War Bringer (23 page)

Owen looked at them. “Good question. Find out the answer.”

“Well, there’s more. Fiona actually spoke to King. She said he visited her in her room Saturday.”

“We need to talk to her,” Kit said.
 

“I know. Take the video off the screen. I’ll go get her.” He paused on his way out the door. “This is not going to be easy for her, so keep it chill.”

Kelan returned a few minutes later, leading Fiona by the hand. He pulled out a seat for her at the table opposite Kit, then sat next to her.

Kit leaned forward. “Fee—Kelan said you had some info for us. I know this is a difficult thing to do, talking about what happened, but we need to know what you know.” He looked at Greer, who set a digital voice recorder in front of her. “We’re going to record it so that we don’t miss any of your story.”

Fiona nodded.
 

“Can you tell us about meeting King?”

She looked at Kelan. He tried to give her a reassuring look. “I had just come back from meeting the guy I was supposed to marry this weekend. Erick Ansbach—the one who…who…”
 

“He’s the guy King wanted her to marry,” Kelan finished for her.

She nodded. “He tried to cheat at the arena fight. Kelan had just fought three men, and more outside the arena before he ever went in, and probably more even than that. It was too much.”

Kelan smiled and shot a look at Kit. “She stopped the fight. Then the sirens made us all clear out.”

“Kelan said to play along with whatever was happening, but none of it made sense. When they took me to meet Erick, I told Mr. Edwards that I was disappointed they had selected a substandard fighter, that I refused to marry him.”

“Mr. Edwards is the one you told me about?” Kit asked Kelan.

“Right. The other shot caller,” he said.

“After that, King came into my room.”

Kelan noticed the tension deepen in the room as the team focused on what she was saying.

“There’s not much I can tell you about him other than his height and size. He wasn’t as tall as Kelan, but he was trim. He was covered from the top of his head to his feet. He wore gloves, some kind of mask that covered his face, neck, and hair. He wore eyeglasses and a baseball cap. And he used something that changed his voice. I don’t even know if he really was my father.”

“Okay.” Kit nodded. “What did he say to you?”

Fiona drew a long breath, sending another glance toward Kelan. She closed her eyes. Kelan was glad they were doing this debriefing now rather than waiting; he knew Fiona was going to block the memories as she began healing.

“He said a lot of things. I don’t know what it all meant. He watched me grow up. He talked about a breeding program they started long ago. He said he killed my mother and a boy I sometimes dated because he threatened my”—she paused and looked at her hands in her lap—“virginity. He said he killed my mother because she was supposed to keep me pure. He made it clear that they died because of me.”

Kelan reached over and held her shoulder. “Fiona, you didn’t kill them. He did.”

“But if I had made other choices—”

“He would still have killed them. He was done with your mother and your friend was in the way.”

Her eyes looked tortured when her gaze met his. “He let us have our night together because that way, when he kills you, your death will break me, and then I’ll have a second chance to become the daughter he wanted.”

“Yeah, that shit’s fucked up,” Max said. Kit gave him a quelling look.
 

“He said he’d engineered his War Bringer, after generations of careful breeding”—she looked at Kelan—“and that you had no right to the same title because you’re a mixed breed. He said his War Bringer was a pure Arian son.” She paused. “He left then.”

“Thank you, Fiona,” Owen said, breaking the silence that followed her words. Greer shut off the recorder.

“Were the girls in the tunnels found?” she asked, looking around the table.

“No,” Kit said.
 

“You told Kelan they were from the Friendship Community?” Greer asked.

She nodded. “They wrote letters to their families.”
 

“I gave you the letters yesterday,” he said, looking at Max. “These girls are being held against their will. If Lobo hasn’t seen them, I have to go get them out.”

Max leaned forward. “I’m going, too. I want to look for Lion and his boys. It would be easy to hide a large group of kids in a place like that.” He looked at Kelan, then Fiona. “While you were in the tunnels, did you see or hear about the watchers?”
 

“No,” she said.

“Were they using Lion and his boys as guards?” Max asked.
 

“The guards I saw were adults, not boys,” Kelan said. “Doesn’t mean they aren’t there. I just didn’t see them. I want to make a stop on our way down and talk to a friend of Fiona’s. Stacey Atkins. She was integral in getting info about Fiona to King’s people. I want to see what she knows.”

“Who is that?” Kit asked.

“My friend from CSU.”

“The girl got close to Fiona and found out everything about her—her taste in clothes, in jewelry,” Kelan said. “Helped King prepare for taking her.”

“Shit. All right. Kelan, take her upstairs. We have a little more to do here before you head out.”

The team stood when Fiona got up. She nodded at Kit. Kelan took her hand and led her back to the elevator. “You did great. Really great.”

“I don’t know how that helped.”

“We now know more of the things that King’s interested in. It’s good.” He pulled her into a hug as they rode the elevator up. “Don’t let him do a mind freak on you. You can’t control his crazy.”

She nodded, but he could tell from the tension in her body that warning was way the hell too late. He was still worrying about that when he rejoined the group.

Angel stood up, putting a few images on the smart screen. “So about those silos. I did some digging. Colorado has its share of active silos, but it also has a large number of decommissioned ones, those were mostly built in the late sixties, like the one under the WKB compound. They stretch for miles in an almost straight line from north of the airport to south of Colorado Springs. Really, along the whole front range, like every ten miles. Some of them have been sold to private owners. Some are abandoned but are still on the government’s books. Some have dropped off the record completely.” He clicked a button and red dots showed up where the old silo sites were. “These were the ones I could find record of.”

A frisson scraped Kelan’s spine. “Can you overlay the arena where I fought?”

Angel did. “Here’s the farmhouse Fee called us from, and here’s that garage with the auto lift in it. I don’t have the coordinates for the exit Rocco and Jafaar used, but I bet it’s somewhere in this line.” His map showed a silo beneath the garage.

“Who owns the farmhouse?” Kelan asked.
 

“Same company who owns the arena and the garage.”
 

Kelan realized now that all the trees and the shrubs surrounding the arena weren’t to keep it cool in the summer or provide windbreaks; they were for privacy from the ground and air. “Who owns that silo?”

“That’s one of the ones that have dropped off the books. It’s not on DoD’s list, and it’s not on the EPA’s list of superfund sites.”

“Good work, Angel,” Kit said. “Do some more digging to find out where and when that silo and any others dropped out of the system. See if there was any remediation work done. Find the original plans for the site. Selena, give him a hand. Greer—dig into the company. I want to know everything there is to know about them—who they are, what they do, who works for them. And I want to know about this Erick Ansbach that King wanted Fiona to marry. If they engineered him, anyone who’s connected with him may be of interest to us. Rocco, Blade, Val, and I will crack open Bladen’s library.”
 

“Blade, let your dad know we’re getting into the boxes. He wanted to be here for that,” Owen said.

Chapter
 
Twenty-One

Mandy stepped quietly to the doorway of the third bedroom in the suite she shared with Rocco and Zavi. Zavi’s smallpox vaccination still had a beige Band-Aid on it, but it no longer seemed to trouble him. The doctor was coming up to the house later to give Wynn her vaccination.
 

The two of them were sitting at a small table discussing the alphabet. The bedroom had been transformed into a cute classroom, with a couple of tables in different heights, a big whiteboard, and bookshelves filled with fun stories. Zavi even had a cubby where he could keep his schoolwork organized.
 

It all looked so ordinary, as if the room had never housed Rocco’s dark retreat. The closet was empty now. She wondered where he had moved his secret nest. He seemed to need ever more alone time since she’d told him about the baby.
 

Zavi saw her and his face lit up. “Hi, Mandy!”

“Hi, baby. How are things going?” she asked Wynn.

“Wonderfully. We’re learning about each other. Zavi’s showing me all the things he knows.”

“I know a lot,” Rocco’s boy assured her.

Mandy smiled. “You are the brightest boy I know. Are you hungry? Kathy has lunch served up.”

“Yes! Miss Wynn said we can go for a swim after lunch.” Zavi hurried over to take her hand.
 

“I think it’s time we introduced Miss Wynn to the rest of the team.” She looked down at Zavi. “Would you like to do that?”

He nodded. “It’s important. We’re a very big family now.”

“We are indeed.”

* * *

Wynn followed Zavi and his stepmom downstairs. The closer they came to the dining room, the louder things got. Men’s voices, deep and rich, laughing. Softer women’s voices. She was curious about the group and what they did. The house was big and rambling, lavishly decorated. Rocco and Mandy had been able to put together a perfectly equipped classroom for her work with Zavi. And the furnished apartment they’d provided her over the garage was even nicer than the one she rented in Cheyenne.
 

What did the people here do that made such an environment possible? She’d done a comprehensive internet search for Zavi’s parents. Other than some obituaries regarding Mandy’s parents and grandparents, she’d found an article about Mandy’s plans for her hippotherapy center…and its subsequent explosion from a faulty gas line. So sad. She found nothing on Zavi’s dad, but that didn’t surprise her, since he’d been serving overseas for a while.

She researched Tremaine Industries, too, but didn’t find anything other than their company website. She looked up the company’s founder and CEO, Owen Tremaine, but only learned that he had no social media presence, which for a man who headed a company like his wasn’t surprising.
 

Perhaps the most important element of her research into her new employer and living situation was the fact that they clearly weren’t wanted by the FBI or anyone. That gave her some small comfort. Hopefully, they weren’t associated with any crime families who knew just how to keep a low profile in a technology-driven world.

She felt her nerves tighten as they stepped into the huge dining room. Zavi took her hand, then stepped up onto the chair at the head of the table. She thought about correcting him about standing on the furniture, but his parents were there, and no one else in the room seemed to mind.

The chair gave him the height he needed to get everyone’s attention. The introductions took some time, because it was never a simple matter of his listing names for each person. Everyone’s association with each other was detailed, too, which she found surprisingly helpful. Casey was there, the other potential student she might need to help tutor or babysit.

A man with pale blue eyes and blond hair came into the room. He stared down at Zavi in a way that would have terrified Wynn had she been the recipient. Instead, the boy just met his look, stare for stare.

The man lifted his brow. “I believe you’re in my chair.”

Zavi grinned. He reached up and touched the man’s chest. Wynn held her breath. It was like watching a cub bite the paw of a huge male lion.
 

The boy looked at her. “Uncle Owen, this is my teacher, Miss Wynn. Miss Wynn, this is our chief, Uncle Owen.”

Wynn had the strangest thought that she should curtsy or something. She held her hand out. “Uncle Owen.”

“It’s just Owen.” He shook her hand, then lifted Zavi off his chair.

She looked around the room, uncertain as to what to do next. Mandy smiled at her. She explained the buffet system to her, offering the choice of eating at the table, outside, or in her suite. Really, there were no rules. If she didn’t like what was offered, she could help herself to something else in the kitchen. Kathy often had leftovers available to munch on.

Wynn was surprised by the group’s generosity. She started toward the far end of the buffet line, but was stopped by a late arrival to the room. A tall man with swarthy skin came up the stairs from the living room. His hair was short. His dark eyes were clear and sharp. She noticed him give her a quick, almost instinctive once-over, from head to toe and back again. Heat warmed her face as his dark eyes settled on hers.

She was a tall woman. It was unusual to find a man who made her feel short. He held his hand out without breaking eye contact. “I’m Angel.”

She slipped her hand in his. It was larger than hers just like all the rest of him. “I’m Wynn. Zavi’s teacher.”

He smiled. The skin of his face wrinkled by his eyes and made lean folds beside his mouth. His teeth were big and white. God. He stole her breath. “Welcome, Wynn.” His words rolled from his chest in a baritone rumble.

“Thank you, Angel.” He still held her hand. His grin widened.

“Down, boy,” Blade called from across the table. “It’s the teach’s first day. Give her a break.”

He nodded and released her hand but not her eyes. “Right.” Again the grin.

Wynn smiled and lowered her eyes. How was she going to survive this job? She looked around the room of hot, capable, probably deadly men, and thought she’d best spend most of her time away with Zavi or in her own quarters.