both her body and heart to. And until she did, she’d stay a virgin.
Thinking about Gage and sex made her uncomfortable…but not in a bad way. She felt as if she was finally coming awake after being asleep for a very long time. She shifted on the couch and her thighs rubbed together, reminding her how long it had been since she’d given herself relief.
Closing her eyes, she suddenly felt exhausted.
It could’ve been a minute later or an hour, but she felt Gage drape a blanket over her. Snuggling into the warmth, Kinley smiled when she felt his lips against her temple.
“Sleep, Kins.”
“I’m so tired,” she mumbled.
“You were really sick. Your body’s still recovering. Just relax.”
“Gage?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for believing me.”
“I’ll always believe you, Kinley,” he said firmly. “Believe you and believe in you.”
With those beautiful words floating in her head, she slept.
“This is bullshit. She needs to be silenced!” Drake Stryker barked into the burner phone he was going to get rid of after this phone call.
“She’s smart,” replied Simon King, a man known for being willing to take on dirty jobs no one else wanted to do.
“She’s a chick; she’s not that smart,” Stryker scoffed. “I can’t believe you fucked up a simple job.”
“Don’t piss me off,” Simon said gruffly. “You want her dead, you can come to the States and take care of shit yourself.”
Stryker took a deep breath. He couldn’t afford to lose King.
He needed him to take care of his huge problem.
There was no way he was going to spend the rest of his life in jail.
No fucking way. Especially not because of some nosey bitch.
He had to make sure she kept her mouth shut about what she’d seen.
“Sorry. I’m just frustrated,” he told the hitman he’d hired to find and kill Kinley Taylor.
“Right. She just got lucky on that Metro platform. She was just starting to turn when I pushed her, and the angle was wrong when she fell. I hadn’t really planned on doing the job right then, but figured I might as well when I had the chance.
Anyway, I followed her home, and when I broke into her apartment that night it was obvious she’d already taken off.
I watched her place for a while and she never returned.
Do you have any other information for me to go on? ”
Stryker frowned. He hated this. He’d had to bring someone else into this mess, which wasn’t good.
The fewer people who were involved, the better, but he and Brown had needed someone to plant the email in her account, and the same man was watching her bank accounts and trying to track her electronically.
“She took out most of her money not too long after your attempted hit. She filled up her gas tank in DC and hasn’t used her credit card since. ”
“Are you tracking her license plate?”
Stryker ground his teeth. “Yes, but it’s not that easy. She’s avoided any toll roads, and my guy doesn’t have the time to look through every traffic cam in the country to try to find her.”
“What about friends? Family?”
“She’s got no one.”
“Well, that makes things harder,” King said without any kind of emotion. “She could be literally anywhere in the world then.”
That lack of emotion was what made him such a good hitman. He didn’t get all worked up about who he was being paid to kill. It didn’t matter to him. Women, teenagers, old men…he’d whack anyone if the price was right.
“She hasn’t left the country, we know that,” Stryker said.
“Because her phone was destroyed on the tracks—thanks to you—we don’t even have that to go on.
” He tried not to sound pissed, but it irked him that one of the best ways they had to track her had literally been smashed to pieces in King’s assassination attempt.
Stryker’d had nothing but bad luck when it came to Kinley Taylor, and it was beginning to unsettle him. It was as if the universe was on her side rather than his.
“You hired me to kill her, not keep track of her fucking belongings,” King growled.
“Whatever. Anyway, my guy took a look at her phone records from the last six months or so, and the only person outside of her job who called or messaged her was a guy who lives in Texas.”
“And?” King asked.
“She never responded, but it sounds like he wanted to be more than friends, if you know what I mean. But there’s a problem.”
“What?”
“He’s Army. Delta Force.”
“What’s the connection?” King asked, not sounding worried in the least.
Crazy motherfucker, Stryker thought. “Nothing that we know of. But he was in Paris a few weeks ago. He and his team were assigned to guard Johnathan Winkler. And the same team guarded Kinley Taylor’s boss in Africa months ago. They could’ve met then.”
“I don’t know or care who the fuck Winkler is, but if that’s all you’ve got, give me the details and I’ll head down to Texas to check things out.”
Stryker was starting to hate this asshole, but he gave him the info on Gage Haskins that their contact had managed to ferret out.
“I’m going to need cash to get down there,” King informed him.
Biting back the bitter response, Stryker agreed.
“And my fee for this job is now two million instead of one.”
“What? No fucking way!” Stryker exclaimed. “We agreed on one. You can’t change the terms now!”
“I can’t? Seems to me that I’m holding all the cards here. You gonna fly back to the States and find her yourself? You gonna kill her?”
“I could,” Stryker bit out. “She wouldn’t be the first bitch I fucking choked. It’s not as hard as you think.”
King chuckled, but it wasn’t a humorous sound. “Seems to me two million’s not a very high price to pay if it keeps your hands clean. I don’t know why you want this chick dead so badly…but I can find out.”
Stryker was so furious, he wanted to reach through the phone and fucking kill the asshole on the other end.
“Fine. Two million. I’ll have the money for getting to Texas wired.
But you’re not getting a dime of the millions until I have proof she’s dead.
If she’s not breathing, she can’t tell anyone what she saw. ”
“Done,” King told the ambassador. Then clicked off the connection.
Stryker wanted this bitch dead. He didn’t care when it happened.
Tomorrow, next week, ten years from now.
She’d dared to accuse him. Him. He was the fucking ambassador to France.
He’d had dinner with the president. Hell, he’d fucked the man’s wife in one of the bedrooms in the White House while her husband had been on some humanitarian trip.
If Kinley Taylor thought she could narc on him, she was wrong. Dead wrong.
No one cared about the teenagers he’d killed. They were runaways or prostitutes. Trash. Throwaway human beings that were as important as the gum people spit on the ground.
Still, he had no choice but to agree with all of King’s terms. Of course he couldn’t fly to the States undetected and do the deed himself. The man had him by the short hairs, and they both knew it.
“Fucking asshole,” Stryker muttered before dropping the phone to the ground and stomping on it. When it was nothing more than a pile of tiny plastic pieces, he headed back down the alley toward his car and driver.
He needed to call Walter and find out if he’d heard anything about the missing assistant.
And to make sure the man had kept his own mouth shut about the entire situation.
Though, he wasn’t so worried about that.
Brown was as involved in this mess as he was.
He might not’ve killed the bitch that night a few weeks ago, but he’d certainly had his fun with her.
Including taking a few videos for his personal collection.
Brown had also done him a solid by immediately letting him know what his assistant had told him.
He needed Walter Brown to be his eyes and ears in Washington, DC. If even a whisper of this got back to the president, Stryker knew he’d be fired in a heartbeat. The president would do whatever it took to cover his own ass, and if that meant throwing his friends under the bus, so be it.
“I’m going to find you, Kinley Taylor,” Stryker said softly as he sat against the expensive leather in the backseat of his government-provided car. “You’re going to regret not keeping your mouth shut.”