CHAPTER ONE
Rebecca Barrows. His muscles vibrating with the urge to get up and run to her, Jay stared at the photo of the woman who’d stolen everything from him: his body, his heart, his soul.
She looked the same, yet different.
Identical to her sister, but now she sported the exact same tattoos.
Full sleeves in shades of gray ran from shoulders to wrists, and if she’d copied Maya completely, her back would be covered too. The garden of good and evil. Nothing could better describe the Barrows sisters.
Becca. Good. Sweet. Kind.
Maya. Evil personified.
Aside from their looks, the two shared nothing in common. Except for Jay. His fault. He’d come between them.
“You sure that’s her?” Adam Grayson asked. The leader of the Joint Task Team swept his gaze from one side of the boardroom’s big screen to the other, his gun-barrel gray eyes flitting back and forth between the pictures of the twins until they landed on Becca. “How do you know?”
Jay shrugged, his attempt at nonchalance fooling no one. “I just know.” He’d always known. Could tell with a glance who was who. Nothing had changed in the seven years they’d been apart. He’d know Becca anywhere.
Regret beat hard against his rib cage.
After everything they’d been through, letting her go had been a mistake. He should’ve followed her to Europe. Gone to her in Switzerland. Cornered her in Italy. Caught up to her in Germany.
She hadn’t wanted to be found. Not by anyone. Not ever. And despite keeping tabs on her, he’d respected her wishes and kept his distance. Misappropriation of technology and unauthorized computer surveillance—he’d used his superpowers and his new position as a CIA cyber operations specialist to trace her digital footsteps and watch her from afar.
The technical intricacies too difficult for the average social media user to comprehend; his methods had been highly illegal, and the most effective way to stay connected to the woman he loved, regardless of her personal preference on the matter.
It’s called cyberstalking, asshole.
Okay, whatever. Call a spade a spade. He didn’t give a flying fuck. Invasion of privacy aside, who had he hurt besides himself? He’d kept himself hidden behind his firewalls. Hadn’t initiated contact. Left her to live the life she wanted, free from the nightmare of their past.
Then a little more than two years ago, she’d disappeared. Poof. Gone. No signs of her anywhere. Not since she used a fake passport at the Munich International Airport and was captured by a surveillance camera looking exactly like Maya, right down to the ink in her skin.
“And she’s in Russia?” Cody Babbitt asked, his questioning gaze swiveling from the Smartboard to Jay.
He frowned and nodded. Yeah, when it came to Becca, Jay had to be the dumbest fucker on the planet. For a guy who didn’t believe in coincidence, he hadn’t made the connection between her falling off the digital map and his recruitment to the JTT.
Then again, even though he’d had a hand in coding it, he hadn’t known about Dominion’s creation either, or the computer virus’s role in the plans of the domestic terrorist they were after.
The same terrorist Becca now had an unhealthy interest in pursuing.
“After she took the bait and hacked the bogus file Davis suggested we plant on Johnson’s computer, I managed to reverse trace her IP across half the damn planet. She dodged me through multiple VPNs, proxies, and more than one darknet relay, but eventually, I managed to track her to Big Diomede.”
With a click of his mouse, he pulled up a map and zeroed in on the Russian island located halfway across from Alaska in the middle of the Bering Strait.
“Motherfucker,” Zander Cavanaugh said. “Diomede is a satellite site for IronShield, a government-funded research and development facility owned by Russian billionaire Alexsandr Volkov.”
“That makes no sense,” Grant Kincaid said. “Big Diomede is a slab of granite surrounded by one of the most dangerous bodies of water in the world. Why use a Russian military base that’s nearly impossible to get to as a secondary research facility?”
“That’s the thing,” Zander replied. “Nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing there, but the remote location makes perfect sense if Volkov is Russia’s representative on the Imperium Council.”
Jay didn’t give a shit about Alexsandr Volkov or the Imperium Council. Let the bad guys win and the world burn. He only cared about one person. Okay, fine. Not true. He had his JTT family: his best friend Jamie Snow, Jamie’s wife Summer, their daughter Halia, and the rest of the team.
He’d give his life to protect them all. Keep them safe. Shield them from the mess he had a hand in creating. But Becca came first. She always came first. He had no choice in the matter. She wasn’t a conscious decision. He lived and breathed for her.
Always had.
Always would.
