Saving Serena (Hawk Security #1)

Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

Serena

The conference room crackled with anticipation.

The Duke Sparrow I’d known from camp had been tall but gangly, nothing like the massive man in front of me today who looked like he could lift an elephant. His dazzling gray eyes looked straight through me with an intensity I wasn’t used to. His dark hair was in need of a cut. With a strong jaw and a short beard just beyond stubble, he wasn’t classically handsome. Yet Duke exuded a very masculine power that sent a tingle down my spine.

The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question was, did he remember me from summer camp? After their initial questions, quiet had settled over us. “Where do we start?” I asked.

Duke—or Cobra as his boss had called him—opened a mini fridge. “Water?”

“Yes, please.”

Constance declined with a wave of her hand. Her bob cut fit my view of a woman in the Secret service, but she was short and I always pictured their agents being tall.

My eyes trained on Duke’s strong forearms as he brought the water to the table. It wasn’t my fault. I blamed it on him for rolling up his sleeves and flashing forearm porn. With those hands, I’d bet he had a hell of a handshake.

He sat and slid the bottle forward. “It’s been a long time, Serena.” Question answered.

Puzzlement flashed on Constance’s face. “Cobra, you two know each other?”

I snatched the water and opened it, not meeting Duke’s eyes. “We met a long time ago as teenagers,” I said as nonchalantly as possible, ignoring the twist in my stomach and remembering the lie. My heart skittered. If he mentioned the note, I was going to die of embarrassment over my teenage crush on him.

He merely nodded.

“Back then, I knew him as Duke Sparrow.” I had been Serena Rose. The camp was big on not bringing our backgrounds with us, so our nametags had been first name and cabin name only. I blushed, remembering those times. I’d imagined him as Captain Jack Sparrow from the movie, only more clean cut.

He gave me a slight wave. “It’s Duke Hawk, but you can call me Cobra.”

“Wait, you’re Lucas’s brother?”

He nodded. “Guilty as charged.”

We needed to move this along. “How does this debrief business work?” I chugged from the bottle.

“Men like your father don’t like to be left in the dark,” Constance said, a dog unwilling to give up a bone.

I almost coughed up my water at the mention of being in the dark. “Tough,” I spat. The room felt suddenly colder, and I wrapped my arms around myself. I was not reliving the darkness, the nightmare.

She continued. “Maybe if you let my boss?—”

“No.” I slammed the water bottle down harder than I should have. “A hundred times, no .”

Constance’s face contorted. Clearly, she didn’t like my answer.

Screw that. I was done, done, done with having my controlling father run things. After a calming breath, I lowered my anger level. “I’m old enough to have my own life. Your boss agreed. We keep my dad out of this. End of subject.”

Duke settled it. “Agreed.”

If Constance had a problem with that, she kept it hidden.

Duke appraised me for a moment and, thankfully, moved on. “Let’s start with why you think you need us.” He phrased the question just as Bill Covington had, with the implication that I was a neurotic, scared woman seeing nonexistent threats around every corner.

I felt my face reddening and stabbed my finger against the table, done with men not taking me seriously. “I don’t think. I know . I was intentionally run off the road, and the guy wanted information about a USB stick he thought I had. He threatened to kill me. He would’ve torched my car to finish the job if some Good Samaritan hadn’t come along and interrupted him.”

“Take it easy,” Constance urged. “Give us facts.”

I ramped up my volume. “Fact one: he fucking ran me off the road.” I shivered. “Fact two: the car ended upside down. I was trapped inside with gasoline leaking. Fact three: he started down the hill with a cigarette lighter in his hand, not a cell phone to call nine-one-one. No, a fucking lighter. He planned to roast me.” I couldn’t stop trembling.

Duke reached over and placed his massive hand over mine. “Serena, we believe you.”

I looked over at Constance, and she nodded.

The soothing quality of Duke’s voice contrasted with the zing of electricity his touch sent through me. The crush I’d had for him flared back to life like a smoldering fire fed fresh oxygen.

“Serena,” he added, holding my eyes captive with his piercing gray ones. “I’ll keep you safe. We’ll keep you safe.” He didn’t let go of my hand. “But we have to ask all the questions, the hard ones, the stupid ones, and the insulting ones.”

I nodded, gripping his hand like a lifeline. “Well, you got the insulting part right. Now let me help you with a stupid one. I didn’t cut anyone off, tailgate, or anything. This wasn’t road rage. I didn’t flip anyone off.”

He nodded. “I understand.”

Somehow, his two words calmed me. “If it was you…” I looked between the two of them. “Would you choose the safe house?” Had I been too quick to dismiss it?

Constance deferred to Duke.

“You want the truth?” he asked.

I nodded. When our eyes connected, I saw the same kind eyes from years ago—and something else. I knew he was one of the rare men I could trust.

“Once you start running from your fear, you’re condemned to be on the run forever. You have to face it as best you can, because the alternative is never being free of it.”

Constance nodded silently.

His answer was different, but eerily similar to my therapist’s advice.

I took a breath. “What would you like to know?”

Constance started. “Do you know of anyone who would want to hurt you?”

“No.” That wasn’t precisely correct, but Harvey Fox had been locked up in jail for years.

“Did you see his face?” Duke asked. “The man who attacked you?”

I nodded. “From a distance, yes, but I don’t know him.”

“What kind of vehicle?” Constance asked.

“A big, black SUV. I don’t know what kind. I’m not a car person.”

“Do you remember any part of the license number?”

“It didn’t have a plate on the front.”

Constance opened a notepad. “Have you received any threats? Phone hangups, anything like that?”

“No.” I shook my head. “Nothing—wait a minute. I forgot to mention that I got a note on my windshield this morning. I’d parked on the street, down a few houses from mine, and I thought somebody had mistaken my car for one of my neighbors’. The note said to leave the USB stick under the red bush or else. Almost everybody has a red bush, and I had no idea what the stick… ” I added air quotes. “…meant, so I ignored it.”

“Can we see the note?” Constance asked.

“It’s in my purse.”

“Which didn’t travel with her to the hospital,” Duke added.

Constance took down a note. “Have you noticed anybody following you, lurking around, anything out of the ordinary in your neighborhood recently?”

I’d already asked myself the same thing. “No.”

Duke sat back. “Run us through your day.”

It confused me how much I wished he was still holding my hand. “I started in the office on Wilshire, the same as any other day. Well, not exactly the same, because I just got a promotion, and this was my first day out in the field.” I explained my previous position and how I’d been selected by the merit review board for my new job in external auditing. “Which means I go out into the field now to check on companies.”

Unlike Constance, Duke didn’t take any notes.

The door opened, and Lucas Hawk joined us, taking a seat next to Duke. With a buzz cut, dark brown almost black eyes, and a deep voice that cut through you, he was scarier than I remembered, a lot scarier. But that circumstance had been very different from today.

Thankfully, Lucas didn’t acknowledge having met me before. “What did I miss?” he asked.

“The incident was definitely intentional,” Duke said. “She saw him but doesn’t know him.”

That relaxed me a little. At least Duke believed me.

“But she hasn’t received any threats,” Constance added. “Or have any reason to suspect anyone in particular. So we don’t have a suspect yet.”

“Nope.” I shook my head.

“Go ahead,” Duke urged me.

“Right. I had two meetings in Thousand Oaks. After I finished the meetings, I started back to the office.” I explained when I’d first noticed the SUV, my call with my brother, how I’d considered stopping at the fire station but didn’t, and how the SUV had finally run me off the road. Then I explained what I remembered from after the crash—the man in the leather jacket and then the other person who stopped at the crash.

“Back up a second,” Lucas said. “Are you sure it was a lighter he was holding and not something else?”

“Positive.” I’d already reviewed that part in my head. “He flicked the flame on and off as a threat and he yelled about telling him where the stick was.”

Lucas’s brow creased. “And what was that about a deer?”

“I had to swerve right to keep from hitting it. Deer collisions cause two hundred deaths a year in this country. I didn’t want to be one of those.”

“And this was when?” Lucas asked. “In relation to going off the road?”

“Right before,” I admitted. From Lucas’s look, it was clear where this was going.

Great. He didn’t believe me about the lighter, and he didn’t think my crash was related to me being chased and hit by Black Jacket Guy either. He thought I was just a girl who couldn’t drive. He’d ignored the part about the guy demanding information from me.

After a knock at the door, another man poked his head in. “Vladimir Zolotarev is on the phone, and he doesn’t want to wait.”

“Thanks, Winston,” Lucas said, looking a little relieved. “I need to take this. You guys carry on without me.” A second later, he was gone.

I looked back at Duke and Constance. Even I wasn’t sure where things stood now. This day could not get any worse. Are you sure, Serena? Maybe you’re being paranoid.

Duke

The bossman left to take Zolotarev’s call. Ariana had probably called Daddy to complain about how I hadn’t given her enough freedom to interact with her fans, but thank God she was no longer my problem.

“Duke,” Serena prodded, pulling me back to my current assignment.

The defeat in her eyes made me want to hold her and tell her it would be all right. Because of the deer question, she thought Lucas had written her off. But I knew better. My brother hadn’t gotten where he was by jumping to conclusions with zero hard information.

Serena sighed. “What now?”

I held out my hand. “Let me see your phone. I’d like to review your messages.” Prior communications often held clues in a case like this.

“The car rolled, and I couldn’t find it after the accident.”

Constance wrote a note. “I’d like to take you to the med center to get you looked at. It’s a good idea after an?—”

“I’ve been there. CAT scan was negative,” Serena said, looking down.

“Why didn’t they clean your cuts?” Constance asked before I could.

Emergency care had gone to shit if they let her out looking like this.

Her leg started trembling again. “I checked myself out early.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I think I saw him.”

“The guy with the lighter?”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

“It’s certainly too late now,” Constance commented, anticipating my train of thought. Hospitals didn’t do security cameras inside—patient privacy.

Winston opened the door. “The boss needs you both.”

Must be time to listen to Ariana’s father rant about how rude I’d been to his daughter. I forced a nod. “Winston, would you mind cleaning up Serena’s wounds?” We’d circle back to what she saw at the hospital.

Serena’s eyes widened. She was a skittish one.

I patted her hand since that had seemed to settle her earlier. The zing of contact with her was a warning that, after all this time, I hadn’t forgotten the suggestion of her note. I pulled my hand back. That memory lane was best not traveled. “Excuse us while we go talk to our boss,” I told her. “Winston will take good care of you, and we’ll be right back.”

She blinked before nodding acceptance. What she’d been through had clearly terrified her.

Constance handed her a pen. “If he gets out of line, stab him with this. That’s what I do.”

That pulled a giggle and a warm smile from her.

I wished I could see more of that smile.