Chapter Twenty-Seven
Phoenix
Striding out of the restaurant, pausing in the empty vestibule, I turned my back on the security cam. Then I broke my one damn rule for this number and answered the call on the fourth ring. But I didn’t speak.
Neither did the caller.
No breathing, no background noise, the line stayed connected for two seconds.
Then the call ended.
Swiping to connect to my personal servers on the Paragon, knowing who the caller was, I still initiated a location trace. While it ran, I pulled out my work phone to make a call, but a text came through on my personal cell.
Audio clip. Eleven seconds.
I hit Play and held the phone to my ear.
“Ah, hey. Sorry about that. The call, I mean. I just…. Something happened tonight. And I wasn’t sure how bad, I mean, if I should…. It’s just—never mind. Maybe don’t, ah, text back. I’ll try later. I’m turning off the phone now.”
I was already walking through the hotel lobby, aiming for the rear exit where I’d been keeping one of the Denalis before the message ended.
The trace came back. Location confirmed. Virginia Beach.
Hitting Play one more time, I listened again as I got behind the wheel.
No background noise. Distressed tone of voice. Abrupt end to the call.
Fuck.
I initiated a satellite image search, then dialed out on my work cell.
Helios picked up on the second ring. “Fuck off. Whatever it is, I’m not doing it.”
“I need your help.”
“Christ.” Helios exhaled. “You don’t need a damn thing from me, least of all my help.”
I turned the engine over. “Isla Sennan is here. She’s—”
“That fucking trespasser?” Helios cut me off before I could download. “You have got to be shitting me. And where the fuck, exactly, is here?”
“I just left her at a table in The Surf Club Restaurant at the Four Seasons.” I glanced at my personal cell in case another text had come in. It hadn’t.
“What in the fuck were you doing with that crazy-ass chick? You know what? Don’t tell me. I don’t want to fucking know. Hanging up now.”
Pulling away from the hotel, I eased into Miami evening traffic.
“Go get her, Helios. Take her to the penthouse. Make sure she stays there until I get back.” I didn’t do coincidences—not like this, not after that aborted call.
The woman had landed in my three-foot world again for a reason, and I was going to find out why. Until then, she was a liability.
“Have you lost your goddamn mind?” Helios asked, incredulous.
Over his shit, I issued the order again.
“Grab her. Now.” Stopped at a light, I checked the satellite imagery on the location I was homed in on.
Nothing unusual. Switching to the security cams I’d put up two months ago on a property I didn’t own, I checked the feeds.
All offline. All went dark at the same time an hour ago. Goddamn it.
“Fuck you,” Helios clipped. “And back from where?”
I put four incidents together. Helios thinking he was being tracked, the trespasser here in Miami, the texted message, and security cams—nine hundred and eighty miles away—offline.
Everything in my timeline went critical.
I needed to be on a plane STAT. Any other op prior to two months ago, I would’ve already been in the air. Now, having everything to lose, I was doing it all by the book—intel, backup, finalize the plan, then execute—but fuck, it felt wrong.
Glancing at my watch, I answered Helios, but I didn’t tell him where I was going. “Need to know. She’ll be done with her dinner soon. You’ve got fifteen minutes, max.”
“First of all, hell no. Second, I’m twenty mikes out from that location. Third, fuck off. Do you know how many flight hours Ares and I logged in the past week alone relocating your shit stateside? A fuck ton. That’s how many.”
“She needs to be contained.” Fuck, I needed to contain her. But I couldn’t be in three places at once. I had recon, a location to finalize, and I needed to talk to Cypher before I interrogated her.
“Do it yourself,” Helios argued.
My hands on that little intruse, extracting every goddamn answer myself, making her beg for mercy—all of it ticked every depraved fantasy I had for the woman.
I’d been fucking hard just watching her put food in her mouth.
But this wasn’t about a damn sexual phantasm anymore, and it sure as hell wasn’t about my cock.
“I’m handling something.” Tapping into my PSYOP training, I used one of Helios’s triggers against him. “If Sennan walks, my name isn’t the only one she knows.” Helios and Ares weren’t call signs, and the intruse had heard me address both brothers.
“Whose fucking fault is that?”
Out of time and patience, I switched tactics and used an outright bribe. “I’ll buy you a new Citation.”
“I’m not your bitch. And Ghost was the one who ditched my Longitude. You think I didn’t make that motherfucker pay up?”
“He replaced yours with a used one. I’m offering new.”
“He got me the one I wanted, and that conversation was shorter than this bullshit. Now I’m fucking hanging up.” He hung up.
I pulled up to the residence.
All signs of construction gone, architectural and landscape lighting on, gate secured, main house dark.
I quickly checked my email. The contractor confirmed completion, and had left a temporary security code for the gate and buildings. Using my cell and the code, I opened the gate and drove up the driveway to the main residence.
Then, as I pulled up satellite imagery again, I used my work cell to call Cypher.
He answered immediately. “More equipment came in tonight. I’m out of space.”
“Understood.” I watched the sat feeds populate, then zoomed in to confirm I hadn’t missed it before. “Who’s closest to my location at the hotel?” No power outages in the area of the security cams. I exited out of the sat feeds.
“You’re not at the hotel,” Cypher corrected, letting me know he was tracking me. “But Helios, me, Ares, Chaos. In that order. Except Ares is still on the ship.”
“Copy. Calling you back in a minute.” I hung up and dialed Helios.
This time he answered before the first ring. “Let me guess. You called Cypher for a sitrep. He told you I was closest. So now you’re calling my ass back to tell me to go corral the insane trespasser, but you’re gonna up the ante and say I can shoot her if she makes a break for it.”
“No goddamn shooting. You have ten minutes to get on site, then hold her in the penthouse until I fucking get there.”
“Christ. Now I know you’re losing it, you sound like me. Oscar Mike. You owe me.” Helios hung up.
I rebooted the security cams for the property in Virginia Beach.
Forty-seven seconds later, they were back online, and I was looking at them in real time. For another minute, I checked all angles, zooming in and out. Then, as I watched, an upstairs light turned off.
I switched to thermal imaging.
Two heat signatures, separate rooms, both horizontal. No other heat signatures on the property.
I exhaled.
Then I exited the SUV.
Fifteen minutes later, using the on-site satellite command room in my new home office to wipe the security system, I then reloaded and recalibrated it using parameters I’d preprogrammed during construction.
After, I did a quick walk-through of the entire property. Furnished, cleaned, stocked with all supplies except the weaponry I’d bring in from the Paragon, the place was ready to go.
I headed back to the Denali.