Page 19 of Cherish Me

With the other, Deake aimed his own handgun, but Damien had gone low and it was too late. Damien got his shots off, emptying two rounds into the bastard, chest and head.

He stood back, breathing hard. He would have preferred to have caught the guy and broken his neck. Or drowned him in the pool. The odds that those shots had gone unnoticed by the boys on the sidewalk was slim. Which meant he had to figure a way off the roof other than the stairwell.

And he had to hurry. This was clearly a heist, but he didn’t know their exact plan. If they decided to kill the hostages and blow the safe—hell, blow the hotel—then Nikki had no chance other than him.

As much as the possibility terrified him, he knew he had to keep the worst case scenario in mind.

She was relying on him, and he was going to get to her. But how, goddammit? How?

And then he remembered. God, he was an idiot.

He scrambled to one of the sofas in the cabana area, giving him a view of the stairwell in case anyone was on their way up.

And then, from that point of relative safety, he dialed his brother and prayed that Jackson answered his phone.

Chapter Eleven

Damien conferenced Ryan and Jackson in together, and though the line crackled and reception was terrible, at least he could hear them both. And the sound of their voices gave him comfort. His brother, who had designed the hotel, and Ryan, one of the best operatives in the world of security and paramilitary operations.

“Contact whoever you think best,” Damien said to Ryan. He’d already given them a quick rundown of the situation. “It sounds like a heist, but you can never be too sure. Apparently, they’ve already killed a woman in the bar.”

He heard his voice break and Ryan’s soft, “It wasn’t Nikki. You have to keep believing that it wasn’t Nikki.”

“I know. That’s part of why I called you two instead of 911. I want someone I trust taking charge. I don’t want any hero tactics that might put her at risk.”

“We’ve got this, little brother. You and Nikki will walk out of that hotel. No other outcome is acceptable.” That was Jackson’s voice, and Damien almost smiled. He hadn’t known Jackson his whole life, but there was something about his older brother telling him it would be okay that cut straight to Damien’s soul.

Even with everything he’d accomplished over his life and career, Damien had never faced a situation like this before. At the same time, he’d never been one to flounder in the face of a challenge. He had this. He was going to find his wife. He was going to save his wife. And he was going to nail to the wall the bastards who had done this.

“If this is a heist,” Jackson said, “that may be a bit of good news.”

“How do you figure?”

“The vault has a failsafe. I worked with DysonArt Systems, and they installed one of their top models. Two combinations. One will open the vault, no problem. The other opens it, waits fifteen seconds, then drops a hidden wall, trapping whoever is inside. If it’s a good guy, he can get out using his control app. If it’s not, bang, you’ve caught your bad guy.”

“Control app?”

“A phone app, but it’s also wearable as a watch. Looks like one of those fitness tracker watches, with the DysonArts logo on the face.”

“Hopefully the owner will be thinking straight and give them the code to trap them.”

“Even if he panics, he can drop the interior wall from the app.”

“I’m impressed,” Damien said.

Jackson laughed. “I’ll tell Morgan Dyson you said so. The Damien Stark seal of approval. They’ll probably want to add it to their brochure.”

“Funny man,” he said, but he appreciated the levity. It had centered him again, helped him focus. “Okay, it’s time to do this. You know the drill, Ryan. And get Dallas involved. I should have hooked him in already.”

“Already on it,” came a new voice. Liam Foster. One of Stark Security’s prime operatives, and one of the former members of Dallas’s team of agents, Deliverance.

“Liam, good to hear your voice, man.”

“We’ve got hostage rescue, a bomb squad, and a federal task force already underway. They’ll move in quiet and quick and take out the perimeter guard.”

“Let them know I’m here. I’m not in the bar with the others. And make sure they don’t do anything rash. I don’t know what the situation is down there.”

“Don’t worry. We’ve worked with these people before. They’re solid. Seagrave knows them, too,” he added, referring to Colonel Anderson Seagrave, the western commander of the government’s covert Sensitive Operations Command. Seagrave worked out of California, but he knew the teams all over the country. He was a solid operative, both before and after he’d lost the use of his legs, and there’d been more than one time that Damien wished that the man worked for Stark Security directly. Seagrave had good instincts.