Page 4

4

B ellamy leaned against the Hummer and let out a long breath. He ran his fingers through his hair. His heart hammered in his chest.

Octavia was alive.

He squeezed his eyes tight. For as long as he could remember, he prayed Octavia hadn’t suffered. That she had died a quick and painless death.

Tears stung like sandpaper.

There were no words to attach to the emotions that filled his heart. To say he was grateful didn’t even come close.

However, seeing the scars and burns that touched her delicate skin blackened his soul. Revenge had always been something he desired. It lurked in the back of his mind like a sickness. No matter how much he tried to put it in a box, letting others deal with it because it wasn’t his job had become impossible. Tate wouldn’t take his phone calls. The few times he did respond with a random text, he begged Bellamy to let it go. To let the wheels of justice turn as they were designed.

Only Bellamy knew all too well that they worked slower than dirt and wouldn’t necessarily hand down what he deemed appropriate for the crime. Even his parents told him to keep his nose out of it. That if they saw something come across their desk, they would give him what they could.

But nothing came in his direction. Or what little that did wasn’t enough to lead him down the path that he knew without a doubt would bring justice to the one man he knew was responsible for what happened to Octavia.

Now, it smacked him right between the eyes.

He blinked, tapping his fingers on the screen until he found Nova’s contact information. It rang three times before she finally answered.

“Bellamy? Why the heck are you calling me?”

“Are you still in Colombia?” he asked, not bothering with pleasantries. His mother would be so disappointed by his abrasive tone. However, he saw no point in hiding his disturbing emotions. Not from himself, and certainly not from someone he could toss them at in the heat of the moment.

Deserving or not.

Silence on the other end. He couldn’t even hear her breathing. Not even a faint intake or a whoosh as she exhaled.

He cleared his throat. “It was my team that was sent in to get her,” he said, doing his best to reel back his gut-wrenching rage. “You could have fucking told me she was alive.” Obviously he couldn’t keep anything in check.

“We’re not having that conversation. We shouldn’t be talking at all.”

“I don’t give a crap.” He glanced over his shoulder. Blake had taken Octavia inside the hotel while the rest of his team secured the building and went about finding them transport home and safe harbor for their K9s. Finding drugs had put a damper on their original plans and Hawk had made it clear that they had to do the right thing. “Do my parents know?”

“Jesus. Of course not,” Nova said. “And before you pummel me with a bunch of questions, I had no idea you were the team Tate had in place. He didn’t give me that information. All he did was hand me a packet to give to Octavia. That should explain why he was protecting her identity.”

“But I’m sure you had an idea it would be me.”

“Not the point,” Nova said. “It wasn’t for me to say anything. I certainly didn’t want to broach that subject with her. It was hard enough asking her to run with a packet full of intel after telling her Tate had been murdered. ”

Fucking Eric. But even those documents didn’t give him a decent handle on everything. All it did was tell his mind and heart that after all these years, he’d been right. Eric had indeed been behind the attack on Octavia’s village. That he had to have been the one to mess with his team’s K9s’ ability to do what they’d been trained to do.

However, it didn’t give him the why.

Only pieces.

Conspiracy theories.

Things that now he had to prove.

Shit he should have been doing for the last five years.

“What do you know about this Lemin character?” Bellamy asked.

“He’s a new lead and Tate didn’t tell me shit,” Nova said. “But Octavia might know more. She knows Lemin.”

Bellamy didn’t like the sound of that. “When did Tate pull you into his little fold of lies?” he asked. Before he told Nova what Octavia had found, he wanted some solid answers on why he’d been left in the dark. Nova owed him that.

“A couple of months before our doughnut encounter and before you go and list a litany of reasons why you believe I should have told you, I couldn’t.”

“Bullshit. Now explain to me why Tate chose to keep Octavia hidden all these years. Why he felt the need to pull you in. And don’t you dare lie to me.”

“Seriously? Come on. I think it’s obvious why Octavia stayed dead and it wasn’t just Tate’s idea. She was as much a part of that plan as he was. Maybe more. Did you even read the documents that Tate left with her?”

“I skimmed them,” Bellamy said. He wished he had a hard time believing that Octavia hadn’t come to him with her suspicions regarding missing girls and boys in Colombia. But he’d made it difficult for them to carry on a civilized conversation after she’d gotten engaged to Eric. It was one thing for them to break up. He understood that, though he always believed they would get back together. However, for her to cozy up next to Eric Moody had left Bellamy a broken man. “Why didn’t you and Tate take her concerns to someone else? That’s not really the DEA’s thing.”

“Before the raid, Tate did. Of course, that was long before I knew anything and to be honest, Tate told me as little as he could. If anyone found out what he was doing, he would have lost his job and he didn’t want me to compromise mine,” Nova said. “He passed off what he knew to the proper authorities in Colombia. People he knew and trusted. It wasn’t until a couple of missing girls carrying drugs turned up in the United States that it became a thing. But you know how that goes. You’ve got the DEA, Homeland, the FBI, and even ICE involved in the investigation. Lots of chest-pounding, pissing contests, and bureaucratic red fucking tape.”

Oh, Bellamy knew the drill. It was one of the reasons he didn’t follow in his parents’ footsteps. It didn’t matter how smart Bellamy proved to be. He couldn’t care less about his so-called genius IQ. While his aptitude for math, science, computers, and other things served him well, common sense generally prevailed in any given situation.

And you didn’t need to be book smart to have that.

“After Octavia’s village was blown to smithereens and he’d learned she hadn’t been found, he went nuts,” Nova said.

“Yeah. I know.” Bellamy inhaled sharply and let it out with a big swish. That phone call from Tate had been painful. He’d blamed Bellamy and his team and the really hard part about that was Bellamy blamed himself.

Still did.

“How long after the raid did he find her?” Bellamy asked, resenting the roller-coaster ride his emotions had taken him on. He prided himself on being a logical and levelheaded man.

But not today.

He went from zero to sixty and back again without batting an eyelash.

“About two weeks. And circling back to what you really want to know, he only brought me in because he needed two things. He needed someone he could trust to cover for him while he was working on figuring out all this stuff for Octavia. And two, he wanted someone who would do exactly what he asked if something ever happened to him. I was that girl.”

“I’m sorry, Nova. I know you cared about Tate a great deal.”

“I did. He was a good man and he was doing what he could to find out who attacked Octavia, her village, and why. But it’s hard when the Colombian government made arrests. That they have stated it was a drug turf war and our government has accepted that.”

“You’ve worked with Tate for a while now and know Colombia well. Was her village used for the storage of drugs? Did they protect drug lords there? Because it doesn’t make sense that the Peace Corps would drop three volunteers there if there were even the slightest of rumors of something like that going on.”

“The whole country is unstable. Cocaine is big business,” Nova said. “However, Octavia was more concerned with missing young men and women, which we do know was connected to the push of drugs into the United States. That’s how Tate was able to pull the two things together. He told me two weeks before he died that he was onto something big. Something that wasn’t necessarily our turf but had to do with some of the drugs that were being run into our country.”

“Tate didn’t go into great detail about that in those documents. Only that he was working on the proof that Eric was behind it all.”

“Tate has never been able to connect Eric to cocaine and trust me, we’ve both tried. But when Tate headed back to the States right before he died, he was excited and paranoid about something.”

“What was the reason for his trip back?”

“He had meetings with the brass in Virginia,” Nova said. “But he took a couple of personal days after to deal with whatever lead he was chasing that had to do with Octavia and either the raid or the missing boys and girls.”

“And Tate didn’t tell you what that was all about?”

“I’m on a need-to-know basis and he didn’t believe I needed to know,” Nova said. “But he did mention Lemin Basker. However, he’s not on any radar that I can find. Sure, he’s slimy when it comes to his business dealings. But he’s not on our radar and I called a friend of mine with the FBI. They’ve looked into him for white-collar crimes. He’s paid a shit ton of fines, but that’s all I know. Swear to God.”

Bellamy wasn’t so sure if he believed that or not. In all the years he’d known and worked with Cooper, he’d never kept intel from that man. Same went for Rusty and Ethan. Knowledge was power. And in the field, they needed to have each other’s backs. If they didn’t possess the same information, someone always ended up dead. “Are you working the same cases as Tate was?”

“I’m not going to answer that question,” Nova said.

That told Bellamy she more than likely had her fingers in the pot but was choosing to keep her trap shut for a variety of reasons.

He’d like to believe her intentions were to keep Octavia safe. He might not know Nova well, but Tate had trusted her and for whatever reason, he did trust Tate.

Even in death.

And he trusted his parents, who always sung Nova’s praises, but he was going to have to call his folks sooner rather than later. He’d most likely have to lie to them about Octavia and that didn’t settle well in his gut.

“Well, if you were off the case, I’m pulling you back in,” Bellamy said.

“What does that mean?”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. He didn’t want to be angry with Nova. But he needed to be pissed at someone and Tate was dead. Seemed unfair to channel his rage at someone who couldn’t fight back .

“What happened?” Nova asked. “Is she okay?”

“She’s not the problem.” Jesus, he wanted to throttle Nova and that wasn’t a good feeling. He liked Nova. He really did. Not enough to date her, but enough to believe she might be good enough for Cooper.

And that meant something.

“When we got to the extraction location, she informed us there were a couple of bundles of cocaine. We brought them back to town. We didn’t want to leave them out there.”

“Crap,” Nova muttered. “How many bundles?”

“Two.”

“How far are you from Bogata?”

“About an hour. Octavia said you’d know the location.”

“All right. I’ll have to bring another agent with me, so when I get there, make sure our mutual friend is hidden. Her identity outside of this circle can’t be exposed. Not even to your parents,” Nova said.

“The only people you’ll see are Cooper, Ethan, and Rusty.”

“What about you? We’ll need to speak with you.”

“Nope. You’ll deal with my men.”

“Bellamy. That isn’t how this works,” Nova said. “It’s one thing for us to cover up a woman who has been officially ruled dead. But it’s something entirely different for you to pull the vanishing act.”

“Don’t care. You don’t want me saying or doing something we both might regret and I’m in one hell of a foul mood. Besides, someone needs to guard and protect Octavia. That’s me,” Bellamy said. “Cooper will send you a false mission statement with our orders for being there. We make this clean. You get their statements, we give you the drugs, we fly out of this godforsaken country in the middle of the night.”

“How are you going… never mind. I don’t want to know,” Nova said. “Be safe and give my best to our friend.”

Bellamy ended the call and eyed Cooper. He waved him over while he did his best to toss his frustration across the street.

“The perimeter’s secure. Ethan found a place for the K9s, but someone will need to stay with them until it’s time to bug out. Blake secured a private plane which is being piloted by someone through the Brotherhood Protectors. Wheels up at zero two hundred. Rusty, Blake, and I will rotate shifts,” Cooper said. “Everything’s in place.”

“Good.” Bellamy nodded. “Nova will be here in a few hours. I need you to handle her, the drugs, and whatever paperwork is necessary to load that shit off.”

Cooper arched a brow .

“Just do it. I can’t deal with her right now.”

“Whatever you say.” Cooper squeezed his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

Bellamy glanced toward the sky. He remembered the crushing pain in his chest when he loaded up his team and flew out of this country five years ago—without Octavia. Without knowing what happened.

For an entire year, he’d been haunted by sleepless nights and then came the final blow.

Acceptance.

That had nearly killed Bellamy.

“I have no idea what I am,” he admitted.

“Dude, she’s vertical. Focus on that fact. Don’t get hung up on who kept that from you, including her. It’s a lot to process and I know how your brain works. It’s like a current of electricity snaking through a wire from one power source to the next, expanding and then splintering off in a million directions. Narrow it all down to the job we’ve been hired to do.”

“Only, we don’t know exactly what that is outside of protecting her from Eric and don’t go and tell me we don’t know for sure that’s who’s behind this.” Bellamy wiggled his fingers. “That man has been a thorn in my side since the day we met. He set his sights on Octavia and the second she and I called it quits—hell, before that—he was doing whatever he could to sweep her off her feet. I didn’t believe for one second he stood a chance. Boy, was I wrong.”

Cooper leaned against the Hummer, folded his arms, and stared at his feet. “You and Octavia never lacked for loving each other. I don’t believe for one second that has ever changed.”

Bellamy snorted. “She was engaged to another man. To Eric fucking Moody of all people.” He scanned the streets, making note of the people and cars that passed. It wasn’t a huge town, but it was more populated than most, especially being so close to the capital. That was good and bad. Good because it made it easier for them to blend in.

Bad because it made it easier for the bad guys to do the same.

But he didn’t do it because he was concerned for their safety. He had good men taking care of that. He did it because if he didn’t, he’d lose his ever-loving mind. Cooper was right about how his brain worked. It was like an algorithm that got hung up in a never-ending loop. He couldn’t afford to go through that cycle.

“Not even the point,” Cooper said. “Sometimes love isn’t enough. You kind of have to be in the same place for more than a month to make a relationship work. Octavia was never going to ask you to give up being a Marine Raider and you sure as hell weren’t going to suggest she stop what she was doing. At least not eight years ago when the two of you decided together to take a break.”

Bellamy blew out a puff of air. The only problem with that logic was that he’d always believed their breakup was temporary. He’d planned for it. He’d given her the space that he believed she needed. However, he wholeheartedly believed they would be in each other’s arms again.

Until it didn’t happen.

“It kills me that Eric was so quick to believe she was dead. I thought her father was going to rip out his tonsils after that stupid speech he gave at her memorial. Even Claudius held out hope for a couple of years. My folks told me he even sent in a team from an organization similar to the Brotherhood Protectors to search for her.”

“I remember that. The Aegis Network, right?”

Bellamy nodded. “I spoke with them. The Sarich brothers. All four of them went in. Dylan, Logan, Nick, and Ramey. Good men. They are based in Orlando. They even spoke with Tate and Nova. Both of them gave the team bogus intel, which pisses me off.” He pushed from the SUV. “I don’t understand why keeping her dead in this shithole was the better option.”

“Come on. If Eric is behind this, not only does that make him a traitor to his country, but that means he tried to kill her. The question we need to ask ourselves is why? What does she know? Or what does he think she knows? And something else you need to consider is, when did she or even Tate suspect Eric?”

“That packet doesn’t give us much other than Eric spent a lot of time in this country and Tate wondered if his buddy Lemin had anything to do with it. But so much of it all can be explained away. Like when he was here, he could easily say he was visiting his fiancée. Planning a wedding.” Bellamy swallowed the bile that smacked the back of his throat. “Eric wasn’t going on special ops anymore. He hasn’t done that in a few years. His role was in the planning and execution of ops with joint forces. He worked intelligence. The only connection I see is some crossover with the DEA and Tate’s cases.”

“Tate clearly stated he thought there was a correlation between the missing young men and women that Octavia reported and some of the drug lords, which Tate did prove. And Tate did have a list of missing persons throughout the country that could be associated with a human trafficking ring.”

“Okay. But what does that have to do with Eric? None of the units he oversees had anything to do with that. Not even his precious K9 Pilot Program.”

“Maybe not, but he did deny Tate K9 support?” Cooper waggled his finger. “Twice. We need to find out why Tate was denied.”

“That’s going to be easier said than done.” Bellamy rubbed the back of his neck. “I can ask my parents. They will look into it without asking me too many questions. But the person who would have that intel at their fingertips, besides Eric, is Claudius.”

“When was the last time you had a conversation with him?”

“A couple of months ago,” Bellamy admitted. “He calls me every so often. Usually around the holidays. Her birthday. Or anytime he’s had one or two too many and feels like reminiscing. I humor the man. It’s not like we ever had a bad relationship. His only beef with me was that I never pushed her to give up long stints of volunteer work. Eric did, which ultimately pushed her right back into a long assignment with the Peace Corps.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I spoke with Octavia right before she came here.” Bellamy had heard the strain in her voice. He’d hated himself for being giddy over the possibility that she could be done with Eric. But he had enough self-respect not to sabotage her relationship. He wasn’t that guy. “Both her dad and Eric were pushing her to stop spending months in places like this. She had no intention of doing that anytime soon. She figured she could take short-term assignments. Or help out other ways, but she wasn’t giving it up altogether.” Bellamy couldn’t believe anyone would even demand that of Octavia.

Sure, he could see having a discussion about it. Hell, they actually did. They talked about what their future looked like, but they enjoyed their careers too much. It was one of the reasons they broke up. There was so much they each wanted to do within their careers and it was putting a strain on their relationship. They loved each other enough to let the other flourish.

Or maybe he’d been kidding himself all these years.

Bellamy glanced at his watch. “I better go check on her. Text me after you’ve dealt with Nova.”

“That should be interesting.”

“Just keep your dick in your pants.” Bellamy laughed.

“I could say the same thing to you.”