For months, Tehya had contemplated simply giving up and taking her own life. So many people had died trying to protect her that she hadn’t dared contact Stephen Taite, her grandfather’s brother. She had been terrified Sorrel would kill him and the rest of her family as well.
“After all these years do they actually believe I would contact my family?” she asked softly, keeping her back to the others as she laid the mugs out and pulled sugar and powdered creamer from another cabinet.
“When you aided the authorities in France in bypassing Sorrel’s computer security and locating the underground rooms in which he kept the young girls and women he kidnapped, your identity as his and Francine Taite’s daughter was revealed to the authorities,” Lilly continued. “I know for a few years Stephen tried to contact you, to learn if you were indeed the Taite heir, but you never answered the messages he sent to you through the French authorities.”
Tehya shook her head as she turned back to them, hoping she now had her emotions in check.
“I replied and I told him that I wasn’t related to him,” she said. “That he needed to search elsewhere for his niece and her daughter. He never tried to contact me after that but I had to leave days later when an assassin attempted to get to me while I was still at the estate.”
She hoped he had accepted her denial of their kinship. Her grandparents had been murdered because of their determination to help her and her mother. She had no desire to have more of her family killed, or to put them at more risk than when her mother contacted her own father.
“Evidently someone is aware of the connection, though, and believes you will make contact,” Lilly said. “I suspect thats why Arthur and Tenneyson are watching him while I suspect others have been keeping tabs on you.”
“The report our contact received states that there seems to be a rumor that you’ve been working as an agent for the goverment since leaving France until you were dismissed just before you staged your death.” Amusement gleamed in Bailey’s eyes. “Quite the industrious little thing, aren’t you?”
“So it would appear,” she murmured with a grimace as Jordan, John, and Travis came to the counter for the coffee.
“So, do we have a plan C,D, and E yet?” Bailey turned to the men, her tone patient and filled with amusement as she stared at them.
Jordan had always trained his men to have more than one plan. Tehya was aware she had shot his plans A and B to hell and back. Evidently the others were aware of it now as well.
“We’re getting there,” John said. The look he gave his wife was one filled with love, devotion.
Tehya had once dreamed of seeing Jordan gaze at her in such a way. It was a dream that had died the morning she left Texas.
It was the same look Travis Caine gave his wife, Lilly. She completed him, and it was more than apparent that he completed her as well. The two couples were the perfect examples of the relationship she had dreamed of having with Jordan.
“What about grabbing Arthur and Tenneyson and allowing Micah to interrogate them?” Tehya suggested, “Surely they would know who hired them?” She wondered if they could get that lucky? God, she just wanted this over this before Sorrel’s men had a chance to hurt her friends as Sorrel had once destroyed anyone who attempted to protect her and her mother.
Including the young nun who had taken her in at the convent just after Tehya had turned six, while her mother had tried to lead Sorrel and his men away from her.
Within months Francine had sent word that Sorrel possibly knew their location. Tehya remembered Sister Mary wakening her, the room so dark she had stumbled as the sister helped her dress, urging her to hurry.
They had left the convent by way of a small tunnel hidden behind the stone wall of the wine cellar in the basement. As they had exited the tunnel into the heavy forest, Tehya had heard gunfire in the distance and a woman’s screams. The remaining nuns had died horribly that night.
Within three years the nun had put Tehya under the protection of a former CIA agent she had known while in college. He had managed to keep Tehya safe for only a few years.
He had been killed mere days after putting her on a bus and sending her across the country to a friend who lived in the Washington mountains.
The same scenario had played out so many times. A short period of peace. Then as soon as she began learning how to sleep without fear, it had begun all over again.
Tehya had been fifteen when she had received word of her mother’s death. After that she had to run on her own. She couldn’t bear to be the cause of anyone else’s death. To see more bloodshed for a child who was no more than a curse to anyone who cared for her.
And now it seemed, the past was returning with a vengeance.
The thought of seeing these men and women risking their lives, the love they had found in each other, for her, was too much to face.
“We would try interrogation, but we have enough suspicion they’re unaware of his identity that at the moment it’s riskier than we’d like. We don’t want to tip them off that we’re aware of them at this point,” Lilly explained.
Tehya clenched her fingers into fists and tried to beat back the fear and the panic. “I can’t deal with this!” The exclamation shocked herself as much as it did the rest of them. “You should all leave. You shouldn’t be here, risking yourselves this way. For God’s sake, go home.”
She didn’t wait for a response from any of them. Walking past the two women, she strode quickly to her bedroom to escape. She couldn’t bear to see the love between the two couples and know what they were risking if they involved themselves in this fight. She’d tried. She’d fought this fear, but it was her only weakness besides Jordan. No one who had ever tried to help her had survived it.
Even more, she couldn’t allow Jordan to take this risk. Knowing she had been the cause of his death or any of his family’s would destroy her soul in a way she knew she would never survive.
The Elite Ops had given her six years of peace, what more could she ask for? It wasn’t their fault that the te
am had disbanded, that their contracts had run out. It wasn’t their fault that she was haunted by a past her father had created.