Storm Warning (Security Specialists International Book 4) (2 page)

Dev added, “Plus … you’re family now. We’d go to war for you.”

And it might come to that.

Tears of gratitude formed in her eyes.
Not the time, Dahlia Jane.
She furiously blinked the wetness away as she carefully negotiated the curvy, snow-covered road. The mountain road was tricky on dry days, but on snowy days, it was downright treacherous. One wrong move and they’d slide off the icy pavement into the Tug River.

With all the potential dangers, her gaze never ceased moving back and forth from the road to the rearview mirror. No one on the road, but them and a few truckers who had to make deliveries or lose money. Most importantly, no county sheriff’s car in high-speed pursuit.

And who was the Sheriff now?

She’d find out once they stopped. Chances were she might not even know the man, but she’d bet he was firmly in Ed Varney’s back pocket.

To distract her mind from chasing the unknowns like a hamster running a wheel, she said, “So … Donna sure looked scared. What did you do or say to her? The Donna I knew could skin a person with the sharp edge of her tongue.”

DJ chanced a quick glance at Dev. His lips twisted with disgust. Yeah, that was how a lot of decent people felt about old Donna.

Before Dev could open his mouth, Andy laughed. “Ole Dev told her that if she made a single peep before morning that he knew where she lived and he’d come back and personally give her a facelift with a dull knife.”

“Facelift?” DJ bit her lip, stifling an inappropriate snicker, as she carefully steered through a series of S-curves that hadn’t seen a plow or salt.

Dev snorted. “That’s what she said she was in the hospital for.”

“Nothing’s changed with that bitch,” she said on a sigh as she pulled out of the last curve with only a slight skid. Donna had regularly had tune-ups even when DJ lived in Red Bone. She was fairly sure her father and Ed Varney paid for most of the body work.

The Walshes hummed in a way she’d quickly come to recognize meant they wanted her to share—but only if she wanted to. Their patient silence filled the confines of the Jeep until she couldn’t stand it any longer.

DJ grimaced. “Donna was—and probably still is—the town slut. She spread her legs for most of Red Bone’s and the surrounding area’s male population over the age of sixteen including my father and my two brothers. She’s quite the femme fatale.”

She could still remember the one time her mother had put her foot down about her husband “visiting” Donna. Her father had beaten her mother, beaten DJ when she tried to stop him, and then had still gone to see the fat-assed bitch. His regular nights had been Tuesday and Saturday. On Saturdays, he’d shared Donna with his boss Ed Varney in a threesome.

Everyone in Red Bone knew about her father’s philandering. Her mother had tried to shelter DJ from the salacious knowledge, but there were always people who liked to gossip.
Bless their hearts.

“Not seeing that. Not my type.” Dev looked over the seat at his brother. “Yours, Andy?”

“Only if I was blind, deaf, dumb, criminally stupid—and so crippled I couldn’t run the other way.”

DJ’s lips twisted upwards before thinning into a tight tense line as she struggled to keep the Jeep on the road when a particularly vicious gust of wind hit the vehicle sideways. “Thanks, guys. I needed a good laugh. I always thought she looked too … too…”

“Tarted up? Cheap? Skanky?” Dev suggested.

“Rode hard and put away wet,” Andy muttered. “She smelled like it, too.”

“Eeuw, thanks for putting that image in my brain.” DJ shook her head as the brothers chuckled. The laughter relieved some of the tension in the vehicle. “I bet Donna had sex in the hospital bed. She told me once … well, never mind. I’d never take sex advice from the likes of her. My momma raised me better.”

Worry for her mother rose to swamp her once again. She choked up on the steering wheel until her fingers ached. When the vehicle began to drift, she realized what she was doing and deliberately loosened her grip and steered the Jeep back on her side of the center line. Now was not the time to have an accident because she’d become distracted.

With a sigh of relief, DJ spotted the bright lights of the truck stop. She pulled into the parking lot and backed into a spot between a darkened pickup truck and an equally empty SUV.

“We can talk here without being noticed.” Besides the two vehicles and theirs, there were at least twenty semis and quite a few cars. They’d be just three among many snow weary travelers.

After she turned off the vehicle, she turned to face Dev and so that she could see Andy in the seat behind his brother. “Okay, show me the damn pictures.”

Andy hung over the seat and pulled up the first picture on his phone. “Here’s the Sheriff.”

The picture was of a large, dark-haired male. He lay on his side, hog-tied with zip ties, and had gauze bandaging and tape over his mouth. He wore an eye patch, but his other flame-blue eye glared into the camera.

God help them all. His daddy bought Sean the Sheriff’s job.

DJ swallowed the threatening nausea and fought against being sucked into the black hole of her past. The guys needed more intel—part of which would include what had happened between Sean and her on the night she graduated from high school. The events of that night were why they were here now.

She managed to gasp out, “That’s Sean Varney. His father Ed is my father’s boss.”

Both men’s body postures tensed. Their gazes sharpened as they glanced from the image on the cell phone to her face and then back again.

Could they sense her fear of Sean? Her distaste? Her horror?

Probably.

For a few seconds, she ignored their questioning looks and took a couple of slow breaths in an attempt to regain control of her emotions. She wasn’t sure she could talk about what Sean had done to her. Didn’t want to see the pity on their faces, if she could.

Denial, thy name is Dahlia Jane.

DJ swept a shaky finger across the cell phone’s screen and shuddered at the next image—Sean standing against the wall next to the elevator, his hands behind his neck. He’d bulked up even more over the last ten years. But the feral look promising pain and eventually death in the one good eye—the one she hadn’t damaged—hadn’t changed at all. It still chilled her to the bone. He’d aimed the same expression at her on graduation night right after she managed to get away.

Seeing that look in Sean’s eye was the tipping factor. She could no longer hold back the tsunami of dark memories.
—
It was a hot summer night. A good night for a swim in the creek by her family’s cabin. Sean followed her—made crude remarks and sexual overtures. She refused him. Tried to leave. He pounced on her like a hungry bobcat on a rabbit.

Nothing she did stopped him. She scratched and kicked. Screamed until her throat was raw and only mewling sounds emerged.

Sean beat her until she lay, gasping, half in, half out of the creek. Then he stripped her with rough, pinching fingers. Raped her—taking her virginity—and beat her some more. Time blurred as he raped her again. She fell unconscious then. She only roused when dawn broke. Sean must have fallen asleep, but the sun awakened him, too—and he raped her yet again. But this time, she managed to find a rock near her hand. In her fear and pain, she hit him in the face, in his eye.

He screamed, roared, cursed—and threatened, “I’ll cut you to pieces, you fucking bitch. You’ll beg for death.”

As he rolled on the ground, covering his damaged eye with his hands, she struggled to her feet and then stumbled away. She fell many times, but kept getting up until she could no longer manage it. Then she crawled. Anything to put distance between her and the animal who’d hurt her.

Relaxing her clenched jaw and taking several deep breaths, DJ beat back the nightmarish images. That brutalized girl no longer existed. She couldn’t. The Army had made DJ strong, strong enough that no man could ever hurt her in such a way again.

Maybe if she told herself that often enough, she might even begin to believe it, might be able to live a normal life and be more than good buddies with men.

“DJ … come back to us, please.” Dev’s voice broke through the miasma inside her mind.

She blinked and then looked at Dev and Andy. How long had she been lost in the past? It must’ve been awhile since their expressions had switched from questioning to concerned.

Then it hit her.

“Sweet Jesus,” DJ whispered, a sick feeling in her stomach. “Sean as a law enforcement officer would have access to databases most citizens wouldn’t. Maybe not the classified stuff, but my regular Army records. He could’ve come after me at any time.”

“It’s awfully hard to kidnap a Chief Warrant Officer off a military base stateside or on deployment. That would cause a ruckus,” Dev pointed out. “He waited to set his trap until you were out. He and his buddies might not have even been aware of your plan to take your mom away.”

“Yeah, that makes more sense than Momma or Mrs. Binkley screwing the pooch.” DJ laid her head back against the headrest, willing her stomach to stop churning.

“If it bothers you, we can have Tweeter and Keely look into who’s accessed your Army records. They can also check to see if your classified records were hacked.” Andy patted her shoulder. “The fucker could’ve also hired a private investigator and gotten the info about you and your discharge date that way.”

She nodded. “Show me the other two.”

Andy held his phone up with another picture.

“That’s Ed Varney.” She shivered. If she’d been Catholic, she might’ve crossed herself. The devil hadn’t changed at all. He was still big, ugly, and mean-looking. She was surprised he hadn’t had a heart attack since his bulk looked to be all fat, concentrated in his middle.

“And here’s the last guy,” Andy said. “Looks like he eats small pets and children for breakfast. His vocabulary was … impressive.”

DJ frowned as she looked at the picture of the last man. Andy had also taken closeups of the man’s tattoos. He could be militia, an outlaw biker, or an ex-con. He looked very rough. “I don’t know him. Um, where did y’all get the restraints you used to hog tie them? I didn’t see you take in any.”

Dev’s face darkened with repressed rage. “The bastards had them. We also found a couple of syringes on them. We gave each of them a little dose of whatever they’d planned for you. We kept part of one, and we’ll have Dad get it analyzed on base. It’s evidence they’d planned to take you by force. We have lots of lovely pictures before and after our take-down of them.”

DJ shuddered. No matter how strong she was, how well she fought, or how heavily armed she’d have been, the three men could’ve easily overpowered her. God, she was glad she’d come with backup.

“Dev opted to drug them.” Andy let out a disappointed sigh. “I wanted to beat the shit out of them.”

“Glad you restrained yourself,” she said.

“They’re alive, but won’t be real happy. They don’t dare come after us, even if they could discover who we are. What they were doing was illegal,” Andy said. “We took the pictures to show you—but also to turn over to the Feds when we report the attempted kidnapping.”

“If I’d only reported Sean … ten years ago…”

But you didn’t and here you are.

Yeah, here she was. Her mother missing. Two decent men involved in the filth that was her past. All of a sudden she was that eighteen-year-old girl again and nothing had changed. She choked back the sob threatening to escape. The view outside the Jeep’s windshield blurred, not because of the heavy snow, but because of the tears welling in her eyes.

Again with the crying? God bless it, Dahlia Jane, man the fuck up. You aren’t alone. You have a team. Share the load.

Dev wiped away a tear streaking down her cheek with his gloved thumb. “Talk to us.”

DJ blinked away the tears and sniffed. “Yeah … you need to know the whole, sordid story—need to know what you could be walking into and why.”

Also, they needed to learn she wasn’t the hero they thought she was. She’d run away all those years ago and stayed away. She’d failed in her attempts to free her mother, thus leaving her in the hands of an abusive man.

Cut yourself some slack. You tried. Your momma has to share some of the blame. She never grabbed the safety lines you threw out.

With her head resting against the seat back, she inhaled and then slowly exhaled, several times. Her vision finally clear, she stared at the roof of the Jeep.

Jesus, she’d rather face a horde of Taliban terrorists than talk about this crap. She sniffled and immediately resented the weakness in her that still allowed the past to bother her this way.

Andy handed her a handkerchief over the back of the seat. “Here ya go. You know, anything you tell us will stay with us, if that’s what you want.”

Get a fucking spine, Dahlia Jane. Just spit it out.

“The night I graduated high school … Sean Varney beat and raped me.”

Silence met the stark statement, which said it all without having to relive the gory details. Been there. Done that once this evening. Walking an emotional tightrope without a safety net as a result.

The energy pouring off the two men had gone from cool and calm to nuclear in a split second. She sensed their stares, their concern. She couldn’t look at them. Because if she found pity in their eyes, she’d fall right off the thin line she was walking and then be of no use to her mother.

DJ inhaled, then let out a harsh, shaky breath. “My momma found me … I was too hurt, too weak, to make it all the way home … after I got away from him.”

Echoes of Sean bellowing in pain from the hurt she’d managed to mete out—screaming he’d cut her to pieces and use her as fish bait—rang in her head again.

Dammit! No! She slammed a mental door, shutting out the cacophony from the past.

“She’d come to find me, because…” She gasped for breath.

Why wasn’t there enough oxygen all of a sudden?

“Breathe.” Dev rubbed her arm. “Take your time.”

The sound of his calm voice, the warmth of his hand through her coat helped. She took several breaths, then continued, “My father and Sean’s had made a deal…”