“Brady,” I repeated again, trying to shake him awake.
Patting his back, I lifted a hand and found it slick with bright red blood.
With a jolt I realized I couldn’t even feel him breathing.
“Brady!” I shouted, my ragged breath hitching on a sob as the weight of him made my vision blurry.
The combination of not being able to inhale a complete breath and the overload of all of my senses was too much and I found my eyes rolling back in my head as everything went black.
Then I knew nothing except for the distant sound of gunfire and the shouts of the people around me.
Chapter One
White House — Washington D.C.
Four months before the election…
“Ijust don’t understand why you want it to be us,” I said to Vincent Collier as I stood in front of his desk.
My head was still buzzing from the red-eye flight that they had forced us to take from Kuwait back to the states yesterday and I was seriously regretting not trying to get at least a couple hours of sleep last night even though I rarely ever slept on planes.
My team and I had been working with the American ambassador in Kuwait for the past six months because he’d pissed off the wrong people in the capital city and with that had come death threats.
That meant he needed a team better equipped to protect him and that was where we had come in.
Protecting high-risk diplomats was our job and Zeke, Dallas, Brooks, and I did it very well.
We’d been a team for the better part of a decade now—Zeke and I becoming friends during high school and later being recruited straight out of university by the state department. Brooks and Dallas had joined us later after leaving the military and had fit in with our team like they had always been there.
It had been a point of pride for us to take the hardest and most complicated jobs—the ones other security teams working for the United States government wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. We thrived on it.
But this? This was not that.
This was glorified babysitting and the omega at the center of it looked like a spoiled brat.
Everyone had seen the aftermath of Lennon Holloway’s attempted kidnapping two months ago. People on the street that night had whipped out cell phones and cameras to record the firefight that took the lives of several agents—including her longtime security head Greg Brady.
There had been rumors about her return to the campaign circuit for the past few weeks. Even Zeke who rarely kept an eye on the chatter that didn’t have anything to do with our own protection detail, had offhandedly mentioned it a few days before our mission had changed abruptly. Suddenly, we’d been dragged stateside and pushed from the state department and into the Secret Service like that made any sort of sense.
We had made it a rule to avoid the transfer from state to Secret Service. It was too much monotony and it overlapped too much with mine and Zeke’s personal lives for comfort.
So it was hard for me to understand why, of all of the possible people who would have been chomping at the bit to take on this job, Collier had chosen us.
The man in question leaned back in his plush desk chair and regarded me with cool blue eyes that always seemed to stare right through me.
He had worked in the state department when I had been a new recruit and I could never figure out whether he liked me or not. He always tended to look at everyone with an air of suspicion and for me, the grandson of the longtime Greek ambassador, I was never sure I measured up in his eyes.
I had never been more grateful when he had been tapped to head to the White House and head up the Secret Service agency.
“Are you saying you and your team are not capable of protecting the president’s daughter?”
The question was a test that I wasn’t sure I wanted to pass.
Truthfully, we’d grown accustomed to life outside of the states. In high-risk countries the boundaries were clear: keep the target alive by any means necessary. It was simple to a fault.
But this would mean protecting someone amongst the trappings of an election. Someone whose every move was watched, documented, and televised. Someone who also already had one attempt on her life.
If something were to happen to Lennon, then our careers would be over… not that that mattered even an iota to the man in front of me.
