Page 4 of Waiting for Him (Trident Security #3)

Chapter Three

P resent Day . . .

Kate had known Benny would be shocked when he first saw her, but she hadn’t expected him to pass out.

As far as he knew, she was dead and buried in a cemetery in Norfolk , Virginia , and not living and breathing at his place of business.

His boss, Ian , had asked her to have a seat in the reception area, but she couldn’t sit.

Instead , she was pacing back and forth, trying to keep her feet from running out the door and taking the rest of her body with them.

Benny would’ve been better off if she’d never come looking for him, but it was too late to change her mind now.

The last thing she ever wanted to do was to cause him any more pain, but her life was in danger, and she trusted no one in the world more than him.

It was sad he wouldn’t be able to trust her in return.

Not after what she’d put him through, even though none of it had been her fault.

Her father was to blame for everything .

. . her recently-deceased father. And for the first time in Kate’s life, she was all alone.

The sound of footsteps caused her pacing to cease, and she turned to see Benny stalking toward her, followed by his boss and the lab mix.

The look on the man’s face, the man who’d once been the boy she’d fallen in love with, was now hard.

Shock was giving away to anger, and it was evident by the raging inferno in his beautiful amber eyes.

Eyes that still haunted her dreams after all these years.

He stopped in front of her and crossed his arms. The Navy had taken his gangly, teenage physique and made it broad, strong, and sinewy.

She longed to have him pull her into his powerful arms and hold her while telling her everything would be okay.

Instead , he glared at her from several feet away.

“ Do you want to explain how a woman I watched being buried twelve years ago is standing in front of me? Because as far as I know, reincarnation is still a myth.”

“ I - I’m sorry, Benny . I’m so sorry. But if we can go sit down, I’ll explain everything. I promise.”

Benny’s clenched jaw ticked at her use of his childhood nickname and again at her vow. The last time she promised him something, she’d said she would wait for him forever. As far as he knew, that hadn’t happened.

When he said nothing, Ian stepped around him and extended his open hand to her. “ Ms . Zimmerman , please come back to the conference room, and we’ll talk this out.”

A growl from deep in Benny’s throat escaped his mouth, and he ignored the warning look Ian sent him. “ Her name is Maier , Katerina Maier , and you’re damn right we’re going to talk.”

While the two of them walked back to the room, she heard him take several deep breaths before turning around and following them.

Upon re-entering the room they had vacated moments ago, Ian took the seat he’d planned on giving Boomer .

The meeting had taken a dramatic turn before it even began, and he needed to take control of the situation before it blew up in their faces.

Boomer sat across from Kate with his arms crossed and glowered at her.

Sighing , Ian rolled his chair back a few feet to a small refrigerator in the corner, grabbed three water bottles, and put them on the table. They were going to be here for a while. “ Boom ? Why don’t you tell me how you two know each other, and we’ll go from there.”

Benny waited a moment before his harsh words came out, his eyes never leaving hers as if she would disappear again if they did.

“ Boss , this is Katerina Maier . She was my best friend’s sister.

She’s also supposed to be six feet under, along with her parents and brother, in a cemetery in Norfolk , so I don’t have the slightest fucking idea what she’s doing here.

A week before I left for basic training, they were allegedly killed in a car accident.

Tell me, Kat —are all four caskets empty or just yours? ”

She winced at his accusatory tone. It also hadn’t escaped her notice when he referred to her only as his best friend’s sister and not his friend as well. She heard the pain under the anger in his voice but knew he’d never admit to it.

Her own voice came out a little louder than a whisper as she stared at the tabletop in front of her.

“ Mom and Alex are there. The car crash was real, but it wasn’t an accident.

We were forced off the road and rolled down a hill.

My dad and I barely managed to get Alex out before the car exploded, but my mom had been killed on impact.

Alex died in my arms a few minutes later. Dad and I went into hiding afterward.”

She hadn’t realized she was crying until Ian put a box of Kleenex in front of her, and she grabbed two tissues. When a sympathetic, warm nose poked her arm, she gave Beau a scratch behind his ear as his master spoke. “ I get the feeling this is leading to Witness Protection .”

Kate nodded at the man’s gentle and understanding statement.

“ Yes . It’s exactly where it leads to.” Not being able to look at Benny , she turned to the man who didn’t currently hate her.

“ My dad is . . . was a CPA with some questionable clients at the time. Mom , Alex , and I had no idea some of the people he dealt with weren’t on the up-and-up, but he drew the line at certain .

. . crimes, I guess you can say. He said the money was too good to pass up, especially when he’d been starting his own accounting business, but his conscience wouldn’t allow him to let some things slide by.

He tried to know as little as possible about who he worked for because he figured the less he knew, the better off he would be. It worked for him for over ten years.”

“ What happened?”

She drew in a trembling breath, reached for one of the water bottles, and took a few sips to quench her sudden thirst. “ He found out he was doing the books for a Russian organized crime family member. Dad wasn’t the only one.

They used several accountants and gave each the books to only a few businesses, so if one turned on them, he didn’t have access to all the accounts.

There was one man, in particular, Dad was dealing with.

He owned a few bars in Norfolk , Newport News , and Virginia Beach , among other legal and illegal businesses. ”

Ian raised an eyebrow. “ Do you know the man’s name?”

Nervously nibbling on her bottom lip, she nodded. “ Mm -hm. Sergei Volkov .

“ Are you fucking kidding me! Sergei ‘ The Wolf ’ Volkov ?” Kate flinched at Benny’s sudden outburst as he jumped up and sent his chair flying back into the wall.

He started pacing the room, ignoring Ian’s angry glare.

“ Even I knew that bastard should be avoided at all fucking costs, and I was a fucking teenager!”

She looked at him with eyes that begged him to understand something she had never been able to. When her father tried to explain it to her in the days after the crash, she’d been in shock, and nothing would sink into her brain and stay there.

After the U.S . Marshals gave them new identities, and they began their new lives in hiding, her father never wanted to talk about it again. He didn’t want to be reminded how his stupidity and greed had cost him his wife and son and the life he and his daughter had known.

“ Dad swore he didn’t know who Volkov was until it was too late, and he was in too deep.

So , he did what he was paid to do and tried to stay out of trouble.

But then he discovered they were selling teenage girls into white slavery.

The summer and spring breaks in Virginia , the Carolinas , and Florida were the perfect times for them to kidnap a girl and make her disappear.

“ Dad got a bunch of receipts and stuff he was supposed to add to the books, and he found an envelope with a list of . . . God . . . he said it was like a shopping list with the type of girls they were looking for. Specific hair color and eyes, fair skin, a certain build, that sort of stuff.”

She shook her head at the thought of any girl being taken because of their appearance.

“ There were also a couple of photos of girls tied up. Dad recognized one of them from the newspaper. Her parents were rich and were making a lot of noise about her disappearance. He found out later most of the girls who’d been taken were the type no one would be surprised about if they took off on their own.

Mostly they were teenage hookers or runaways.

He said when he realized what he had in his hand, he thought about how he would feel if one of those girls had been me.

“ So , he called the phone number in the paper, and the FBI came to talk to him. They wanted him to wear a wire and get them more information, but Dad refused. He was too scared for our safety. He told them that if he started asking questions, Volkov would immediately know something was wrong because my dad only talked about the accounting when he met with him or his right-hand man.”

“ But they found out about the information he gave the feds, didn’t they?” Boomer gritted his teeth as he sat down again and grabbed one of the bottled waters.

She nodded. “ Yes , right before the accident. Apparently , the FBI thought my dad knew more than he told them, or he might lead them to Volkov . They were following us to my grandmother’s that day.

It was her sixty-fifth birthday, and we were going to take her and my aunt out to dinner to celebrate.

The agents were using a tracking device so they could stay further back and weren’t close enough to stop a car that came out of nowhere and forced us off the road. ”