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T his was the kind of simple, in-and-out op Chase would take all day. He clocked the time it took the ladies to drop their luggage in their rooms—three minutes, thirty-two seconds.

At least he and Denver hadn’t been left to stand around. Though he had been antsy waiting for their plane, the plan was on schedule.

With Chase leading the way and Denver bringing up the rear, they reached the lobby. Chase threw his teammate a quick glance before he stepped up to the valet. The man was on the young side. He’d seen puppies with less eagerness in their eyes.

“Bring the car around, please.”

“Of course, sir.”

“How long will it be?”

“Two minutes.”

“We’ll wait for you out front.”

Chase returned to the group. A few steps away, Denver stood guarding the ladies, his legs braced. Alyssa had changed clothes. She smoothed her palms over her beige blazer, a sure sign of nerves, as if he didn’t already see through her calm facade. The way she curled and uncurled her fingers was a definite sign that her nerves were fraying.

Not that he blamed her. After the explosion, her schedule had likely gone from busy to absolute chaos.

He strolled over to the group. “We’ll have you to your destination on time. If you’ll follow me outside.”

“Thank you.” She gave him a calm smile at the same time her gaze flicked to the door as if armed gunmen would come streaming through them any moment.

He took point, with Denver bringing up the rear. Chase swung his head left and right, seeking out shadowed corners and any person who looked out of place in the landscape. After years of training, he could pick out a threat in a single glance.

As they cleared the door, he slowed his steps. Not only was the car not here yet, something about the air felt off.

Turning his head, he met Denver’s steady stare. They traded a look.

Shit—he wasn’t imagining it. Denver’s radar was going off too.

Slowly, his teammate’s hand slid toward the sidearm strapped to his torso.

Chase scanned the street. Two taxis passed the front of the hotel. A delivery truck was double-parked.

Five minutes had passed since the valet went to fetch the car, not the two he told him it would take. But it was probably nothing. In the civilian world, people had a different sense of time than his team.

Only…his instincts were still pinging.

He took one step forward, fists tightening out of reflex.

A black van with tinted windows whipped around the corner and gunned it toward the hotel—too fast for downtown traffic. It screeched to a halt, and the back door slid open before the driver even fully braked.

Four men wearing all black. Masked. Armed.

“Down!” Chase barked even as he shoved Alyssa behind him.

She stumbled but didn’t scream, crouching low, colliding with Kennedy as he steered them behind a support column and took aim at the men coming for her.

“Get the SEALs!” yelled one attacker.

What the hell? They knew that SEALs were the ambassador’s security detail?

“I’ll get the women!” A man rushed them.

Fuck—they weren’t just after the ambassador. They were after all of them.

Denver threw himself in front of the women as a human shield. “Go, go! I got the women!”

Chase was already in motion, sprinting into the fight, his weapon an extension of him.

He locked in. One step. One target.

He tackled the first guy mid-sprint, and he hit the pavement with a grunt. Chase delivered a brutal elbow to his jaw, disarmed the bastard and spun around to the next.

A low shot rang out from behind. “Two is down!” Denver shouted to Chase.

Chase surged forward and hit the next man blocking his path with full force. His fist made contact, and bone crunched. The man’s head whipped back and he crumpled to the ground.

The third man turned to run, but Chase hurled himself at him. His boot collided with ribs, and he felt the them give way, shattering under the impact. The guy rolled onto his back, chest heaving with the effort to breathe.

In one smooth glide, Chase leaped to his feet and took two menacing strides toward the van.

“Abort!” someone screamed from inside, and the driver took off in a screech of tires. Horns blared as he dodged into traffic. The stench of burned rubber fogged the air, along with the acrid tang of spent gunpowder from Denver’s shot.

Chase’s veins buzzed with adrenaline. He scanned the street one more time before turning for the women. Denver had them corralled behind the big column.

“Put in the call,” Denver ground out to him.

Chase already had his phone in hand and Con on the line. After a brief word to his CO about the incident, he pulled out some zip-ties and bound the downed men hand and foot.

From behind the column, he felt the burn of someone staring at him. He turned his head and met Alyssa’s golden-brown stare.

“You good?”

Pale from fear, she gave him a jerky nod, though her throat worked and her wide eyes said differently.

He looked to her assistant. “You?”

She gave a shaky nod in answer.

“Chase—the car.” Denver paused to point at the vehicle that just rolled up near the guy Denver shot. Blood spread in a gruesome pool on the pavement.

Chase reached for Alyssa. Dammit, the way she was looking at him, like he was the only man on Earth she trusted, sent a visceral heat flooding into his chest.

Something ancient surged in him, a protective instinct older than logic or training. And now, all he could think about was shielding her from the world, even if it meant setting it on fire. The attack hadn’t just frightened her—it had marked something in him, branded him.

She didn’t need to ask for his protection. It was already hers. Unconditional. Immediate. Absolute.

He hadn’t been there for Echo. But he could be here for her.

With his arm around her shoulders and his body shielding her from any more attempts on her life, he rushed her to the car, Denver a step behind with Kennedy in tow.

The valet peered around at the men on the ground in confusion. “Your…car, sir?”

The vehicle should have been there seven minutes sooner—before the attack began.

“Took ya long enough,” he barked. “Wait here with these men. The police are on their way.”

As he spoke, the blare of sirens wailed through the city street. Chase ripped open the back door and plastered his hand over Alyssa’s head to help her duck inside.

Denver did the same and then slammed his own door last. With everyone safe, Chase shot into traffic.

Silence throbbed inside the vehicle. What felt like an hour passed while they only traveled two blocks. His mind was on other battlefields. Ones that didn’t involve crowded city streets and four masked men leaping out of a fucking van.

“W-what was that?” Alyssa’s voice wobbled.

He gripped the wheel tighter, knuckles going bone-white from the force. Fury pounded his system like heavy artillery.

“That was too close,” Denver said.

“N-no one is supposed to know I’m here. Only the secretary-general of the United Nations, my security detail and Kennedy.”

“Exactly.” Chase’s words were steel dragged over gravel. “And yet they were waiting with masks and guns.”

“It was even harder to time when we would step out of that hotel.” Denver’s tone was stony.

Alyssa made a soft noise but said nothing. In the mirror, Chase saw her shake her head. A tendril of glossy black hair floated over her cheek, broken free of her ponytail. He gripped the wheel tighter, still able to feel the heat and texture of her hair under his hand when he shoved her into the car.

“Reporters were outside our h-hotel. Someone might have followed us to the airstrip.”

Kennedy spoke up, her tone laced with strain. “Wouldn’t everyone guess that the ambassador would return to the States after the attack?”

“To the States, yes. New York City, maybe. But those guys pulled up at the exact moment we exited the hotel. Guesses aren’t that precise.” The words were sharp-edged in his mouth for no reason he could comprehend.

“My itinerary was sent to me over an encrypted message on my government-issue tablet. No one could have gotten my schedule—there wasn’t time.”

Kennedy nodded in agreement.

They were after all of us. The thought made his blood pulse with cold fury.

He was going to be the last man standing in this dark game, which meant he had to take out Cypher first. He didn’t like how this pattern was forming. Cypher was circling too close, too fast.

“But someone did know.” Alyssa’s quiet words drifted from the back seat, sending prickles of awareness over the back of Chase’s neck.

He glared at the vehicles on the busy street and the red light that didn’t turn green fast enough.

Somebody knew Ambassador Vargas was at the hotel. Exiting at that precise time.

That meant they definitely knew she was headed to the UN.

He couldn’t wait for another kidnapping attempt and hope they’d be as lucky.

Change of plan.

He grabbed his phone and punched in the text to Con. Authorization for transport to Charlie base requested—two persons.

He wasn’t taking Alyssa to the UN. He was taking her to the Charlie team’s base to speak to Con.

* * * * *

“This doesn’t make sense,” Alyssa said to herself more than anyone else.

She sat ramrod straight in the back seat, her gaze glued to the tinted side window and the landscape blurring by. Since those men jumped out of the van, her heart hadn’t slowed. It tripped and flipped every other beat. And now…

She was certain that Special Operative Chase was not driving her to the United Nations as planned.

They were leaving the city.

The realization frayed her nerves even more, the edges nothing more than flapping threads.

There had to be a logical explanation for why she was being targeted. A breach, a leak of information. Something internal. Someone knew her schedule, but how?

Thinking through it didn’t bring her any closer to answers, just looped back to the same impossible truth: someone had tried to kidnap her.

Kennedy sat beside her, quiet and still, as shaken up as Alyssa was. In the passenger seat, Denver said nothing, arms folded as if brute force would fix the whole mess.

And Chase—he drove like the roads owed him speed.

None of this made her feel any safer, despite the fact that they’d saved her from those armed men.

The buildings changed from inner city skyscrapers to simpler structures, and the road stretched out. She now knew with complete certainty that they were not headed to the UN.

She clenched her fingers in her lap. “Why are we taking a detour? Where are you taking me?” Her voice held a sharp note. “I have a schedule—”

“Which has changed,” Chase cut her off.

Kennedy gave her a wide-eyed look.

Clearly Chase didn’t know who she was or where her career began. She’d dealt with a hell of a lot more stressful situations than a grouchy SEAL with a god complex.

She gripped her phone. “Then I need to call the secretary-general and let him know I won’t make that four o’clock meeting.”

“Do not make that call, Vargas. Or text either. Do you hear me? You’re going to let us handle this.”

Her jaw dropped at his command. And there was no mistaking it was a command.

Well, she didn’t take orders from her security detail, except—

Except when they’re trying to keep me alive.

Her shoulders drooped.

Above all, it was her job to think clearly, and she had allowed those masked men to rattle her.

“Denver, take their phones,” Chase ordered. “I don’t trust our charges.”

Anger ignited inside Alyssa. “Excuse me?”

Those eyes met hers in the rearview, and she saw something there—lethal calm edged in frustration.

“You want to get yourself killed, be my guest. But not on our watch. You do things our way and that means following our instructions.”

A large hand reached between the seats, palm up. She stared at the half-moon calluses on Denver’s hand before reluctantly slapping her phone into it. Kennedy did the same.

Alyssa’s temper spiked, hot and way more irrational than it should be. She’d faced shooters. Negotiated with criminals while a bullet waited an inch from her brain stem. She wasn’t easily shaken, yet Chase was sending her into a fit of anger after only a few barked words.

When he pulled into a parking lot and popped the console, she and Kennedy shared another concerned look. Neither of them knew what the man was doing.

Chase extracted something black. Something cloth.

As he twisted in the seat and fixed her in his stare, her heart performed another of those flips. “Put this on.” He held out the black object.

She fused her spine tighter against the seat. “What is that?”

“A blackout hood. It’s protocol that you wear the hoods to enter our base.”

She started to sputter a protest, but he tossed the hood into her lap and another to Kennedy.

Being taken against her will to what was clearly the top-secret base of a ghost op team was one thing. But it didn’t begin to touch her mortification that she had to wear a hood.

Chase leveled her in a pointed stare that told her that she had zero choice in the matter.

She needed to take the lead in all things. Kennedy looked to her for guidance on government matters as much as Alyssa looked to her for fashion advice.

She plucked the hood out of her lap and held it up in front of her face. With a fortifying gulp, she slipped it on.

“Oh god,” Kennedy murmured, probably as the darkness swallowed her senses too.

Alyssa extended her fingers along the leather seat, searching for Kennedy’s. When she touched her assistant’s fingers, she clasped them. They might be out of their element, but they had each other.

A second later, she felt the car roll forward. The following minutes pulsed by way too slowly. Neither man spoke again, but every muffled noise seemed amplified despite the hood. Alyssa’s other senses kicked in too, giving her a strong awareness of each turn they made and the amount of time they were driving.

When the car finally stopped, she rocked forward in her seat. Before she settled again, she straightened her spine and waited for what came next.

The door opened. Air currents teased at her clothing. Then strong fingers gripped her shoulder, and she turned toward the man that must be Chase.

“Swing your legs out of the vehicle and stand up.”

She drew a deep breath and did as he asked. The faster she got inside this mysterious base, the sooner she could get this damn sack off her head.

He clasped his fingers around her elbow, guiding her blind. The sound of her boots on cement changed to the subtle click of her feet on some interior flooring. Tile?

Marble.

Where was she?

A new male voice came from her left, echoing, indicating that wherever they were, the ceilings were pretty high.

“Take them to the rooms in the back. Split them up.”

Kennedy made a small noise of despair.

Alyssa stiffened her spine. “It will be all right, Kennedy. I’ll see you in a little while.”

When Chase tugged on her arm again, she realized that his fingers weren’t as tough as they had been. He was being a little gentler with her. He led her down an endless hallway, and she counted twenty-two steps. A door opened and closed.

“You can take off the hood.”

She yanked it over her head, gasping fresh, cool air. It took her eyes a moment to focus in the bright room. As Chase’s muscular form came into crystal-clear focus, she shot him a heated scowl.

“Was that really necessary?”

“Yes. No one can know where our base is unless you have a private invitation.” He pointed at one wall where a short table sat with chairs on opposite sides. “Have a seat. Someone will be in to talk to you.”

Anger pounded at her all over again. She whirled on him, jaw tipped a notch higher. “Why am I being questioned? The Secretary-General of the United Nations is waiting to speak with me about the explosion in New Mexico.”

He stared into her eyes, his expression an impenetrable mask. “Your transport turned into a kidnapping attempt. The plan changed.”

“So you think you’ll find out who is responsible by interrogating me? Or Kennedy?”

He took a step toward her, slow and measured. Her instinct to back up kicked in, but she overrode it and locked her feet to the—she glanced down—marble floor.

“Take a seat, Ambassador.” Without another word, Chase performed one of those about-faces in sharp military fashion and exited the room.

She gaped at the closed door. For a crazy minute, she considered flinging it open and walking right out, but knew Chase would only drag her back.

Reluctantly, she drifted to the table. The legs of the chair grated as she pulled it out and sank to it.

She planted her elbows on the table and dropped her head into her hands, battling the urge to scream along with the vibration of worry that hadn’t left since she got that very first call this morning.

People needed her.

She raked her fingers through her hair. The hood had wrecked the style. She slowly removed the band holding her hair back and did her best to smooth the strands before fastening the thick mass with the elastic again.

When the door opened, she jerked her head around to see another huge tower of a man enter with Chase right behind him.

He stepped up in front of the table. “I’m the leader of the special ops team in charge of your safety.”

Chase leaned against the wall behind him, arms folded, staring at her unwaveringly.

Unnervingly.

Her gaze flicked up his muscled chest clad in black cotton to his thick, tanned throat, angled jaw and chiseled features, to those rich brown eyes.

Eyes like that should be soft, but they weren’t. They were burnished bronze under pressure—no warmth, only sharp calculation. As he stared back at her, they didn’t flicker or relent, not even at the edges. Set beneath a furrowed brow, those eyes radiated authority, as if he’d seen too much and trusted too little.

When he moved his mouth, dimples popped in each cheek, even though he wore a grim expression, far from a smile.

She tore her gaze away and focused on the leader. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“They call me Con.”

“All right…Con.”

He turned his face slightly toward Chase. “Tell me what you know.”

Chase didn’t pull away from the wall or shift his gaze from her as he began to speak. “Ambassador Vargas is fluent in seven languages including Spanish and Arabic. She serves as a vital link in cross-cultural diplomacy, ensuring that no nuance is lost in translation.”

Her jaw threatened to unhinge and drop to the tabletop, but she forced it to remain closed up tight.

Chase continued, “She brokered a temporary ceasefire between two hostile factions in a disputed region in the Middle East.”

She swung her attention to him. “Someone did his homework. You get a gold star.”

His eyes flattened at the corners as he continued to study her and brief his leader. “Ambassador Vargas also spearheaded a humanitarian and environmental agreement between the US and Mexico to protect shared ecological zones.”

She tilted her jaw higher and met his stare.

“And she negotiated the release of a hostage in Syria. A journalist by the name of Callie Northwood.”

Her lungs burned. That name tugged at her. Out of all the years she worked as a negotiator, she felt the most connection to that name…because after she negotiated for the woman’s freedom, she never found Callie Northwood again.

“Ambassador Vargas had a…shall we say… meteoric rise in her career. And she’s only thirty.”

“Is there a question there?” she asked him. “Are you insinuating that I didn’t earn my position? That I’m dirty? Slept my way to the top, maybe?”

Con shifted. “No, Ambassador. Congratulations on all your achievements.”

She sat back against the seat and folded her arms, matching Chase’s pose and glare. “Doesn’t sound like congratulations. It sounds like accusations.”

Con appraised her. “We have questions.”

“I have questions too,” she countered. “What are we doing in an estate in New Jersey?”

The men’s gazes flew to each other’s.

“Don’t look at him. Look at me.” When both men gave her almost the exact same incredulous expression, she barreled forward. “I’m not an idiot. I know what direction we turned. I heard tires on the bridge. I smelled grass clippings when the car stopped. And I heard my shoes on marble floors. I know how long we drove to get here, and my deductions come from simple logic.”

She sat back again, satisfied that she could use her skills to put a couple of high-handed men in their place. “By the way, interesting décor. Early 2000s military-grade furniture wouldn’t be my first choice.”

Chase swooped in, planting a hand on the table and leaning over her. It was an intimidation tactic, but she wasn’t falling into that trap. “You remember that mission in the Middle East.”

“Yes.”

“I was on that mission too, goddammit.”

She recoiled, blinking up at him. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember you.”

He pushed off the table and returned to lean against the wall. “We checked your devices.”

“And?”

“There’s no sign of tampering. No leaks about your schedule, details about your flight or your arrival in New York, nor at the hotel, not even secretly transmitted. There’s also no phone record that someone could discover your location. And yet,” his stare blazed into her, “there was an unexplained attack.”

“And I’m being held here until you find out what? That I’m behind my own attack?”

“It’s our job to find out,” Con told her. “Just like it’s our job to protect the country, it’s our job to protect you.”

She issued a low breath. “Where is Kennedy?”

“She’s fine,” Chase responded.

She gave him an imploring look. “Don’t mess with Kennedy. She’s solid. She’s been with me forever.”

“That’s our call to make.” Con stood and walked to the door, leaving Alyssa to gape at the leader’s muscled back.

“How long will I be here?” she called after him.

He paused at the door, glancing back at her. “Not long. You’re going to Syria. With Special Operative Chase.”