Freeing Savannah (Condor’s Overwatch #2)

Prologue

The notes should have soared.

Instead, they trembled beneath her fingers.

Savannah Gaines sat beneath the glow of stage lights in the packed concert hall of the Kennedy Center, her hands poised above the Steinway grand piano. She’d performed on the world’s finest stages, from Paris and Vienna, to United Arab Emirates and China. But tonight was different.

The lights at the Opera Hall bathed her in gold, warm and blinding, as the hush of the audience stretched long and reverent.

Every seat was filled with diplomats, ambassadors, members of the media, and other influentials.

The President, Martha Cuthbert, sat in the President’s box with a quiet but powerful intensity.

The leader of the free world leaned forward, her gaze meticulously tracking every note Savannah played, her unwavering focus never faltering for even a moment.

This was the grand finale of a cultural diplomacy tour that had spanned eleven countries in twenty-one days. An exhausting, glittering whirlwind of music, photo ops, and forced smiles. But also . . . something more.

Somewhere between the Parisian cafes and the neon lights of Beijing, she’d found something truly unexpected.

She hadn’t expected her stepfather to hire a private security detail.

But then again, Senator McNabney had always liked control.

And she definitely hadn’t anticipated her new bodyguard to be Sawyer―the boy who once swore he’d never let anything bad happen to her.

A boy she had to leave behind when her mother remarried and moved her to Washington, D.C.

Now he was back. Older. Sharper. Quieter. And somewhere along the endless tour, between the formal dinners and late-night practice sessions, that old friendship bloomed into something else.

Something extraordinary.

Something real.

Sawyer Graves had re-entered her life not as the boy next door from summers past, but as the hardened, quiet protector assigned to her by Condor’s Overwatch, the private security team her stepfather insisted on hiring.

She hadn’t recognized him at first, not beneath the beard and muscles.

But the moment she did, everything changed.

He remembered the swing in her grandmother’s backyard. The secret fort in the woods. Her favorite ice cream flavor. And as chaos unfolded around them, Sawyer became more than just a bodyguard. He became her anchor.

But tonight, he wasn’t right by her side.

She sat alone at the concert grand, fingers poised over the keys, counting rests in her head, as the orchestra played behind her. The sleek glow of an iPad illuminated the digital score before her. Her heart beat to the rhythm of the Concerto, but her blood ran cold.

A soft buzz from the iPad mounted above the keyboard drew her eyes without tilting her head.

IT’S GOING TO BE AN EXPLOSIVE PERFORMANCE.

She’d ignored it, convinced it was a glitch. A prank.

Then came another. The message blinked, then vanished, replaced again by the digital sheet music of Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto.

I SEE YOU.

She swallowed hard and kept going, her fingers gliding through the storm of arpeggios and shifting harmonies with practiced grace, while the blood in her veins turned to ice.

Two days ago, Savannah had been in Japan, a country she never imagined she’d visit, wrapping up the diplomatic tour.

A cultural envoy. An art ambassador. A goodwill mission dressed up in gowns and encores.

She’d smiled for diplomats, posed beside monuments, and poured herself into the music like it could shield her from the demands of the world.

Savannah blinked hard, the sweat at her temple trickling down past her cheekbone. Her heart was pounding, her shoulders locked in place. On the screen, another message appeared.

I WARNED YOU.

She ignored the messages and played on, wrists stiff, smile fixed for the audience who had no idea someone was enacting a sick joke. A hacker. Some bitter protester with a keyboard and too much time.

But by the time she reached the second movement, she knew better.

ONE WRONG NOTE AND THEY DIE.

And another.

DON’T STOP PLAYING. EVER.

Savannah had learned to compartmentalize years ago. It was the only way to survive the stage. But this was something else. Her fingers flew across the keys with trained precision, masking the rising panic with perfect form. To the audience, she looked like a virtuoso lost in the music.

The tempo built, and she saw the final message flash on the screen.

Nail that last chord!

The words burned into her vision, lingering like smoke even as they disappeared. She finally understood this wasn’t a hoax. It clicked then as she remembered the first message about an explosive performance.

She’d played this concerto a hundred times. But tonight, the notes didn’t feel like music.

They felt like a weapon.

This performance was wired to kill, and she was playing for their lives.

She scanned the crowd with her peripheral vision. The audience was rapt. Smiling. Unaware. The President of the United States sat in the box above, flanked by Secret Service agents and dignitaries, oblivious to the fact that her piano might be wired to explode.

Her pulse beat louder than the music in her ears.

She couldn’t stop, couldn’t lift her hands.

The weight of her fingers on the keys was the only thing holding the building together.

She didn’t know how they did it. She didn’t know how the piano became the trigger, or who planned this, or how close they were.

But she did know one thing. It couldn’t end this way. Not now. Not when she’d finally found her forever with Sawyer.

He’d tried to protect her. God, he tried.

Through the espionage, the sabotage, the attack in Azerbaijan.

Every disaster on this tour, he was there, steady and sharp.

Just a step ahead of the chaos. He’d been her rock, her support, her everything, through thick and thin.

He was the one who provided her with the strength and resilience to make it through everything tour had thrown at her.

And now?

Now she was alone. Hands trembling over a bomb disguised as a Steinway, notes suspended in a silence too perfect to be real. Her pulse beat louder than the music in her ears as the end of the piece drew near.

She reached the final measure. Her pinky struck the last note.

A soft click echoed beneath the keys. The iPad flickered once more, and a timer blinked onto the screen.

00:20:00

00:19:59

A countdown.

The crowd erupted in applause, oblivious.

LET THAT LAST CHORD RESONATE.

OTHERWISE . . . BOOM!

Savannah didn’t move.

The piano had become a bomb. And if she lifted her hands or her feet, the building would explode. She couldn’t pinpoint whether the keys or the pedal triggered the start of the countdown, but either way, she’d keep both pressed down.

Sawyer usually stood in the wings, and she was worried the Secret Security agents had cleared the backstage area. The others on Sawyer’s team were probably scattered around the venue. Maybe compromised. Maybe worse.

She wanted to scream, to cry, to run. But she couldn’t do any of those things. Her hands remained on the keys, sweat trickling down her spine, a breath caught in her chest.

This wasn’t the end of a tour.

It was the beginning of something much, much darker.

And somewhere in the shadows, she hoped—prayed—he was still watching.

Because if anyone could find a way to save her now, it was Sawyer Graves.