Live Wire (11 page)

He watched the suspicion darken her eyes before she moved her hand behind her and a second later pulled the cell phone free from her back pocket.

She slapped it into his hand.

“I’ve checked the security on it weekly,” she informed him. “Nothing’s come up, so no one has tampered with it. I carry the damned thing with me and use it for business, so I know you haven’t called.”

She had a computer program that the phone plugged into. The computer ran through the phone’s programs for any hidden trackers or cyberbots that could have found it.

Jordan popped the back of the sat phone, knowing something was wrong somewhere. If her security program had come back clear, then that left only one other answer. Someone had done something before it left base with her, after the more secure Elite Ops information had been erased from it. It was the only way it could have been tampered with and only a select few had the ability to do it.

“Kira and Bailey both called you the first week after the group disbanded and left messages,” he told her as he popped the battery from the phone to check the only vulnerability left. “I called the morning you left to chew your ass out for leaving without saying good-bye.” He flicked her a look that promised retribution for that little trip.

She ignored it.

Clenching his teeth, he turned his attention back to the phone.

He found the problem in less than a minute.

It looked innocent enough. No more than a small metal prong among several others, yet appearing oddly out of place, set within the small programming section of the internal security chip located just beneath the battery pack.

Jordan pressed the tip of his nail against the prong he knew shouldn’t be there, breaking it off.

Pulling his own phone from the clip at his side, he found and pressed the button preprogrammed for her number. A second later, the phone rang.

Tehya stared at the phone as he flipped it closed, cutting off the call, and held his hand out, the little piece of metal lying in his palm.

“It’s been receiving calls,” she said faintly, but she wasn’t doubting him. Jordan had no reason to lie to her.

“It’s an additional tracker. It allows the master program to track all calls, messages, and e-mails in or out. It can also be preprogrammed to re-route specific numbers or e-mails,” he said. “The tracker is used on phones given to assets and contacts rather than operatives, though, and placed in phones belonging to suspects or marks if possible. It shouldn’t have been on your phone.” It was only used with those whose trust was in question. Tehya’s trust was never in question.

“Then someone at base messed with it,” she guessed, that ache in her chest tightening further at the suspicion as she accepted the phone when he handed it back to her. “Now, who would have done that?” she asked mockingly. She could only think of one person who could believe she was capable of betrayal.

Killian and his team had been at the base several times before she and Jordan had left. It had been their job to clean their sat phones of the agency protocols, e-mails, or mission notes before returning them. Only Killian’s team and Killian himself had had the opportunity to tamper with the phone.

Jordan sighed. “It was developed specifically for the Ops by our techs. No other agencies have anything like it.”

“Well, then, that tells me something, doesn’t it?” It told her she was no safer at base than she would be here. Hell, Killian Reece would feed her to her enemies a piece at a time if he could, which meant she was safer taking care of herself.

“I’ll know who did it,” he told her, his voice icy cold. “I promise you Tehya, I’ll get to the bottom of it.”

As far as she was concerned, she knew exactly who had done it. There was no getting to the bottom of it. Only one person would have been capable of distrusting her to that extent.

“I think we’re both well aware who it was. Why the hell do you think he agreed to have me at base? So he could destroy me and made it stick. Not out of friendship for you, a sense of decency, or anything else.”

“I’ll find out.” His voice couldn’t have gotten any harder.

Tehya gave a small, almost silent snort. “And you think I’d be safe there, do you? Killian and I understand each other, and you keep refusing to believe it. He hates me. I stay out of his way and understand that he’ll always place Sorrel’s sins on me.”

She actually liked Killian Reece. He was hard-core, stone-cold, paranoid, and damned dangerous. He was the perfect commander for the new Elite Ops team. And she knew, in his position, she would have felt the same. She respected the hell out of him, but she was well aware of the fact that he saw her as the enemy. She would have seen him as no less if positions were reversed.

Sorrel had murdered Killian’s wife and unborn child; there was no way in hell Killian would ever trust the bastard’s daughter.

“Tehya, you can’t stay here,” Jordan stated simply. “You know yourself what could happen if it’s Sorrel’s enemies that are after you. If it’s his associates or allies, then it could be far worse.”

“Naw, I’m too old to be trainable as a sex slave,” she assured him. “If it’s his associates, then they simply want vengeance. I killed Sorrel and his son Raven, and helped to all but destroy the organization. Why would they care now, more than eight years later? It doesn’t make sense.”

“And you think they’ll simply kill you?” His blue eyes seemed brighter, harder. “Tehya, these are men that Sorrel funded, that gave him their loyalty. The same men who were determined to capture you and your mother for all those years. These men aren’t out to thank you, baby. They’re out to torture the hell out of you and make you beg to die because you destroyed the man and the organization they were so fanatically devoted to.”

They hated her because she had killed Sorrel and Raven, men she knew as her father and her brother. She hoped they were burning in hell.

“I’ve been running since I was five, Jordan.” She sighed wearily, exhaustion crashing in on her at the thought of even attempting to live again as she once had.

The last two weeks had been harder than she had realized. She hadn’t slept well; the fear that she was being stalked, that she had been found by her father’s friends, or his enemies, had weighed on her, she realized.

“Tehya, there are other places besides the operational base. Just let me hide you until we can reset your identity. We’ll do a full facial reconstruct and fingerprint alteration. When we’re finished, no one will find you, I swear it,” he said. And perhaps, if there had been a hint of emotion in his voice, the thinnest vein of desperation, she might have considered it. But that was all she would have done, considered it.

“The fingerprint alterations rarely work, and there’s still DNA. I’m tired of running,” she whispered, staring back at him as the heaviness weighing at her soul threatened to weaken her knees and take her to the floor. “I’m tired of losing everything I’ve worked for because some entity out there has decided I have no right to live, no right to freedom.” No right to love or to have the rest of her life to regret what couldn’t be.

“So you’re just going to sit here and wait for the bastard to strike?” He crossed his arms over his chest, which was never a good sign.

Jordan was possibly the most arrogant, most domineering man she had ever met in her life, and she had met a lot of men. When he took that stance, he was impossible to sway. Even his men knew better than to confront him at such times.

Fortunately, Tehya wasn’t one of his men, and confronting Jordan was something she had perfected over the years.

“I killed my father and my brother.” She shrugged, knowing that waiting for the strike would be easier than trying to run from it, easier than never having friends, never having a place to belong. “And I haven’t had a single nightmare over it. But if I have to start running again, Jordan, then my life will become a living hell again. I simply can’t survive that way anymore. And they’ll find out, I won’t be as easy to capture as my mother was.”

Her mother. Delicate, fragile Francine Taite. She had been tortured to death in Nicaragua when Sorrel’s men had finally chased her down, ten years after she had escaped with Tehya. Francine had refused to reveal where Tehya was hidden, had given him no information about where he could find the daughter he had chosen to breed.

Her father’s family was obsessed with bloodlines. It ruled everything, and nothing was allowed to taint its purity. Huge sums of money, land, and power were made in exchange and sometimes, there was even force. Her father’s family occupied a very dark corner of their superbly rich, exclusive world and for the right price, a blue-blooded daughter could be forced into marriage. Her mother was one of those women. Her father had repeatedly raped her until she had become pregnant with Tehya. It was a fate Francine did not want for her daughter.

Sorrel had still managed to find her, though. Through those hellish years he had murdered everyone who had tried to help her, cut her off from all possibility of peace, and in his demented mind he believed she would actually willingly return to him.

“Goddamn, Tehya.” Frustration filled Jordan’s voice now.

“You trained me well, Jordan,” she reminded him. “At the least, I’ll have a chance. They won’t be expecting someone able to fight back.”

She had learned a lot during her years with the Ops. Enough to believe she had a chance.

“I didn’t teach you to be fucking stupid,” he snarled, those blue eyes darkening to deep sapphire as he glared back at her. “Tehya, you can’t face these men alone. Hell, you’ve seen the merciless cruelties they inflict on their victims. Do you think I’m going to let you become one?”

Damn, she’d never seen him this pissed off at anyone, especially her so quickly. He was, but for that one night, always calm, cool, and fairly unemotional when dealing with her. No matter what she had done to prick at that wall of self-control he possessed.

“Maybe I just learned that one on my own.” Giving him a tight smile she turned on her heel and headed back to her bedroom. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to shower and go to bed. Just because it’s a weekend doesn’t mean I don’t have things to do tomorrow.”

Jordan watched as she stalked through the bedroom door, her head held high, those damned curls making his fingers tighten with the need to sink into them and hold her in place for a kiss that would rock them both to the soles of their feet. A kiss that would ensure she was too weak to fight him.

Son of a bitch.

His fingers plowed through his hair before he jerked his satellite phone from the holster at his hip and keyed in Killian’s number.

“I assume you found her,” Killian answered on the first ring. “The protocol on her phone has been disengaged. How did you know it was there?”

Jordan felt his jaw tighten to the point that he wondered if it would crack. Had Killian been standing before him, he might well have killed the fucker. “I didn’t, Killian. I tried to call her to give her advance warning of the danger that was already stalking her, only to learn she wasn’t getting my calls.”

How Killian could have done something so insane Jordan couldn’t imagine. He knew that Killian, possibly more so than anyone else, should have known better than to leave her so vulnerable.

“They’re already there? They moved faster than you expected then,” Killian mused as though he hadn’t heard even a hint of the anger in Jordan’s tone.

“Why did you fuck with her phone?” Even he heard the animalistic growl in his tone now, the unmistakable fury.

All he could see was Tehya lying in a pool of her own blood, destroyed before he could get to her because he’d had no way of warning her of what was coming.

And that was Killian’s fault. The bastard had dared to mess with her only means of communication with the team. Her only way of contacting him if she was in trouble.

Killian didn’t answer for long moments. “She’s a risk, Jordan,” he finally explained, his tone reserved, as though he were carefully choosing each word. “I was merely keeping tabs on her.”

Keeping tabs on her? He’d been spying on her calls, tracking her movements, blocking her ability to receive a call from her former unit operatives.

“And when I called requesting your help to protect her, you didn’t inform me of this, why?” It was all he could do to keep his tone low, the ice from disintegrating into full, fiery fury.

“I saw no reason to tell you,” Killian answered bluntly. “I was only tracking her, nothing more.”

“The team’s numbers were disengaged and blocked from receipt,” he snapped back. “She couldn’t have received our warning of the danger if her life depended it, and it just may well have.”

“That was unintended,” Killian answered carefully. “I didn’t deliberately change those features. Sometimes, the secured numbers already programmed in become disengaged for receipt after the tracking protocols are set. She could have called
you
, though, as you well know. I didn’t set those protocols and the default doesn’t disengage the ability to call out to any of the programmed numbers. It does however sometimes block the incoming features as well as track them.”

He hadn’t thought Killian could be so fucking cold, so merciless. Jordan prided himself on being able to anticipate the moves of every man he worked with. It was one of his strengths as a commander, and one that had saved his and his men’s asses more than once.

He could count on one hand the number of times he had been wrong about an agent he had worked with and each time that failure had resulted in someone’s death.

Had his inability to anticipate Killian’s actions gotten Tehya killed, then Jordan knew he couldn’t have borne the guilt. Or his fury. He would have killed Killian. Hell he was ready to fly back to Texas now just to take his rage out on the other man. He hadn’t lost such control of his emotions since he was a fucking teenager.

He had known Killian didn’t trust Tehya, but he hadn’t expected him to have actively moved to do something so drastic as to have placed a tracking and security protocol on her phone. For nine months Killian had known where she was every minute of the day. He had listened in on her conversations, possibly known every detail of her life, and it was information he hadn’t volunteered to Jordan when she became endangered.