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.
“When this is cleared up, and I have a minute to beat the fuck out of you, then I’ll be back to base,” Jordan said, the violence swirling just beneath the surface leaking into his voice.
It was a promise, and one Jordan intended to stand by. Even better, Killian knew he would stand by it. Killian would be lucky if he could walk for a week.
“Your emotions are involved here,” the other man told him coolly, and Jordan listened, just for the sheer pleasure of allowing the man to dig his own grave deeper. “Once this is over, I trust you’ll see things more clearly.”
Jordan breathed in slowly. “If she had been taken, Killian, if she had been harmed … How long do you think she could have held out before she broke and revealed the Ops? Think about that. Think about the danger you placed not only my men in, but also your own.”
Not that Jordan doubted Tehya’s ability to withstand things that would