Page 70 of Leading Conviction
“The fire?” Hannah’s eyes widened and Hawk resisted the urge to once again tell her she didn’t need to know the behind-the-scenes details of taking down her father.
But if she wanted to be a part of this, he needed to respect her decision, no matter how much he hated subjecting her to his life.
“Phoenix and Callie set his old headquarters in Atlanta on fire before they fought their way out,” Wes answered simply. He hadn’t even taken his eyes off of the monitors in front of him, obviously not registering the impact his words could have on the General’s own daughter.
“Oh.” Hannah’s warm-olive skin took on a slightly sickly yellow hue before she nodded and looked back at the Polaroids. “Got it.”
“Dammit, Wes, do you have to put your foot in your mouth every time you talk?” Hawk growled.
Wes finally glanced away from his screen. His eyes widened when they landed on Hannah. “Shit. Sorry. I get in the zone—”
She shook her head and waved away his concern. “It’s okay. I asked to be here. I want to know everything.”
Wes’s lips flattened and his eyes narrowed at her, studying her, before he nodded once and went back to the keyboard.
“Were there… were there people inside when they set the fire?” Hannah asked after a moment more of studying the pictures.
Nora thankfully seemed to monitor Hannah’s reaction as she replied with a careful tone, “Yeah… Phoenix is the ‘burn the world for his woman’ type of romantic.”
Wes huffed a sardonic laugh, eyes on the screen again. “Totally swoonworthy until you have to smell the lingering stench of burned bodies.”
Their communications sergeant rubbed his nose. Wes had gone into the headquarters with the FBI after the rest of the team cleared it so he could help assess what evidence should be taken and what could be left behind. The odor down in that basement was the kind that never left the nostrils. Wes was likely getting the same phantom whiffs of death Hawk still experienced.
“We looked through all the Polaroid pictures,” Wes explained further. “We logged the dates on the back to see if there’s any pattern. The FBI secured subpoenas, so we can now look through the laptops and flash drives we’ve gotten from our investigations along the way. ADA Marco Aguilar also set up meetings with the witnesses and suspects. We pieced all that information together with the locations Hannah gave us—”
“I know this place,” Hannah murmured as she bent over the table and pointed at a picture.
“You do?” Wes asked and got up from his chair.
Hawk moved to one side while Wes flanked her other, peering around her shoulder to scrutinize the picture she indicated. Hawk tried to see it through Hannah’s perspective, as if he could figure it out before she told him, but there were few details in any of the pictures other than the scared and naked women.
“Yeah… this.” She showed them a picture of a woman on a bed, eyes wide in horror, gagged and bound. “You see this headboard?” Hawk nodded. “That’s at one of his vacation homes in the mountains of Georgia.”
“How can you tell?” Wes asked with skepticism in his voice. “You can barely see it.”
“True, but if you put them all together, you can.” She grabbed several different pictures and placed them side by side, showing more pieces of the bed.
“And you’re sure?” Wes asked again. “There are probably tons just like that one—”
“No,” she insisted and tapped slowly at the edge of the headboard. “I… I’d never forget this headboard.”
Her whisper dropped like lead in Hawk’s gut and he watched her as she opened up to them. “It’s closer to Atlanta than here, if I remember correctly. It’s, um… this was in my bedroom.”
Bile burned the back of Hawk’s throat at the implication behind the General keeping women in Hannah’s bedroom. Hannah’s few words, tense muscles, and the almost childlike reversion of her voice made his skin crawl. All he wanted to do was hold her and hope she’d tell him the full truth she’d kept hidden from him. But his years of working with survivors told him if she was ever ready, her disclosure needed to be on her time, and touch was the last thing she needed at the moment.
So when her hand sought his for comfort, his heart nearly shattered.
He was still home for her. After everything, he was still her safe space.
Hawk squeezed her hand, honored she still wanted him. He cleared his throat and rubbed the back of his head. “We need to put that on our list of places to raid. Maybe tell Marco afterward.”
“We’re FBI liaisons,” Wes pointed out. “He’ll probably send us to check it out.”
“No doubt,” Hawk answered, mentally logging yet another task to their long “figure out what the fuck to do about the General” to-do list. “We definitely want to get in there before the FBI does, though.”
A knock on the door made him lift his face from the Polaroids and Hannah dropped his hand. The cool chill of BlackStone Securities facilities wafted over his empty palm as the rest of his team—Phoenix, Callie, Devil, and Jason—filed in one after the other.
“What’s happenin’?” Phoenix asked as he collapsed into a chair, immediately balancing it back onto its rear legs. His eyes widened and he pointed at Nora and Wes, who were both working diligently at a laptop and keyboard, respectively. “Jesus H. Christ, you two look like shit.”
