Oxblood (13 page)

“So my stubbornness came in handy, huh?” I gave him a crooked smile.

“Yes. It most certainly did.” Ian brushed my hair out of my face and sighed. “Now, are you okay to continue? It's not much farther.”

“Yes, I'm good. Thank you, Ian.” We mirrored tight-lipped smiles at each other and kept walking.

We climbed two flights of stairs at the end of the tunnel and emerged inside an old, abandoned house—completely empty and all kinds of creepy—before continuing outside to a barn. A keypad was hidden in the paneling, and Ian flipped the cover open and entered a six-digit code.

As we passed through the door, it became clear that the barn was just a shell hiding the true interior. We had entered a showroom with two cars parked with space for a third car between them.

Ian entered another code into a different keypad. Suddenly, the floor shifted, revealing that each car was parked on a massive plate. The car on the left lowered, and the middle plate moved into its place. The car on the right moved left. As each car replaced the previous one's place in line, a new one appeared from below on the right. A hydraulic, Ferris wheel–type system rotated several cars until a black SUV arrived.

Ian moved to the driver's side door.

“That. Was. Crazy,” I said.

“Get in,” Ian said, ignoring my amazement. More whiplash. Sweet to sour in the blink of an eye.

Once we were on the road, Ian pulled out the new cell phone and dialed. I saw relief flood his face when someone answered. “Claudia! What the hell is going on?”

I heard the muffled sounds of Claudia talking. Ian nodded a couple of times, told her to stay put in the new safe house, and then hung up.

I looked at Ian expectantly, but it appeared that he had no intention of filling me in. “What did she say?” I asked.

“Not now,” he said tersely. He kept his eyes on the road, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

“What did she say, Ian?” Did my friendship with the team suddenly not matter?

“I said,
not now
, Victoria!” He brought the car to a screeching halt in the middle of the road, jerking me forward into my seatbelt.

I looked at Ian in shock.

He calmed himself, but not before his nostrils flared with frustration. “Now that I know everyone is fine, I am trying to figure out the next move. I can't do that if you're asking questions incessantly.”

“I'm sorry if I want to know what's going on! Two gunmen just chased me down a hallway, I was knocked out and tied up, you were hanging from the ceiling, I kicked a guy in the face and broke his nose, you just killed a man, and the team has gone MIA. Now we're driving toward I don't know what, and all you're doing is telling me to shut up!”

“Your job is to take orders and do as I say. I'll give you information when it's time for you to have information.” His face was hard and steady. That was when I understood what it was really like to be a part of this team.

I realized that to be around Ian was to be around two different people. When it came to his team or the mission, he was one person. And, for whatever reason, when he was alone with me, he was someone else. A guy who
didn't
want to be that other guy all the time.

I turned my body to face the windshield and steeled myself. I wasn't going to become the two-faced machine Ian had become, but I could become the good little agent he needed me to be.

“You're right. I'm sorry. You'll give me information as I need it,” I said coldly.

“Victoria,” he began apologetically.

I had to let Ian work the way he worked. That was my only hope of finding Gil.

“It's fine, Ian.”

Ian nodded once and turned to face the road. He took the car out of park and took us from zero to sixty in a matter of seconds.

Chapter 12

We drove for a long time. We passed farmhouse after farmhouse with nothing much in between. While he drove us to undisclosed location number two, I combed through the journal and came to a familiar story at the end of the book. The names had been changed, but I recognized the people and the events.

In the journal, the girlfriend of a man who Gil identified as a distant cousin had to leave Miami and go home to Indiana with her family. Weeks went by, and the cousin received no replies to his almost-daily emails. The cousin became consumed with worry, until one night, his worry turned into a nightmare.

Watching the evening news, he saw a story about the body of an unidentified young girl found inside a brothel in Miami. When a sketch of the girl's face appeared on the screen, the cousin fell apart. It was his lost girlfriend.

Gil's lost girlfriend.

We never got any clear answers about what happened to Maria or how she ended up in that brothel. All we knew was what Maria had told Gil: Her family was being deported back to Cuba. It was such a hard time for Gil. They had dated for two years and when he found out that she'd been murdered, it nearly killed him. He didn't eat and he barely slept for days. He snapped out of it, though, when he realized that I needed him. Dad and Mom had already been gone for more than two years by then. So it was just the two of us, and he couldn't check out on me. It was after her death that he became so laser-focused on school and research.

Poor Gil
, I thought.
Maria's death still haunts him.
But what did her story have to do with Italy? Had Gil found himself in a mob family that ran a prostitution ring?

I logged the Maria story away and put the journal back in my bag.

We were entering a town that looked similar to Bologna. The farmhouses and pastures were slowly being replaced with rows of homes and businesses. It seemed like a nice place to explore someday—when I wasn't searching for my missing brother and running for my life.

After several turns, including a few extra that I'm pretty sure Ian took to be on the safe side, we pulled into an alley.

“Let's go,” he said, his game face still on.

“May I ask where we are?” I shut my door and followed him into a building and up two flights of stairs. My still-fatigued legs were not thrilled by the lack of an elevator.

“We're almost an hour southwest of Venice in a city called Padova.”

He pulled out his phone and began typing, but instead of putting it to his ear, he held it flat on his palm while we stood in front of a door. A moment later, the door unlatched and popped ajar.

“Fancy,” I muttered under my breath.

“Damon!” Ian called as he strode across the room.

The setup here was different. This was a huge apartment with rooms and furniture. It felt almost welcoming until I spotted Adam's artillery on the coffee table. Although, it probably felt like home to Adam to have his “babies” right at his fingertips. Claudia's scaled-down tech was spread out on the dining-room table, a fraction of what she had at the other location. There were no flat-screen televisions. Only a lonely TV with bunny ears like the one my grandmother had in New York.

“Thank God, you're both okay,” Damon said as he rushed in from a back bedroom. “We couldn't reach you when it all started.”

Damon kissed both my cheeks and threw his arms around Ian in a manly hug.

Ian looked angry. “What happened? Why didn't the surveillance security on the building work, and why the
hell
didn't any of you answer your cell?”

Claudia was feverishly clacking away at her computer. “I don't know what happened, Ian. Our cells were fine when you called Damon after you got ambushed at the hotel. Then we got raided within minutes of Damon hanging up. After that, we hit the tunnels. They went dead down there and didn't come back up until we were already here. We tried calling you, but there was no answer,” she explained. One of the thugs probably destroyed Ian's phone when they strung him up. “And I have no idea how they got in, but I'm going to find out.
No one
cracks my system!”

“I've pulled a few things you need to see,” Damon began.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked. I didn't know if Ian was going to bark at me or ignore me altogether.

“Just sit tight,” he said before he walked away with Damon.

I sat down next to Claudia, and Adam joined us. “You okay, kid?”

“Yeah,” I answered him. “What about you guys? What happened?”

“We were totally freaking ambushed, that's what happened!” Claudia said as she continued working.

Adam explained, “The trip wires at the other end of the building went off. Claudia pulled up the surveillance feed, and once we knew a rat wasn't the culprit, we grabbed everything and were in the tunnel in less than a minute.”

“That tunnel is nuts!” I said.

“Right? That building used to be a factory. Rumor has it that the tunnel connected the factory to the designer's house. Shipments had to be brought through the tunnel to his home for his personal approval before they went out.”

“Who was the designer?” I asked.

“The Prada family,” Adam answered. “Ever heard of them?”

“Oh, I'm more than familiar! My friend Tiffany would have a heart attack if she knew I stood on the same ground as a Prada,” I laughed. “But, I hate to break it to you, the Prada business has pretty much always been in Milan.”

Just then, the door flung open, and I thought for sure that we were being attacked again. A woman with a blazing red pixie-cut and a broad-shouldered wall of a guy with dark brown hair entered the apartment like they owned it. They were both dressed up and looked like they had come from a fancy party. His white dress shirt was undone, and his tie was draped around his shirt collar. Her strapless, skin-tight cobalt-blue dress didn't leave much to the imagination. They both looked a little rough, but not enough to keep them from being embarrassingly good-looking.

“What the hell, Ian?” the guy shouted as he closed the door behind them.

“Carter. Eva. What are you doing here?” Ian asked.

“Well, let's see. We were solidly embedded in Rubio's family, enjoying the engagement party of his daughter Caramia, when all hell broke loose! A team came in, guns blazing, and took Rubio and his boys out. You know the procedure before you send a Rogue team in!”

“That's bull and you know it!” Ian shouted.

Carter was pissed, and Eva seemed just as angry.

“What's a Rogue team?” I whispered to Claudia and Adam.

“We are. We're R-14,
Rogue
-14,” Adam answered.

“How many Rogue teams are there?”

“No one knows for sure. I mean, someone knows, but we don't.” Claudia looked at her screen again and shook her head. “And no one knows how long the Command division has been around. All we know is that in the last year, seven teams have either been eliminated or disbanded, with the remaining team members sent to join other teams.

“Enter Carter and Eva. They were on a mission in Colombia when the rest of their team was found dead, execution style. They contacted base, were extracted, and got reassigned to our team.”

“Ian's right, Carter,” Eva said, calmer now. “We need to regroup. If that wasn't a Rogue team, then we were ambushed along with the rest of them. What happened out there?”

“It's a long story that starts with Victoria and me being attacked at the hotel,” Ian told them.

Carter and Eva turned to look at me. “Who's this?” Eva asked.

“This is Victoria. She's a part of the team now,” Ian said matter-of-factly. It was the first time he referred to me as a member of the team without sounding like he was sorry I was there.

“Hmph,” Carter responded.

“Stop being a jerk, Carter,” Eva said. She walked over and shook my hand. “I'm Eva. That's Carter. He's not usually so . . . well,
that way
. It's been an interesting day. Welcome to the team.”

“Thanks, and I don't think
interesting
begins to cover it,” I said.

Carter took Eva's hand and disappeared into a second bedroom, closing the door behind them. I wondered if they were together, like,
together-together
. While I would think that romantic relationships would be a no-no, if you are playing a part with someone for so long, the lines must get blurred.

While everyone else returned to their tasks, I sat on the couch, tense and worried. Why was Ian's team being ambushed out of the blue? Of course any mob family that realized it was being monitored by a Rogue team would surely want to eliminate the agents. But the attacks didn't seem very moblike, based on how Ian said they operated. And Carter's description of their ambush didn't sound like one mob family coming after another.

I thought back over the events at the hotel. I felt like I had missed something. I closed my eyes and pictured the hotel bar. I saw the two guys who chased me, the old lady knitting, the various couples and people around the room. I couldn't think of anything I had missed. The two men who chased me were the only ones I saw
do
anything. Except . . .

The old lady.
She had been there the day I checked in and met Ian. She moved to the lobby just around the same time Ian did. And she was in the hotel today. It sounded crazy, but I knew in my gut that she was involved.

Oh my God!
I whispered to myself. “Ian!” I stood up and shouted.

“What?” he asked, looking slightly annoyed.

“They want Gil,” I said as if it were explanation enough.

“What is she talking about?” Carter asked. He and Eva joined us in the living room, his bow tie hanging loose around his neck and Eva's feet bare.

“The old lady who was knitting—well, she's probably not an old lady, she's probably young and just dressed as an old lady to seem less assuming. She was there the day I arrived. She was in the lounge where I first saw you.”

“She's probably a guest there,” Carter said.

“She was sitting in the lounge not far from you, knitting. When I checked in at the front desk, you were behind me in line and she moved to the big bench in the lobby.”

Carter looked annoyed. “There are any number of reasons why that woman was there. C'mon, Ian. Really? Have any of you wondered about her showing up within days of the attack on this team?”

Carter folded his arms and glared at me. “What are you even bringing to this team?”

I stepped forward and looked up at him. “You favor your left leg.” I said.

Carter dropped his arms. “What?”

“You try not to, but you favor your left leg when you walk,” I said. “You also have a scar behind your right ear. And you might want to consider a smaller weapon strapped to your ankle because the one you had on when you got here screams, ‘I'm armed!'”

Ian folded his arms. “That's what she brings to this team.”

All eyes were on Carter, with Eva adding a knowing smirk.

“We'll see,” Carter said before turning on his heel and walking back into the bedroom.

“Well done, Victoria.” Eva said with a smile. “He may be pissed now, but he'll respect you later for not backing down.”

Ian waved his hand dismissively. “Carter is a hard-ass. He doesn't like taking orders from someone with less field experience than him. I trust your instincts. If you say the old lady was casing the hotel, then let's start with that.”

“Why do you think they were at the hotel?” Damon asked.

“Maybe for the same reason Ian was,” I said. “Maybe they were waiting for Gil. Ian heard me ask about Gil, maybe she did, too?”

“Then why not just follow you to your room?” Eva asked.

“I don't know,” I answered. “Gil sent me his journal from
that
hotel, and he sent it to me because something was wrong. What if they, the two guys and the old lady, were closing in on him, and he sent it just before he was able to get away?”

“Claudia, pull up the hotel surveillance footage,” Damon said. He leaned in over her shoulder. I could see she was not as comfortable with his proximity as he was. His cologne must have been too much for her, too, because she kept wriggling her nose and looked like she was about to sneeze.

“They wouldn't be after the journal,” I mused aloud. “There's no way anyone would look at it and think it's anything but a family history. Besides, I'm guessing no one else knows about it. They must just want
him
.”

I tried not to let my nerves get the better of me, but my voice betrayed me. “This whole time, I've been thinking that Gil was relatively safe because his skills are so valuable, but what if he was trying to get away from them? What if they asked him to do something he just couldn't do? Either he didn't know how or couldn't morally do it? Do you think he tried to make a run for it?”

“First of all, calm down,” Ian said. “Even though it might not seem like it, we've got this under control. And, honestly, I have no idea if Gil is hiding or if someone has him. He was sure he was getting closer to Paolo and had new information for me, which is why I had been sitting on the hotel when you arrived. Maybe the old lady knew what he had. But why come after you?”

“If she heard me ask about Gil, it makes sense that they would come after me thinking either one of us could get to Gil. The question is: What does Gil know?”

“I don't know,” Ian said. “Damon pulled some information about the locations we decoded and the people of interest. We haven't gone through all of it yet, but so far, there's nothing we didn't already know. All of it showed up on our radar, but none of it was out of the ordinary.”

“I read through the rest of the journal. We could go through that and see what else we find. Paolo has to be in there somewhere,” I suggested. Ian was right, though. So far, we had figured out where Gil had been and what he had been observing, but none of it was getting us that much closer to Paolo.