Crazed: A Blood Money Novel (3 page)

He’d been so ready to be a team player and leave the farm team for the big leagues. He hadn’t realized until later that Faraday Industries
was
the majors, just utilizing a different playbook.

Hauling a duffel from the closet, he tossed in a spare set of boots, a weapons kit from under the bed, the travel toiletries bag he kept atop the dresser, and a week’s worth of boxer-briefs, socks and shirts. Cargo pants and an extra belt joined the gear, and then, quickly, he tucked Adam’s messenger bag with the broken tech inside before situating an all-weather jacket and baseball cap over top and obscuring an immediate visual, if someone peeked inside. Someone like—

“Where’s the fire?”

Ignoring the faint tension that particular voice instilled in him, Casey turned to face his father. “Hey, Dad.”

Frank Faraday, the figurehead CEO of Faraday Industries, sat in his electric wheelchair at the door to Casey’s room, his line-worn face looking as displeased as usual. In the decade-plus since his multiple sclerosis diagnosis, Frank’s stocky frame had lost much of its formerly muscled mass, his blond hair now completely gray and his blue eyes muted by the pain he lived with on a daily basis. The once-imposing patriarch’s legs had lost most of their functionality only in recent years, relegating him to the chair his children knew he hated.

There was no set expiration date for Frank, not that they’d been told, but his deterioration had been swift of late, though noticeable only to the few people the older man still permitted within his orbit. That circle grew smaller every day, but Casey found he didn’t have the heart to challenge Frank, to demand he not shut out those who cared for him. The grouchy old man was a pill, undeniably so. “I said, where’s the fire?”

Case in point. “No fire.” He fought to keep his tone neutral as he stuck to the narrative he and Tobias had agreed upon. “I’m heading to Chicago, gonna give Vick some oversight. Spend time with Bethie.” Tossing in one last shirt, he zipped the duffel closed, placing one hand atop it as he waited, waited—

“It was my idea to open a satellite office in Chicago, you know. I should be the one checking up on Elisabeth and her...man-friend.”

Yup. There it was. “Fiancé. Vick is her fiancé.” The news of their announcement, brimming with quiet happiness, had come a couple of weeks ago, shortly after Beth and Vick had moved into their new house. It might seem as though things were moving quickly between the two of them, but Casey knew better. Time was irrelevant when you were with the right person, and those two were definitely each other’s right person. “And no one’s saying you can’t check on the new office. But you do know Beth’s not working it, right? This is all Vick’s show.”

“I know, I know,” Frank grumbled. “She’ll come back to us eventually.”

Casey bit his tongue to forestall his argument. Beth had already come back to the family, just not to the business, and there was a difference—a difference Casey and the rest of the family were happy with. Frank’s happiness, however, was a foreign, fleeting thing. “Do you wanna come along or not?”

Scowling, Frank’s hand clenched atop the steering mechanism embedded in the right arm of the chair. “Not. Can’t just drop everything and hop a plane anymore, can I?” Bitterness threaded through the gruff words, and Casey fought the wave of pity that threatened. Frank’s pissy attitude had been around far longer than his illness, something it behooved all his children to remember.

Clearing his throat, Casey shouldered the duffel and walked to the door, meeting his father’s gaze dead-on. “Look, you don’t have to say it, but I know you signed off on a Chicago office and put Raleigh Vick in charge for Beth’s sake. You want her to feel safe in the city she loves, with the man she loves. You did this for her.” He knew the begrudging gift Frank had given Beth with what they now termed Faraday Chicago, but Beth, still healing from her scars, might not recognize precisely what it was their father had done. Not when such generosity was a rarity.

For a long moment, Frank said nothing. “Family first, Casey. Family first.” Then he nudged the chair backward with a flick of his fingers, retreating down the hallway until he disappeared around the corner.

With a shake of his head, Casey turned in the opposite direction, heading for his mother’s second-floor office, hoping to say goodbye to Sofia before hitting the road, but she was nowhere to be found. After scribbling a note to her—
Going to see Bethie. Will give her your love. xo C
—he hustled down the stairs and out the front door, where a black sedan waited just beyond the steps of the sprawling front porch, idling in the circle drive.

Tossing his duffel onto the back seat next to him, he nodded to his parents’ driver, and minutes later the car had passed through the security gate at the edge of the compound, heading toward the nearby private airstrip where Captain Okumura waited with the company jet. Tobias probably hated that he’d have to charter a flight, but so what? It wasn’t like Casey could bring the gear he needed onto a commercial plane. Scan him—or his luggage—and TSA would get real concerned, real fast.

With a heavy exhalation, he pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the messages waiting for him. A note from Finn saying he’d groveled at Jaime Redding’s feet and they’d have red-light cam footage within the next two hours. A text from Henry confirming that Finn had, in fact, done said groveling. Tobias’s ETA in Chicago. A shit-ton of memos from Casey’s executive assistant reminding him that he had a full schedule this week of outfitting his team in new body armor, field-testing some of Gillian’s latest firearms and the dreaded quarterly psych evals.

Casey hadn’t always dreaded those sessions. Ten years ago, he’d been twenty-four, debating how long he might stay with the Army before transitioning fully into the family business, tempted by the recruitment offers he’d received from the CIA and completely unconcerned about the state of his mind. Initially instituted to protect Beth when she first started taking on wetwork assignments, evaluations with the on-staff psychiatrist became de rigueur for any and all active field operatives.

But after coming back from Colombia four years earlier...yeah, he wasn’t exactly a fan of someone digging around his psyche anymore. He faked it, plain and simple. He pretended things were A-okay, said all the right things and just enough of the wrong things to avert major suspicion that he was feeding the shrink a line. But things weren’t okay, not really. Not even close.

Glancing down again, he realized he’d tapped open the photo app on his phone—and not only that, but navigated his way into the private album he kept dragged to the bottom of the list, only looking at it in his darkest moments.

There had been a lot of darkest moments lately.

His thumb hovered over the image filling his screen. A round face with golden-brown skin, flushed cheeks and the widest, whitest smile he’d ever seen. Untamed curls falling riotously over slim shoulders, her hand lifted in front of her, palm out, as if to ward off the camera. Big brown eyes, so dark a man could get lost in their depths, stared back at him, lifting at the corners in the faintest of crinkles as she laughed at the photographer. At him.

Ilda Almeida had been the most beautiful individual Casey had ever met, inside and out. And she was dead, leaving him a secret widower and unable to tell a damn soul how her loss made him ache on the insides of his bones.

He turned off the phone. Fucking demons.

Chapter Two

Chicago

Tobias took the teacup and saucer his brother-in-law-to-be, Raleigh Vick, offered him, nodding his thanks as he leaned back in the leather club chair. Thankfully, the contents of the delicate porcelain weren’t tea but coffee, with enough of a kick to rev Tobias’s brain into high speed.

His fiancée was handed tea, however. The British were weird.

Chandler McCallister didn’t take a seat as she sipped her morning beverage, standing tense and alert next to him. Her hip brushed his shoulder, and the warmth from that contact worked better than any caffeine burst. Settling his saucer on the clouded glass side table at his left, he shifted to grip the back of Chandler’s thigh, his fingers slipping over the slick stretch fabric of her black jodhpur pants. He stroked the subtle seam running the length of her inner thigh, not saying a word, because they were being watched.

Not overtly, of course, but Tobias was aware of every cautious glance directed their way. Unsurprising, seeing as this was the first time Chandler had been in this particular group’s company since the February night Beth was taken and subsequently tortured, nearly to death. Since then, Chandler had proven not to be the evil accomplice the Faradays had initially believed her, but the tension lingered.

Still, she was the woman Tobias loved, the woman he needed to get through each day, and he and his siblings were going to have to get over this uncomfortable hurdle, sooner or later.

The situation with Adam necessitated the former.

Beth lounged on the couch across from Tobias’s seat, her hands wrapped around a giant mug of steaming coffee. Her short dark hair was growing out quickly, he noted, curling around her ears and brushing her forehead. Her head had been shaved during her ordeal, and Tobias—and the rest of the family—was relieved to see one of the most obvious outward signs of trauma fading. The scars on her arms, pale pink against the dusky gold of her natural skin tone, were also fading, more slowly than any of them would like, similar to the marks on her calves. Marks the entire room could see because of the sleeveless navy sheath dress she wore.

It was a deliberate outfit choice, Tobias knew, and though his heart hurt—for Beth, for Chandler—he understood. His sister wanted his lover to see the damage inflicted by John Nash, Chandler’s former MI6 partner, wanted Chandler to know she was strong enough to not only survive that torment but to thrive in its wake. That dress was a pointed message:
I won
.

But Beth’s weren’t the only pair of eyes on them. On the large flat-screen mounted over the living room fireplace, his other sister, Gillian, stared at the gathering with avid interest. It was early in San Diego, before sunrise, but Gillian had an energy drink in hand, her hair in a messy knot at the crown of her head, black-framed glasses adding angles to her rounded face. The head of weapons development for Faraday Industries looked to be in her home office—for once, thank goodness. Much like the rest of their clan, the brilliant thirty-year-old engineer was a workaholic.

A few minutes ago, Casey had clomped down the stairs from the guest bedroom he’d crashed in for a few hours after arriving at Beth and Vick’s two-story home in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago late last night. Now he had a coffee in his hand, pacing from one end of the open-plan kitchen and living area to the other. He’d settled a bag—Adam’s bag—on the island counter in front of their cousin, Della Quinn, before shoving a doughnut into his mouth from a box labeled
Glazed & Infused
sitting near the coffeepot.

Della hadn’t bothered with coffee or doughnuts before diving into the broken cell phone, tablet and hard drive she pulled from Adam’s bag, her own laptop open on the quartz countertop as she plugged everything in and began to work her magic. As Adam’s right hand, Della had put up with Adam’s breed of crazy more than just about anyone else in the family. Tobias’s kid brother may subscribe to a laissez-faire attitude in the rest of his life, but Adam was an exacting taskmaster when it came to the job. He took his work seriously, protecting every Faraday asset online and doing his fair share of investigating—through means legal and illegal—to perform the sometimes ugly duties that came with running part of the world’s leading arms manufacturer.

Now Della muttered to herself as thick silence blanketed the room, plugging cords into devices and typing away with a vicious frown marring her pale face. The trio of delicate hoops piercing her eyebrow blinked in the light as she shoveled a hand through the haphazard white-blond pixie cut. Della hid her true identity under hair dye, skillfully applied liner and lipstick and numerous piercings, and, given what Tobias knew of her history—and the history of her older siblings, Freya and Keir—that urge toward concealment was understandable.

The Quinns had blood in their backstory. But then, what branch of the Faraday family tree didn’t these days?

“So.” Vick grabbed a cup of tea of his own and settled next to Beth, one long arm running along the back of the couch, fingertips stroking over the bare cap of her shoulder. “Everyone’s here.”

Tobias glanced toward the empty entryway to the kitchen. “Not quite every—”

“What’s with the board meeting?” The gravelly Georgia drawl reached them before the owner of that voice did. Gavin Bok limped into the room, pausing to grip the doorframe in one scarred, tattooed hand. Dark blue eyes scanned the room, clear and alert as they hadn’t been in the weeks since he’d given up his undercover work with the Russian mob. Not that Beth’s field partner had planned his exit from the black market arms ring
Polnoch’ Pulya
—he’d been gut-shot and beaten when Tobias, Chandler and Casey had hauled him out of Moscow and delivered him to Beth’s doorstep, and to see the former Navy pilot steady on his feet was a testament to the man’s iron will.

“Gavin. We were just waiting for you.” Tobias looked to the screen where Gillian stared out at them. “Is the audio working on your end?”

She lifted her energy drink in toast. “Loud and clear.”

“Then we begin.” Taking a bracing sip of coffee, his other hand still locked around Chandler’s firm thigh, Tobias recounted the known facts. “At approximately eighteen hundred hours last night, Adam Faraday was assaulted and kidnapped from an alleyway in historic Boston.”

Gavin, the only person who hadn’t known, tensed and cursed, but otherwise remained silent.

“He was on the phone with Casey when the struggle began,” Tobias continued, his voice cool and modulated though inside he felt anything but, “and was able to provide clues as to the identity of his attackers. Three Latino men, one of whom was left-handed, wearing tourist-style clothing, managed to overpower him and got him into an unmarked black panel van that had been parked on a nearby street. A fourth individual was driving the van, identity unknown.” He looked to Casey. “A contact inside Boston PD was able to provide us with red-light camera footage. The van was a rental out of Logan International Airport, but it was not returned to that location last night, which leads us to believe...”

Casey cleared his throat. “Which leads us to believe they flew out of either a private airstrip or a more rural setting—there’s flat farmland if you drive an hour or so west from the city, mostly abandoned.” He nodded toward Della, who hadn’t bothered to stop clicking and typing during the recap. “We received marginally clear images of the captors’ faces from the footage, so Della is running those against local, national and international offender databases.” Casey paused. “More than twelve hours have passed with no ransom demand.”

He didn’t need to explain further. They all knew if that amount of time had elapsed with no demand, then no demand was forthcoming.

“I spoke with Adam last night,” Della mumbled, eyes glued to her screen. “Must’ve been right before he got Casey on the line.”

Quiet followed that lilting statement, until Gavin lifted a brow in question. “And? What did he say?”

For the first time since Casey had slid the broken tech in front of her, Della looked up, green gaze clashing with Gavin’s blue. “I was instructed not to share.” The hoops in her eyebrow glinted as she mirrored his forbidding expression.

The tension in the room rocketed higher, so Tobias defused it, gently because they were all understandably on edge. “I know what Adam said to you.” Just as he knew that his cousin had been placed under strict orders to only speak to either Adam or Tobias on the matter. Adam’s kidnapping changed things. “Given the circumstances, Della, full disclosure can only strengthen us.” He looked around the room. “Call this the proverbial circle of trust.”

“Dirty laundry, boss, but whatever.” Della shrugged. “Adam asked me to look into a helicopter believed to have been present during the Kabul Girls’ School Bombing last year.” She tipped her head toward Gavin, either oblivious or uncaring of the effect of her words on the rest of the room. “And he said to start by questioning you.”

“Me?” Straightening, Gavin dropped the shielding forearm he had wrapped around his midsection, his glare a ferocious thing. “Why me?”

“Dunno, boyo,” she snapped, lip curled. “Perhaps you ought to unburden yourself to the ‘circle,’ save me the effort of dumping your browser history and credit card statements. Tell you honest, I don’t much fancy discovering whether or not you’ve got an Asian fetish.” Nose wrinkling, Della gestured toward the rest of them. “Trust circle? Your two cents?”

“He prefers busty redheads,” Beth offered wryly. “Never once accidentally ran across any Japanese schoolgirls on his laptop.” And Beth would know, being that she and Gavin had been nigh inseparable in the three years they’d been partners in the field. That time in the field had, unfortunately, included the disaster in Kabul, the catalyst event that had driven Beth from her life as an assassin-for-hire and sent Gavin spiraling into undercover work with the Russians.

“Not helping, B.” Gavin scrubbed a hand over his scruffy jaw and stalked to the coffeepot. “Can’t believe y’all are putting me in the crosshairs here,” he muttered as he poured, but Tobias noticed he didn’t look their way. In fact, his face had gone pale at the mention of the helicopter.

And Tobias wasn’t the only one who’d made that observation. Casey, doughnut long since devoured, sauntered over to the island, pressing his palms flat to the counter and spearing Gavin with an assessing glance. “There a reason why Adam might have told Della to start her line of inquiry with you?”

Before Tobias could interrupt—because it was on
his
orders that Adam had started down that road in the first place—Gavin turned, mug in hand, and met Casey’s gaze. “Probably due to what I learned while I was under in Moscow. Or...what I think I learned.” He indicated a pair of empty chairs in the living area and, reluctantly, Casey followed him, until everyone but Della sat together. Gavin eyed Beth with tender caution. “I wore that cover longer than I should’ve once I first heard mention of the chopper. Guess I was hoping I could find some sort of redemption for us, B.”

“The bombing wasn’t our fault, Gavin. Rawad al-Fariq was strapped with explosives, and would’ve been whether or not we were there.” Beth lifted her mug for a cautious sip. “I know we’ve been trying ever since to make amends for what we
weren’t
able to prevent that day. Both of us.”

Vick’s arm visibly tightened around her. “What was it you learned, Bok?”

“That Karlin Kedrov escaped in a helicopter,” Gavin said gravely, naming the villainous leader of the
Polnoch’ Pulya
, the man who’d orchestrated Beth’s torture, who’d tormented Chandler for almost a year while she was playing double agent in the organization...the man whom Tobias had killed with a bullet to the head and two to the chest only a few weeks ago, the night that Gavin had been wounded.

Gavin wasn’t done. “The only reason Kedrov survived the bomb blast is because he was halfway out the building on his way to the helicopter. It was a getaway.”

Everyone absorbed that revelation, but Beth was the first to speak, frowning thoughtfully. “We’d seen him enter the building, though. The heat signature never disappeared.”

“But we didn’t clear the building ahead of time,” Gavin said with a shake of his head. “I’ve been thinking about it for over a year now, and the conclusion I keep coming back to is Kedrov, already suspicious, had a body man do a sweep before he arrived.”

“And so the heat signature we were looking at was that guy’s?” Setting aside her mug, Beth leaned forward, elbows propped on her knees and scarred forearms unwittingly on prominent display. Tobias forced himself not to stare at the evidence of her pain, took solace in the fact that both of the monsters responsible for that pain were dead and buried. “Okay, fine, we can argue we fixed our scope on the wrong man, but that just leads to more questions. Like how did Kedrov get out of a building with only one staircase, which I was monitoring like a boss? And why does it matter that he got spooked and booked it out of Dodge on a chopper?” Her frown deepened. “I don’t understand why you’d stay with
Polnoch’ Pulya
for something so...inconsequential.”

“Because he was tipped off ahead of time—either that al-Fariq was strapped to a bomb or that you and I were on the ground with sniper rifles—and whoever tipped him off provided the bird.” Gavin’s gaze dropped to the coffee mug in his hand. “I stayed undercover because I...think I know where that tip came from.”

Della made an irritated noise from her perch at the island. “Dramatic much?”

Gavin glared at her over his shoulder. “It was a Faraday chopper, okay? That’s why I stayed. Because a few months ago, I stumbled on a burned-out bird hidden on one of Kedrov’s estates, and when I looked closer, I discovered the fireproof floor compartments we’d outfitted all our choppers with.” His eyes closed, as if in pain, and maybe he was. Maybe he was hurting just as badly as Tobias was in that moment, as they all were. “I got the compartment open, and inside were three Faraday assault rifles. The helicopter that got Kedrov out of Kabul was one of ours.”

Rage blasted a path along Tobias’s sternum, choking him with acidic heat he could barely swallow past. “We have a leak,” he said quietly. Dangerously. Chandler’s hand settled on his shoulder, squeezing in a show of solidarity, and he wished—oh, how he wished—he could give in to the firestorm blazing through his bones, but that was not his role. No, right now, his family needed him to be a leader.
The
leader. “Faraday Industries has a leak.”