Page 119 of Killer Secrets (Tempting SEALs 5)

"In here, gentlemen." She stopped before the door, well aware that Deke and Trevor were watching from the upper landing, well hidden from the two visitors.

The door opened wide, revealing Tehya, for all intents and purposes bound to the high-backed chair across the room. The chair had been placed in front of the wide windows, the drawn shades lending a creamy backdrop to the brilliant, bloodred waves of hair that flowed around her.

Antoli stood behind her, a Glock held in the hand resting comfortably by his side.

"My daughter." There was a sigh from behind Kira as Tehya's gaze clashed with the men behind her.

That voice was soft, almost reverent.

"What a beauty you have become," Sorrell whispered.

Tehya sneered back at him. "Perfect breeder, am I?"

A long sigh whispered through the silence. "You are my child. You would have been adored. You will be adored. Treasured."

"And bred in an incestuous relationship." Her expression contorted in fury.

"I would have loved you."

"You would have destroyed me as you destroyed my mother and everyone else you've ever touched. You bastard!"

At that moment, Kira felt the barrel that pressed against her forehead and the tightening of the fingers on her arm.

"Mr. Fuentes." The stouter, barrel-chested man at her side snapped at Ian and Diego as angry tension filled the room then. "There will be no negotiations. Release my daughter and send her this way, and the lovely Miss Porter might live to see another day."

She hated it when men went back on their word. It just pissed her off.

Her gaze sliced to Ian as he leaned back comfortably in his chair, his legs lifted and resting on the corner of his desk as he watched Sorrell with no small amount of amusement.

Antoli's gun lifted to Tehya's forehead and Diego sipped at his whisky from where he sat beside Ian's desk in a comfortable leather chair.

"You know, we can do this the easy way, or the hard way," Ian said.

The gun at her head said.

"Perhaps the easy way then." He muttered his cue to Kira.

Kira dropped. She simply bent her legs, pulling them up, and let herself fall and roll as Ian's bodyguards swarmed around the two men.

There was a curse, a grunt, and as she rolled to her feet in a crouch, it was to see the two men unmasked. And she couldn't believe what she was seeing. There had to be a mistake.

She had known there was something familiar about the two men, known that she should have recognized something about them, but the French accents had thrown her off. The supposedly natural accents, the arrogance in the tone that she hadn't heard before.

It wasn't any of the men they had suspected. The associate he had brought with him wasn't Gregor Ascarti as they had assumed it would be.

The men, unmasked, were friends, associates of hers and Jason's, European but not French, and so well respected that she knew the knowledge of this would rock the world.

"Kenneth," she whispered, staring at the younger man, seeing the familiar brown eyes, the thinning brown hair.

He inclined his head regally as she turned her gaze to his father.

"You killed my parents," she whispered. "Then cried at their funeral."

Joseph Fitzhugh, distantly related to royalty, and friends with the current president of the United States. Good friends. Hunting-and-fishing-type friends.

"The loss of your parents was regrettable, but necessary," Joseph informed her in frosty tones. "That was a nice move you performed in breaking Kenneth's hold," he complimented her. "I will assume you have had more training than I suspected?"

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