first explosion from somewhere down below and knew exactly what was happening: Con.
She’d known he would come. She’d known nothing on earth would keep him from coming for her, and for eight long, grueling weeks that knowledge had been both her hope and her despair.
The second explosion came fast on the heels of the first and speeded up her already racing heart, but she didn’t move from the chair where she sat at the kitchen table with her hands in her lap, her shoulders squared.
Con, dear God. She would have spared him, if she could. But he was here, and she wanted out of this place, away from the hard, awful truths she’d been forced to face.
A third explosion rocked the night, the noise and vibration coming up through the floor, but she still didn’t budge, not an inch. He was somewhere in the labyrinth of car-filled garages below her. She didn’t know how many floors down, but he was here—and he had no idea what he was up against.
She did.
She’d known since her capture in Paraguay, and it still left her heartbroken half the time and confused all the time.
Yeah, she knew what he was up against. She was looking right at it, and so help her God, it was looking straight back at her, standing not ten feet away, talking on a radio with a subgun slung across his chest and a .45 strapped to his thigh. His name was Peter Chronopolous, Kid Chaos, and everything Con used to be was molded in the curves and angles of the younger man’s face. It was written in the sudden determination tightening his mouth, in the breadth of his shoulders and the squareness of his jaw, in the way he moved.
The similarities were inescapable, and they proved everything everyone in this damn place had been telling her, that Con was a man named John Thomas Chronopolous, J.T., Kid Chaos’s older brother, and that he belonged to them.
Not to her.
Never to her.
She’d been hearing it nonstop, every day and every night in a hundred different ways from half a dozen hard men and two hard women, a blonde she might be able to take on her very best day, if the girl was in a slump, and an auburn-haired shooter she didn’t think anybody except Con could take.
She shifted her attention from Kid Chronopolous to the beautiful, extremely tough woman sitting across the table from her. She was dressed in olive drab BDU pants and a black T-shirt, looking like she was ready to rumble. Her hair was short and wild, a deep chestnut-auburn with blond highlights—gorgeous, like her face.
Red Dog was her name, and she scared the hell out of Scout, not because of anything she’d done. Red Dog, also known as Gillian, had been nothing but professional, but the woman wasn’t like anyone else Scout had ever known, except Con, and therein lay the second hard truth, the hardest truth of all.
“That’s him, isn’t it?” the female shooter said, listening, as they all were, to the explosions echoing up from below. The loft on the tenth floor was a wide-open expanse of hardwood floors over a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. It had floor-to-ceiling windows on the north and the west sides and a gallery’s worth of art adorning the inner walls.
Red Dog, Scout thought. What a name for someone with the warmest brown eyes she’d ever seen. They were amber colored, filled with compassion, full of concern, but more than once over the last two months, Scout had seen them freeze over to an unforgiving shade of cold, rusted iron. The woman was fierce, her body chiseled, and her husband was the single most beautiful man Scout had ever seen. Red Dog called him Angel, but everyone else called him Travis.
“We’ve been over this, Scout,” the woman continued, her voice firm, with a thread of steel running through it. “The time is here, right now, today. This is your chance to help Con. Maybe the only chance you’ll get.”
Help him? Or betray him? That was the question that kept her up at night, and no matter how much information this crew of operators pumped into her, she still didn’t know the answer.
“I know what he’s been through, Scout,” Red Dog said. “If you help us bring him in, I can help him. I’m a walking pharmacy for the kind of drugs that can keep him alive and help restore his memory, help him with the trauma