He had to call Noah and Lucia. He had to warn them. Maybe they could find out who’d done this. Rafe needed to know. If it took him the rest of his life, he’d find out who’d hurt Diana and make them pay.
Then he remembered his cameras.
Anyone ORUS deemed capable of taking him on would have disabled most of the cameras, but with his training, he knew how to hide a few that might not have been found. His laptop was still on his desk, so he dragged himself over to it and used his fingerprint to boot it up. When he opened the security system and saw that it hadn’t been disabled or tampered with, he faltered. What the hell?
Even with a new Orion in charge, there was no way an ORUS agent wo
uld be this sloppy. For the first time, Rafe looked down at himself and forced the fog to clear from his mind. Nothing about this made sense. He’d been in the bed, vulnerable and unable to defend himself. So why was he still alive? What kind of job was this where they’d open his safe and take Diana but wouldn’t kill him?
He pulled up the video for the day and sped through until the timestamp showed a few hours ago. Then he saw Diana walk out of the front door with a duffel over her shoulder. Alone.
Rafe rewound the video and watched it again, searching her face for signs of coercion. Was there someone else who’d threatened her and made her leave? There didn’t appear to be anyone else in the video. Why would she just leave in the middle of the night?
Then he thought about the way he’d woken up, obviously after being drugged, and he looked back at the video. He paused it on Diana’s face.
“Who the hell are you?”
THANK YOU for reading the first book of the DEEP duet. The next book, Deeper, releases on 1/29/18. PREORDER NOW at malonesquared.com/deeper
While you’re waiting, catch up on Jonas and JJ's hilarious antics in their steamy, suspenseful novel - FORCE.
* * Download FORCE now at www.malonesquared.com/force
EXCERPT of FORCE © August 2017 M. Malone and Nana Malone
Jessica Jones closed her eyes, exhausted. Day after draining day of pulling double duty while her bestie and partner in crime was on maternity leave was starting to take its toll. Like hell was she going to start complaining, though. If anyone deserved happiness, it was Lucia. Her best friend had been to hell and back and deserved the time off.
JJ could deal. After all Lucia would do it for her. Besides, JJ wasn’t letting a prima donna fashion designer run her into the ground and call uncle. She’d rather burn her Jimmy Choos first. She could handle anything their boss Adriana could dish out.
It felt like she’d only shut her eyes for mere seconds before she frowned in her sleep.
Something was wrong. Very wrong.
When she peeled her eyes open again, she was in hell.
“Oh my god,” she screamed.
But that scream was her first mistake. It meant emptying out her lungs, which meant she needed to breathe... and that meant lungs full of smoke.
It was so hot her hair plastered against her head and her sheets clung to her naked breasts from sweat. Yeah, she slept topless, so what? It had been so hot lately.
Frantic, she looked around the room trying to find the source of heat. It was so dark she couldn't see anything. But she could feel the smoke all around her, cloying and thick, wrapping around her and constricting her lungs.
“Don't panic.” The sound of her own voice out loud scared her out of her frozen state. Fear immobilizes. Anger motivates. That’s right, get pissed off!
If there was anything JJ was good at, it was being hot tempered. What the fuck was smoke doing in her room anyway? She’d just had a goddamned blowout. She needed to charge that color and cut to whatever or whoever was the source of this fire.
Move your ass girly.
She had to move because she was not dying in this room. She did not survive her past to die like this. Fuck that noise. Besides, if she died like this, Lucia would resurrect her ass and kill her all over again. After Lucia had survived being stalked and almost killed, JJ had a new appreciation for the meaning of life.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed, letting out a sigh of relief when her toes met the carpet. Now that her eyes had adjusted to the dark somewhat, she could see the faint hint of an orange glow from down the hall. Which meant the fire hadn't reached her room... yet.
But the bedroom door stood open to the hall, which was probably why she could already smell the smoke.
It was weird that the door was open. She always closed the door before going to sleep. It was one of the things Lucia’s husband had drilled into her. Noah owned a security company, and his overprotectiveness toward Lucia had spilled over onto JJ. Now she always had one of the annoying, albeit sexy, guys who worked for him trailing her to and from work, and her apartment had been subjected to a thorough security ‘review’ by Noah’s resident IT wizard. Matthias had deemed her place ‘merely acceptable.’
JJ was pretty sure they'd have asked her to move if they hadn’t known from experience that she didn't take suggestions well. The last thing she needed was some man trying to tell her what to do. Maybe Lucia was okay with that, but she wasn't interested. JJ knew from experience that she didn't want any man having control over her life. Never again. That alpha-asshole shit didn't work for her, so they could shove their over protectiveness where the sun didn’t shine.