Page 26 of Storm and Tempest (Brand of Justice #13)

Chapter Eighteen

“ I ’m good here.” Maizie settled at a small round table for two with her laptop, her backpack on the second chair. Good way to keep someone from sitting there in this busy hospital lobby with a wall of glass windows, arched ceilings, and a fancy coffee bar on one side.

“I don’t like leaving you.” Jax crouched by her chair.

She tipped her head toward him, an expression he wasn’t sure about in her eyes. “You need to look for her, and I can wait here and work while you do it.”

He wasn’t sure if that put her in harm’s way or kept her out of it. “I should’ve called Bruce.”

Ramon moved to stand behind the backpack, where he’d have a view of the door. “He’s grilling Amara on what she knows about Kenna. Sounds like it’s a real knock-down, drag-out fight.” He focused on the entrance, and when Jax looked at him, he lifted his chin.

Jax glanced at the front doors of the hospital and saw Zeyla heading toward them.

Ramon said, “She wants to find Kenna as badly as we do.”

Maizie glanced over her shoulder, some wariness on her face. But not fear.

“Are you good with her hanging with you?” Jax asked.

Maizie whispered, “She looks like she wants to kill someone, but she’s on our side.”

“That’s who I want protecting you.” He touched her shoulder. “But only if that’s what you want.”

Zeyla strode up to them, her dark hair in two Viking braids hanging over her shoulders. She wore wide-leg black pants and a white cropped T-shirt that revealed a belly button ring. Boots on her feet.

He figured she wore no other jewelry because it could get ripped off in a fight.

“Thanks for coming.” Jax straightened.

Zeyla cocked a hip. “Even though you had no idea I would be here? Seems like there’s a lot of that going around.” She rolled her eyes. “For the record, my mom said she told you about the texts. I can’t believe she didn’t. I thought you knew. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you for letting me know.” Jax glanced at Maizie and saw more of that odd look. “What is it, Maze?”

She shook her head. “I want to say, but I can’t.”

Zeyla dragged over a chair from another table and sat with Maizie. “Being here is better than listening to Mom and Bruce arguing. We can get a latte and get to know each other.”

Now that was a scary proposition.

“I have work to do,” Maizie said. “We can get to know each other later—like, after Kenna has been found.” The confidence in Maizie’s voice made him smile. She looked at him. “Can you grab the comms from the side pocket of my backpack?”

Ramon was the one who dug in there and tossed them to him. Jax handed them out, grudgingly giving one to Zeyla as well.

Maizie clicked the mouse on her laptop. “Check?”

Jax nodded. “I copy you.” But he didn’t walk away. “You’re good?”

“I’m good.” She looked like she wanted to say more, but the quicker they got this done, the sooner they could get back to the RV.

As he and Ramon strode to the elevator, Jax said, “I’m leaning more and more toward the way Kenna is with her RV.”

“Feel like hitting the road and becoming a freelance investigator?”

“No one gets the deal Kenna got with private investigator licenses.”

Ramon hit the button to go up. “I don’t have any. She’s got a dozen or whatever. Doesn’t make any difference to us.”

“I think I just want to hide. Or ignore all the bad in the world.” With her there, too, of course.

They’d spent their honeymoon in the RV, making their way from Colorado back to Phoenix.

Over those couple of weeks, they’d stopped in a few places and burned all his vacation days looking at Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon.

Their troubles hadn’t been over—fighting Dominatus wasn’t just a one-time thing, it was an ongoing case.

But the trip had been a reprieve from their lives.

Jax sighed. “Or we could just drive with no destination in mind.”

“You’re looking for peace.” The doors opened, and Ramon stepped in. “We all are.”

Jax stepped in behind him. “Have you found it?”

“Don’t start talking to me about Jesus. I’ve heard it.” Ramon leaned against the wall of the elevator.

“So what’s your hangup?”

“A million tiny things I don’t have answers for because there are none.”

When the doors opened, they stepped out. There was a breezeway between the main building and the wing named after Jax’s father. A few pieces of trash and a newspaper had piled on the concrete up against the wall.

Jax looked around. “Different out here than in the hospital.”

“I was getting fancy private hospital vibes back in there, but this is more inner city.” Ramon grabbed the handle for the Edward Russell Jaxton wing, but the door stuck. “Huh.” He drew a lock pick kit from his pocket. “Maybe you should look away.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“And if I don’t want an FBI agent watching me commit a crime?”

Jax turned away. “Fine.”

Back on the other end of the breezeway, through the small porthole door, he saw a woman walk by and glance at them. Dark hair. He didn’t get a good enough look at her face to know if he’d seen her before.

“We’re in.” Ramon hauled the door open, and they stepped through.

Jax frowned at the state of disarray. “Wasn’t there a ribbon-cutting ceremony two years ago? Looks like this place was never finished.”

“They did a tour of the first couple of floors, but not the rest. It was still being worked on so they could expand later.”

“So we might be in the unused portion of the hospital?” Jax paused. “We should’ve gone in downstairs.”

“It’s boarded up. Locked up tight with guards and everything. This is the only way in.”

Ceiling tiles lay discarded on the floor. Wires and metal piping for HVAC hung down below the ceiling. Plastic sheeting had been put up to cover the exposed walls but now hung down from the corners and flapped in some unseen breeze from the air current.

“Split up?” Ramon glanced over.

“Sure. Stay on comms and meet at the elevators.”

“Got it.” Ramon headed off in the other direction.

Jax set off down the hall. “Maizie, you copy?”

“I copy.”

“So do I,” Zeyla said. “This latte isn’t good. And it cost me seven dollars.”

Jax turned a corner and found a hall of what had to be treatment rooms. “Any success getting into their computer system?”

“They have a whole lot of things behind a firewall,” Maizie explained. “The hospital itself has all their stuff in a database, but there’s a ton more data that I can’t see. So it has to be hidden from me. I’ll get into it.”

“Sounds promising.” Also like she was trying to prove herself and going overboard with it.

One hand on his gun, he opened the first door he came to. A hospital bed with no sheets. It could be where the photo of Kenna had been taken, but there was literally no way to tell. Nothing had been left behind but the basics, the bed linens in a pile on the floor with a pillow.

He left that room and tried one across the hall that was empty.

Jax told Maizie, “If you can’t access it, that’s not a problem.”

“We need to find out what they know,” she replied. “What information they’re hiding.”

“Okay, but even if we don’t succeed here, it was still worth coming. We’re all feeling the pressure on this one, and I don’t want you to feel like it’s your fault if we don’t get a result.”

Silence was the only response.

Then Maizie said, “We’ll see what I get.”

Jax figured there was more to say, but he was searching and she was working.

He needed to make sure Maizie didn’t feel the weight of Kenna being missing with any sense of guilt for the fact they hadn’t found her yet.

The only people responsible were those who had taken her.

And if—when—Jax got her back, he would see that justice was done.

He spotted Ramon at the end of the hall. The tall Hispanic man shook his head. Jax stepped into another empty room where a machine had been set up, one that had a monitor and a keyboard on a cart, and a wand in a holder beside the keyboard.

Some kind of radiology machine, or an ultrasound maybe?

He looked at the bed. An ultrasound. Kenna. Jax sucked in a breath. “Makes sense why they took her now and not before.”

“What’s that?” Ramon stopped by the door.

Jax didn’t want to say it. The idea had barely formed in his mind. “If Kenna is pregnant—or they want to get her pregnant—that might be why they wanted her now.”

Ramon kept his voice low. “Is this what you wanna talk about?”

“Of course not.” Jax went over to see what he’d noticed on the floor and crouched to pick up the dark scrap of paper.

An image of a tiny person, barely bigger than a peanut.

His eyes burned. “They’ve had her for two months. They could have done anything to her. She could be anywhere. Suffering. Tortured. Experimented on.”

Maizie said, “Jax,” her voice strained.

“She could be pregnant.” Jax blew out a long breath.

“I have their files,” she said. “I’m in the records. If they treated her, I can find out.”

Zeyla said, “I’ll help her. You guys keep searching.”

Jax stood, unable to take his eyes off the image. It was probably not even Kenna who had been seen here. This could be a picture of anyone’s child.

Just because he happened to find it didn’t mean it was his. Or his wife’s.

Dominatus regularly took women and impregnated them. That was where Kenna had come from, a product of their genetic experimentation. They’d want to use her to continue their research and further their agenda. If they wanted it, he would never find her. Never get her back.

That was simply how powerful they were. Nothing Jax could do on his own would bring them down, not with a lifetime of trying.

He slipped the ultrasound in his pocket, knowing what he was fighting for.

His family.

Ramon stepped out, his demeanor switching in a split second. He drew his gun. “Hey!”

Jax rushed out of the room, his gun out. He spotted an older man at the end of the hall. “Four! Do not move.”

The older man, wearing coveralls so he looked like a repair guy, didn’t move. He stood straight, but with no tension in his body language. Hands up, palms facing them.

“He was coming toward us,” Ramon said. “Trying to catch us by surprise.”

Four’s expression shifted, and he almost rolled his eyes. “I’m not here to kill you.”

“And if we’re here to kill you ?” Ramon stalked forward, grabbed Four, and shoved him up against the wall. “Anything in your pockets I should know about?”

“Just a phone and some other incidentals. I’m unarmed.”

Ramon huffed. “I find that hard to believe.” He held the guy against the wall with one hand and patted him down with the other. “He’s clear.” Ramon held the phone with one hand and drew his weapon again with the other. “Where is Kenna?”

The older man turned, his back now against the wall. “Ask me something that won’t get me killed if I answer.”

“You think we care about your longevity?” Jax yelled. “You’ve lived years, done more than most people dream of, and become a nightmare thing that should be eradicated.”

“So kill me.” Four shrugged. “But then you’ll never know what I came here to tell you.”

Jax didn’t want to compromise what he knew was right to win at this, but it might happen. The battle between who he was and who he wanted to be raged inside.

Ramon huffed. “We aren’t interested in being strung along. You know where she is.” He surged forward and slammed his forearm against Four’s chest, high enough his arm lifted the man’s chin.

Four struggled for breath.

“Tell us where Kenna is. Now.”

“You’ll never reach her.” Four gasped. “Even I don’t know. They have so many layers of security, misdirects, and covers.”

“You know.” Ramon pushed on the older man’s chest.

“I know your computer whiz friend will die if you kill me.”

“Zeyla!” Ramon called.

Jax wasn’t messing around if someone was threatening Maizie. “Check in, Maze.”

“We’re good,” the young woman said. “We can hear you. Zeyla has me covered.”

As long as he could trust Zeyla, that was fine. “Four, you’d better start talking or we’re going to have a serious problem.”

“You think you don’t? You’ve been left alone so long as your childish attempts to cause problems haven’t caused us issues. But your boldness will be repaid swiftly.”

Ramon launched in. “If you even touch Maizie?—”

Four cut him off. “My employer doesn’t negotiate or respond to threats.”

“Neither do we,” Ramon said.

“What do you have to tell us?” Jax needed this over with, because the threat level had just gone up substantially. Clearly this man wanted to convey something more than a not-so-veiled threat.

Maizie wasn’t going to be sacrificed in the fight to get Kenna back.

He wasn’t willing to allow her to give herself up any more than he would dangle her out as bait.

He wanted his wife back, sure. But the person he would be if he lost everyone he cared about in the process wasn’t the kind of man who could find that peace he’d been talking to Ramon about.

It didn’t matter if he was FBI or a freelance investigator, a construction worker or an architect, he was going to be the man who did everything he could to save his family.

Every member of his family.

Four swallowed. “Call your dog off.”

“He doesn’t work for me. He works for the woman you kidnapped.”

Ramon stepped back, but didn’t go far.

“Your father made a bad deal. He’s on the run.” Four blinked. “ Dominatus is offering you the chance to bring him in before they send an operative to take out your father.”

“What deal?”

“Above my paygrade,” Four said. “But his time is running out.”

Just another of their distractions. “I want my wife back.”

“So you’ll sacrifice your father to get her?”

“Of course not. Dominatus is running on borrowed time. You all can’t keep ruining people’s lives. I’m not living the rest of my life always looking over my shoulder, wondering when one of your operatives is going to show up and take my children from me or take my wife.”

“You think any of us have a choice in this?”

“Then make a choice.” Jax was going to offer him freedom. “Leave with us. Get out and stay out.”

“Live my life on the run?”

“We can protect you,” Jax said. “It’s not foolproof, but it’s better than being their errand boy. Isn’t it?”

“You wanna give me a life, a place to retire, and set me up like it’s witness protection?”

Jax nodded. “It’s up to you.”

“The only way this ends is with blood and pain. For any of us.”

Ramon said, “We’ve had our share, so you aren’t going to scare us with that. It’s time to rewrite the ending. For you. For all of us. And for Kenna.”

“There’s nothing you can do for her,” Four muttered.

Jax wasn’t going to accept that.

Not ever.