Page 2

CHAPTER TWO

Her hand shook as she tried to keep the gun pressed against his head.

Charlie’s nerves hiked into overdrive as the in-truder’s gun hit the dingy carpet with a hard thud. Seconds ticked off in her head. A minute. She wasn’t sure how long she stood there or what she was going to do next. This wasn’t part of the plan.

“I knew you were still alive. Even after all this time.” His voice worked to counter the uneasiness clawing through her, but she wouldn’t let it. Not this time. “This is usually the point where you close the door so no one sees you’re holding a gun to my head and order me into the other room.”

“This house is in the middle of twenty-two acres of land.” She kicked the door closed, because that seemed to be the logical thing to do, all the while trying to keep both hands tight around the gun. The dog at his feet stared up at her as though expecting some kind of treat for parking his butt in her laundry room. “No one is going to see you coming and going.”

“Does that mean I’m walking out of here alive?” he asked.

How could he ask that? After everything that’d happened, how could he still believe she’d been responsible for the deaths of those four people, of her sister , in that bombing? That she was a terrorist? Charlie forced herself to take a deep breath as next steps formed in her mind. “Into the living room. Straight ahead. You and your little dog, too.”

“Might be hard to believe, but I’m familiar with the layout of this place.” He followed her orders, moving forward through the tight hallway leading back into the laundry room from the main part of the house. “I’ve been here a few times.”

She knew that. Security cameras had picked up his incessant search for clues each time he’d visited and relayed the live video to her phone. Despite her being thousands of miles away. After a few months, she’d come to crave that notification. To know that he was still thinking about her, that she hadn’t been forgotten by the man tasked with bringing her in. Which didn’t make a lick of sense.

She hadn’t gotten those notifications in a long time.

Charlie maneuvered behind him, the gun now aimed at his spine. A thousand fantasies of this moment had kept her from going insane all these years. How she would approach him, what she would say. None of them seemed to fit the moment though. “What are you doing here, Agent Morais?”

“It’s just Granger now.” He pulled up short in the middle of the living room, turning as though to study his surroundings, but she was familiar with his way of working. How he liked to keep the threat in view. His sidekick didn’t seem to care she was holding a gun to its owner though. Some guard dog. Afternoon sunlight highlighted all the little details of his face. The shaggy hair that always seemed to stay in place without effort, the divots between his brows that’d creviced deeper over the years, that long perfectly straight nose she’d come to love. His eyes though. They’d somehow gotten darker. Heavier. As though he’d lived two lifetimes in the span of ten years. “Dropped the agent part soon after you went off the radar.”

He’d quit Homeland Security? It didn’t matter. Charlie kept herself from shifting her weight, from giving him any idea that her nerves were getting the best of her. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I came here because I got a stack of surveillance photos this morning. Of you.” He said it so matter-of-factly, without emotion, that the lack of inflection threatened to carve through her. “I don’t know why you came back. Frankly, I couldn’t care less about what you’re doing here. I imagine the only reason your father hasn’t killed you is because he doesn’t know about this place. But considering how we got our intel, my boss seems to think you might be a target of the local drug cartel, and she wants to know why before a bunch of people die.”

Her brain struggled to keep up with all the bits and pieces of that statement. Charlie gave in to the need to shift her weight onto her other leg. “Your boss? You said you quit Homeland.”

“I’m with Socorro Security,” he said.

“Socorro.” The word took some of the strength she’d managed to summon over the past few seconds. Her arm ached with the weight of the pistol in her hand. People like him trained for things like this, and while she’d been raised around guns and how to use them to defend what was hers, she wasn’t like him. “You work for the private military contractor that declared war against the Sangre por Sangre cartel. You’re one of their operatives.”

“Despite what you might’ve thought when you disappeared, Charlie, the world moved on without you. I moved on. Only now, here you are, dragging me back into a life I fought to give up.” Granger took his time facing her. Stepped into her, pressing his chest against the gun. “So we can do this one of two ways. You can come back to Socorro with me willingly to answer a few questions about your connection to Sangre por Sangre and what they want from you, or I can drag you out of here kicking and screaming. Either way, you’re coming with me and Zeus.”

The dog cocked his head to one side at the sound of his name.

“I didn’t kill those people.” Did he even care? Her mouth dried as memories she’d forced herself to relive every single day played at the back of her mind. “We were told there wouldn’t be any civilians around. Sage set the explosives on the lower section of pipe while Erin worked ahead, but then we heard a vehicle approaching. It was dark. We couldn’t see who it was, but it didn’t matter. I told her to stop the countdown. She wouldn’t listen. We argued. I had to knock her out, but when I ran to stop the explosives from going off, it was too late.”

She could still feel the blistering fire and searing heat flash across her skin, driving beneath her clothing and burning her from the outside in. His gaze lowered to the lines of scarred, folded skin wrapping both forearms from beneath her jacket cuffs. “I tried to stop it.”

“And yet you’re the only one alive who can corroborate your version of events, Charlie.” The hardness in his voice severed the final string of hope in her chest. This Granger Morais wasn’t the man she’d studied—who she’d gotten to know, who she’d trusted—before the bombing.

He was right. Her oldest sister’s body had been recovered at the scene, along with four other sets of remains. Erin had managed to escape, but she’d ended up six feet under back in Vaughn all these years later. Charlie had no proof of her story. Her father certainly wasn’t going to step forward and incriminate himself. She had no home. She had no family. She had…nothing. Nothing except this moment with a man she never thought she’d see again. “It’s the truth. I need you to believe that.”

“The truth?” The deadpan tone in his voice suffocated the last of her optimism that they could work this out. “You’re holding a gun to my chest, Charlie. You lied to everyone in your life, trying to convince them you were dead, including me. You had the chance to make this right since the moment that bomb went off, but you chose to run. You made the choice every single day to hide. What part of that is the truth?”

The survivor in her, the one who’d managed to keep herself off the radar, kicked her back into the present. She wasn’t going anywhere with him. Not until she kept her promise to her sisters. “That was always your problem, Granger. Everything is so black-and-white for you, but that’s not how the world works. You’ve been trained to think your assignments are the right thing to do, the right choice. But you don’t know me anymore. And you have no idea what I’m willing to do to survive.”

“Don’t run, Charlie. You’re only going to make matters worse,” he said.

“I don’t have a choice.” She slammed her heel into the floor. The board she’d pried loose to once hide cash, a new identity and anything else she’d had to keep from her family collapsed under the weight. The other end shot up behind Granger. Charlie twisted away from him at the sound of impact and lunged for the front door. This wasn’t a safe house anymore. She had to go.

Her hand met the doorknob. She wrenched the reinforced steel open and dashed into the New Mexico desert. Despite clear skies and a blazing sun, cold flooded through her from the change in temperature.

Heavy footsteps pounded through the house. Closer than she expected. But Charlie only had attention for the rental car stashed in the garage at the back of the house. The keys were already in the ignition in case she had to run. She could make it. She had to make it.

She pumped her legs harder, out of breath, as she turned the last corner. She didn’t dare glance back to gauge the distance between her and Granger. It didn’t matter. Exposing Henry Acker for the monster he was? That was all that mattered.

A low huff reached her ears.

Just before an impossible weight landed on her back.

The world tipped off balance as she collapsed forward. Her palms took most of the impact with bits of dirt embedded in the skin. Air exploded from her chest. Ten more feet. That was all that was left between her and the car. Charlie threw her elbow back to dislodge the weight on her back but met nothing but rolls of fat and fur. She tried to roll free. Only the mass of bull terrier refused to budge. She dug her toes into the ground and got a mouthful of dirt for her effort. It was no use. “For crying out loud, what does Granger feed you? I can’t breathe.”

“I warned you not to run. Zeus’s favorite game is jump-on-the-bad-guy.”

Is that what he really thought of her? That she was a bad guy?

“Get this thing off of me.” Her ribs protested every inhale. This wasn’t how she was supposed to die. She’d always imagined her final moments entailed facing off with her father and his army for not only ruining her life but her sisters’. Not suffocating beneath an overweight K9.

“Off.” There was a bit of life in that single word, a kind of affection he’d once used when talking to her. “Now, are you coming back with me to Socorro willingly, or will Zeus have to sit on you again?”

She gasped for breath, rolling onto her back. “Please. I can’t take anymore dog butt.”

Granger centered in her vision. Nothing like the man she remembered all those years ago, and yet at the same time, everything she’d missed about this place.

Zeus penetrated her vision with a near smile as his tongue lolled to one side. And drooled down the side of her face.

* * *

A war had started behind his sternum. One between his personal life and the job he was supposed to do as a counterterrorism operative. Charlie Acker hadn’t just betrayed her family when she’d dropped off the grid. She’d betrayed him and everything they’d done together.

Their secret plan to erode Henry Acker’s immunity, to get her sisters as far from their father as possible, to free the people of Vaughn—it’d all gone up in flames with the pipeline she’d destroyed. He’d put his entire career on the line for her. And she’d merely used him to fake her death. All these years, the evidence hadn’t lined up, but there was nowhere else for her to run now. If Charlie wanted to keep the new life she’d built, she’d have to rely on him.

“You found her.” Ivy Bardot folded her arms over her chest, emerald green eyes dead set on the woman pacing the interrogation room.

It was an observational tactic. Leave a suspect or witness alone and study their behavior. Right now, the amount of tension in Charlie’s shoulders told him she didn’t like being kept in one place. Which meant she most likely hadn’t let herself settle down in one location for long. Maybe a few weeks at a time. Never more than a couple months. Even after convincing everyone she’d died in that pipeline explosion, there was still a part of her that believed she could be found at any moment. And with good reason.

“Scarlett and Jones are searching the safe house as we speak.” Socorro’s security and combat experts wouldn’t let anything slide by them. If Charlie was hiding something in that place, they were going to find it. “She would’ve had to go by an alias all this time. I instructed them to start there. Give us a chance to see what she’s been up to the past ten years. Maybe build a map of her activities.”

“Why do I get the feeling you don’t believe they’re going to find anything?” Ivy’s insight almost seemed supernatural, as though Socorro’s founder could read the minds of her team. No matter what each of them were feeling or denying, Ivy saw right through every single one of them. She was a force to be reckoned with against congress, in the boardroom and her personal life. If that last one even existed.

“Henry Acker raised Charlie and her sisters to clean up after themselves. It’s one of the reasons it’s been impossible for us to pin any of these attacks on him or his army.” Granger took in every movement, every shift from the interrogation room. The longer they left her inside, the higher chance she’d shut down. He had to time this right. Like a countdown on one of the bombs she used to handle, there was always a point of no return. “Based on what I saw of the safe house, she wasn’t planning on staying there for long. No supplies, no more than a couple days of food. I’ve searched that property a dozen times. She wouldn’t have left anything behind that could expose her. Like father, like daughter. She tried to wash it off, but there was dirt under her fingernails and smeared on her face.”

“She dug something up. A new alias? Cash?” Ivy unwound her arms, turning toward him. “You’re thinking she might still be in contact with Acker and his army?”

“I’m not sure.” It would be easy to assume the connection, but he didn’t have any proof. “Charlie has always resented her father’s political leanings. Called him the homegrown terrorist nobody suspected. She faked her death after the pipeline explosion to get away from him. I can’t imagine her willingly participating in his organization again.”

“And how would you know that?” Ivy’s attention attempted to dig deep past his armor. “From what I understood of your time with Homeland Security, you and Charlie Acker were never in contact. You were investigating Acker’s Army from the outside. Or was there something missing from the reports you submitted?”

“No. Just a hunch.” As Socorro’s counterterrorism operative, Granger had spent the past four years helping Ivy build her own personal army to counter Sangre por Sangre . He’d risked his life, his morals and his trust in the people he served with, and he didn’t owe her a damn thing. Certainly not an explanation into how little he’d included in his final report concerning the investigation into Charlie and her family.

He shoved through the interrogation room door with Ivy on his heels.

Charlie turned in expectation, instantly neutralizing any hint of the tension she’d let build over the past thirty minutes of isolation at the sight of Ivy at his back. Like the good terrorist she was supposed to be. “Who’s this?”

“Ivy Bardot, Charlie Acker.” He motioned between both women. One a monument of his past, the other his future. Granger slapped a file folder onto the table, and the surveillance photos Ivy had shown him this morning spilled out. “Ivy is the founder and CEO of Socorro. You’re here because we got these from an inside source of the Sangre por Sangre cartel.”

Charlie moved—far too gracefully—to pick up the top photo of the file. No sign of distress. Nothing to suggest she was taking this as seriously as they were, apart from the loss of color in her cheeks. Good. She needed to know what kind of mess she’d left behind and just how far the cartel would go to survive. “Who’s your source?”

“That’s none of your concern, Ms. Acker,” Ivy said. “Now I’ve been patient, but I’m afraid we don’t have much time before Sangre por Sangre traces you back to Socorro, and I can’t risk a head-on attack at the moment. So let’s just get everything out in the open, shall we? You were responsible for the destruction of the Alamo pipeline ten years ago.”

Charlie’s gaze cut to Granger, but he wasn’t going to help her out of this one. Despite her claims of innocence, of arguing with her sister and trying to stop those explosives from going off, evidence never lied. It’d been her blood investigators had collected from the scene. Preserved with that of five others. She refocused on Ivy, pulling her shoulders back. “Yes.”

Surprise pricked at the back of Granger’s neck. Then turned ice-cold in his veins. No matter what the evidence said, he’d wanted to believe her. To believe that she wouldn’t have gone along with Henry Acker’s plan to sabotage the government and everyone he considered a threat. Then again, he hadn’t really known her, had he? She’d been a suspect, then a source. Then something far more. All in the span of weeks.

“I designed the mission. My sisters and I were instructed to set charges at two intervals along the southwest curve of the pipeline outside the town of Bennett.” Slow breathing exaggerated the rise and fall of Charlie’s shoulders, to the point Granger was convinced she was forcing herself to keep her inhales and exhales at an even pace. To prove she was in control. “My younger sister, Erin, took care of the first one. Sage was in charge of setting the second. I was assigned to be the lookout.”

“At Henry Acker’s instruction,” Ivy said.

Charlie notched her chin higher. A visible struggle twitched the corner of one side of her mouth. A fight between defending herself or defending the man who raised her. Henry Acker was responsible for three separate attacks aimed at government property, like the one carried out at the Alamo pipeline. That they knew of. Dozens of innocent lives taken. Massive amounts of financial damage, not to mention the installation of fear across the state, but in the end, he would always be Charlie’s father. She tented her fingers over the top surveillance photo. “That was a long time ago. What does any of this have to do with a drug cartel?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Granger said. “ Sangre por Sangre isn’t in a position to waste resources at the moment. What’s left of the cartel is scattered and in hiding after they attacked Socorro head on three weeks ago, but this surveillance tells us they’ve got their sights on you. Why?”

Charlie folded her arms across her chest. Not in defense. He knew as well as anyone the kind of rigorous combat training she’d been put through as a kid. No. She was hiding something. Trying to keep him at a distance. “How should I know?”

“Because you’re the only Acker daughter still alive.” Ivy leveled the statement almost like an accusation. The last connection to the inside of Acker’s Army. “ Sangre por Sangre might be on its last legs, but they still have resources we can’t even begin to imagine. It’s possible whoever is targeting you knows you and your sisters were involved in the Alamo pipeline attack and want something specific from you.” Ivy slid her hands into her blazer pockets. “Or this could have nothing to do with you and everything to do with getting to your father. Through you.”

“What do you mean?” Charlie asked.

“Henry Acker has continued his mission since you’ve been gone, including two other attacks in the state.” Granger leveraged his weight against the oversized conference room table. “Both were aimed at undermining the government, and by doing so, Acker’s Army has proven themselves a real threat. Sangre por Sangre may be taking notice. Might even use his daughters to get to manipulate or influence him.”

“Wait.” Charlie released her hold on herself. A physical calm washed over her features, a stillness that could only be achieved through years of training. “You think this cartel could be involved in my sister’s murder?”

“Murder?” Granger stood a bit taller as he cut his attention to Ivy and back. “As far as Vaughn PD and the media are concerned, Erin died in a hunting accident.”

Charlie’s mouth parted on a shaky inhale. The first real sign that something was very wrong.

“That’s why you came back.” Granger should’ve seen it before now. There was no plausible situation he’d been able to think of that would explain her return to New Mexico, and yet here she was, after all this time. The muscles down his back pulled tight as a chain reaction of sympathy and anger and grief charged through him. Erin Acker didn’t have the same views of her father and his anti-government protests as her sister, but Charlie had loved her sister all the same. Even tried to get her out of Acker’s Army before the attack on the pipeline. Only she hadn’t been fast enough. “You don’t believe your sister’s death was an accident.”

“No. I don’t.” Charlie locked away the vulnerability that’d taken over for a brief moment. “And I’m not going anywhere until I find who killed her.”