Forsaken Duty (Red Team #9)(36)

“For last night.”

Maybe that got through. She gave a long and quiet sigh, then nodded.

“You feeling okay today?” he asked, worried the effects of her nightmare lingered. They did with him.

“I’m all right.”

Fuck that. She was frosty as hell.

“Jax just came through the gate,” she said. “He’s on his way up to the house.”

“That a fact. Addy, I’d like you to stay up here. I’ll go talk to him.”

“Not without me. I have too many questions now to leave them unanswered.”

“Did you call him?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s take him out to the firing range. He can be a target if he doesn’t have the right answers.” Owen grinned.

“I agree,” Jax said as he came into Addy’s study. “It would be a lot easier to clean up out there than in here, should you decide to shoot me.”

Owen gave him a cool smile. “Don’t tempt me.”

Spencer came into the room with a coffee tray and some small pastries. Jax fixed a cup. Owen reheated his.

Addy shut her laptop as the butler left, then just gave her brother a sad stare. “So many lies, Wendelly. I don’t know what’s true.”

Jax dropped down into an overstuffed armchair. “I agree. It’s time. I wanted you two to reconnect first. Looks like you have. Owen’s no more mangled looking now than when I brought him here, so I guess that’s good.” He looked from Addy to Owen. “Where do you want to start?”

Owen reached a hand out to Addy. When she took it, he led her over to the small sofa in the sitting area where Jax was. “Why did you go rogue?”

“Who said I went rogue?”

“Your dad.”

“Guess you can’t believe everything you’re told. I separated at the end of my tour months ago.”

“Why would he lie?”

“It would be easier to tell you the reasons why he wouldn’t lie. I guess both answers would be the same—because it served him to do so.”

“Wendell, let’s start at the beginning,” Addy said. “Did you know the Omnis had taken me?”

“I wondered, when I saw the corpse of the woman they said was you.”

“How did you know it wasn’t Addy?” Owen asked.

“There wasn’t much to go on…wasn’t much of her left,” Jax said. “Her hands. Her feet. Bits of hair. But something about her nails caught my attention. My sister and I have the same nails, broad and flat. They’re distinctive.” Addy looked at her nails. “The corpse’s nails were different. Curved in the middle.”

Jax sipped his coffee. “I told my dad that that body wasn’t Adelaide’s. He showed me a note from somebody named King who said he’d taken Addy in retribution for my dad’s involvement in getting the Red Team started six years earlier. Guess it took them a while to figure out his role in all of that. Dad sent me to a contact of his—a guy named Santo who lived in the tunnels.” He looked at Addy. “The same place where your hell began. He hadn’t seen you. Nor had anyone in his network.”

“You met Ace there,” Owen said.

Jax nodded. “Yeah. I learned she was involved with prepping women for their secret induction. I gave her a camera and asked her to record everyone who came through.”

“She had that camera when she was with me. I asked her to stop recording,” Addy said.

“But she didn’t,” Owen said. “She felt guilty about not turning it off when you asked her to, so she didn’t turn that one in to Jax.”

Jax shut his eyes.

“You act like this is all a shock, but you knew about your parents’ plans,” Owen said. “You told me to take Addy and go, that they had someone else in mind for her.”

“I knew they didn’t want her to pick you,” Jax said. “I didn’t know who they had in mind. And I certainly never thought it would be what it was.” He leaned forward and scrubbed his hands over his eyes. “You told me that night you’d been laying down the tracks of your plans for Addy for years.”

“You knew I was crazy about her forever.”

“Yeah, but then it was a train that took her from us,” Jax said. He sent Owen a sad look. “I overheard Roberta talking to someone on the phone a short while after the accident. She said you were King. Then when I talked to my dad, and showed me that note…I don’t know. I just fixated on you being King.”

“Why would I seek retribution for the founding of the unit I served in?” Owen asked.

“I thought you were a plant. Of course you would deny it if I confronted you.”

“That’s why we went our separate ways,” Owen said. “I thought it was because we were both so broken up over losing Addy that even our friendship was painful. Little did I know we weren’t even friends at that point.”

“Yeah. I kept looking for Addy. Dad would send me on assignments that only he knew about. I thought the secrecy had to do with keeping it from the Omnis, but now I see it was for his own personal reasons that I did what I did. I was his spy, ferreting out what the Omnis knew, what they were up to, who their players were.

“You know,” Jax continued, “you went to live with Val after your dad passed—or at least we thought he passed. I learned in those years while I was dad’s errand boy that Jason Parker was bad. I figured that’s when you’d turned. Santo said Tremaine was King. Since I thought your dad was dead, I assumed he meant you.”