Page 106 of Seal of Honor
Oh, God.
As silently as she could, she closed and locked the bedroom door. She had no way of knowing if the intruder had seen her—the interior hallway was always dark, and the way the door was set into the wall with a slight indentation provided a little protection—but from the sounds of his footsteps, it didn’t matter. He knew the layout of her house and bypassed the laundry room, the guest bath, and the extra bedroom, moving with unerring accuracy toward the main bedroom.
Toward her.
* * *
Something was not right.
Everything looked normal. The nearly full moon floating over the ocean in the inky sky provided a good view of the house and yard, and Gabe saw nothing out of place. No odd shadows that shouldn’t be there, no movement except for the sway of the palms, no sound but the soft lapping of the ocean against the dock.
Still, he couldn’t shake the gut feeling that something was way off, and he knew better than to argue with his gut—it had saved his ass in more near-fatal situations than any one man should survive. So he walked the grounds again, still found nothing, and his instincts still told him it didn’t matter. He strode to the end of the drive and looked both ways on the narrow, empty road.
Maybe he should take Audrey to a hotel for the night. She had next-to-nil for security—something he planned to fix if he was going to live here—and the crappy system she did have had so many holes it would work better as a colander than a security system.
Actually, that sounded like a damn good idea. He’d sleep better tonight knowing they were secure. Tomorrow, he’d make some calls and pull some strings to have a security specialist out here by noon. Maybe Jean-Luc’s brother-in-law would want the job.
He turned to go back to the house and, out of the corner of his eye, caught a glint of moonlight off something down the street. A car, a blue sedan, parked in the foliage alongside the road. Given that Audrey had no immediate neighbors and lived on a twisty, rarely used road that fought a constant losing battle with the encroaching jungle, it was not normal to have a car just sitting in the street. That was probably the cause of his unease. He’d bet his good foot it was Chloe’s car, and he was not a betting man. People didn’t just pop up for random personal visits in the middle of the night unless there was a problem. Especially not wealthy, pampered people like Chloe Van Amee. He could only come up with a couple of reasons why she’d leave the car here in this specific spot, hidden from view, and none of them were good.
Weapon aimed, he melted into the jungle shadows alongside the road and moved toward the car, keeping down and to the right so he’d come up in the driver’s blind spot.
And what do you know, it wasn’t abandoned. Chloe still sat in the driver’s seat. She jumped when he opened the passenger side door and pointed his gun at her forehead.
“Hi,” he said. “Mind if I join you? No? Great.”
Her eyes flicked from his gun to his face, then skipped away. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Could say the same of you, Mrs. Van Amee.”
Her hands tightened on the steering wheel until her manicured nails dug into the braided leather. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
She pressed those grotesque, collagen-injected lips together, refusing to answer.
“Chloe.” He made her name into the verbal equivalent of a dagger, all edges, and she flinched.
“I’m sorry.” She turned in the seat, brown eyes wide and wild as tears spilled over. “God, I am so sorry. I-I love my husband, and I didn’t think anyone would get hurt. Rorro—” She said his name with a Spanish inflection, rolling the Rs, and Gabe held up a hand to stop her.
Average American women from Kansas couldn’t roll their Rs like that.
“Your real name isn’t Chloe,” he said. “Who are you?”
“Claudia.” Just like that, she dropped the perfect Midwestern accent, and the lilting sounds of Colombian Spanish weavedthrough her words. “My name is Claudia Rivera.”
“Jesus Christ. Angel and Jacinto’s missing sister.” How the fuck had they all missed that connection? His first instinct was to get back to Audrey as fast as his bum foot could carry him. Second was to shoot Chloe Van Amee on principle because he suddenly knew who set up Bryson’s abduction and caused Audrey so much anguish. Chloe may not have been the mastermind, but she was in this shitstorm up to her liposuctioned rear end.
“I tried to get away from them,” Claudia sobbed. “I didn’t want any part of my family, but they dragged me back. Rorro called me a year ago and said he’d tell Bryson who I was and what I’d done in Colombia if I didn’t go along with his plans. I had no choice. Ididn’t want to lose my husband. My house.”
She said nothing about her sons, and inwardly, Gabe ached for the poor boys. He knew exactly what it was like to grow up with a mother who put on all the right appearances but really didn’t care about anyone but herself. At least Grayson and Ashton still had a loving aunt and father.
Maybe.
“What plans?” Gabe demanded.
“At first, he only wanted money,” Claudia said. “But he bled me dry. The allowance Bryson gave me wasn’t enough, and I couldn’t draw from our joint accounts without making him suspicious. When I explained that to Rorro, he said we had to come up with another way for me to pay. Then he saw a stupid action movie, and it gave him the idea to kidnap Bryson for ransom and blame it on the EPC. He had me call Jacinto with the plan because he doesn’t want anyone to know he isn’t as dumb as he pretends to be. He likes it when people underestimate him.”
Gabe thought back to the raid, and hell, that’s exactly what he’d done, even after Luis Mena warned him that Rorro was vicious and not to be underestimated.
