Holding on Tighter (Wicked Lovers 12)

“You can set her free yourself once we arrive at our destination. All you have to do is come with me.”

“Don’t take me for a fool. You kidnapped her so you could kill her and torment me again.” He lunged into Myles’s face, snarling. “You decided that I’d done something to earn your hate and you wanted to make me pay. Since the grief and guilt nearly killed me the first time, you thought you would simply do it again and see if that would finish me off.”

“I’m hurt that you didn’t assign me some more complex and interesting motive. And why would I have killed my own wife and unborn child simply to torment you? You think rather a lot of your importance if you imagine I would do that.”

“Then what the fuck is going on?”

“Do you remember the kill list of homegrown terrorists the Home Secretary floated through the service that summer before Anna and Lucy died?”

Yes, they’d both been on a task force to hunt down combatants who had trained overseas in terror camps and come home to launch attacks on British soil. Her Majesty’s government would never admit it, but MI5 agents had been tasked with hunting these people down once they returned to the UK and assassinating them.

“Of course.”

“As you’ll recall, we split the list. But Lucy and I were trying to get pregnant, so you covered my responsibilities while I spent time with my wife.”

“Yes.” That had kept him beyond busy, constantly on edge.

“As it happens, I located one of my targets. Or rather, he found me. He said he wanted to explain his beef with the British government and the Western world, so I listened.”

“And he converted you to his brand of terror?” The thought horrified Heath all over again.

“Of course not. I have no interest in someone’s mission serving another god. But they had cash, and I needed some.” He paused, reluctant to speak. “I’d run into a bit of bad luck gambling online.”

Heath had wondered back then what was troubling his former partner. He’d simply thought Lucy’s desire for a baby had proven more difficult than they had expected. Then, after Myles’s wife had conceived, Heath had assumed his friend’s stress had to do with her difficult pregnancy. He had never seen any sort of addictive behavior.

“You had a gambling problem?”

Myles nodded. “I’ve since gotten treatment. It’s under control now. I haven’t bet on anything in at least five years.” He sounded proud of himself.

Heath stared in horror. “So you killed off your wife—and mine—because a terrorist paid you to?”

“It’s nothing that simple.” Myles shoved the gun in his gut. “Enough chitchat. Move out. And before you think about trying to take me down here, you should know we’re not alone in this convenience store.”

Myles had accomplices? Heath couldn’t scan the little place again since Myles and a wall blocked his view. But when he had last looked at the store’s patrons . . .

“I don’t believe you.”

“Your folly, then. If I don’t return in the next ten minutes, the accomplice I have watching your wife will shoot her. Now give me your gun.” He held out his hand expectantly.

Heath had no way of refuting that assertion, and he feared testing it. He looked for some way out. Any way. But Myles had thought everything through. Yes, he could be lying again. But Heath couldn’t take the risk of Jolie dying because he’d been stubborn. Better him dead than her.

He reached in and extracted his weapon, giving it over to Myles clandestinely and praying the Edgington brothers could pull magic out of their hat.

“Excellent. My car is over there.” He pointed and headed outside. “I’ll explain then.”

Blinding sun glared overhead. The young guy behind the cash register barely noticed them but the older lady watched with a suspicious frown. Heath didn’t expect them to be any help and didn’t want to put innocent bystanders in danger. Instead, he allowed Myles to lead him to the vehicle . . . while looking for his opportunity.

Beaker settled him into the passenger’s seat of his rental and cuffed his wrist to a handle in the door before settling in the driver’s side.

“I’ll make this quick. I’m explaining because it involved you and I can see why you would insist on knowing the details and motives.” Myles backed out of his parking spot and merged with the traffic on the road, heading south and east. “I haven’t told your wife because I’m presuming you’d like to keep her alive.”

Which meant that Beaker intended to kill him. Frankly, Heath wasn’t surprised.

“I’m listening.”

“So . . . my gambling addiction. Before the attack, I owed nearly a hundred thousand pounds. This group of British nationals with foreign training on our kill list were willing to pay me to overlook their names. At first, that was enough. But the pressure became too great. Remember what a prick Evans was about checking every name off?”

Heath remembered Jonathan Evans being a tough director general and demanding that more suspects be purged from the list more quickly before innocent civilians were caught in the crosshairs. While no one had ever taken responsibility for the attack that killed Anna and Lucy, he had wondered if some combatant had known his name was on that list and decided to strike back. But Heath had never found any proof. Other than locating a few underlings—Myles’s accomplices, apparently—he’d run into one dead end after another.

“So they had you help them plan an incident for more money?”

“Exactly. I resisted. God, did I. After all, it was the sort of crime I try to prevent from ever happening. I did my best to divert the group of school children wandering through. It was a relief to lose only two, though several were scarred for life. Pity . . .”

Heath could scarcely believe any of the remorseless words coming from Myles’s mouth. “If you had been stupid enough to mount up gambling debts and the choice between killing innocents or letting your bookie end you came about, I rather think you should have chosen the latter.”

Myles rolled his eyes. “Always the hero. Always doing the ‘right thing.’ You realize that will get you killed? I wasn’t ready to die. I knew that if I could get my gambling problem under control, I could do more to keep the UK safe than anyone who died that day. It all would have gone swimmingly with fairly minimal casualties.” He sighed. “But Lucy caught on to the fact that I’d accepted money from these terrorists. She invited Anna to lunch that day to tell your wife that I’d gone rogue and to persuade Anna to plead for your help so she could both leave me and turn me in. What kind of disloyal wife is that? Killing her in our home would raise too many questions, so I decided I’d be far better off suggesting the two women have lunch at a new bistro in the open-air market. Lucy had no idea that I’d caught wind of what she plotted, so she took my suggestion.”

“And you killed her for what she knew. Why Anna, then? Why take my wife?”

“Because I’m fairly certain she knew more than she should by that point. I didn’t want to give her the opportunity to divulge anything to you. You’ll find this odd, but I loved you like a brother, so the last thing I wanted to do was kill you. Ending Lucy was difficult, and it hurt me deeply to lose the baby. But I promised myself that I would find someone again someday. Camille is a far better partner. More understanding. And I did you a favor that day as well. Jolie is your equal. She is a wife worthy of you. Anna . . .” Myles shook his head. “She was a simpering girl. I think you could have been far happier with Jolie. But I digress. I didn’t want to have to kill you back then, so I ensured that your wife took whatever she knew to her grave.”

“How? You didn’t pull the trigger or set off the explosives.”

“Kensforth, the greedy bastard, helped me to arrange all that and the cover-up. I intentionally stayed by your side that day and acted appropriately shocked and saddened by our mutual loss so that no suspicion would ever come my way. It worked perfectly, and you later killed all the contractors Kensforth had hired. Thank you, by the way. Those were loose ends we

needed to eliminate, and you saved us the trouble.” He sent Heath a smug smile. “Then a few months later, I made sure that Kensforth met an unfortunate end. That should have been everything. You were clearly in the dark about the details, so I stepped back, let you be. I’d hoped that would be the end of it. But your new wife simply had to dig through your past. She poked into your background, and that investigation extended in some part to me. Somehow, she extracted old phone records that tied me to the extremists I was supposed to be eliminating. I had to find out exactly what she might be looking for.”

Jolie hadn’t looked into his background, not that Heath recalled. Then . . . he remembered that Karis had. Using Jolie’s computer.

Myles had always been paranoid about his paperwork on the job. It made sense that he would be doubly paranoid about any cyber trail he left behind.

“How did you even know about those Internet searches?”

“I have little alarms that trigger whenever anyone searches for certain parameters or digs into particular files. Every so often, people stumble into such things, which often forces me to hunt them down and place tracking software on their computers. Sometimes they’ll believe they’ve suffered a computer virus. Or if it’s serious, a break-in. If I have to go in person, I often remove an item or two to make it look good. Then I’ll watch the user’s cyber traffic. If, based on their other searches, it’s clear they have no interest in me or anything I’ve done, I move on. I would have done the same with Jolie but you interrupted me that night I sneaked into Betti before I could complete the software install. Most of what I gleaned from looking at the queries on your wife’s computer was that she was quite interested in her company and courting a potential investor. But she was incredibly interested in you. I wanted to scare her away from digging deeper into me by association. When you turned up on the scene, I knew I needed to distract you. You were already paranoid with her safety. In the following days, I could see by watching your interactions through open windows and whatnot that you were smitten with her. Really, you should consider that I did you a favor by eliminating Anna so that you could upgrade your wife . . .”

Heath didn’t feel anything but sick. “So you had Dulin shoot at her the other day and miss on purpose, hoping it would keep us busy.”

“Quite. I tried to show mercy, Heath. You must know I could have killed her twenty times over if I had wanted to. I even begged you to leave it alone.” He sighed, heading through a green light and turning south again. “You chose not to listen, and I know you too well to believe any speech you’d give now to persuade me you’ll keep my secret. Your conscience won’t let you be anything but a hero, so you’ll never stay silent about innocent blood spilling.”

Myles was right. “So what do you have planned next?”

“It should be obvious.” Myles sounded disappointed that he hadn’t yet figured it out.

Heath had—and he wished like hell there was something he could do to stop it. “You’re a fucking despicable prick and I hope you pay for everything you’ve done.”

“Perhaps I will someday but it won’t be by your hand.”

“And Jolie?”

“Your wife is a pragmatist. She’ll keep her mouth closed, I think.”

He hoped so. She would know that Myles had killed him. Perhaps she was even aware that Beaker had murdered their first wives. For her sake, he prayed she kept that secret.

“Likely so. She doesn’t have a violent bone in her body.”

“I know how to manipulate her. She won’t want to risk her business or her sister. Understand, I’m taking a risk by letting her live. That’s my favor to you, because we were best mates. When you see her, convince her to accept my leniency and move on.”

Heath would try. But Jolie had always had a mind of her own, just one of the many things he loved about her. “How were you able to kidnap her?”

“You deciding to invest in her business without her knowledge really was a boon. It helped me gain her trust long enough to walk out Betti’s door with her. Her mother’s terrible history with men gave me an edge, too. All I had to do was prove you were playing her and persuade her that I had more incriminating evidence. She’s so insistent that no man take her for a fool.”

Myles had figured out Jolie quickly. He had known exactly how to dig under her defenses and gouge her soft spot. It disappointed Heath that after all they’d shared—the closeness, the soul baring, their spontaneous marriage—that she would suspect him of having underhanded motives for wanting to invest in Betti. He’d hoped that she could trust him and believe that he had invested in her. But she had never seen any examples of solid, stable men in her life. Jolie liked empirical evidence with which to make decisions, and when it came to men with long-term staying power, she had none.

His former partner had also concluded that she would stand down to protect those she loved—another good guess. Heath wanted her to keep on living, grow Betti, steady Karis, maybe—if they’d been fortunate—raise whatever child they might have conceived together.

From a side street, Myles pulled into the car park of an abandoned factory. It was ghost-town eerie, the quiet. People had once worked here. It had been a bustling environment. Today, the big building was a sprawling lot of emptiness with faded signs pointing employees long gone to a security door. Utter silence.

Myles killed the engine and leapt from the car, darting around to the other side. Slowly, he opened the door and pointed the gun in Heath’s face with one hand, while handing him the cuff key with the other. “Unlock yourself and come with me.”

Heath did. If Jolie wasn’t trapped inside the building with another potential killer waiting for time to run down so he could pull the trigger, Heath would have played dirty and beat the stuffing out of the bastard while he waited for the Edgingtons and their backup to arrive.

But he refused to risk his wife. No matter what she thought of his surprise investment or whether she hated him for accidentally dragging her into this mess, he loved her. He always would. And if fate gave him the chance, he would make certain she knew it before he left her in safety and peace.

“Key, please.” Myles held out his palm as soon as Heath had finished removing the cuffs.

After shutting and locking the vehicle, Myles jabbed the gun into Heath’s back and prodded him toward the employee entrance. Heath walked, taking one last look around at the sunny day, at the steel marvels of the buildings mankind had erected with time and ingenuity. He hated that, barring a miracle, he wouldn’t see what came next in humanity’s chapter, that his parents and sister would mourn him and likely feel incomplete for the rest of their lives. Mostly, he wanted to watch Jolie walk to safety so he could die in peace and know he’d finally saved someone he loved.

A movement on the far side of the lot caught his attention. He flicked his gaze in that direction and caught the rustle of a bush grown wild after the factory had been abandoned. The glint of metal hit the sun for an instant before disappearing.

Hunter and his team had managed to figure out the location of the lair and were in place.

To distract Myles, he turned and asked, “What’s your endgame?”

“After I’m through with you, I’ll watch your widow for a few days to ensure she understands the rules. Then I’ll go home and back to work. Camille is due in January, so I’ll have that to look forward to. Simple, really.”

As he’d expected. Myles had already done his explaining, so the instant Jolie left this warehouse, Heath would be a dead man. Oh, his traitorous mate might enjoy another moment of gloating or sneer that Heath had a moral stick too far up his bum. But then Beaker would pull the trigger. The one silver lining? The Edgington brothers and their cohorts would get Jolie to safety in case Myles had a change of heart and decided to end her, too. They would also make Beaker pay for his sins. Heath wished he could be around to see that.

Myles dug out a key from his pocket. The door squeaked when it opened. The inside was musty. Dust motes played. Dead, dry

leaves covered the floor. Nothing here had been touched for at least twenty years. A rusting desk sat empty except for an old telephone. Paper clips were strewn across the surface, nearly buried under inches of dust and grime. An old rack of time cards littered the wall and the floor beside the door to the factory floor. The ancient time clock looked like a relic. Everywhere he looked, windows had been busted out. Parts of the metal roof looked as if they’d been rusted by the elements or had simply blown away.

“Through this door.” Myles gave him a shove, then yanked another portal open before pushing him in the back once more, sending him stumbling into the big open space of the factory.

Other than some long-forgotten machinery, he saw nothing inside. The power had been turned off for years, and if it hadn’t been for sunlight, the place would be pitch-black. Thankfully, golden rays managed to reach the center of the space and cast a little glow on a cascade of dark curls brushing a woman’s shoulders and drifting down to brush the back of the chair. Jolie. Thank god she was still alive. She was the only thing that mattered now.

She’d been cuffed to a lone metal desk chair in the middle of the room. A pang cramped his chest and rage fueled his blood when he saw his wife restrained, terrorized, and in danger. What he didn’t see was another accomplice who would have killed Jolie, as Myles had threatened. Fuck.

“Jolie!” he called out and ran for her.

Myles pulled him back, pointing a gun at her head. “You have three minutes. Use them wisely.”

At the sound of his voice, his wife craned around to look at him, but he ran to her side and skidded to a stop in front of her, taking her face in his hands. She looked no worse for the wear. A little smudge of mascara where she might have cried. But no bruises or cuts, no signs that Myles had used blunt force on her.