They both knew she was lying, but hell, whatever it took to get her back in the bed.
“That’s a deal.” A quick kiss to her lips, just one more taste before he had to leave her and return to the dark shadows that awaited him.
A kiss into which he swore she fed all the love she believed she felt.
If the illusion was preserved, pampered, and taken care of, did it matter if it was an illusion, Jordan asked himself again as he slipped from the study and made his way to the basement, where Noah, Micah, and Nik awaited him.
With them was one of the two-man teams, his youngest nephew, Rory Malone, and a former Army Ranger with whom Jordan had worked in a few past operations overseas, Turk Gillespie.
“Commander.” Turk nodded as Jordan stepped into the wine cellar at the back of the basement and closed the door behind him.
Low lighting and racks of wine stacked throughout the room gave it a shadowed atmosphere. At the very back, the door leading to an old tunnel and a hidden exit was open.
“Status?” He started with Turk and Rory.
“Casey and Iron are watching Ms. Talamosi,” Turk answered. “The chip you placed in the belly ring she wears is working perfectly. Everything’s in place if anyone makes a move on her.”
“Ascarti’s warehouse was hit and the weapons confiscated,” Noah informed him. “Ascarti wasn’t there, but we managed to get a jig on one of his bodyguards at a bar last night when he used his credit card to pay for drinks. He’s currently sleeping off a hangover in a motel, so we haven’t managed to follow him to Ascarti yet.”
“I want Ascarti taken out at the earliest opportunity,” Jordan informed him as he forced back the fury that rose each time he thought of the bastard still living.
“We already guessed that.” Noah nodded.
“One of the mercenaries working with Ascarti, Mark Tenneyson, has made several drive-bys along the street in front of here,” Rory reported. “We’ve tried to track him, but we keep losing him. So far, we’ve not seen anything or anyone to indicate someone else is pulling the strings.”
“I agree with Jordan, though,” Nik stated. “This setup with Ascarti is just a little too damned handy. Something isn’t ringing right with it.”
“John and Bailey, Travis and Lilly will be covering Tehya at the party,” Jordan mused. “I have the tracker on her and we have every access to her I can come up with, covered. They’ll move tonight, before they believe John and Travis can get a plan in place to have her covered. This is their best bet, there’s no way they’ll find a better opportunity to grab her, especially with the information both John and Travis have put out there.”
Jordan prayed it would be enough. From the moment they had set this up, they’d pushed every contact they had and placed pressure at each pulse they could find leading out from the men they’d identified as a threat.
This party was the only chance they would see in the near future of grabbing her. Word going out was that a team would arrive in the morning to whisk her to an undisclosed location, where her identity would be so completely altered that there would be no finding her.
Whoever was tracking her, whether it was Ascarti or others, wouldn’t want to risk being unable to find her, or identify her again.
“Our contact in Afghanistan also reported finally.” Noah leaned against the wall, his dark face covered with a closely cropped beard to hide the scars he carried, frowned pensively as he crossed his arms over his chest. “It seems Tehya’s identity and her location were betrayed by an anonymous party to a low-level criminal formerly in Sorrel’s employ, Thaddeus Alchoni.”
“Thaddeus is a French-born aristocrat identified as a runner and informant for Sorrel,” Micah continued when Noah glanced at him. “Our contact there called me and reported that word went out to Sorrel’s men within hours of his death ten years ago, that any information concerning the wife or the child that escaped was to be reported to someone they called the Marquis. Alchoni sent the information via a mail service Sorrel had set up years before his death for use by informants who couldn’t meet with him. We have someone trying to track that now, but so far, there’s no further information.”
“Why didn’t we know about that order when it went out?” Jordan questioned, his voice harsher than he intended at the thought that he had overlooked an important detail in Tehya’s safety.
“Because it wasn’t an organization-wide order,” Noah picked the conversation back up. “That order only went out to a few of their higher-level informants. Those who weren’t identified as part of the organization after Sorrel’s death.”
“It was well hidden, just as Lilly’s mother and many of her fine friends managed to hide what they were doing,” Micah growled.
It had amazed them, all the secrets they had learned once their operative, Nighthawk, had been allowed to return to her former life after she was nearly assassinated.
How the some of the impossibly rich conducted their personal lives, manipulated their bloodlines, and bought and sold their women as though they were no more than pets or breeding stock.
Men would choose their mistresses, future wives, or their son’s playthings as young girls, then arrange with their fathers, or even their mothers, for specialized training or interests to be introduced into their lives.
The girls that rebelled were sent to a clinic in Switzerland that had often used torturous practices to ensure they never rebelled again.
They created puppets out of their daughters and monsters of their sons. And if the reconditioning didn’t work, then men like Sorrel had arranged “accidents” so skillfully that even their parents never suspected, in many cases, why their sons or daughters had died.
Finally, Jordan turned to Rory. “You and Turk back up Iron and Casey from here on out. I want everyone ready to move on this if so much as a breath of wind thinks to blow the wrong way.”
“You have a bad feeling about this, don’t you, Jordan?” Noah probed.