Page 44 of The Illusion of Power (Passion and Politics #1)

CAL

T here’s a wariness to Selene’s demeanor that weighs down her shoulders and makes her footsteps heavy as she climbs the stairs up to her bedroom. Beck and I watch her go, anger and concern dueling for precedence in my body while guilt flashes behind his eyes.

“Stop beating yourself up, Beckham.” I place a hand on his shoulder to guide him to the office where Selene was working yesterday. He waits until the door is shut to respond, self-loathing wrapping itself around each word.

“Twice,” he says, shrugging me off to pace the length of the floor. “Twice she’s been in my care, and something has gone wrong.”

I lean against the door with my arms crossed.

Years of knowing and loving him have taught me how nasty and incessantly negative his thoughts can get.

How necessary it is to combat that self-deprecation with facts.

I never inflate them, never exaggerate his role in anything, just give him the cold, hard truth and let it work its magic.

“And both times you have gotten her out of harm’s way without so much as a scratch.”

“Don’t do that, Drake,” he scrubs a hand down his face. “Don’t fucking patronize me. She shouldn’t have been in harm’s way to fucking begin with. That’s the whole point of what we do.”

“Beck, our job only exists because it is inevitable that people like Selene will find themselves in harm’s way. We do what we can to prevent that, but sometimes prevention isn’t possible, which is why we have protocols and procedures.”

“Protocol dictates that you stay with your charge at all times.”

“Yeah, well protocol also doesn’t account for the bullshit situation Hicks has us in right now. You had to make a judgment call.”

He lifts his hands, threading his fingers together and letting them come to rest at the nape of his neck. “Would you have made the same call?”

“Absolutely. Leaving her food unattended would have rendered it inedible and delayed the meal. The bathroom was in your line of sight. You stayed in the spot that made it possible for you to execute both of your responsibilities to the best of your abilities, and you were successful.”

He blows a harsh breath through his nostrils. “I wasn’t successful.”

“Is she dead, Lance?”

My tone and the question make him flinch, but they also ground him in reality. He sighs and gives a resigned shake of his head, “No, but?—”

“No buts. Just facts. She’s alive. Say it .”

His jaw clenches in a futile attempt to stop himself from obeying, and I march over to him, palming his defiance and squeezing gently.

Desire and indignation flare in his eyes, and as much as I want to fan the flame of one, I’m more concerned about stomping out the other so we can get on to more important things.

“ Say it, Beckham. ”

I feel the flex and release of muscle, the hinging and unhinging of bone, and then finally, he gives me what I want.

“She’s alive.”

“That’s right, and we’re going to make sure it stays that way.”

Now that his head is back on his shoulders, I have to tell him something that might send him spiraling again, but for different reasons. I remove my hand from his jaw, barely resisting the need to pull him in for a kiss, and take out my phone.

“Let’s sit down, I need to show you something.”

We settle into the armchairs in front of the desk, both of us perched on the edge of our seats so we can look at the photo displayed on my screen.

It’s a little dark and taken at a distance, but you can still make out the woman in all black climbing into an older model sedan with a man behind the wheel.

Her hair is whipped around her face, hiding her features, but she matches the description Selene gave us.

Beck takes the phone from my hands, zooming in on the woman. “When was this taken?”

“Tonight. Around the time you found Selene in the bathroom. It’s a still from some CCTV footage from a shop one street over from Feast.”

“I don’t remember seeing her. Are we sure this is the woman Selene described?”

“We can’t be certain until we show the photo to her. Houston PD is working on getting an ID. That’s not the important thing, though.”

His brows wrinkle with confusion. “It’s not?”

“No.” I reach over and swipe to the left, bringing up another image. “This is from a red light camera on the same block.”

Beck examines the photo closely, but his focus is only on the woman in the passenger seat. His tunnel vision makes sense to me. She’s the one who slipped past him and got to Selene. She’s the one who made him feel like a failure, but she isn’t the problem.

“Look at the driver,” I insist. “Does he look familiar at all?”

He’s reluctant to pull his eyes from the woman, almost like he’s scared she’ll slip through his fingers again, but when he does, they grow wide with recognition.

“Holy shit. It’s him!”

“Yeah, it’s?—”

“The driver of the red Honda,” he says, completing my sentence with the wrong words.

“What? This is the guy you saw in front of the house that day?”

Beck’s excitement wanes a little at my lack of understanding. “Yes, isn’t that what you were going to tell me?”

“No.” I run a hand over my head as agitation builds behind my ribs. This situation is growing more complicated by the minute. “I didn’t get a look at the driver, remember?”

He frowns. “Right. Then how do you know him?”

“Because he’s Leland Marsh’s son.”

The gravity of that statement makes the air in the room heavy with the kind of dread that can only be associated with the name of a man who plotted the public murder of a sitting President and almost killed me along the way.

We arrested Leland Marsh years ago and left him to rot in a federal prison in Florence, Colorado, while the rest of his brothers in racist arms wound up facing charges for their role in the assassination attempt or died trying to avoid arrest.

Our years-long investigation into Marsh made it necessary for us to know everything and everyone in his life, but his son, Jacob, who was, by all accounts, estranged from his father, never garnered any true interest for us.

We interviewed him once after the Warner incident, and he made it quite clear that he wasn’t affiliated with Leland or his group.

He was only twenty-five at the time, a quiet, but clearly angry kid with long, greasy hair that hung in his face and gave him a mean case of adult acne.

In the photo taken today, he has a buzz cut, and, as far as I can tell, the acne has cleared up.

With the close-cropped hair, he looks more like his father than he did before.

I squint at the picture, wondering if maybe it’s the hateful glint in his eye that’s feeding the resemblance.

Beck rubs at his temple with one hand. “I don’t understand. Why is Leland Marsh’s kid stalking Selene? And who’s the girl? How does she fit into all of this?”

His questions mirror the inquiries floating around in my mind, and I hate that I don’t have answers.

Hate that I don’t have them for him, and I won’t have them for Selene when we break this all down for her.

Hate that I have to introduce another unsettling query into what’s already a long list of unknowns.

“I don’t know, but we’re for damn sure going to find out. And we’re also going to find out how the fuck they knew we were here.”

Selene’s trip wasn’t advertised. As far as the world knows, she’s still in her hotel room recovering from the stressful incident at the boutique.

All of her socials are quiet, save for the constant influx of nastiness in her comment section, and the TED x Women team was forbidden from breathing a word to anyone about her being here.

Of course, it’s always possible that someone spotted her in the restaurant and posted about it…

“That wouldn’t give Jacob enough time to get to Houston, though,” Beck says, making me realize I was speaking out loud. “They were here waiting for a chance to take a shot at her. They were lying in wait at the restaurant.”

“That doesn’t make sense. That kind of preparation would mean access to proprietary and constantly changing information that is only available to our team.”

“It makes perfect sense, Drake.” Beck’s eyes narrow, pools of onyx swirling with betrayal and murder. “Because we have a fucking leak.”

It’s not a question. It’s an indictment, only we’re not sure which member of our team is about to stand trial.

My hands turn into fists, and I squeeze them tight, imagining the faces of every man we’ve worked alongside for the past four years.

We’re not a tight-knit group by a long shot, but I wouldn’t have ever thought any of them capable of this, of putting the lives of their fellow agents and the person they’ve been charged with protecting in jeopardy.

There’s no denying the evidence, though.

Only someone on our team could have obtained the information about the restaurant in time for Jacob and the mystery girl to arrive. Aubrey’s camp hadn’t received the report on the change of plans yet. Hell, knowing Hicks they might never get it because he didn’t deem the communication necessary.

“Could it be Hicks?” I wonder out loud, my brain sorting through all the instances of nonchalance and weaponized incompetence.

“It could be any one of those fuckers,” Beck hisses. “Or, worse, all of them.”

“The whole team? Even Harris?”

“Maybe. It doesn’t matter right now, though, because until we find out who it is, we can’t trust any of them.”

“Did you ever start?”

“Hell no.”

Amusement feels out of place in this room, so I swallow the laugh his matter-of-fact response sparks in my chest and pluck my phone out of his hand. “How do you want to play this?”

He eyes me suspiciously, obviously wondering why I’m deferring to him when I’m usually the one who lays out a game plan.

I don’t feel like explaining that I don’t like it when he doubts himself, when he acts like he’s not one of the best agents and investigators I know, when he forgets that I trust him with my life and Selene does too.

“How do you want to play it, Beckham?” I ask again, demanding an answer with an arch of my brow.

“We start with Marsh. Looking into him will lead us to the leak in our boat. Keep everything off the books until we know who we can read in. Off the books means leg work we don’t have time to do, though.”

He’s right. We’d be completely on our own and starting from scratch without the Service’s resources.

Tracking down Jacob’s mom and friends and interviewing them in person, handwriting notes, and keeping hard copies of everything so none of it touches compromised servers.

With Aubrey and Selene’s travel schedule and public commitments keeping us busy, it’d be the slowest investigation in history.

“I could call Charlie,” I offer, invoking the name of one of the few agents we keep in touch with from our old unit. Beck strokes his chin, nodding thoughtfully.

“She did always like you better.”

“Yeah, cause you’re an asshole.”

“So is she.”

Once again, he’s right. Charlie Monroe is an asshole.

It’s what she had to become to survive as a twenty-something-year-old woman with her entire career ahead of her in an agency still dominated by old men who refuse to go out to pasture.

Like Beck and me, she existed on the margins of the Bureau, passed over for promotions because of her age, denied coveted assignments because of her sex.

I’d taken her under my wing, becoming something of a mentor to her, helping her find a path that fit her skills and career aspirations.

It didn’t take her long to figure out she liked undercover work, and she made her bones as a UC by infiltrating a sex trafficking ring operating in DC and bringing down everyone involved.

After that bust, cases that required her to go under were her bread and butter.

When Beck and I left the unit, she was embedded in an arms dealer’s entourage as the girlfriend of one of his lower-level runners. We didn’t get to say goodbye, which is something she brings up every time we speak.

This time is no different.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t my so-called friend who abandoned me to go play with the big boys,” she says by way of greeting, her voice deep and commanding.

When we met, she talked like a cheerleader, all high-pitched and excited.

She looked like one, too. Short, petite with brunette hair she always wore in a ponytail.

Now, even when she’s relaxed and playful, there are no soft lines or gentle notes, which speaks to the things she’s seen and fits the severity of the short pixie cut she had the last time I saw her.

“It wasn’t like that, Monroe,” I recite my line in this worn-out script with ease.

“What was it like then, because?—”

Beck groans, the little patience he had with Charlie and this conversation expiring. “A promotion,” he growls. “It was like a promotion. Can we please get to the point?”

Charlie’s tsk of disapproval rings through the speaker. “Glad to see nothing has changed with you, Lance. Still a total buzzkill.”

He glares at me like I’m the one who just called him out, and I hold a hand up to stop him from digging into Charlie’s ass over the phone. If he upsets her too badly, she won’t help us, and we can’t have that.

“Listen, Monroe. I need a favor.”

The line goes quiet as she decides whether she wants to address me or further antagonize Beck. “I’m listening,” she says eventually. I don’t give her time to reconsider, rushing through the ask and all the pertinent details that led to us making it.

“What makes you think the Bureau has a file on Jacob Marsh?”

A derisive snort leaves Beck. “His father carried out an assassination attempt, Charlie. There’s absolutely a file on him. Can you get it for us or not?”

“Let’s say there is a file,” she hedges, sounding like a true agent of bureaucracy. “Why can’t you get the information inside of it another way? I’m sure the Service has access to the same databases we do.”

I glance at Beck to see if he thinks we should read Charlie in. He shakes his head, so I pivot to the closest thing to the truth I can give her. “The usual channels aren’t an option for us right now.”

“You don’t trust your team,” she deadpans.

“We don’t trust anyone but each other,” Beck retorts.

“And you,” I add, attempting to sweeten the pot. “We trust you, Charlie. Wouldn’t have called if we didn’t.”

She heaves a long, deep sigh, and when she speaks again, I hear the reluctant resignation in her tone. “I’ll see what I can find.”