Page 8 of Storm and Tempest

Maizie stared at him. “She would never do that. And she would never do this. I’m going to prove the video is fake.” Her voice thickened, and she cleared her throat. “It’s a deep fake.”

Ramon shifted closer to Maizie but didn’t touch her.

“Maybe it isn’t,” Jax countered. What the bar owner had seen was real. “What was on the video?”

He didn’t want to ask, but he had to.

Maizie looked at Ramon.

“A dead man,” he said. “That’s how we know it’s fake.”

Jax waited a couple of seconds. “Whatever it is, just tell me.”

“We don’t know where they were,” Maizie replied. “I’m running the buildings around them through a program that looks at those street view maps online, and it’s comparing the image to see if it can find them.” She took a breath. “It was Kenna and Doctor Buzard.”

“He’s dead,” Jax pointed out. “Definitely fake. Or old.”

Ramon said, “Kenna is the one who killed him.”

“The video is date and time stamped in the metadata, and it’s from a month ago.” Maizie sucked in a sharp breath.

Ramon turned to Jax. “They were making out. Whoever set it up did a great job of making it look like she’s in a romance with him. Definitely not under duress this time at least, so don’t bother asking about that.” He waved a hand. “Doctor Buzard and Kenna. Looks like they ran off together and now they’re in cahoots.”

“His body is in the ground.”

Bruce snorted. “As if no one ever faked their death.”

“That doesn’t explain why she’d do that.”

The two men shifted. Jax didn’t want to think what that meant—aside from that they pitied him because his wife had evidently run off with a dead man and was living the high life with her new romance and a thriving business.

He crossed his arms. “We all know Kenna would never switch sides and suddenly start working forDominatus.”

He hated that he even had to say it. But the truth had to be spoken aloud so others could hear it. Even if no one everuttered it, the truth was still truth. And yet, declaring it out loud strengthened the person doing the declaring. It enabled them to believe in it even more. “She would never do that. Not even if they forced her.”

“She wouldn’t,” Maizie said, her voice a little shaky, but she nodded.

“Not even before she got to know you would sheeverhave done something like that.” Jax said it for his benefit, and hers. “Those guys from the retirement home pretended to be FBI, they took her and gave her to our enemy, and then they disappeared.”

Jax had been trying to find them for weeks.

Dominatushad gone unchecked for decades. Was it any surprise he hadn’t found a trace of those men? Their cover stories, impersonating FBI higher-ups, had been impeccable.

“Now they want to destroy her reputation,” Jax said. “They want the FBI to shut down my investigation, so I have no way to find her.”

His credibility would take a hit. Jax might even lose his job if he pushed it.

He needed the job to keep himself together, because without the boundaries of a day job and the strictures that came with being a Special Agent in Charge, he would have nothing to keep him in check. He might even turn out like Ramon, a guy who skirted the edge and had a limited skillset. Thankfully, Kenna had kept Ramon in the fold, working together so that she could keep an eye on him and help him get out of trouble if it turned out he needed that.

It was the kind of person his wife was that she seemed to collect strays. Ramon. Maizie. Bruce even. People with no family who had a reason to destroy their life trying to right a wrong. She helped them pull themselves together and live on the right side of the law—with enough leeway they could still be who theywere. He wasn’t sure what that said about him and didn’t much care.

He just wanted his wife back.

“My people are working the intel we got from the bar. Maybe we’ll find something in their network that can lead us back toDominatus.”

“Maybe?” Ramon shifted, aggression in his stance even if he didn’t necessarily mean to display that. “You’re banking Kenna’s survival on a maybe?”

“It’s all I’ve got.” Jax thumped his chest. “I’m FBI. That means I run this like the FBI does. It’s how we get results.”