Page 45 of Storm and Tempest (Brand of Justice #13)

Chapter Thirty-Four

“ I can stick with Kenna.” Ramon walked behind them along the side of the road where they’d left the car, though it was only the three of them right now. “I can watch her back while you find Maizie.”

Jax wondered if this was about the last time they’d lost her. “Looking for a shot to redeem yourself?”

“Long as no one hits me with a stun gun.”

Kenna glanced over her shoulder at Ramon, bringing up the rear. Why did the woman look so good in a bulletproof vest with her hair in the quick braids? She’d done her hair in the car with two rubber bands—the only thing available.

Even with dark circles under her eyes, and being thinner than might be healthy for her, she looked amazing to him.

She smiled at Ramon. “I’m surprised you haven’t spent the last few months practicing so you can get hit and keep going.”

Ramon saw the look he shot her. “What makes you think I haven’t?” The note of humor in his eyes took the tension out of it. At least a little.

Kenna said, “No one blames you for not being able to stop them.”

“Thank you.” Ramon gave her a tight nod. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t hunt down those old guys and get some payback.

“Put that on the agenda for the next staff meeting,” Jax said. “And we appreciate the offer, but both of us are hanging back. We’ll watch out for each other, and you go find Maizie and Zeyla. We’ll be right behind you.”

“Copy that.” Ramon skirted around them and jogged up the path behind Earl Jonas’ house. A walking trail that ran alongside the highway.

The MSI boss had a house across the hill beyond the trees.

Bear, Hollace, and the men loyal to them would breach the house.

Ramon had the back entrance. They were his backup, hanging back but still part of it.

Neither of them was a hundred percent—or even close to it—but no way were they going to sit this one out.

Preston and Jax’s father were also supposed to hang back and not come in the house until it was clear. Which, if he were honest, he and Kenna should do. But when had that ever stopped them?

Jax shifted his gun to his left hand and took Kenna’s with his right so they could walk through the woods down a deer trail together.

Ramon sprinted the length of the trail, and some words drifted to them when he got on the radio Bear had given him with instructions to use a channel the men in the house wouldn’t be on.

An encrypted channel they wouldn’t find the frequency for, even if they scrolled through them all.

“I guess you and Ramon became friends while I was gone.”

Jax couldn’t argue with her assessment. “First it was tense. We worked together out of necessity, and he was probably in it because he felt guilty about what happened as much as he wanted to get you back. But he’s more than proven his loyalty to you, and I can’t help but respect the guy.”

Kenna glanced at him. “Shouldn’t the FBI be out here, helping you take this guy down?”

“The FBI and I…aren’t exactly on speaking terms right now.

” He gave her a brief rundown of Maizie coming on as a consultant, the worm in their network, and Special Agent Herron.

“Who knows what Andrette is doing now, and what the Assistant Director in Charge thinks. I’m not sure I really care.

I have you back, and we’ll have our family back together by the end of the night.

” He shrugged. “Even the taskforce the president put together is kaput. However it happened, Dominatus discovered people are trying to fight them and squashed it.”

“We need a new plan.”

“We need a vacation.”

Kenna chuckled under her breath. “Maybe we can vacate and make a plan while we’re relaxing.”

“I’ll think about it.” Right now, he didn’t want to do anything but take a month off and spend it with her. Maybe a year. Or twenty.

She squeezed his hand. “Why did we get the farthest walk from the road to the house?”

He smiled. “Because they’re hoping they get the situation resolved before the injured people even get there.”

“Fine by me. Bear seemed pretty…perturbed that his people worked for Dominatus. ”

“I mean, if I thought I was an Avenger, and it turned out I was working for Hydra…”

She glanced at him. “You…what?”

He shrugged. “You were gone. I watched a lot of movies to distract myself. Maizie and I worked through the entire Marvel timeline. Twice.”

Kenna laughed aloud.

“Why is that funny?” he asked, smiling.

“Because I probably would’ve done the same if it had been months.” She squeezed his hand. “Movie night sounds good.”

“It’s a date.”

The trees came to an abrupt end, the terrain switching from backwoods overgrown brush to a manicured lawn in a stark line that delineated the edge of Jonas’ backyard.

Acres of grass that could’ve been a golf course stretched beyond them, a slight decline down to the gravel around what could only be described as a mansion.

“Why do all these bad guys have gorgeous stone houses?”

Jax tugged on her hand, and they set off walking down the hill. “Do you want one?”

“No way.”

Over by the house, Ramon ducked through a door and left it open for them. Light flashed in one of the first-floor windows to the left. A gunshot.

She continued, “I want a cabin with acres and acres of hills, and mountains in the distance so you can see someone coming toward you from a long way off. The kind of place where the closest neighbor is five miles down the road and you get snowed in for weeks in the winter.”

“I’ll need an ATV with a snowplow attachment.”

“Of course.” She squeezed his hand. “Kids. Dogs. Cases we can consult on and not leave the house.”

“At this point, we’re gonna have a team we’re coordinating who go out and do the legwork for us while we go through the evidence.”

“Sounds good to me.”

To him, it almost sounded like a dream. The kind of life they might’ve had without Dominatus in the picture.

Something that “could be”—and if things went a certain way, that’s all it would ever be.

The only chance they’d actually achieve it would be after the fight of their lives, doing whatever it took to take that organization down. If they even survived the battle.

And with her pregnant… Well, he wanted to decree that they found that sanctuary of a cabin together.

Then she could stay there while he took care of it for her.

Kenna would never go for it, which was why he didn’t voice the idea out loud.

Still, now that she was carrying their baby, he needed her to stay safe rather than be a target for Dominatus .

For all he knew, they were both now on the radar. Targets of an enemy who would relentlessly pursue his family until they got what they wanted.

“As much as we might want to,” she began, “we can’t check out or bury our heads in the sand. Not with all we know and how widespread the threat is.”

“I still can’t see how we’d ever be able to take them down. The whole thing seems insurmountable.”

Not without identifying every single member of Dominatus and taking them down one by one. That was a fight that could take a lifetime.

He continued, “Right now all I can see is a fight that will be so difficult I don’t want to do it. I’d rather pack it all in and enjoy my life instead. But you’re right—with all we’ve seen, that isn’t something we can do. Not in all good conscience.”

“So we take it one day at a time. One mission at a time.” She slowed. “To be honest, this is the most exercise I’ve had in months.”

And she was coming off an “endurance” test, where she’d been subjected to starvation and hypothermia.

“Before you say it”—she smiled—“there’s no way I was going to stay in the car any more than you were.”

The steps up to the back door Ramon had left open were stone and looked like they’d been imported from someplace where medieval structures like castles and churches still stood.

Was Earl Jonas really the kind of guy who would ship every piece of it over, stone by stone, and reassemble it?

Jax wouldn’t have said so, but that was exactly what it seemed had happened.

Above his head, a window shattered and a dark form sailed out.

The man hit the gravel behind them with a sickening thud.

Kenna moved closer, and he slid his arm around her waist reflexively, even if the guy was dead. He could feel the baby between them, his family safe and sound. He leaned down and kissed her neck. “Stay behind me.”

“I’ll watch your back.”

“That’s not why.”

She squeezed his waist right as he crossed the threshold of the door. “I know.”

Jax couldn’t hold her hand because while he could shoot with his left, now wasn’t the time to sacrifice accuracy for convenience.

He scanned the hallway, which was encased in wood wainscoting with pretentious paintings on the wall, listening to the faint sounds of hand-to-hand combat through the house.

A gunshot exploded, somewhere far enough it sounded like a muffled thud. Like a firework miles away.

“You think this place has basement cells like in France?” she asked.

“I wasn’t there when you rescued Preston,” he replied. “I was delivering a message to that publisher.”

“Right. I was thinking about that in my cell. In fact, I came up with a whole story for a book. But it’s so outlandish no one would ever believe it could really happen.”

“Like our lives?” He had her wait at the next corner.

Someone stepped into view at the end.

“Ramon!” Jax stayed where he was, though. Just in case. There was something about?—

The guy lifted his gun.

Not Ramon. Jax fired around the corner, and the guy fell to the side. He shot wide, the rounds slamming into the ceiling while muzzle flash lit up the long hallway.

“Jax!” Bear strode down the hall from the other end. “You guys good?”

“We’re good. Where’s Ramon?”

“This way.” Bear motioned. “He found them, but he can’t get through the door. Jonas barricaded himself in there with Maizie and Zeyla, and he’s threatening them.”

Jax followed him, Kenna by his side.

Tension stiffened every inch of Bear’s body, as though the slightest thing might make him snap.

Like he wanted to rant and pace or just knock someone out with one punch.

He stepped through a set of doors into a pretentious study.

There really was no other way to describe the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that filled the room, complete with one of those old-world library ladders that slid all the way around so a person could climb up and get a book off the top shelf.

Ramon stood at the far end, pushing on a panel that looked like it should move one way.

Jax said, “Panic room.”

“I need plastic explosives.” Ramon didn’t turn around, he just kept pushing.

“One of those remotes.” Kenna clicked her fingers. “When was that?”

Ramon glanced at her. “New York. Look around.”

She went to the desk and sat in the leather chair before she pulled open drawers. “Wish I could remember what that thing looked like. Some kind of clicker remote thingy that opened the secret drawer.”

Ramon pulled open drawers on the other side of the desk, rooting around.

A man came into the room. Jax lifted his gun to protect the rest of them, but the guy’s body jerked, and the sound of a gunshot rang through the room. Shot from behind. He fell to the floor, and Hollace appeared in the door. “It’s clear.”

“That’s all of them?” Bear asked.

Hollace nodded.

Jax said, “Is there any way to communicate with Maizie, or Zeyla, or even Jonas, inside there?”

Bear scratched his jaw. “Preston might know.”

“Or my father.” Jax figured that was a longshot, but anything was worth a try right now. “What happened, Ramon?”

He was still thrown by the guy he’d thought was Ramon in the hallway, not wanting to contemplate how many doppelgangers might be out there.

Assets loyal to Dominatus who would be willing to lay down their lives for the cause.

That guy probably hadn’t looked like Ramon, just a similar build in the dark, but tell that to Jax’s racing heart.

Ramon crouched to root around in a drawer, while Kenna sank back in the tall-backed leather chair with an audible sigh. The Hispanic man said, “He shoved them in there and hit the button inside that closed the door.”

Jax heard the note in his voice. The two women had been freaked out. He turned to Hollace. “C4?”

Hollace folded his arms. “He could kill them before we clear the smoke to get in there.”

“That might be a chance we have to take,” Kenna said. “If we can’t find the remote that will open the door.”

Bear shifted and pulled out a phone. “Earl Jonas is calling me.” He tapped the screen and held the phone in front of his face. “Let those women go, and I won’t put a bullet in your head. If you hurt them, you have no leverage.”

“No?” Earl Jonas said. “Seems like all I have to do is wait for backup to descend.”

Descend . Interesting choice of words there.

Jax whispered, “Helicopter.”

Hollace headed for the door, talking into his radio.

Jonas continued, “They’ll take care of you, and I’ll get to walk away. Over your dead bodies.”

“That isn’t going to happen,” Ramon said, loudly enough Jonas would hear. “Let them go, and we might not kill all of you.”

“Hmm. No thanks.” The line went dead.

“We know how they’re going to approach.” Bear glanced around. “Let’s make a stand. He’ll be forced to come out eventually.”

Hollace said, “Nothing incoming yet. We have no idea how many people there will be, or if it’s even a chopper.”

“You won’t like my idea.” Ramon slammed the desk drawer shut and stood.

“Try us,” Kenna suggested. “We’re brainstorming. There are no bad ideas.”

More MSI guys came in the room, and since Hollace and Bear didn’t react with lethal force, Jax figured they were on the same side.

Ramon eyed her. “He thinks we’re going to fight them all. That’s what he wants—he’s planned for it.”

“So what do we do?” Bear shrugged.

“Set the house on fire,” Ramon said. “No way to get in, no way to fight them.”

“With them inside that room?” Jax said. “They’ll suffocate.”

Ramon didn’t seem worried. “Unless it’s the kind of panic room that’s sealed.”

“He could kill them,” Jax countered.

Kenna glanced at him. “Whatever we do, there’s a risk he retaliates and hurts them.”

“There’s a risk Zeyla will hurt him, and I hope she does.” Ramon folded his arms.

Hollace said, “We can blow the gas line and the water at the same time. Trip the system so there’s fire and it’s working on putting it out.” His tone indicated it was a question.

“Can he see us?” Jax pointed at the panic room door. “Or can we fake a fire?”

“We have no idea,” Ramon said. “You’re no fun.”

“Decide fast.” Bear strode to the door. “There’s a chopper incoming.”

Jax glanced at the sealed door to the panic room, or hidey hole, or whatever Mr. Jonas had installed behind his study. Some firefighter tools would come in handy right now.

Dark-gray smoke drifted out of a vent, high on the wall.

He told Ramon, “Seems like someone beat you to it with the fire idea.”