But then, I heard footsteps falling quickly behind me. Heavy boots and panting breaths running at a tremendous pace. I put my hand on my gun and whipped around, watching as a man decked out in full tactical gear came racing up the driveway. He was sweating bullets, and his face was red, but he seemed familiar.
I picked up my phone and rifled through the pictures I’d sent Derek until I landed on the one for Reggie.
Him.
The man running up the driveway.
He was man number fifteen.
“So sorry,” Reggie said. “It’ll never happen again. There was a wreck. Had to run here to get here on time. I don’t think we’ve met.”
I stood there, flabbergasted as I eyed the man closely. This was the new guy. This was body number fifteen.
This was the threat I thought had been posed.
“Reggie,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am. You must be Williams. Honor to meet you. It’s gonna be great working with you,” he said.
All fifteen were accounted for. The entire team was here. My mind started to spin as the world started to tunnel. If the threat was on this property, and everyone had shown up for the team meeting, then it only meant one thing.
John.
John was the one who was betraying us.
“Do me a favor, Reggie. Get upstairs as fast as you can and relay a message to Mr. Steele.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “What’s the message?”
“Tell him mission accomplished. Then, whatever you do, don’t let him leave that room,” I said.
“Mr. Steele? But I thought—”
“Show me you can take orders,” I said flatly. “Or I’ll have your job.”
“Yes, ma’am. Going now.”
I turned around, watching as Reggie ran up the driveway toward the house. My head felt like it was in a vise grip. My heart felt like it was shattering into pieces. It was the only logical explanation. We had ruled out everything else. All of the fifteen team members were accounted for, and now John was nowhere to be found.
John was the only person on this team no longer accounted for.
How the fuck had I been so stupid? It was so simple. So easy to see now that I had removed my own personal biases. If John was being paid by Jacob, then that was how Jacob had been attacked in the garage. He paid his own bodyguard to attack him. John would’ve had access to the boat. To the luggage. To the security guard he knocked out and stuffed in that closet. For all I knew, that security guard had caught him planting something. Wrong place, wrong time.
That would also explain how I was unable to see any of this. John wasn’t simply being paid by Jacob to run his plan, he was probably being paid to cover his tracks using his knowledge of my own tracking skills he’d acquired over years of service to me and using it to blind me. He was being paid to use my own tactics against me, tactics he had been privy to on jobs because he had always been my second-in-command.
How the fuck could I have missed this?
I know exact
ly how I missed it. I didn’t fucking vet him like all the other guys. I relied on our past history, on my trust in him, to stand instead of running a background check. Instead, I relied on the fact that the company kept hiring him and substituted the rest with all the jobs we had taken together, all the lives we had saved together, and all the good we had done together.
I had to find John.
I had to figure out where the fuck he went.
I was buried waist deep in my thoughts when I heard it behind me. The sound of a car accelerating before my body went flying. There was a searing pain my side as my body came crashing down, my head bashing against the pavement. My ear was aching, and my head was ringing. It felt like my body was on fire as I lay there on the concrete, stunned and confused. I tried to get up. I tried to push myself upright as the world spun around me. The ground was undulating, my hands were trembling, and I felt like I was going to throw up all the contents of my stomach.
Then a searing pain ricocheted up my leg.