Page 68 of Shadows Relived
“You better hope you do better than you’ve done so far,” the senator growled.”
Callen cut a quick glance at the senator, a scowl twisting his features. It was time for answers.
“We have an hour and a half drive ahead of us, so now you’re going to tell me everything,” he said, his voice a low, coiled threat, a quiet fury just below his surface. “How could you let someone use your daughter like that? Put her name on bank records, budget reports, and purchase orders for a program she didn’t even know existed. What kind of father uses his daughter that way?”
Roger shifted in his seat, the senator’s normally composed expression cracking at the edges. “I told you it wasn’t me,” he snapped, rubbing his palms along his thighs. He then turned and stared out the window, his voice dropping. “Not directly anyway. I had a partner. Everett Marris. He’s the one who runs the internal operations at New Horizons.”
Callen’s jaw clenched as he stared at the senator’s reflection. “You expect me to believe you didn’t know what he was doing?”
“I don’t care what you believe,” Harrington sighed, shaking his head. “I suspected. But by the time I found out he was using Meaghan’s name to funnel funds, it was too late. It was a warning to me. A threat, really. He caught me, and this was his way of making me pay, of keeping me in line.”
“Why her?” Callen’s hands curled into fists around the steering wheel. “Why use her as leverage?”
“Because she’s the only thing I give a damn about! Why the hell do you think I sent you away all those years ago? I only want the best for my baby. He knew that. Knew I’d let nothing touch her. So he made sure I’d be too scared to blow the whistle.”
Callen stared at him, his silence heavier than any accusation.
“I tried to fix it,” Roger continued, voice hoarse now. “I was working to scrub her name from everything: offshore wires, false vendor trails, even the fake authorizations. But Everett must’ve had some kind of alert system in place because as soon as I started wiping the paper trail, he moved to eliminate the liability.”
“No,” Callen said, with an icy edge to his voice. “Not the liability because that’s you. You were going to be the one to fall, so they turned to your daughter. They’re afraid you would go to the authorities, so they fixed it so you wouldn’t by using her.”
Roger turned away, a muscle jumping in his jaw. “I don’t know for sure. But it wouldn’t surprise me. If Everett can’t pin it on me, he’ll use her. And then disappear.”
A stretch of silence hung between them.
Callen’s stare was hard enough to break bone. “Then you better pray I get to her first, because if I don’t…” He leaned in, voice like razors in a velvet box. “I will use you as bait. On a leash if I have to, but either way, you’re going to help me take this man down, Senator. Or I’ll feed you to him myself.”
Roger’s eyes widened, his face going pale, but he didn’t argue.
Callen faced forward again as the SUV rumbled over the uneven back roads toward the location Blaze had triangulated. The silence in the vehicle was thick, humid, taut as a tripwire, and he felt the familiar rage just below the surface of his soul. He never should have walked out on her a decade ago, and he refused to walk away now. No matter what it cost him.
He ran his gaze over the front of the vehicle, and in the rearview mirror, he met his own gaze. He stared at his reflection, knowing the face that stared back, recognizing it from a time he preferred to forget. He knew his friends worried about what he was doing, the path he was following to save Meaghan. Heard the name echoing in his mind like smoke through the cracks of memory.
Wraith.
The old name lingered like a bruise.
Callen shifted slightly in his seat, uncomfortable under the weight of it. He’d earned that name for the way he moved through shadows, for the grim detachment that kept him alive in enemy territory. The ghost of a man who felt haunted, hollow, and could be brutal when he needed to be. They said he looked dead even when he breathed.
But he hadn’t died. Not then.
He’d just stopped living because he had walked away from the one person who made his life make sense, and he did it for her. At least, that’s what he told himself back then. Now? He knew it was bullshit.
And to make himself forget, he poured himself intothe mission. Every mission. He crossed lines back then for a paycheck and a cause that wasn’t truly his. But now?
Now he was crossing them for something real.
For her.
He could feel the pull of it like a thread wound around his chest, drawing tighter with every mile.
She wasn’t just some mission.
She was his everything, his world. His life.
And this time… Wraith wasn’t fading into the dark.
He was coming for blood.
