Chapter Twenty-One
“Xavier, can you hear me?”
Xavier’s eyes flickered open. What? Where was he again?
He couldn’t even remember. All he could think about was the pulsing, throbbing pain at the back of his head and the blurriness of his vision.
He felt hands on his shoulders, someone trying to shake him awake, and he managed to focus his gaze on the person in front of him.
“Aaron?” he mumbled. “Don’t do that, man.” The shaking was making him nauseous.
“Yeah, it’s me, Aaron,” the man replied, sounding relieved. “Can you see me okay? Can you hear me?”
“You’re a little fuzzy, but yeah, I think so,” Xavier replied, trying to sit up. He winced as a jolt of pain rushed through his system again. He sank back down, letting out a groan as the memories began to surface.
“Do you know where you’re bleeding from?” Aaron asked.
“My head,” Xavier mumbled. “The back of my head, I think.” He tried to reach up to touch it, but Aaron caught his hand.
“Let’s not do that, all right? We’ll get it looked over,” Aaron promised. “Come on, let’s see if we can get you up.”
He managed to lift Xavier off the ground and get him planted on the edge of his bed, the mattress barely still on the frame. Everything was spinning.
Aaron sat beside him to get a look at his wound just as Lawson appeared in the doorway to his room.
“What the hell is going on?” Lawson demanded.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Aaron replied. “I heard a commotion in here, and when I came in, Xavier was down for the count but no one else was around. That’s when I called you.”
“Damn,” Lawson muttered, shooting a look of concern at Xavier. But more than anything, Xavier could see the anger in his eyes. He knew that was how Lawson dealt with shock, but right now, he needed his best friend on his side.
“Do you know who attacked you?” Lawson demanded.
“Jed,” Xavier replied, wincing as Aaron poked around at the back of his skull.
“Jed?” Lawson sounded surprised. “What happened?”
“I came to grab a change of clothes for the shower and the door was open again. I noticed the room trashed and was going to grab my gun and he nailed me from behind. We fought some and he got in a final hit and took off.”
Lawson frowned in confusion. “Why would he attack you and trash your room? That doesn’t make sense.”
Xavier closed his eyes, trying to fight the nausea rolling up his throat. “Jed’s looking for something he thought I had.” He paused and sighed. “It’s complicated.” He chanced a quick look at Aaron, then locked his eyes on Lawson.
“He’s not working alone,” Xavier replied, starting to shake his head, then thought better of it. The movement was making his eyesight worse. “He called me something—a name I haven’t heard since my CIA days. I’m certain he’s working with someone I used to know. Someone called… Sampson.”
Saying the name out loud seemed like a bad omen. But he knew he had to. He had tried to leave that part of his life behind, but clearly, he wasn’t going to be able to get away quite so easily.
“Sampson?” Lawson asked, frowning. “You never mentioned anything about a Sampson before. And I don’t remember meeting anyone by that name at the agency.”
“He was another operative I worked with when we were on separate squads at the agency,” Xavier explained.
“The two of us had a few difficult missions together. I always got a strange vibe from him, but he never really did anything that gave me a concrete reason for that. It was just more of an unease of how he carried himself and certain things he said, so I just pushed it to the back of my mind and kept doing my job. Figured that was the best thing for me to do. Not make extra waves and complicate things further.”
“But?” Lawson prompted him.
“The last mission we were on, it went sideways,” Xavier explained with a sigh. He hadn’t thought about this in so long. He had hoped he wouldn’t have to deal with it ever again. He’d tried so hard to leave it in the past.
“In what way?” Aaron asked him.
Xavier reached to the back of his head, brushing his fingers against the bloody gash in his skull.
He winced. He was going to need to be stitched up and checked for a concussion sooner or later, but right now, they had to deal with the issue at hand.
“We were assigned to this case, tracking a lost arms shipment that we had reason to believe was going to fall into the wrong hands,” he explained.
“But the more time I spent on the case, the more obvious it became to me that Sampson was the wrong hands. He dropped a few hints about the two of us working together, coming up with a cover story so we could sell them ourselves.”
“So what exactly are they looking for here?” Lawson asked. “What do they think you have?”
“A USB drive.” Xavier sighed. “It was the one with all the information about the shipment, all the tracking details we had on it. I was supposed to pass it on to Sampson so we could find the container, but I destroyed it before he could get his hands on it. I knew I couldn’t risk firepower like that ending up in rotation with the wrong kind of people.
It was a tough choice, but I know it was the right one. ”
“But he doesn’t know you’ve destroyed it,” Aaron surmised. “And he sent someone to infiltrate the lodge to try to find out where you were keeping it.”
“That’s what I think,” Xavier agreed.
“You think he would kill to get his hands on it?” Lawson’s voice hardened.
“Definitely. He’s killed before,” Xavier replied, with a grimace.
“When we were working together, he was always trigger-happy. Most of the time, they were the kind of people who would have ended up dead one way or another because of their line of work. Sampson just took great pleasure in being the one who pulled the trigger.”
“Why do you think he’s come after you now?” Aaron wondered out loud.
Xavier sighed again. “I don’t know,” he admitted.
“I guess because he finally tracked me down and found a way to get closer to me without arousing any suspicion. Sending Jed in first… I don’t know what he’s promised that guy, but I think he’ll just take him out the first chance he gets.
He uses people to get what he wants. And he’s going to use whatever means he can to get his hands on that USB drive. ”
“That doesn’t even exist anymore,” Lawson finished up for him. “Do you think he’s going to believe it when you try to tell him that?”
“No,” Xavier replied. “From what I know about this guy, he’s going to put up as much of a fight as he can. That’s definitely what Jed was looking for in here.”
“And where did he go?” Lawson asked urgently. “Do you have any idea where he is now?”
Xavier slowly shook his head. “I wish I did, but he knocked me out and then took off. Next thing I knew, Aaron was waking me up here.”
“Hell,” Lawson muttered and began pacing back and forth.
Xavier could practically see his mind racing.
His own was going a hundred miles an hour, despite the aching pain at the back of his head.
He couldn’t think straight. Was Sampson here on the grounds?
Had he been watching from afar, making sure that his plan came together?
Though he might have been a psycho, he wasn’t stupid—he wouldn’t have made it that far in the CIA if he was.
Jed had to be in contact with him somehow to get his orders. Now they just needed to find Jed.
Hannah. Xavier felt a flood of terror grip him when he thought of her.
She was out there, and she didn’t know what had just happened.
Yes, she had her doubts about Jed, but she wasn’t aware of just how serious things had gotten.
Hopefully, if she saw him, she would know to steer clear of him, but Xavier needed to get to her and catch her up on everything that had gone down.
He would never forgive himself if something happened to her and he hadn’t been there to stop it.
“I’ll call Bailey, tell her to come up here and get a statement from you and process the crime scene,” Aaron offered. “And I’ll ask her to bring River along to look at that wound on your head and check for a concussion.” He stepped out into the hallway, phone in hand.
“I need to get to Hannah,” Xavier growled, trying to get to his feet.
Lawson put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down again. “You need to sit your ass right there and wait to get checked over,” he replied firmly.
Xavier knew there would be no arguing with him.
“You can’t walk into a fight with a wound like that on your head.
You’re going to be more of a liability than anything else,” Lawson pointed out in his infuriatingly calm and logical way.
“Now, tell me everything you remember about Sampson. He might have other people here he’s been using to watch you.
We’ve had an influx of new guests this week alone. ”
Xavier tried to catch Lawson up on every detail he remembered, but they were hazy.
Their time at the CIA was long behind them—or so he’d thought.
It had been the incident with Sampson that had driven him to leave in the first place, because he knew he couldn’t handle winding up on a mission with someone else like him again.
He needed to get out and do things on his own terms, and he couldn’t rely on the CIA to do the right thing. There were plenty of agents who had to be aware of what Sampson was up to, but they were willing to look the other way, either because they were scared of him or they were on his side.
And Xavier had no idea if that made him the enemy here.
What if Sampson had the full force of the CIA behind him?
Xavier would bet money that Jed had been an operative before Sampson pulled him into this, hell, maybe he still was.
He seemed to have a certain comfort with putting on an act the way he had since he arrived here, as though it wasn’t the first time he had gone undercover.
After Aaron had called Bailey, he stepped back into the room, eyes darting between him and Lawson, his face pale.
Xavier’s stomach turned, and his nausea came on full force. He knew before Aaron even opened his mouth something terrible was wrong. There was only one reason he would have that look on his face. Xavier swallowed heavily, trying to prepare himself for the worst.
Lawson sensing the same, clenched his fists at his sides. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Bailey just got off the phone with Sarah. There’d been an incident in her office, so Bailey’s on the way. But…” His gaze shifted between the two men again. “It’s Hannah. They’ve taken her.”
“Jed.” Xavier all but growled. He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths trying to control the immediate range that flooded his system. Tuning out Lawson’s forceful steps pacing the room and his muttered curses.
That was the one thing he didn’t want to hear above everything else—the one person he couldn’t lose.
Not now. Not after they’d just come clean about their feelings for each other and were finally together in the way he’d always hoped for.
Hannah had always been special to him, but now she was his to protect.
He wouldn’t let her slip through his fingers.
He wouldn’t let some ghost from his past snatch her away.
He didn’t care what it took. He was going to get her back. Sampson and Jed didn’t know what kind of storm they had coming their way.