King of Hearts: RH Series

PROLOGUE

Without a doubt, the weather in Norfolk, Virginia was one of the best things about living there. Being kidnapped as a young preteen for my hacking skills had left its mark, but none so deep as the cut the arctic climate of Russia carved into my soul. The brief summers and dreary winters held me just as hostage as the human monster who had terrorized me for so long.

The first day of a Russian April would be buried beneath feet of ice-encased snow, but here I sat, outside the Cardinal Team’s new home, sipping iced tea in shorts and a tee.

After their previous house had been bombed, they spent some time bouncing between different rentals from the agency until they caved and accepted my offer to pay for a rebuild. It’d been my fault they lost their home, after all.

They’d resisted until I pointed out that, technically, Bryce would be footing the bill since I didn’t have a dollar to my name. Heck, I didn’t even own a name, not truly. Tricked at a young age, I’d helped erase my identity.

Callie Jensen never existed, according to the U.S. government, so it mattered little that I went by my biological father’s surname these days, King. Although I couldn’t file for a legal change, I wanted nothing to do with Drew Jensen, the stepfather with a silver tongue who’d betrayed me in the worst of ways. He’d convinced my na?ve, eleven-year-old self that I was helping him gain custody of me from my less than stellar mother. In reality, he’d been showcasing my hacking skills to the highest bidder, a trial run that I passed with flying colors, only to end up kidnapped for my troubles.

“Callie?” my friend and leader of the Cardinal Team, Sabra Jaheem, called, drawing me from my spiraling memories. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, just lost in thought. Sorry. I’m lousy company today.”

Sabra shook her head, a regal lioness with her ramrod perfect posture and warm golden eyes that glowed against her dark complexion. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault. Sometimes, it is easy to miss how much Triz dominates conversations with her energetic enthusiasm until she is missing.”

I smiled. “She makes me feel less socially inept.”

“As she does me.”

I blinked. “You? People make you nervous?”

A small, secretive smile danced on her lips. “Is that so hard to believe?”

“Of course it is! You’re… so poised and unruffled. I thought nothing affected you.”

“That’s kind of you to say.”

She didn’t elaborate, and the conversation wilted once more.

“Well, I’m bored to tears,”a voice said, one I was careful not to acknowledge. If Sabra caught me conversing with a dead person, she’d double my therapy sessions with Dr. Harper so fast my head would spin.

However, my eyes were inevitably drawn to the side, despite not acknowledging the statement verbally.

Hips propped against the porch railing, looking deadly in a custom-fitted suit with his hands slipped into his pockets, stood a blond, curly-haired man. He looked just the way I remembered him, apart from the lack of bullet holes, since the last time I saw him alive, I’d buried a few in his chest, and he still hadn’t gone down until someone got off a rather skilled shot through his head mid-fall.

I blinked, and the man disappeared, making the cheerful flower boxes of pink begonias seem all the brighter just from his absence.

Desperate to move beyond the all too common occurrence of dead people visiting me, I cleared my throat. “So where is everyone?”

“Triz and Darcy are on a job. They won’t return until the end of the week. Yolo should be by soon though.”

My head cocked. “You guys separate on long-term missions?”

Sabra pursed her lips. “We do, but rarely, and you wouldn’t have noticed before because when Karl placed you with us—”

She didn’t need to finish. My brain could connect the dots well enough. “I was the job.”

Despite intending to sound neutral, my words rang out with shades of bitterness flavoring them.

Sabra considered me for a moment. “Callie, I don’t recall ever discussing how your information—which was and still is highly classified—stumbled onto our radar.”

I shifted in my seat.

The terrifying ghost from my recent past popped into existence. “She’s talking about how you’re a phantom, a nobody. So what if I’m dead? You’re nothing. Your own government doesn’t even claim you, Callie King.” The man snorted. “You’re a wannabe superhero, running around and changing your designation on a whim—”

Yeah, I got it,I clapped back mentally, frustrated at my inability to do so aloud. The urge to argue, to explain how I didn’t just choose my name at random, would accomplish very little. Nothing good stemmed from quarreling with the dead.

Message received loud and clear.

Despite my careful silence, the man still smirked as if he heard me.

Sure, that checked out. He was a figment of my imagination, so it made sense. After all, my brain brought him into existence. It was only a quick jaunt from the crazy train to reach the conclusion that an imagined ghost could tune into my mental dialogue.

Sabra reclined against her backrest, staring off into the distance. Her dark orbs morphed into pools deep enough to get lost in.

As she reflected on how to explain, she crossed her hands over her stomach. “Callie, when your case was brought to our attention, they gathered us into a conference room. Our team, as you’re familiar with, is called the Cardinals because of how many languages we speak—”

“Coined after Cardinal Mezzofanti, the hyper-polyglot rumored to know up to seventy languages,” I finished, immediately regretting my impatience when she gave me a stern look that wilted me in place. “Sorry, I just wanted to skip ahead of the history lesson. No matter how brief, I was a Cardinal.”

Warmth entered her gaze, morphing coal black into deep mahogany. “Yes, you were.” She cleared her throat, propping her hands on the glass table, edging beneath the umbrella’s shade. “Anticipating the international nature of the case, and without knowing the full scope of what we would deal with, the higher-ups pulled several teams with a broad offering of lingos—including your current team.”

That information startled me at first, but after she’d pointed it out, realization set in that, yes, the guys boasted quite a few vernaculars between the eight of them. The agency didn’t rate that ability as a priority among their extensive repertoire of skills, so it’d fallen by the wayside in my mind as well.

“Karl, rest his soul, had been following a trail of bodies, trying to solve a puzzle with half the pieces missing. We still weren’t sure if the string of deaths wasn’t the work of a dozen separate criminals. There wasn’t sufficient evidence to unify things, nor any distinguishable motive or method, and they had CJ digging.”

She didn’t need to elaborate on the importance of CJ’s involvement. Aside from my case, I hadn’t stumbled across anything CJ couldn’t uncover, given enough time. Tenacious didn’t begin to describe the tech guru when he was sniffing for a bone.

“Our first sight of you, though we didn’t realize this until much later, was the CCTV footage of someone shooting you in that Parisian hotel. The quality was awful, and the content even more so. We watched what we weren’t entirely certain wasn’t a murder scene unfold like disconnected pictures of an antique slide projector, each frame a glimpse of action with missing seconds in between. It wasn’t until they saved you from that Russian hell when we discovered the girl shot in the video and CJ’s online correspondent were one and the same.”

My throat dried up. The idea of that traumatic moment—because I knew the exact instance she referenced since it became the catalyst domino for everything that followed—being broadcast to a room full of colleagues unnerved me.

My numbed fingers brushed the sweating glass of tea, as I was in need of a cool drink to combat the unbearable heat buzzing through my brain at a million miles an hour. Though I didn’t taste the overbearing sweetness laced with a bite of lemon wedge, the icy liquid helped stave off the panic attack my body attempted to throw.

“Are you okay?” Sabra asked kindly. “We can discuss something else.”

“No,” I squeaked. “The guys avoid chatting about the past, and I don’t blame them. Your statement just threw me for a second.”

Sabra grinned. “Men avoiding emotional topics? You don’t say.”

I snorted. “Sure, when you put it that way…”

This was good.

It was refreshing to leave the house. Despite the guilt threatening to drown me beneath turbulent waves, I always enjoyed visiting the Cardinals. The guys were amazing, but I longed for feminine company outside my own.

I’d have to thank Dr. Harper for the suggestion later—or perhaps I wouldn’t. Notwithstanding his claims of professionalism, he’d carry an unbearable twinkle in his eyes for being right.

“So you uncovered a snuff film—”

“Callie King, how do you know about snuff films?” she demanded, her tone sharper than normal for the six-foot tall, unflappable leader.

I straightened. Because of my petite size and spotty record of picking up on sexual innuendo, people considered me innocent and na?ve. In a lot of ways, their assumptions were accurate. My hacking skills had, by some stroke of luck, protected me from being forced down that awful road of trafficking victims.

That didn’t mean I hadn’t witnessed some of society’s bottom of the barrel. At night, I dreamed of monsters that bore all too human faces.

Allowing that knowledge to spill into my gaze, I met her frown with a firm, if deadened, world-weary look. “Sabra, I spent my teenage years working for criminals. The job description, if you will, demanded hours upon hours of scouring the dark web, and snuff films are just the tip of the iceberg for what thrived in those depths of depravity.”

The air stilled.

“Fair enough,” she conceded. “Either way, after viewing the video, Karl knew secrecy was of the utmost importance. Only the units who had previously been briefed could apply for your protection detail, and it was a voluntary assignment due to its dangerous nature.”

That mollified me somewhat. “Yeah, I remember looking through profiles of potential teammates when Karl gave me the choice.”

Sabra paused, pinning me with the full weight of her gaze that glowed with wisdom beyond her years. “Callie, Karl weeded out some applicants from the running because they wouldn’t have been an ideal fit, so you received a highly pared set of options. What you probably weren’t aware of was that every single person in that initial meeting applied to host you. Nobody considered you unworthy of the high risk.”

That… I didn’t have words.

Apparently, my own personal ghost did though. “And look where it landed these girls—their home bombed, displaced, and a teammate killed, if I’m not mistaken.”

Tears welled in my eyes, and Sabra mistook them for gratitude in the face of her revelation. “You’re not a burden, Callie. We protected you, yes, but our intention to adopt you into our fold was genuine. You mean more to us than a job. Never convince yourself otherwise.”

The ghostly man snorted in response, and I smothered my flinch beneath the guise of reaching for another triangle sandwich.

He vanished as the backdoor slid open amid the elongated silence, announcing the arrival of the only other Cardinal in town—Yolonda Bernard, French baroness in the making. She took one glance at my averted eye contact, the stilted hush, and our serious expressions before sighing. “Mon Dieu, you two are so stuffy.”

Early on, I’d learned that the agents at Delta had dubbed the all-girl team with Disney character nicknames. Some were more apropos than others, personality wise, but the similarities between the Cardinals’ appearances matched spot on with their given monikers. While Sabra embodied both the essence and kind-hearted look of Princess Tiana, Yolonda’s demeanor leaned more toward a hybrid lovechild of Black Widow and Harley Quinn instead of the book-loving Belle from Beauty and the Beast, as she’d been branded.

Yolo, which she preferred since it perfectly represented her favorite motto, “You only live once,” perched in a chair, crossing her legs delicately as she folded her arms and gave me the stink eye.

“What?” I asked, resisting the urge to shift in my seat—barely.

Her muddy gray eyes shifted up. “You dyed your hair again.”

My fingers trailed to the ends of my ponytail, and I glanced at the platinum blonde strands, so bright they glowed white under the healthy spring sun. “Wanted a change of pace.”

Yolo’s impeccably groomed eyebrows rose. She reached out and tugged on one of the pale locks. The floral bouquet of her favored perfume, Chanel No. 5, tickled my senses as much as the light brush. “So soon, ma petite? You only returned it to your luscious, au naturel chocolate half a year ago.”

My hands fidgeted with the hem of my tank top. “I liked the way it looked.”

Yolo held my gaze. “And do you also intend to grow a foot in height?”

“Yolonda!” Sabra hissed.

Yolo’s French accent ebbed and flowed with the tide of her emotions. “What? It is ze truth. We both know zis, only you ahr too soft-hahrted to say anyzing!”

“That doesn’t mean you should put her on the spot.”

“Well, fine. I apologize for voicing my concerns!” Her wavy, mousy brown curls spun out as she whipped her head back in my direction before Sabra could scold her further. Her countenance softened as she reined in her passion. “Natasia’s dead, ma petite. When are you going to stop punishing yourself for the past?”

“Callie, don’t!”

I sped up. I had to help. “Natasia! Karl!”

They looked up.

Natasia’s lips curled in a fatigued smile that failed to reach her eyes. Karl’s normal rumpled, disheveled state seemed downright pristine beside the battered and torn image she presented. Of course he’d arrived to the party late, missing the torture segment of the evening, so she could hardly be blamed for her appearance.

“Run! Karl, Natasia, run!” I screamed.

Natasia’s warmth slipped away.

“Bomb!” I exclaimed.

An eon passed in the millisecond it took them to process my warning.

Karl burst into action first. “Callie, turn around! Go back!” he ordered, scooping Natasia up and carrying her to safety.

I ignored his warnings, forcing Corbin to speed up now that he knew what was happening, the reason why I was running. He switched from keeping pace to chasing.

“Stop her!” someone bellowed.

Corbin tackled me to the ground right as the world exploded.

The blast lasted forever but ended in a blink.

Intense heat ate all the oxygen, and debris broke free and collapsed with deafening force.

“Natasia!” I yelled before breaking into a coughing fit as smoke and dust filled my lungs. “Karl?”

My name was being called from multiple directions. The combination of that, plus the haze of smoke obscuring the air, made it impossible to determine the yellers’ identities. The only thing I could discern was that the shouts weren’t coming from where the bomb had been.

“Natasia, Karl!” I cried. Something pinned me in place—a dead weight had settled on my back. I squinted, at first only seeing the blood and dirt, but then I was able to make out the toned, tan arm beneath the grime. “Corbin?”

He didn’t respond.

“Corbin?”

I tried to concentrate, but hysteria had set in, and I couldn’t distinguish if he was breathing or if my body was making his move.

Was he dead?

Footsteps crunched as someone knelt near my head. “Callie, luv, don’t move.”

I hiccupped on a sob. “C-Corbin, i-is he—”

“He’s hurt. You need to be still. Something impaled him, and I’m worried about how closely you’re pressed together. It might have punctured you too.”

His words halted my movements. If I had been pierced by debris, I felt nothing, but I’d been numb even before the explosion, and the last thing I wanted was to jostle Corbin and worsen his injuries.

“Natasia and Karl?” I asked, my voice breaking.

Payton’s hands didn’t falter.

“Payton,” I prompted, in case he’d missed the question. “Natasia and Karl. Are they okay?”

He didn’t answer.

The post-disco, hip swaying tune of “It’s Raining Men” propelled me from my memories. I didn’t even care that someone had been messing with my phone again. That was a mystery that could be solved later, but it afforded me a distraction from the dark turn of conversation.

Saved by the bell.

“That’s my ride,” I offered as I climbed to my feet.

Yolo snorted but refrained from commenting further on any perceived latent issues she suspected I was harboring. “Of course. Your harem awaits. Make sure they give you a breather now and then! Between the eight of them, you’d think they could keep you properly fed.”

It wasn’t their fault my appetite was so flighty lately, but I’d already been on the chopping block for one deficiency today, so I did the cowardly thing and allowed her assumptions to hang in the air undisputed.

Heck, it was Yolo, so she might just be fishing. She was sneaky like that.

“Hey, if they give me a break, we should do this again. Maybe when Triz and Darcy return.”

“Of course, Callie,” Sabra agreed. “Be well.”

“Au revoir, ma petite. Until next time.”

Thumbing open my phone, I stumbled at the name “Motorcycle Vet.”

That could only be one person, and it wasn’t who was supposed to pick me up.