Page 1 of Storm and Tempest (Brand of Justice #13)

Chapter One

“ M y name is Oliver Jaxton, and I’m an addict.”

Jax gripped the sides of the podium, staring at the noticeboard and clock on the back wall rather than the men in the rows of folding chairs. “I used to think cops were heroes. When I became one, I realized we’re just as broken as everyone else.”

He took a breath. “It all started when I blew out my knee playing high school football. Then I blew it more when I got hooked on the pain meds they gave me. I should’ve cared, but I didn’t.

Things got so much easier. I didn’t have to care how my shot at playing football had been flushed down the toilet.

How my dad didn’t have a winner anymore, and my mom didn’t have a son she could brag about.

“So I checked out. I…” He cleared his throat.

“I didn’t want to face anything, but eventually my sister called me out.

She knew what was happening. She made me flush the pills down the toilet.

My dad offered to get me more, but I knew it wouldn’t work to live in that oblivion. I had to face the real world.

“But that place is still in me. That nothingness, where I don’t have to care about anything.

“I stayed clean for fifteen years, four months, and three days. Until I woke up in the hospital with an IV drip of that same feeling and a busted shoulder. For a few seconds I was seventeen again, lying in my bed staring at the ceiling. Not caring about anything. I wasn’t an FBI agent who’d been held hostage.

“I woke up at rock bottom with a friend there to tell me that my wife is missing.” He looked at the clock, fighting against the gathering lump in his throat.

Determined to get it all out. “I’d been captured by these mafia guys out of Vegas because of a case I was working on.

” He had to stop and swallow. “Because of my wife.

“She’s been gone for ten weeks now, and my shoulder is healed thanks to the surgery.

I’ve been doing PT, trying to ignore how much I’d like to take a pill and forget about all of this.

” He rubbed the left side of his ribs where they’d poked him with a cattle prod just for fun.

“It’s not the first time I’ve been held captive, or beaten, and I’m not telling you all this so you’ll feel sorry for me.

My shoulder was dislocated and torn pretty badly.

I was prescribed more narcotics, and I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to care.

I didn’t want to feel how much it hurts that I have no idea where she is.

” He sniffed. “But that wasn’t going to help me get her back.

I had to fight what I know, and what I want to do, so I can save her. The way she saves everyone.

“So I’ve been clean for forty-two days now.

But I still can’t find her. I have no idea where she is, or what’s happening to her.

This isn’t even close to being over. And getting that oblivion back won’t make it go away.

I can’t escape into the nothing this time.

Not if I want a shot at finding her.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a second.

“The pain doesn’t make me feel alive. What makes me feel alive is her. ”

The Bible study leader, Ron Ward, got up from the front row and came to the podium. “Thank you for sharing. Let’s all be praying for Oliver and his wife, and the situation. In fact?—”

Jax’s phone rang in his pocket. He drew it out, left-handed because his right arm still ached all these weeks after surgery, and looked at the screen. “It’s my office.”

Ron nodded. “You take that. We’ll pray for you.”

“Thank you.” Jax looked at the men who attended the study, a Bible class for those in recovery that his sponsor had hooked him up with. “Thanks, all of you.” He skirted the edge of the chairs, and his shoes clipped the varnished wood floor as he retrieved his suit jacket.

He’d come here right from work, but that was no surprise.

He spent most nights at the office now so he could be around if they got a lead.

Maizie was staying at the townhouse with his cat, Jolene.

The young woman he and Kenna had adopted was helping him at work and at home.

He just wanted to find his wife—before his whole existence imploded.

Living on a knife edge wasn’t going to last long.

Jax drove to the office, the world awash in dark sky and bright lights from the other cars on the road.

He’d probably been living in autopilot since he realized she really was gone, and that he had no idea how to find her.

For a few days he’d been certain they’d find her within the week.

That they would get intel, and her team would go with him and the Phoenix FBI’s tactical team, and they’d get her back.

Jax had been in no shape to think about joining them, as he’d had surgery within days of Bruce and those lawyers finding him.

The car behind him honked.

The light was green. Jax hit the gas and set off.

This whole thing was a mess. They hadn’t found her, and he hadn’t been in any shape to get out and do it himself for two weeks after. Swallowed by the thing that made this feeling in his chest go away.

Am I ever going to get her back?

But the man he was—FBI Special Agent in Charge and husband, believer in Jesus—didn’t ever go back to who he used to be.

Out of necessity he gathered the rules and procedure around him like a blanket.

He lived his life by tenets he’d clung to because they meant being the person he wanted to be, and not an addict.

He couldn’t afford to let go of the life he’d built.

Not right now, when being an FBI agent was the thing that would enable him to find her.

The Bureau had the means to hunt the people who had taken Kenna, and the resources to get her back.

The alternative was to cut and run and do this himself, solving the case the way Kenna would—solo. But Jax needed the FBI. He needed the rules, the resources and procedures.

If he lost control of himself, he would never get her back.

He pulled into the parking garage and went through security, going up to the floor where his team were situated. He dumped his backpack under the desk in his corner office and headed for the lab.

Special Agent Andrette Herron turned the corner at the end of the hall toward him, wearing tan cargos and a polo shirt. “Boss, you heard the judge signed off on the search warrant for the bar, right?” She jingled a set of keys. “We’re gearing up. Rolling out in ten.”

“That’s great.” Jax nodded. “I’ll meet you there.”

He wasn’t going to bother changing out of his suit. He wanted to talk to Maizie about what she had, then go to the bar. It was the best way to not interfere in the work his team needed to do, and when he got there, he’d see if they found Kenna.

If he were honest, he was losing hope.

Before he even reached the door, he could hear the thumping beat of an ’80s workout playlist. The one that meant Maizie was trying to figure something out.

He pushed open the Plexiglas door, and the volume increased significantly.

The room accommodated several technicians, but when Maizie had moved in—hired on as his newest consultant—they’d rearranged.

She worked at a long table that allowed her to stand and face the door, so he could see her head.

She looked over the monitors she had stacked one on top of the other, beside them a vertically aligned display, all of which ensured no one walked up behind her and surprised her.

It looked like the setup of an emergency dispatcher.

Jax didn’t think she’d explained to the other agents why she needed things set up a certain way, same as he hadn’t told them that technically she was his adopted daughter. All he’d said was that she was excellent at what she did. Good enough it warranted them hiring her on as a consultant.

If anyone thought that was because he planned to use Bureau resources to find his wife…okay, so they’d be right. But Maizie had helped with several other cases the past few weeks, and she loved his cat.

Her eyes flared seeing him, and she lowered the volume of the music. “You heard about the warrant?”

He nodded, going around her table to see what she had on her screens. At the last second the left side flashed, and the home page for an internet search engine popped up. “I’m heading out in a minute.”

Maizie hopped onto the stool beside her, angled toward him.

She wore the same kind of cargos that Special Agent Herron had on, but her polo shirt was a gray color and had a different emblem sewn on it.

She’d also chosen one that was a size too big so it hung loose on her, and she’d pulled her thick blond hair into a ponytail.

Some makeup, but not much. All of it designed to draw as little attention to her as possible.

She was barely eighteen, and for all intents his daughter, so he was fine by that.

Later, when she found some confidence in who she was as a woman and started to come out of her shell a little, she was going to be a knockout.

He wasn’t ready for her to knock some poor young guy on his behind, but if she got into a relationship with someone who treated her like precious china, then Jax figured they could probably come to some kind of consensus.

The kind that would have Jax burying evidence along with the guy’s body if he hurt her.

The others in the office had noticed her unique mannerisms. She wasn’t exactly skittish.

She simply turned to face the person every time she talked to them.

She didn’t go alone to her car—Jax always walked her downstairs and would often see one of Kenna’s team in the parking lot watching out for her as well.

And she kept things professional with the agents and other civilian employees.

If anyone looked her up, they wouldn’t find a file on the reason she was the way she was. Far as Jax was concerned, Maizie’s past was no one’s business.

Kenna was gone, so it was up to him to look out for Maizie.

Both of them wanted to find her, and coming here, Maizie had acted like he gave her the keys to the kingdom. Their tech was pretty cool. She just had to stay within the bounds of the law—something she hadn’t technically always done with Kenna.

“Do you think Kenna might be at the bar when they search it?” She bit her lip, which made her look younger. But it was her eyes that told a different story.

One of the women in the office had asked him a few questions that got pretty close to the truth of what had happened to Maizie.

No one would guess she’d been a captive her entire life, raised by the man who called her his wife.

She’d escaped and he was dead, and now Maizie got to start over and live the life she wanted.

Jax leaned back against the counter and folded his arms. “I don’t want to get my hopes up, but I can’t help it. And then at the same time, it’s so unlikely she’s there.”

“I know.” Her face flushed. “I want her to be there so you can have her back.”

“Me, too,” he replied, wanting to reassure her.

Maizie had still been in Colorado when he got out of the hospital, and during those rough few days when he was getting clean. She hadn’t seen his worst, and he planned to keep it that way.

“You good here, Maze?”

“Yes, Jax.” She almost rolled her eyes but didn’t.

“I found a connection between the bar and… Dominatus .” She said that last word more quietly than the rest, as they’d both learned to keep to themselves what would sound like a worldwide conspiracy to the other agents.

“I need to solidify the connection, but it’s there. ”

“Good.” That meant there was a greater chance Kenna was at the bar.

“But it’s a front for?—”

“Sex crimes?” They had to keep it plain, keep the emotions out of it.

“If she is there?—”

“Maze.” He had to tread cautiously. “I know what you’re saying.

But the fact is, she could be anywhere, and we have no way to know what’s happening to her.

You can’t let the unknown drive you crazy.

We deal in facts, and things we can prove.

Like a connection between this place and our enemy. Tell me what you found.”

She scrunched up her nose, her gaze scanning the screens. “It’s just a feeling, but I’m going to prove it. There’s a connection to shell corporations we’ve come across before, but it’s thin. They’re good at hiding their tracks, burying what they own.”

A few months back they’d taken down a rogue doctor, formerly with Dominatus but operating on his own in a silo buried out in the desert.

They’d stopped that, and it had cost them Kenna.

Right now, they didn’t know what the organization behind all this was up to.

But it was definitely something, considering for decades—or more—they’d been directing international events, infiltrating governments, creating genetically superior children, and pretty much trying to rule the world.

And now they had Kenna.

He rubbed his chest. “I need to go.”

Maizie reached over and touched his shoulder.

Jax tried not to freeze, considering this was the first time she’d initiated physical contact.

He’d had to stop himself from hugging her a number of times, not sure if she would be okay with it.

He lifted his gaze to her so she could see the honest fear in his eyes.

She wanted to be here to help him, and she had to know she was making a difference.

She also had to know how much he needed her presence in his life.

“I’ve gotta go, Maze.” He cleared his throat. “Find me proof.”

She let go of his shoulder. “I won’t let you down.”

There it was. The delicate balance between needing her, and the young woman feeling like she had to prove herself. Not wanting to let him down was one thing—he felt the same way—but she didn’t need to tie herself up in knots trying to do it.

“Whatever happens, we stick together.” He went out on a limb and held his hand up in front of him with his palm toward his chest.

She clasped it, locking hands with him almost like they were going to arm wrestle.

“Deal?”

Maizie nodded. “Okay, deal.”

He squeezed her hand and headed out. Hopefully tonight would be the night he got his wife back. He didn’t want to know how bad the alternative was, for any of them.

He just wanted to find Kenna.