DOMINIC (Dragon Security Book 3) (10 page)

Amy

I was afraid the police would follow us. Plenty of people inside the diner had seen us. They could have given a description of the car to the police. But we hit the interstate and no one was behind us.

“Did they follow us from Arlington?”

“Probably.”

Dominic sat up and dragged his fingers through his hair, knocking loose the grass and debris that was clinging to him from his roll on the ground. His shirt was torn and there was blood on his arm, but he looked otherwise unharmed. At least, from what I could tell.

“Should we stop?”

“Let’s get closer to Houston first.”

I started to speed up, but Dominic reached over and touched my leg. “Slow and easy, babe. We don’t want to attract any unwanted attention.”

I nodded, my head beginning to spin with the reality of what had just happened now that the adrenaline was wearing off. My arm stung, but I was more concerned about him. I saw him grab on to the side of the SUV. I watched from a block away as they tore down the road with him barely hanging on. I was so afraid that he would fall, that I would see him crushed by the tires.

“What were you thinking?” I demanded.

He glanced at me, surprise written on his face.

I reached over and punched his arm. “You could have gotten killed!”

“I was trying not to get killed.”

“Who the hell grabs a ride onto the side of a moving vehicle? They could have shot you or caused you to fall! What would I do if you’d gotten killed?”

“You were supposed to be on your way to Houston.”

I shook my head, biting so hard on my bottom lip that it hurt. “I couldn’t just leave you there.”

“You should have. They could have shot you if they’d seen you.”

“They didn’t.”

“They could have.”

My hands were shaking. I wasn’t sure how much further I could go without losing it completely.

“Is this what they taught you in the Army? Is this what you were doing out there in Afghanistan?”

“Amy—”

“Is this what you were doing with Emily?”

“It’s complicated.”

I slammed on the brake and skidded the car to a stop on the side of the road, nearly throwing us both through the windshield. I was out of the car as quickly as I could put the transmission into park, storming down the ditch that divided the interstate from the access road, needing distance.

“Amy!”

Dominic grabbed my arm, twisting me around so that I was facing him. I slapped my hand against his chest, as much to catch myself from the momentum of the movement as it was to punish him for everything he was putting me through. He tried to grab my wrist, but I jerked back, moving out of his way and causing him to stumble forward. I wanted to scream; I wanted to hurt someone. But I wanted to touch him, to make sure the visible scrapes and bruises were all that he carried.

“Why would you do that? Why put yourself in that position? Why didn’t you just leave with me?”

“Because I didn’t want them to chase us. You could have gotten hurt.”

“So could you!”

“But I didn’t. I’m the one with combat training, remember?”

I tried to pull away, but he jerked me up against his chest, his free hand slipping over my face with the gentlest of touches.

“I love that you care this much.”

“I don’t care. I just didn’t want to have to deal with all this on my own. I want whoever killed Emily to pay, and you’re my best chance of that happening.”

“So you don’t care what happens to me?”

“I hate you. Remember?”

He smiled, his eyes lighting up with amusement. “I remember.”

“When this is over, I never want to see you again. You’re fucking insane!”

I meant it, too. Sort of. Seeing him jump onto the side of that SUV…I didn’t want to care what happened to him. I didn’t want him to die. I didn’t want to have grieve someone else I cared about.

“I love you, too,” he said softly, kissing me with that same passion that he always came at me with, like every kiss was the first.

What was I supposed to do?

I melted into him, returning his kiss with the same heat. He lifted me up and carried me back to the car, his hands sliding under the back of my shirt. If it’d been dark, if there hadn’t been dozens of cars rushing past us, honking their approval, he might have ripped my shirt away right there, stripping me down and taking what he wanted. And I would have let him.

Damn! I wished I did hate him.

He broke the kiss, his breath coming in little gasps. He slowly, regretfully, removed his hands from under my shirt, his attention turning to the flesh wound on my arm. It had already stopped bleeding, the blood beginning to dry thickly over the broken flesh.

“We should clean this up.”

“What about these?”

I lifted his own sleeve, exposing scrapes all along his bicep, obscuring a part of his tattoo of the Army emblem. He glanced at it, dismissing it without really looking at it.

“Scratches.”

“Are you hurt anywhere else?”

“Do I look hurt?”

Again that amusement was back in his eyes. I smacked him again, but it was a weak slap that ended with my hand resting against his heartbeat, feeling the life pounding inside of him.

“Are we going to survive this?”

He grew serious, his hands lifting my chin so that I was forced to look him in the eye.

“I will not allow anything to happen to you.”

“I don’t care about my safety.” I ran my hand along the length of his arm. “We finally found each other again. I don’t want to spend another minute without you.”

He groaned softly, leaning close to kiss me again.

“We will survive this. I promise.”

It wasn’t a promise I was confident he could keep. But I believed him anyway.

He kissed me a moment longer, then carefully lifted me and set me down in passenger seat of the tiny car.

“We need to find another car,” he said.

I just nodded. Stealing cars? Not nearly as scary as being shot at.

Megan

“He’ll be here,” Sam said, touching my shoulders to make me stop pacing.

“Things are getting out of hand. Dominic has done some really stupid things before, but this? They’re going to arrest him if they find him before we do.”

“I know. But he’s smart. He’ll be here.”

Almost as the words fell from her lips, there was a loud knocking at the back door. I got there first, more relieved than I could say to see Dominic standing there, his shirt ripped, but clearly still in one piece. There was an attractive young woman standing behind him, a petite thing with deep mahogany-colored hair and bright blue eyes. There was blood dried on her arm, but she, too, seemed to be mostly unharmed.

I yanked the sliding door open and gestured for them to come inside. Dominic dropped a duffle bag to the floor and removed a 9mm Glock from his back waistband, setting it on the table before offering me a hug. I almost felt like I was back in Afghanistan.

“What the hell?” I asked, pushing him back after enjoying the hug for a long minute. “Why do the police think you kidnapped someone?”

“Because I did. Sort of.”

He turned to Sam and offered her a hug, too.

Dominic was one of the first employees of Dragon Security. We’d hired him even before he left Camp Pendleton in California, anticipating his release from the Army. Hayden was first, Dominic a quick second. For two years we’d worked closely together, and that led to something of a friendship. I didn’t want to see anything hurt him.

“This is Amy Greene,” he said, drawing the girl forward once Sam released him.

“It’s nice to meet you, Amy.” I offered her a hand and she took it, looking me over as if she was wondering if I was competition or something.

It made me wonder if this was the girl who was supposed to belong to the engagement ring Dominic carried on his key ring. I’d never asked, and he never offered. It felt like an intrusion to ask, particularly since he’d always respected my privacy when it came to the man who left me at the altar on our wedding day.

“I’ve got a first aid kit upstairs,” Sam offered, gesturing for Amy to go with her. “We should clean that up.”

Amy glanced at her arm like she’d forgotten about it. “Thanks,” she said, following Sam out of the room.

Dominic watched her go, then his eyes moved slowly to my face. He looked like a child who’d gotten caught trying to sneak in the house after curfew.

“I guess you have a lot of questions.”

“Tons. But you should probably get washed up, too.”

He looked down at himself, just as Amy had done, as if he’d forgotten what he looked like. He grabbed the duffle and disappeared into the powder room just under the stairs. I heated some water, looking for tea bags in Sam’s cupboard. Dominic hated coffee, though he’d drink it during a late night stakeout if it was the only option. The things you pick up about people you work with day in and day out.

The tea was just about ready when Dominic came back into the room, the dirt washed from his face and a clean shirt stretched over his barrel chest. I handed him the cup, gesturing toward the table.

He set a picture paper clipped to a couple of sheets of paper on the table. I picked it up, recognizing his Army ID photo from my own files. The papers were not marked with any agency names. They could have been printed from any printer in America. But they offered a full dossier on Dominic and named him as a person of interest in one Emily Greene’s death.

“Who is she?”

“Amy’s twin. We worked together in Afghanistan.”

I looked up, his tone deep and secretive.

“CIA?”

He nodded. “She was murdered three days ago in Arlington.”

“Do you know who?”

“We were working on a case that involved a terrorist cell in Paris. She was reassigned before she’d finished it, so she continued to work on it on her own. I think she might have discovered the hierarchy of the cell. Maybe even the name of a CIA agent who was working both sides.”

A touch of dread washed over me.

“Paris?”

His eyes fell to the table. “I’m sorry, Megan.”

“For what?”

He looked up, regret filling his eyes. “Months ago, when you first started investigating Peter’s death, I knew it might be connected to what Emily and I were doing. But I didn’t want to compromise Emily by sharing what we knew with you.”

“But she was compromised somehow anyway.”

“Yeah. I’m not sure how that happened.”

“What was she investigating, exactly?”

He outlined it for me, the terrorist cell that consisted of college-aged students in Paris. He told me how he worked with Emily to find out who they were and what they were up to, an investigation that ended before they’d done more than uncover the lower section of a much larger pyramid. He told me how Emily was reassigned and then quit so that she could follow the leads the CIA chose to ignore in order to find the true leaders of the cell. How she felt partially responsible for what happened in Paris in November of this past year. She thought if she’d been allowed to finish the investigation, or if she had worked faster on her own, she might have helped bring down the cell before they had a chance to act.

Amy and Sam came back into the room as he finished, his fingers playing with the edge of his own photograph.

“This? Where did this come from?”

Dominic glanced at Amy who was standing against the counter, her hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. She was watching him, watching us, curiosity and concern and a little fear written clearly in her eyes.

“We stopped at a diner in Ada so that we could freshen up a little. A couple of guys in an SUV started shooting at us with a gun equipped with a silencer. They clipped Amy before I realized what was happening.”

“Where are they now?”

Dominic shrugged. “Probably in the local hospital.”

“Ada?” Sam asked. “That’s where Amber’s from.”

I nodded, growing more and more curious by the minute.

“So what aren’t you telling me?”

Dominic’s eyes moved to Amy again. I turned and gestured for Sam to take her out of the room. As polite as always, Sam offered to show her a collection of snow globes she oddly kept in her study along with an impressive—and very expensive—array of computer equipment.

Amy hesitated, reaching for Dominic’s hand as she left the room. The way he looked at her…it made me ache deep inside because it reminded me of the way Luke once looked at me.

Dominic lifted his cup of tea and sipped at it, using it as an excuse to put off what came next. But then there was nothing left to hesitate over.

“Emily’s been back for eighteen months. I’ve been going up to Arlington every couple of weeks, going over evidence with her, helping her reason out her theories. She was working with a couple of other guys, including one of her former handlers, a guy named Edgar Olsen. He was still with the CIA until six months ago when they forced him out. He wouldn’t say what caused his dismissal, but I think it had something to do with information he was slipping to Emily.”

“He was slipping her CIA materials? Do you realize that’s considered treason?”

He nodded. “The thing was, Emily was convinced that someone at the CIA was involved in all this. What caused our investigation to end, for her to be reassigned, and me to be pushed out of the Army wasn’t just the fact that our cover was blown. Emily believed that someone was trying to hide something. So she kept investigating, determined to learn the truth.”

“And did she?”

Dominic sat back, glancing toward the archway where Amy and Sam had disappeared.

“Do you remember the CIA team that was watching the guy…Kurt Sanchez?”

“I remember.”

“I gave you that file folder with the pictures of Sanchez in it?”

“Yeah?”

“There was more. Things on their computers that I downloaded onto a thumb drive and took to Emily. Dates. Places. Names. She said it was a list of operations that the CIA ran in France. She said it was helping her pinpoint the agents involved and the people they interacted with.”

“You got that from our investigation?”

“And she said that it had information on those guys, Sanchez and John Fuller, the ones arrested for terrorist acts back seven or eight months ago. She thought that they were just minor players, people arrested to take the focus off of what was happening with their companies.”

“Which was?”

“They were using the stolen Bradford Telecommunications software to pass on information to someone, probably members of the terrorist cell. Maybe even the CIA. But Sanchez had gotten out almost a year before, and that was likely why he told Peter about it. And Fuller…it was happening at his company, but his knowledge was limited.”

I sat back, struggling to wrap my mind around what he was saying. We’d gone over all this, searching everything we could find to get more information on these people. Peter had gone repeatedly to Huntsville to visit Fuller, convinced that he knew more about the stolen software than he was letting on. That’s how he met Amber—the waitress who would have his son and was now engaged to my little brother, Cole—at that diner in Ada. And it’s probably what led to his death.

“You knew this all along?”

“Emily was doing all the research. She was putting out feelers everywhere, trying to connect the dots. She had notes…” Dominic pulled a thumb drive out of his pocket. “This is all her work. I think this probably identifies the hierarchy of the terrorist cell and that’s why she was killed.”

I stared at the thumb drive. “You think my brother accidentally stumbled across a terrorist cell working here in the States?”

“I think he might have also come across a CIA agent working both sides of the fence.”

I got up, crossed to the counter to pour more coffee in my half-full mug.

“Why do you think that?”

“Someone’s trying to cover their tracks. Someone’s making minor arrests when they should be going after bigger fish. And isn’t it suspicious that the CIA didn’t really take much interest in Sanchez and Fuller until we started investigating Peter’s death?”

“We don’t know that.”

“We do. The files I downloaded? They’d only been watching Sanchez for a week when I caught them that afternoon when you were meeting with Sanchez.”

“But how would someone know what we were up to?”

“They knew about Amber. Fuller approached her. Maybe the CIA did, too? We just never asked her.”

“But how would the CIA have known about Amber?”

“Did Peter ever mention talking to anyone in the CIA?”

“Luke.”

Comprehension filled Dominic’s face. He stood slowly, approaching me across the kitchen.

“Luke disappeared not long before Peter’s accident, right?”

“Three months.”

“And you never heard from him again?”

I thought about the small slip of paper that I kept tucked into a book upstairs in my night table. It was with the rose he’d given me prom night and the engagement ring that I kept in its box. And the note he sent to me the morning of our wedding, the morning he disappeared.

“I heard from him. Once.”

Dominic’s brows knitted as he studied me closely. “When?”

I looked away, but that didn’t take away the burn of his gaze. I took a deep breath.

“Look, it wasn’t that big of a deal. It was just a note left behind for me. Just to let me know he was okay.”

“Where, Megan?”

“The empty house where Amber was taken when she was kidnapped.”

If I’d thought his gaze was heavy before, it became almost unbearable then. “And you didn’t tell anyone?”

“It was just a note. Meant only for me.”

“But it proves that he’s involved in all this. It proves that he was there that night, holding the mother of your nephew captive! Did you really think that it was inconsequential?”

“What about you hiding the information you took from the CIA? Or the fact that you knew about all this and you never said anything to anyone?”

“But I didn’t kidnap anyone.”

Touché.

“I don’t know what he was doing there. I don’t know why he’s involved in all this. I don’t know why he left, for that matter. I get that it looks all connected—”

“Looks?”

“Okay, so maybe he’s connected to all this. But that’s because Peter went to him when he first started investigating the software and asked for his advice. Maybe Luke went to his supervisors and they pulled him back into service. That’s as far as I can figure it all out. But that doesn’t mean that Luke’s on the wrong side.”

“I never said that.”

“And it doesn’t mean that he means anyone any harm.”

“I didn’t say that either.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“That we don’t have enough information to figure all this out, yet. But this thumb drive”—he held it up where I could see it—“just might have what we need on it. At the very least, it could tell us who killed Emily and why.”