Circle of Deception (23 page)

“What did the investigator really say?” She wanted Rex to tell her good news.

After all but one patrol car had left earlier, he’d told her mother that Edward’s car hadn’t been found. Everyone hoped that was a good sign. Then again, the criminals—they all agreed it would take more than one person to stop Edward from returning home—could’ve dumped his body somewhere. They hadn’t received a ransom demand or any type of note saying why he was taken. So they were waiting.

“They believe he’s dead.”

She gasped and then took a few seconds to gather her thoughts. “Why?”

“He’d received several death threats.”

“But the moonshiner and his two cousins are in jail.”

He shrugged his broad shoulders, which looked even broader in the black long-sleeve T-shirt. She was relieved to see he was dressed again. Her concentration needed to be centered on the mission at hand, but something felt off about her brother’s disappearance. What a coincidence that it would happen at this time, and she’d never believed in coincidences.

“Could be he has more than two cousins.” He buckled a thick belt with a gun on one side and a huge knife on the other. Similar looking to a police officer’s duty belt, it had little cases with snaps lined up next to the knife along with a flashlight. The gear would be too heavy for her to wear, but on his tall frame, he looked ready to take down bad guys. “Let’s go.”

“Rex.”

He looked at her. “Abby, are you calling me by another man’s name,
milaiyah my-ah
?”

At least he looked at her. Not until that moment had she realized he’d barely glanced her way but a handful of times since returning. They had a lot of personal drama to talk about, but now wasn’t the time.

“Rurik, I need to find my brother.”

“Abby, we have people on it. Now you have a job to do. Time to concentrate.”

She locked her jaw and nodded, refusing to let the tears fall. She was a grown woman and knew what she needed to do.

He opened the bedroom door and peeked into the hallway. “You first.”

They left quietly though the back door. The officer in the patrol car out front was more for notifying everyone if Edward returned than for protecting the house, but they didn’t want to explain their dark clothes, the late hour, or why they were armed.

A black van waited for them about a mile from the house with its headlights off. They split and carefully walked to the sides. There was no certainty that the people inside were who they expected. The window nearest Abby rolled down.

“About time you got here. We were about to leave without you.” Behind the steering wheel, Jack leaned across the front seat and opened the passenger door. “Abby, up front with me.”

“We had to wait for the house to settle down.” There she goes explaining herself. She hated feeling like a wayward child after failing at Brody’s. Tonight, they needed to be successful.

Jack jerked his head to the back. “Rex, have a seat and tell us what you’ve found out.”

“The road in has six guards, with two of them in the trees, and cameras every ten yards. The electricity is underground and the box is located near where three of the guards stand sentry. We’ll have to take them all out before they can alert the interior. I never could get close enough to the caves to see how many are inside. During the hour I watched, I spotted only two trucks going in and one out.” One of the operatives sitting in the back handed him a map. “Here, here, and here are where we can find the caves. The entrance into the caves is in this area. Like I said, I couldn’t get more information out of the guards, no matter how many drinks I bought.” The paper crackled as he handed the map back.

So that was why he’d been gone so long on his jog that afternoon and returned with alcohol on his breath. Busy little bee. She tried to not let it bother her that he hadn’t said anything to her. It was all a job, one that they’d become too immersed in for a short period of time.

The van started to rock and bounce along the dirt road Rex had pointed at earlier. They planned to go two miles or less before ditching the van in the underbrush and continuing in on foot.

Brody’s people had no idea their lives were about to be cut short by a group of trained deadly operatives.

Abby stared straight ahead. The Circle was her life. She was good at killing and for a little while had forgotten that she wasn’t normal with normal dreams.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“W
HERE DID THEY
go?” Rex kicked out at a nearby crate. It landed against the stone wall, splintering one whole side and showing it was empty. Echoes of other crates being pried apart or bashed in vibrated throughout the cavern. Not a living soul had been in sight. “What the hell were those guards protecting?”

He turned to Nic as she wiped the sweat off her forehead with her arm.

“Some farm equipment and several rotten crates,” she stated the obvious. The cavern was cool and the humidity tolerable but tugging and breaking open everything they came across worked up a sweat. “From the looks of it, this place hasn’t been used in years. I can understand why no one would want to use this for storage anymore. The only cell tower is on the other side of the mountain. With no service, we’re cut off from everything—even Jack’s satellite phone can only work outside. By the way, Liam and Charlie are here now. They checked the smaller caves, and they’re empty too. I have a feeling Abby’s screwed the pooch on this one.”

At the mention of her name, Abby came in sight. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She looked so feminine. He liked it. He wished it was as simple to decide what else he felt for her. He wanted her. That was easy for him to understand. He’d wanted her since she first joined the OS and had remained that way after she’d returned from the dead. That was it. He wanted her too much and for too long. Her scent, the taste of honey and salt on her skin, between her legs, the tender spot behind her ear, every soft inch of her pulled him in and brought a need to sink into her every waking moment.

When he woke up hard and aching for her after their night of wild sex, he understood how dangerous she’d become to him. The last time she’d disappeared, he’d gone insane, and when the news came that she’d died, all the light in his world had died with her. He never wanted to love someone like that again. To allow someone that much power over him was asking for trouble, and for it to be the same woman? They might as well strap a straitjacket on him and put him away.

A little distance was needed to clear his head. Whatever drug Brody had in that wine, he hoped to never come across it again.

“Rex!”

He rubbed his eyes and looked at Nic.

“Are you okay?” Her sweet face looked at him with such concern.

“Yeah.” His gaze caught something shining in the wall near where the kicked crate had broken up. “What’s going on here?” A missing chunk of the limestone wall exposed a hinge. “Hey, Jack! We’ve got something here.”

He ran his hands over the wall and beneath a little lip was the latch. The wall moved smoothly, opening into another empty cavern. Except for the look of the floor, someone had moved a lot of full crates recently.

“Let’s see where this cave goes. Everyone be careful and keep an eye out for traps. I wouldn’t put it past the asshole.” Jack aimed his flashlight along the floor and moved inside with Abby a step behind him.

Rex tensed. Why the surge of jealousy? He believed Jack had been telling the truth about the one-night affair. So what was up with the unreasonable fury?

For the moment, he needed to concentrate on tracking down Brody. The key to finding out who created the bullets and where they were being manufactured rested with him. And then they needed to beef up the search for Abby’s brother. There was a good chance Brody had something to do with that, no matter how much Abby’s mother denied it. What any woman saw in that bastard, he would never understand.

About ten minutes later, they reached the other opening. Damn. A one-lane dirt road wound through a thick stand of trees, the limbs arching over the road, hiding it from satellite pictures. They were less than three miles from I-65, an easy way to escape. Brody and his crew could be anywhere.

“About time you fellows showed up.” Bubba stepped out of the tree line. Dressed in camo with a rifle resting on his shoulder, he looked like any hunter walking through the woods in the south. Problem was, hunting season was several months off.

Rex pointed his gun at the man.

“I’ll be damned. I thought you were dead,” Jack said as he and Bubba slapped each other on the back. “Good Lord, man, you’re skinny enough to be a skeleton.”

“Others have tried, but I’m too mean.” Bubba laughed. His accent was still Southern yet refined and less the good ol’ boy with each word. “I heard that Collin’s brother is running the show now. Is he any better than Theo?”

“Let’s say Ryker likes grown women and he doesn’t demand anyone call him master.” Jack shook his head.

Rex crossed his arms and listened to the two men. He barely kept from tapping his foot.

“Who is that?” Nic asked in a whisper. The way she kept her eyes on the man and the way she asked the question, he could tell she was interested in more than just his identity.

“That’s what I’d like to know too.”

Rex looked over at Abby. He didn’t like the glint in her eye at all.

“Jack, you might want to introduce me to your brother. I was working under an alias when we met in Brody’s house.”

“So you were involved in that clusterfuck.” Jack referred to the failed mission, but the crooked grin Bubba gave said he remembered what Rex and Abby had done. The gasp next to him warned that Abby realized it too. Rex’s face tightened with Jack’s unwitting remark. The man better keep his mouth shut.

“Clusterfuck, heh? I wouldn’t say that exactly. I left in the middle of the night so I didn’t see much.” The man’s gaze remained on Abby.

“We’re wasting time. It’ll be morning soon. Time to get back to our transportation and get out of here.” Rex had had enough of the long-lost-buddy routine and wanted the man’s eyes looking in a different direction.

“Hey, Rex. This is Ty Roman.” Jack grinned from ear-to-ear.

He nodded toward the man formerly known as Bubba. He’d heard of the infamous bounty hunter. Rumor was he’d pissed off the Savalas family a few years ago and old man Mikolas called in a favor from Theo. Rex had figured one day they would come across his bones in a cell deep inside the basement of The Circle’s old facility.

Ty nodded back. “Listen, Rex’s right. They’ve already covered the entrance you came in. The asshole underestimated your ability to find the hidden passageway.”

“How did you get involved with Brody?” Rex hadn’t decided if he trusted the man, a wild card in his opinion. What was a bounty hunter doing working undercover?

“Paying an old debt,” he said without adding more.

“You know another way around?” Jack asked.

“Nope.”

“Where’s your ride?” Abby piped in.

One side of his mouth lifted as he eyed her. “A few yards away, grazing.”

“Grazing? You rode a horse?” Nic edged in a little closer.

What was it with these women ogling the guy? Tall and rawboned, he didn’t look anything special; then again, Rex wasn’t into men. So what did he know?

Feeling uncomfortable analyzing what the women were thinking, Rex pointedly looked at Jack and said, “If they’ve realized we found the passageway, then we don’t have a lot of time here. They should be—”

A hissing sound passed his ear and a small limb near Rex’s head shattered.

“Fuck! Down! Everyone down!” Jack hurtled into cave opening, dragging Nic with him. Several other operatives followed. The bounty hunter had disappeared.

Rex and Abby landed next to each other behind a thick stand of undergrowth.

“We’ve got to quit meeting like this,” she said in her usual sarcastic tone. “It’s hell on my manicure.”

Rex looked at her nails and up at her face. She grinned. Christ! She could’ve been killed. Unable to tease back, he gritted his teeth.

“We’re getting fired on and you’re making jokes. Maybe you and Jack are made for each other.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wished them back. Her smile disappeared, and she looked away.

Each time gunfire zinged through leaves, thudding into the ground and tree trunks, a second later the crack of a rifle firing echoed around them. He couldn’t tell how many were firing, though he pinpointed the general direction.

“Rex! Abby! Are you okay over there?” Jack stepped a little too close to the opening as the
zing
and
whack
of a bullet hit near his feet in warning. A second later the echo of the rifle fire reached their location.

“We’re fine!” Rex wanted to squeeze Abby, wrap his body around her to protect her from the bullets zinging everywhere. “They want to pin us down until reinforcements show up.”

“Yep, that’s what I think too.”

“We’ll go farther into the trees.” Rex jerked his head toward a steep cliff in the direction of the firing. When Jack nodded, he knew he understood that they were going to work their way around and try to come up behind the shooters.

“We need to split up.” Abby looked up from where he still pressed her to the ground. He wanted to argue and keep her close and safe, but she was right. She hadn’t gotten to her position in The Circle by hiding behind the men.

“Okay. No time to waste. Jack and the others should be safe enough but if we don’t get the shooters before sunrise, I have a feeling we’ll have more company than we can handle. You game?”

Abby nodded, her eyes round with anticipation. He felt the same. They were ready to kick butt.

“The usual? I come up one side and you on the other?”

She nodded again. “Sounds like a plan,” she said.

He rolled off her and started belly crawling over the leaves and limbs scattered on the forest floor. A grin spread across his face when he heard her move off to the opposite direction.

After about twenty minutes he felt he should be safe enough to gradually stand, keeping an old wide oak between him and the snipers. He heard the hiss of the bullet and as he grunted from the impact, he heard the shot. Damn, that burned like a son of a bitch. It wasn’t the first time he’d been shot, but it was never easy to deal with. He wadded the tail of his shirt and pressed it to the wound on his hip. Of all places. If it had been his arms or side, he could deal with it better. But so close to a joint, every time he moved, blood spurted out and stung.