Dayne Castille, former small time arms dealer, was currently living a career as a paid assassin. She was a one-woman crew, but she never underestimated the importance of networking. She popped into several loops and kept an eye on chat topics on the drive home. Generally the gossip was at its juiciest right after abductions like this occurred. It didn’t matter if it was gossip or fact. There was no such thing as coincidence. Every manipulation was only a piece of a larger pie. That was the only absolute in her life.
Chapter Two
Dayne’s residence was more of a display than a home. It had taken months to shape the property into a balanced work of art. Her well-maintained façade was located in a middle class neighborhood, where she was not the only single resident. Her lawn and shrubs were trimmed once a week by a landscaper. The exterior of the home placed it directly in the middle of the value range. Everything about the design made it blend in perfectly. The interior of the ranch style house was the same. Knowing absolutely nothing about the tastes and style of middle class Midwestern American families, Dayne had hired an interior decorator. A maid came twice a week. All were completely oblivious to the goings on in the basement.
Anyone who casually strolled downstairs would see a partially finished basement. There was a large flat screen television, a plush sectional, and a set of end tables. A tiny half bathroom completed the official basement level. Behind the false wall Dayne had designed a larger room. This was her office. This was where she worked. And now, when she had a puzzle to work out, it was where she went to think.
Dayne frowned at the computer screen as she swung back and forth in her posh leather chair. Ryan Stafford. It was a total dead end. The kid’s identity was a sham, she could feel it. Yet when she dug a little bit, everything looked totally legit.
“Parents dead, killed in 2000 in a car accident on I-95 outside DC,” she murmured. “Only child. Official guardian listed as Ms. Shayla Stafford. She was the aunt at the library.” She chewed one manicured nail down to the cuticle. “So she said you’d only been here for five months…where did you live before that?”
Dayne dove into the information highway with voracious appetite. She’d always been a software junkie. Her hacking abilities had saved her backside more times than she could count. New identities, ghost bank accounts, passports; she could do it all with a few clicks.
She cross-referenced school files. Ryan Stafford attended Dardenne Elementary School in Ofallon, so Dayne hacked their system and found his records. Using that information, she started following a winding paper trail of elementary schools in fourteen different states.
“
Somebody
didn’t want you to be found,” Dayne commented as she hacked yet another school database.
After thirty minutes of finding vague links she locked onto something promising. In 2001, after his parents’ death, Ryan Stafford had registered at Kennedy Elementary School in Reston, Virginia.
“Ryan M. Stafford…” Dayne muttered to herself. “M is for what?”
Opening six windows in less than ten seconds she found the name of Ryan’s guardian. She wasn’t surprised when there was no mention of a Shayla Stafford. Instead, the guardian was a man. His name was listed as J. Stafford. A tiny box on the registration form specified the relationship between guardian and child. J. Stafford was Ryan’s brother.
“Brother?” Dayne was intrigued.
Forty-five minutes and six hacks later she had her answer. The identity of J. Stafford had fallen away completely beneath her tenacious probing. Ryan Stafford was actually Ryan McKay. Ryan McKay was the much younger brother of Jace McKay.
Jace McKay.
Hooking her socked foot on the edge of the desk she spun herself in circles. She closed her eyes and contemplated Jace. It wasn’t exactly a difficult task. The big sexy bastard was sort of hard to forget.
Tall, broad, and built like a professional athlete, Jace couldn’t have been called handsome. But dangerous applied nicely, and Dayne had always found dangerous far more attractive than handsome. Being around him was sort of like riding a roller coaster you couldn’t get off of. And that effect alone was enough to make her avoid him like the plague.
She dredged up the memory of her last encounter with Jace. It wasn’t a pleasant one. She had been at the wrong end of a 9mm Smith & Wesson, the sweat already trickling down her back and pooling at the base of her spine. While she’d been preparing to make excuses for her career choice to St. Peter at the gates of heaven, Jace had appeared, seen her predicament, and eased his sexy as hell lips into a mocking smile.
His arrival on the scene hadn’t made her feel any better at the time. The big smooth-headed bastard wasn’t a friend and wasn’t an enemy. In fact, they had a habit of getting in each other’s way. Assassins were only paid if they brought down their mark. If someone else got the proof, they got the cash. Jace was there to steal her contract, not to pull her out of a tight spot. But he’d saved her life instead of walking away. And no matter how twisted the situation had been, Dayne owed him a little for that. The wisest thing for him to have done would’ve been to shoot her
and
the mark. She probably would’ve done it had their roles been reversed. But whatever his reasons, Jace had spared her.
The doorbell jolted Dayne back to the present. Glancing quickly at the closed circuit screen, she groaned.
“Of all the idiots to show up at my door…”
She watched the man on her doorstep shift from side to side and then ring the bell again. Apparently he wasn’t going to give up. Sighing in disgust, she placed her Sig carefully in the desk drawer. As much as she wanted to run upstairs, fling open the front door and wave the gun in the man’s face…it wouldn’t have been wise.
“Is there something I can help you with, Oliver?” Dayne kept her voice polite.
Oliver’s five foot eleven inches leaned casually against her doorframe. He gave her a suave smile. His thinning light brown hair and green eyes were enough to make her want to vomit. The idiot did
not
know when he was being intentionally brushed off. She had been trying unsuccessfully for months to let him know that she wasn’t interested. So far he was dense as solid rock.
“Well, Sheila.” Dayne cringed at the sound of her alias. “I was in the neighborhood…”
“You
live
in the neighborhood, Oliver.”
“Yeah, I know… I was driving by your place and just thought I’d stop and see if you wanted to go out tonight. It’s time you started getting out more, Sheila. You can’t let your ex-husband’s cheating put you off all men forever.” Oliver waggled his eyebrows suggestively.
When Dayne first moved into the neighborhood she had intentionally let slip that particular story. Suburban areas were infamous for their grapevines. The story had been designed to keep the single men from bothering her. She made a mental note to switch the cover story next time. She was going to be a lesbian. It
had
to be easier that way.
“Look Oliver, I appreciate this. But truthfully, I’m fine the way I am. I’m just not interested in seeing anyone right now.” Dayne pasted an earnest expression on her face. “I’m enjoying the time to myself. My therapist says I need some Me-time, you know?”
His eyes crinkled at the corners. He was obviously gearing up for another round of convincing. She seethed with irritation. She was mentally listing all the damage she’d like to do to Oliver, when movement in her peripheral vision caught her attention. She just had time to slide sideways as the first bullet pierced Oliver’s body. The second sliced across her right arm. She bit her lip, the familiar pain lancing through her body. Her ears registered the sound of bullets ripping through drywall, the glass vase shattering on her coffee table, a puff of feathers as they went through the sofa, and then the muffled ping as they lodged in the chimney and fractured the brick.
“Holy hell,” she breathed.
Oliver’s lifeless body crumpled to the front steps. As he fell, four black clad figures trotted up the driveway and through the yard. All had rifles at their shoulder. Shoving the body away, she leapt backward and slammed the front door closed.
Dayne barely had time to dive before the next barrage of bullets decimated her house, the sounds a cacophony in her head. Only one thing had the power to penetrate so much at once: high-powered assault rifles of the ridiculously expensive variety shooting armor piercing full metal jacket bullets. She didn’t pause to wonder who’d bankrolled a hit like this. She fled.
With bullets flying overhead, she ducked down the stairway to the basement. Her sock feet slid on the ceramic tile at the bottom of the steps. Pulling herself together, she hit the false wall and tripped the switch just as the intruders entered the upper level. The wall slid shut behind her. There wasn’t much time.
She shoved her Sig into her waistband and began pounding keys on her computer. She had to erase it, to make certain they didn’t know what she was up to. They couldn't find out
what
she knew about Ryan McKay. She didn’t know how, but she
knew
that these men were here because she’d been at the library earlier. Someone had been tracking her movements. Making an abrupt decision to leave her life in Missouri behind, she keyed the final sequence that would bring it all to dust.
With the timer counting down, she ran to the far wall and punched numbers into the gun safe. A tap on the wall told her that the would-be killers knew there was more to the room than it first seemed. Yanking her bag from the gun safe, she slung it over her shoulder.
The hatch was the only way out of the fully subterranean basement. During construction the builder had been annoyed when she’d demanded they build it. She had pretended to be paranoid about fires. The man had finally relented and built the hatch to her specifications - for the right price of course.
She tore the mini-blinds clean off the wall to reveal a window. Hastily sliding it open, she stepped into the well. Above her head was a cluster of bushes. Peering out, she checked to make certain she was alone. Satisfied that they were all in the house or out front, she rolled over the top of the well, heaving the bag behind her.
Her brain was screaming for her to hurry. She had only minutes until the explosion.
It was four steps to the garage. Her truck waited inside, strategically facing the doorway. She shoved the bag into the extended cab and reached into a nearby locker to extract a bag of clothing and personal items she always kept on hand for situations just like this.
She leapt behind the wheel and revved the powerful engine. Flooring the gas pedal, Dayne shot out the front of the garage. Pieces of the door flew in every direction. Thankfully there were no neighbors milling around the sidewalk or loitering in their front yards to get her in her way. The bullets had chased them all indoors. They were probably too shocked to begin wondering why the hell somebody had shot Oliver and then blasted her house. She wished she could warn them that the whole place was about to go up, but she couldn’t.
The truck thundered toward the subdivision exit. Anyone in her field who didn’t know the layout as well as she did would’ve thought she was stupid to pick a place that had only one exit. But in the Silverado, there were plenty of exits. An explosion lit her rearview mirror like the Fourth of July. She felt a moment of remorse for the life she’d just been forced to destroy. Of course, in her line of work there were worse things - death, for example.
As she’d half expected, there was a black SUV blocking the exit. A man leaned out the driver’s window, aiming a Russian assault rifle in her direction. Swerving off the road, she pointed the truck between two houses. There was barely enough room for the Silverado. She got a glimpse of a woman’s blank stare through a window before she flattened an air conditioning unit and burst onto the golf course surrounding the subdivision. Glancing at the compass in the upper corner of her rearview mirror, she headed west.
The SUV was chasing her. She wouldn’t have expected less, but she wished she knew who the bastards
were
! The black vehicle roared over a low hedge, losing a headlight to a park bench. She floored the Silverado and tried to decide what would be the best way to get rid of the SUV.
She swept past a group of befuddled golfers as they waved their clubs at her. Dayne couldn’t suppress a laugh. She’d always thought golf was a waste of time, much too slow for her taste. The country club loomed to her right. A large man-made pond stretched around the left side of the enormous glass and stone structure. Thanks to her obsession with preparing for disaster she knew it was four feet deep at its widest point. The lift kit on the Silverado gave her an advantage. The SUV wasn’t quite so fortunate, and it was going to drown.
Dayne pressed the accelerator to the floor. Her knuckles were white on the wheel. The vibration of the powerful engine increased as the high performance transmission downshifted. Training her eyes on the point where she wanted to exit, she entered the water.
The spray arced high around the truck. There was a brief sensation of floating as large tires skimmed the first few feet of the surface before the weight of the truck forced it down. Wheels spun in four-wheel drive before they caught, and the truck lurched through the water. Jockeying the wheel, Dayne kept her eyes on her exit. In only seconds she was ripping up the grass on the other side as she emerged in a tidal wave of greenish water.
A glance in her rearview told her that the SUV wasn’t doing as well. They were bogged in the center of the pool. With the tailpipe submerged in the murky green water, the vehicle had stalled. She allowed herself a satisfied chuckle as she roared up the hill behind the main building. The truck shoved several golf carts unceremoniously out of her way before bumping onto the parking lot and shredding rubber out onto the main street.
Chapter Three