Justice for the SEAL (HERO Force Book 5)

  Justice for the SEAL

  HERO Force Book Five

  Amy Gamet

  1

  Logan O’Malley worked for a bunch of assholes.

  He picked up his tequila and swirled it in a circle, staring into the liquid like it had the power to turn back time, to make him forget the things he’d heard that had knocked his entire world off its motherfucking axis.

  Jax and Cowboy had killed a Navy SEAL. One of their own employees. An original member of HERO Force named Garrison Cole.

  Allegedly.

  He downed the rest of his drink in one gulp.

  He could see now how stupid he was for looking up to them. How childish.

  Naive.

  Jax and Cowboy had sat him down in Cowboy’s office, shutting the door even though the rest of the team was on a mission in Dubai. There was a lawsuit, Jax said. A civil case against the two of them for wrongful death.

  But it was his face that fucked with Logan’s brain.

  Jax registered no emotion while he recounted the story of Cole’s death. None at all. The leader of HERO Force was nothing if not pragmatic, but he could have been talking about a broken fax machine or running out of copy paper.

  He was downright icy, and Logan had been filled with unease. No.

  Suspicion.

  The bartender poured him another drink.

  Logan wasn’t usually a guy to go with his gut. Analytics and proof, rational thought and logic. Science. But sitting in that room listening to Jax had his inner empath screaming.

  They did it.

  Jax and Cowboy fucking killed one of their own guys.

  Logan probably wouldn’t have found out about it at all, except now they were being sued for wrongful death in a civil suit, years after the criminal charges against them had been dismissed, and they needed his help.

  Well, they didn’t need it, exactly.

  Anthony Royce did.

  The crack of a cue ball was followed by the thud of balls dropping into pockets and Logan’s eyes focused on the liquor bottles on the shelf in front of him. The bar smelled like cigarettes from a time when smoking had been allowed. It was stale and foul, just like his meeting an hour ago, the air conditioning barely cooling the humid air.

  Jax had brought him in the conference room to meet Justice Royce, a state judge who looked so goddamn respectable sitting in the HERO Force conference room, and that’s when the dirty laundry really got pulled out from under the bed.

  Jax and Cowboy told him Royce was the guy who’d dismissed the criminal charges against them, and now he was getting death threats.

  That’s when Logan started thinking of quitting his job. His bosses were no better than the dirtbags HERO Force was always fighting back against.

  You can go back to the NSA.

  Hell, there were a hundred and one jobs he was qualified for. That wasn’t the issue. The problem was he still wanted to work for the company he’d thought he was working for—where the men had integrity and fought for justice.

  He hated himself in that moment. Hated the blind faith he’d allowed himself to have in these men.

  Jax and Royce were still across the street at HERO Force headquarters right now, probably getting their stories straight in case Royce was called to testify. What a fucking joke.

  You have a choice to make.

  He could go to work on the Royce case like it was business as usual, or he could hand in his resignation. He took another sip of tequila.

  The street noise got louder and Logan turned to see Jax walk into the bar. He sat down next to Logan and ordered a whiskey. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Now that I know you killed a man?”

  “I told you how it happened.”

  “Yes, you did. Total accident. Could have happened to anybody.”

  “This isn’t about me or Cowboy. This is about Royce. Someone related to the case wants him dead. That’s where your attention needs to be focused, not on something that happened years before your time that doesn’t affect you at all.”

  “Right. Royce. The man who behaves like a close personal friend of yours, but is actually the judge who dismissed murder charges against you and Cowboy.”

  “He wasn’t a friend at the time.”

  “Because that would reek of impropriety on his part if he let his friends go free.”

  Jax set his drink on the bar with a thud. “I’m still the commander of this team. You’d do well to remember that.”

  Logan knew he was pushing back too hard. Knew what it might cost him. But he couldn’t seem to stop talking, stop picking at the scab that covered Jax’s culpability.

  He needed to see what was underneath, now that he knew his hero was made of flesh and blood. He had to know the depth of the darkness Jax had kept hidden from view. “I don’t want to work for a man I don’t respect.”

  Jax stared at him for a beat. “It was an accidental shooting.”

  Logan leaned in close. “Tell me what the fuck really happened, or I’m gone.”

  Jax seemed to focus far away, the silence stretching out to an uncomfortable void. When he finally spoke, his voice was low. “We had no choice.” He met Logan’s eyes. “We did it because we had no choice.”

  “Go on.”

  Jax shook his head. “All you need to know is none of this was Royce’s fault. Now someone wants him dead, and it’s our responsibility, Cowboy’s and mine. If we could solve this without involving you, we’d do it. But you’re the one with the skills we need, Logan. And you’re just going to have to decide if you trust me.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Jax. You have to decide if you trust me enough to tell me the truth.”

  An intense light flashed brightly through the window over Jax’s shoulder, white light so bright it seemed to burn a hole in Logan’s retinas.

  “Get down!” yelled Logan, lowering his own head as he pulled down Jax. The sound erupted and the shock wave hit, shattering the window into the bar, spraying glass like water from a sprinkler.

  Someone was screaming.

  “Go, go, go!” barked Jax, but Logan was already on his feet, passing Jax as he pulled out his weapon. They ran into the sunny street, black smoke billowing from a sedan full of fire, fifteen-foot flames licking the sky.

  A car bomb.

  A figure could be seen in the car, barely human, covered in flames, and Logan rushed to the vehicle in an instinctual move to help the victim. The heat was unlike anything he’d experienced before but still he reached for the door, jerking back his hand when it was instantly burned.

  He was ambushed from behind, Jax screaming in his ear as he pulled Logan away from the car, “Get back! You can’t save them now.” But Logan could still see the person on fire—dying right before his eyes.

  Maybe already dead.

  He felt nauseous.

  “Jesus,” yelled Jax. “The license plate! Look at the fucking license plate!”

  Logan’s eyes popped open, zeroing in on the piece of metal, a single word showing clear.

  Justice.

  It’s Royce,” said Jax, his voice like a sob. “The motherfucker got Royce.”

  The smoke was noxious and Logan stumbled backward. He was inhaling the smell of gasoline and burning flesh, and he needed to vomit.

  Sirens echoed in the distance.

  There was nowhere to go, nothing to do but watch the car burn.

  A firetruck arrived and firefighters hopped out, attacking the fire with long hoses until all that was left was a scorched black shell.

  A scorched black shell and Royce.

  Logan had never been so close to death, seen it reach up from the depths of hell with gnarled fin
gers and rip someone from the earth. He thought of the man he’d just met upstairs and imagined his torched skeleton now covered in water.

  He bent at the waist and threw up on the street.

  Cowboy boots appeared in his line of vision. “You need to find out who did this,” said Cowboy.

  It was a challenge. A request. A demand.

  And Logan knew he would continue to work for HERO Force. He would find out who was responsible for this and do everything in his power to bring them down.

  Jax and Cowboy were his brothers, no matter what they’d done. “I will.”

  Jax crossed to Logan and Cowboy. “Are you with us?” he asked Logan.

  “I am.”

  “Good.” Jax scanned the area, pointing out surveillance cameras. “I want video from those cameras, and I want it now.”

  2

  Gemma Faraday parked and opened her car door, heat coming at her like she was opening a hot oven. She stood and started to sweat in the sunshine, her silk blouse still stuck to her back from the equally hot walk from the courthouse to her vehicle.

  Day nine of record-high temperatures in Atlanta with no end in sight, and the weather was smothering her as surely as a well-placed pillow.

  Her heels clicked on the pavement as she crossed to the nursing home, waves of heat from the asphalt making the building shimmy like a mirage. She thought of last night’s news, death count from the heatwave now over a dozen, most of them elderly.

  She walked through a revolving door and into the lobby, the icy air conditioning as welcome as the smell of old age was not. These elderly people weren’t dead.

  They just acted like it.

  She smirked at a familiar nurse as she passed. “Hi, Laurie.”

  “He’s waiting for you.”

  He doesn’t even know who I am.

  She grit her teeth to keep from stating the obvious and kept walking.

  Click. Click. Click. Click.

  Damn it. She was running late, her father’s favorite news program long-since begun, her caseload weighing on her mind and waiting not-so-patiently for her to return to her chambers.

  You don’t need to come here anymore.

  That nagging voice that longed to be free of this obligation was the devil on her shoulder. What was the point in visiting your father if he didn’t even know who you were?

  Because I know who he is, and I love him.

  That was the point. She’d stand by her father’s side for the rest of his life. It was important. Maybe the most important thing in her life.

  She pushed into his room, struck as she always was by the complete lack of color in the space. There was beige in a multitude of hues, even a few specs of white, whereas in her memories, her father had always been surrounded by color.

  It was a nice place. The best facility money could buy; her bank account could testify to that. Yet it was apropos that his room was a small square of space cut off from the rest of the world and operating completely independently from it.

  She took in his sleeping form, so much smaller than it used to be. She touched his white hair and his eyes opened, confusion registering in their depths.

  Her face fell. That look never got easier to take.

  She moved for the television and turned it on. “Time for the news. You like this.” They were already doing the weather.

  “We missed the beginning,” he grumbled.

  “You were sleeping.” And I was late.

  “I was awake.”

  She pulled out her computer, half-listening to the television. More of the same. Hotter than hell with no relief in sight. Atlanta was always hot in summer, but this wasn’t just hot, this was roasting—like chickens-in-a-grocery-store kind of roasting—and it made her grumpy.

  Her inbox had over a hundred unread messages. She sighed heavily while the news droned on in the background.

  “It appears we made a mistake when we reported the car fire today in downtown Atlanta. Here again is the image we brought you at the top of the hour, an explosion we reported as having killed state justice Anthony Royce.”

  Gemma’s head shot up. Video of firefighters putting out a car fire played on the screen. Everything in the room grew louder, as if her panic had amplified her hearing.

  Royce who’d once said he loved her.

  Royce who’d lied and broken her heart.

  Royce who she stared down whenever their professional paths crossed, which was far too often.

  The anchor cleared his throat. “It appears that was a mistake. The occupant of the vehicle was in fact Barbara Royce, Anthony’s wife. She was pronounced dead at Grady Memorial Hospital.”

  “Oh God, no,” she whispered, holding her hand to her chest. The familiar guilt settled in her stomach like a stone. She’d once been responsible for hurting Royce’s wife. Embarrassing her. Humiliating her. And now she was gone.

  Gemma imagined Barbara in that car, surrounded by flames. The terror she must have experienced. And the girls! They must be devastated.

  “But in a bizarre twist, the FBI reports Justice Royce was abducted from the sidewalk near the explosion by two men as he approached the burning vehicle. The two events are believed to be related.”

  Gemma’s mouth dropped open.

  “Wow,” said the female newscaster.

  “Wow indeed, Janet. Authorities are asking anyone with information about the crime to call Crimestoppers.”

  Royce had enemies, herself included. But what kind of motive could someone have for kidnapping?

  Maybe he was dead, too.

  She shut her laptop, her hands shaking. She needed to get out of here, get back to the office and see what people were saying. Maybe they knew something more than was being reported on the news. “I have to go.”

  “It was nice to meet you,” said her father.

  “You too, Dad.” She stood and walked briskly toward the door, calling over her shoulder, “See you tomorrow.”

  3

  Gemma plopped onto the leather couch in her chambers feeling like a wet towel that had been wrung out. The car bombing and Royce’s kidnapping had the courthouse turned on it’s head even though Royce worked in a different building—with heightened security and the gossip mill buzzing to a nearly audible hum.

  She hadn’t learned anything new about the incident, and she certainly hadn’t expected the majority of the gossip to be about her. It was like the past eight years hadn’t happened, and she was right back there, Anthony Royce’s mistress who’d slept her way to the top.

  A knock on the door to her chambers and she squeezed her eyes shut. “Come in.”

  A woman with short black hair pushed into the room. “I got out of work as early as I could, sweetie.”

  “Did we have plans?” asked Gemma, racking her brain.

  “No, I just figured you’d appreciate a friendly face. I think you need a drink.”

  “I don’t want a drink.”

  “Your ex-lover’s been kidnapped and his wife’s been killed by a bomb. Honey, if anyone needs a drink, you do.”

  Gemma shivered at the thought of Barbara Royce’s fiery death. “She didn’t deserve to die like that, April. She didn’t deserve any of it.”

  “This has nothing to do with you and Royce. Don’t go there.”

  “How can I not?”

  “You didn’t know he was married! It’s been eight years. Stop blaming yourself.”

  “Do you think she stopped blaming me?”

  “We’re going out for drinks. Now.”

  “No.”

  “I’m not asking, I’m telling.”

  “I have work to do, even if I’m not in court.”

  “And you’re really able to get it done today? Like this? You look like shit. Clearly your mind is other places, so take it home with you if you need to, but get the hell out of this office and away from the people who are looking at you sideways.”

  Gemma’s head dropped. “You noticed that, too.”

  “Hell yes. Your
secretary was tripping over her tongue talking about you. Get your purse.”

  She swiped at her eyes, unaware she’d been crying. She didn’t feel like going out. She felt like going home and sobbing in a quiet, dark room. “I know you’re trying to help, but I just want to go home.”

  “I know you. You’re going to beat yourself up until your soul is black and blue, then you’re going to stay up all night worrying about Royce.”

  “Which is exactly what I should be doing right now.”

  April took her by the elbow. “Well, too bad, because you’re coming with me.”

  Gemma let herself be dragged from her chambers, past her secretary who yes—damn it—had an all-knowing and gossipy look on her face. The rumors had nearly derailed Gemma’s career eight years earlier, rumors that were mostly true.

  The only part that was pure fiction was the notion that the affair had gotten her the judicial nomination. That wasn’t true at all.

  But it sure as hell looked true.

  She’d been a hair’s breadth away from moving to a new town and starting over when things started to improve, then one day the rumors were gone.

  Well, now they’re making a comeback.

  “Okay. We’ll go out. But I don’t want to go to a dance club.”

  “Fine. We’ll go to that bar you like on Peachtree.”

  4

  Nighttime was just slightly cooler than the day, the air clammy and still. Logan walked down the crowded street, lights from restaurants and bars shining in the haze. He was aware of the people around him, but all he could see was the burning car and the one woman he couldn’t save.

  Royce’s wife.

  The bodega next door had a camera that covered the sidewalk. You could clearly see Royce come out of the HERO Force building and a man intercept him on the way to his car as the bomb went off and Royce freaked out, the man grabbing him and throwing him into a waiting van while all eyes were on the explosion.

  Logan wanted to find the guy who did this and make him pay. He wanted to strap him into a car and make him burn alive like he’d done to that poor woman.