Page 56 of Guarding The Phoenix: Vol. 1

I’d never allow her to fall victim to that bastard’s depravity. My team had discovered just where his proclivities lay. At his hands, Kylie would suffer the fires of hell. It would happen over my dead body because I would stand between her and Santos until the end of the world.

She thought I was mad at her. And I was, but not for the reason she thought. It infuriated me that she knowingly put herself at risk—to go shopping, of all things. I realized her actions forced Santos to make his move. We wanted him to make a play for her. Kylie was the bait we were dangling to draw him out. But it still pissed me off. Because she did not know the type of monster she was dealing with.

I did.

Santos was a sick bastard. He would hurt her, flay her beautiful skin open before raping her, and would laugh while he did it. The sick fuck would leave her broken and battered until she was a shell of her former self. She wouldn’t come back from it.

One of his victims was in a mental health facility under a near constant suicide watch. The thought of Kylie being that broken made me want to bury anyone who meant her harm. I wouldn’t think twice about putting a bullet through Santos’s brain and forgo my need to watch the bastard suffer for what he did to my brother.

And I struggled with guilt. Kylie’s safety challenged my quest for vengeance. Because she was different. She made me feel again. She was the first breath of fresh air after months of breathing sulfur in hell. And there were feelings present. Feelings I’d yet to examine more closely, but they were there. They existed.

Fuck, she made me territorial where she was concerned. I wanted to beat my chest and warn off any man who came near her.

Seeing her in the SUV with Chase and Axel had stirred a ferocious jealousy within me. I had wanted to flay them alive for touching her. The four of us had shared more than a dozen women over the years. Some had been just for the night, and then a select few we’d attempted to create a long-term commitment with. And not once had I ever envied or been pissed at the guys for screwing the woman without me.

Kylie differed from all the others.

I didn’t know how to handle it. Instead of dealing with my feelings, I avoided her. It was a crappy approach. I knew it, but couldn’t force myself until I rectified what I wanted from her beyond the bedroom. Because if I was in this deep after a few cataclysmic, world-altering rounds in her bed, how deep would I go if I went all in?

I wasn’t comfortable with emotions. That shit I compartmentalized and shoved away most days. I had to, otherwise the things I’d seen and done would eat me alive.

Taking the stairs two at a time, I couldn’t shake the sense of impending danger. That damn itch on my neck was going haywire.

Mateo was in the surveillance room, studying the monitors, when I waltzed in. He had set a bed in the corner so he could observe the camera feeds twenty-four-seven. The large sixteen by sixteen bedroom had twelve large screen monitors. Mateo had run extra cables into the room to support all the tech. Each monitor had split screens, divided into four with the camera feed images. There wasn’t a hall or corner or room in the house that he wasn’t watching at all times. Then there were the exterior cameras with night vision. They were motion sensitive and didn’t alert a person that they were actively being recorded. The night vision made it capable of recording without turning on a spotlight.

I did a cursory glance at the screens, checking for movement out of the ordinary.

“Anything?” I asked as I came up beside Mateo in his computer chair.

He shook his head with a yawn. “Nah. It’s all quiet on this front.”

“You sure about that?” I studied the screen with Kylie’s room pulled up. There were multiple cameras in her bedroom. A necessary invasion of her privacy. She appeared fast asleep. Her hair spread out behind her on the pillow. And she looked incredibly young and fragile.

Mateo eyed me. “What’s going on, boss? You’ve got that look.”

I rubbed the back of my neck as the itching sensation increased. “Something doesn’t feel right. I need you to check the feed again. Make sure every camera is online and working properly.”

“Did you see something?” Mateo asked, swiveling back toward the bank of monitors. His fingers flew over the keyboard.

“No. My neck is itching.”

“Shit.” Mateo swore. Years ago, when we were serving in Afghanistan, I got that itch and radioed in that we were re-routing our path back to base. But before we could execute the re-route, we watched the Humvee in front of ours get taken out by a rocket launcher. The Taliban had an ambush waiting for us on the other side of the rise.

We survived. But six Marines died that day.

Later that night, when we were back in our bunks, they asked me how I knew about the ambush. I explained the feeling I got before a mission went sideways. That itch had saved our butts that day because we’d stopped and were backing up to take the road we passed when the others were blown up. “Precisely. And it’s getting worse.”

For the next ten minutes I watched on edge. I couldn’t get past the itch. Mateo searched through footage and lines of code. He was brilliant with computers. He could do things with lines of code that were jaw dropping. The guy had hacked the Pentagon as part of his interview to join the CIA. And even they had been impressed with his skills.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Mateo snapped, seething with anger.

My gut clenched at his fury. “What? Did you find something?”

He jerked his chin, his fingers flying over the keys. “Yep. They fucking hacked me.Me.Goddammit! The systemIfucking built. Give me a second to counteract it and take it down. There’s a video stream being fed into the monitors. Whoever the fuck Santos has working for him knows their shit.”

Dread settled over me. It meant we were viewing false footage. What the fuck was Santos planning? “Hurry. Figure out why the fuck—”

“Got it. And this is our feed. He’s been hiding…oh shit, Gideon.”

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