Chapter 6
B eth sat ramrod straight in the wooden chair at her kitchen table. Kane flanked her, his steel leg pressing into hers like an immovable security blanket. With faces as hard as stone, yet with a river of anger and empathy coursing beneath their tough exteriors, the VIPER team listened to her account of what happened since she’d gone to the bakery. Nobody needed to know her whole twisted saga. Tonight’s events had rattled her enough.
The arrival of Ryan Bradley, VIPER’s chief information security officer, and Admiral Edgar, VIPER’s director, should have made her feel even safer. Ryan was former military. At thirty-five years old, he held as many degrees as Scarlett. He radiated the least amount of alpha hormones, but the outline of muscle under his tailored white dress shirt suggested the time he spent in a uniform wasn’t solely in front of a computer.
He shot her a smile from across the table. Sympathy brimmed in his kind gaze. She managed a weak grin. When she’d met him and his uncle, the governor of Maryland, a few weeks ago at the Army vs. Navy football game, she’d sensed strong convictions and good hearts inside both men. She’d been glad a man like Governor Bradley held a seat in Congress. Now she was thankful his nephew—with thick, wavy blond hair and an authoritative, sexy professor kind of look that merely hinted at his brilliance—sat in her kitchen.
Beth figured Admiral Edgar must also have formidable skills if he’d been chosen to lead Project VIPER. The tall, lanky sixty-something-year-old stood at attention by the sink, his big fists clenched at his side. The impeccable neatness of his starched red western-style shirt, dark, pressed jeans, and shiny black cowboy boots paraded his military background. His penetrating gaze and the hardness in his square jaw embodied his commitment to truth and justice. Add spurs and a six-shooter, wrinkled clothes and a cloud of dust, and he could be a sheriff from the Wild West.
He touched his palms together in prayer. “I am deeply sorry for your trouble tonight. Please tell us more about your initial contact with the stalker.”
Beth sat up straighter. Even though her kitchen nearly busted at the seams with testosterone, she still felt vulnerable. “I agreed to meet the man I met on the dating site at a local bar for a drink. His profile said his name was Bobby Collins.”
Edgar’s bushy eyebrows furrowed. “This contact was made on the site’s page, not through your personal email or via text or phone, correct?”
“Yes.” If anyone else in the room had asked her that question, she’d shoot them a snarky comeback about not being too stupid to live. Edgar, however, wasn’t in her kitchen for the beer and cake. He’d declined the party invite because of a prior commitment. Someone alerted him about tonight’s events, and he thought it was serious enough to drop whatever he was doing and come.
“What happened next?”
“After Danny and I reconciled, I sent Bobby a message via the site and took my profile down. The next day I got a pleading text message to meet with him. I blocked his number, but similar texts, and then messages to my personal email kept coming. I got a new phone number and shut down all my email and social media accounts, but he kept finding me.”
“According to police reports, false accounts with the dating site had been established during that time frame.” Ryan stroked his trimmed goatee. “The hackers were never identified.”
Beth eyed his laptop. “Did you just hack into the police department?”
Scarlett raised an eyebrow from across the table. “You act like that sort of thing has never happened in your kitchen before.”
“Point taken.” She’d sat at this table many nights watching Scarlett try and locate the stalker. If she couldn’t find him, Ryan wouldn’t either.
She turned her attention back to Edgar and reiterated what she’d told Kane about being ambushed in the dark alley.
“I tried to fight.” God, she’d tried. Her vision dimmed as the crack of her skull against the ground reverberated in her head. She blinked a few times to refocus. “I blacked out, but I remember hearing voices. I heard the stalker say something in Spanish but couldn’t make it out as Danny screamed my name.”
Those voices she heard nearly every night in her dreams keened through her mind. She clenched her fists in her lap to stop herself from plugging her ears.
Kane covered her hands with his and squeezed. “Take your time.”
His strong grip belied the patience in his tone. She welcomed both. Pulling in a breath that did nothing to untwist her insides or calm her frantic heartbeat, she forced herself to speak. “Then I heard a gunshot. Then nothing. The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital and learning that Danny was…”
She dropped her head and closed her eyes. Tears she didn’t want to spill in front of everyone bullied their way past her lids. Kane’s grip tightened as he muttered a curse. She heard a chair scrape across the floor. A moment later, Scarlett stood next to her.
Beth’s shoulders shook as a sob gurgled up her throat. She forced it down. Crying didn’t change a goddamn thing. Every day since the attack, she’d pushed herself to leave the house, to go to work, to live a normal life and not hide in fear or wallow in sorrow. Yet right now, the final word of not just the sentence she couldn’t finish but Danny’s life was stuck on the edge of her tongue.
Scarlett stroked Beth’s hair. “Danny didn’t make it.”
Beth nodded, half in thanks for the intervention, half in silent affirmation, as another tear slipped past her defenses. Kane unlaced her clenched hands and slipped his fingers into hers. His hold was as fierce as his unspoken support.
“ Dios mio,” Nic said.
“My God,” Chris echoed.
She opened her eyes. Both men stared at her from across the table, their lips pursed in horrified, livid lines and their lethal bodies tensed to fight. Ryan sat between the two, his hands speared into his wavy blond hair. Something akin to the strength emanating from the VIPER boys flashed in his gaze. A half second later, he banged his fingers on the keyboard. “We’ll find him.”
Linc slid behind Ryan and clamped a hand on his shoulder. “Work fast so I can filet the fucker with my fishing knife.”
“Not if I get to him first with my shotgun,” Edgar said .
Kane’s leg vibrated against hers like a ticking time bomb. “Get in line.”
The hard-core support surrounded Beth like a fortress. Her tears retreated as she pressed her palms onto the table to ground herself. For the past two years, she’d lived on edge. Yes, the police had investigated, and Scarlett had done her deep-dive cyber thing, but outside of her federally protected lab, she’d been solely responsible for her safety. Now, the nation’s most dangerous assets stood in her kitchen, vowing not just to protect but to avenge.
Little did they know she was the most lethal person in the room.
She slipped her hand from Kane’s. Getting too close to the sexy-as-sin super soldier put him in danger.
Ryan glanced up from his laptop. “The surveillance feed from the shopping center is too grainy to get an ID. The bakery’s video feeds were a dead end, so I called the shop and spoke to the teenager who helped you. Turns out, she took a photo of the cake stealer with her phone because she thought he was ‘smoking hot.’ The image is only a profile and it’s blurry, but I ran it and got a potential match.”
Beth shot from her chair so fast she swayed. “You know who he is?”
“Potentially.” Edgar cleared his throat. “While you were enjoying the festivities, Ryan and I were busy looking into your background.”
Eggnog curdled in Beth’s belly.
Oh shit. He knows.
She swayed again. Kane grabbed her elbow as she readied herself for what would surely come out of Edgar’s mouth.
“Dr. Parker, I need you to tell us about the drug you are working on at the National Agency for Health.”
The hurricane in her belly settled into a thunderstorm. He didn’t know about her past, thank fuck. As she sank into her chair, she sent up gratitude for keeping her ghosts where they belonged—dead and buried. “I can’t talk about my work. It’s classified.”
Ryan handed her a file with the VIPER logo stamped on the cover. Trepidation skittered up her spine as she opened it.
Edgar slid next to her. “Your director confirmed all this information. You’ve been cleared to tell us everything about this project. This is groundbreaking work, Dr. Parker.”
Pride fought for space in her emotional whirlwind. “Thank you, but what does my work have to do with what happened tonight? And how did you get these details so quickly?”
“Because”— he took the file from her and tucked it under his arm like he was packing away a weapon—“I’m Admiral Edgar.”
“Okay.” Who was she to question a man who could circumvent bureaucratic red tape? “For years, since I started at the agency as an undergrad, I’ve been working with a team developing a promising cancer drug. We discovered it has applications in other areas, not as a treatment, but as a…”
She glanced at Scarlett. Despite the night’s events, a grin spread across Beth’s face. Permission to share this news with her bestie and the VIPER team, to tout the groundbreaking work she’d been sworn to keep classified, trumped the squall in her belly. “We found the drug could cure opioid addiction.”
“Holy fucking shit.” Kane spun her chair to face him. “Are you working on Triple X?”
She blinked, not at the awe in his gaze, which did a weird thing to her heart, but his knowledge. “You know about it?”
“I can’t pronounce the wonder drug with the three X ’s in it, but we know intel agencies have been tracking the Mexican cartels’ interest in Triple X for months.”
“Drug cartels?” A bead of sweat dripped from her hairline down the back of her neck. “No. The cartels can’t find out about Triple X. If they get the formula…” Goose bumps pebbled on her skin and burned like toxic rain as she scanned the grim faces in the room. No, not just grim, but… concerned. “Wait, do the cartels know about my involvement with the drug?”
“It appears so.” Ryan spun his laptop to face her. “The man who stole your cake, as far as we can tell from the photo, is Enrique Chavez, son of the Diablo leader, Maria Chavez.”
Beth jerked as if she’d been stabbed with a cake fork. She knew about the notorious cartel and its ruthless leader.
Kane cursed under his breath. The rest of the VIPER boys chimed in with equal vigor.
“He knows my name.” The man on the screen the bakery owner described as tall, dark, and sexy instead of big, evil, and scary knew everything about her. She whipped her head to the front door. “He knows where I live?” She wasn’t safe here. She hadn’t even been safe in her… “Oh, God. The network in my lab. It’s been down a lot lately.” She fixed her gaze on Edgar. “It wasn’t maintenance like we’d been told. The Diablos were trying to hack us. Did they breach our firewalls and get the formula?”
Her shoulders relaxed as he shook his head no.
“Thank God.”
“But they’ve amassed enough data to know the drug works. They’re scrambling to counter before it makes an impact on their operations.”
“They can’t get it.” She clasped her shaking hands under her chin as she looked at each super soldier in the room. “Triple X is on the FDA approval fast track. In a few days, it will be available to thousands of people in drug trials across the country. So many lives could be saved.”
Edgar nodded. “And that’s too many addicts to lose for the cartel’s bottom line. Intel we recently uncovered indicates that the major players in the Mexican drug trade are in a race to get the Triple X formula. Maria Chavez has set a midnight Christmas Eve deadline for her son and his team of enforcers to deliver it. Enrique is her only living child. She lost her twins when they were twelve years old. The loss reportedly hit the thirteen-year-old Enrique hard, and he became quite the mama’s boy. If his mother wants the formula, and the bragging rights that she got it first, he’ll go to any lengths to get it.”
Any lengths? She pressed her fingers against her lips to stifle a gasp. “Oh God, what if Chavez stole my cake to lure me outside? If I’d run out when I spotted my cake on the hood or hadn’t let the owner carry the new cake to the car, I might have been taken.” The terrifying what-if scenarios mushroomed up her throat like a nuclear blast. “And if Kane and Nic hadn’t secured my house, an enforcer from the world’s most feared drug cartel might have been waiting for me.”
Scarlett appeared at her side. “Breathe, Beth.”
“No.” Her voice hitched as more goose bumps exploded on her skin. “I can’t be a target for some sicko again.”
Scarlett linked her arm with Beth’s. “Let’s pivot from Enrique the Enforcer for a minute. I want to hear everything about this wonder drug you’ve been working on that will change millions of lives.”
Beth nodded and sniffed. Bless her bestie for the much-needed diversion. “Well, the chemical compound of…” Her heart rate slowed as she talked about Triple X. One glance at Kane had it racing again. Scarlett was the only one in the room who likely grasped much of what she was saying because of her scientific background, but Kane? The way he gazed at her, with those full lips partially open and a reverent look in his eyes, skyrocketed her pride and melted her heart .
God, that second bit had to cease.
He slid a bottle of water into her hands. “If you could explain all that to us, then you could explain it to the cartels. And much more if under duress.”
“Duress?” Her voice squeaked as his features shifted from awed admirer to no-nonsense warrior.
Edgar cleared his throat. “Enrique Chavez is known for extracting information in unsanctioned ways. His father, who was killed along with the twins in a skirmish with a rival cartel two decades ago, was a brutal bastard. Enrique’s mother is reportedly worse and raised him to show no mercy. If you’re on their radar for whatever reason, you’re in grave danger.”