Under Sean’s Protection by Lisa Oliver

Chapter Eleven

All eyes were on Sean in the mansion house room at the end of the video, which Aiden had played on the large HD screen.

“Who the fuck is that bitch?” Levi was the first to say anything. “She’s a fucking psycho.”

“Her name is Janelle,” Tron said quietly. “She’s a human contractor, hired by the council when they need some dirty work done to one of their own.”

“You know her, Sean?” Aiden asked.

Sean nodded. Know her. Hardly. He used her to get close enough to a target years ago to complete a complicated job. The target was her husband. A lowlife lawyer. He earned her trust, fucked her as often as was necessary to get the job done. Which he did, of course. He always got the job done. And then he hadn’t seen or heard from her since.

“She was a mark on a job a long time ago,” was all Sean said. He wasn’t up for sharing anymore because his mind was working overtime trying to figure out where the video was recorded and where Kyle was. The horror he’d felt, seeing his mate exposed, the bite he’d given him being stitched up, he pushed firmly to the back of his mind. Now was the time for strategy. Anger would come later.

“Well now we know that Kyle is not being held at the council offices,” Tron said. “This Janelle typically bases her work off site, always keeping an arm’s length between her and the official council business. That way they can wash their hands of it if things go sideways.”

“Any idea where she could be?” Ranger asked Tron. “There were trees outside the window. Some forest location?”

“That would narrow it down to about a billion possibilities,” Marcus pointed out.

Sean had watched the video with an eye towards spotting any clues about the location. At the same time, he tried to remember more and more about his time with her. She was married to a lawyer, but unhappily so. She was terrified of her husband, and so Sean had to promise that he would save her from him. That he would be her protector. And now she’s taken the one I will protect.

“Would she follow through on her threat?” Cam asked Tron.

“No question,” Tron said. “Like I said, council is desperate to get you all back. It’s despicable, but smart of them to hire it out to a third party, so they can cry ‘we didn’t think it would come to this’. But it always ‘comes to this’ in the end.”

“Sean?” Sean looked up to see Ranger watching him. “Anything you can share that sheds some light on her?”

“I’m thinking about it.” What else did he know about her? That job lasted months. What did they do together besides fuck in all that time? What was it about the video that was nagging at him, tugging at him, almost screaming at him to figure it out?

“She’s obviously provoking us, taunting us,” Tron said, “stitching up the bite mark the way she did. She might be human, but working for the council, she’d know that’s an insult more than anything, a cruel and demented slap in the face to Sean and Kyle’s claiming of each other. Something only a non-shifter would dare undertake. She’s making it personal with you for some reason, Sean.”

Personal. How personal did I get with her? Sean wracked his brain, thinking back to a time that was years ago. Did I say that I loved her? Possibly. Assassins said whatever needed to be said, did whatever needed to be done, to ensure the target was eliminated, and in that particular case, that it looked like a death from natural causes. No suspicion of murder could be risked at the time because of who the lawyer was working for, which was why Sean was sent in rather than Ranger or Levi. They were the ‘looks like a murder’ types that littered bodies all over the place as warnings to other rogue paranormals.

“Aiden, can you replay the video again?” Marcus suggested. “Now that we know what she’s said, let’s focus our attention on anything that might give away where they are.”

As the video came back on the screen, the voice of Janelle saying the same words he just listened to a minute ago, a memory shot into Sean’s awareness like a bullet. It wasn’t a word, or place, or feeling that came back to him in a sudden flash of clarity. It was a scent. Of course! The one overriding memory of Janelle he should’ve never forgotten.

And now it was the clue he needed. By the time the last line of the video was spoken, Sean was already out the door and on his bike.

All the others, so intently focused on mining the video for clues, didn’t notice him slip away.

/~/~/~/~/

He was half an hour away before he pulled over, took out his phone out and speed dialed Ranger.

“Sean, where the fuck are you?” Ranger barked into the phone.

“I know where she’s taken him,” Sean said. “I’m on my way to get him back.”

He could hear Ranger relay the information to the group.

“Tell us where you’re going and we’ll send back up,” Ranger instructed, but Sean wasn’t about to let his friends fall into the council’s trap.

“It’s too risky,” Sean said. “Stay there and find a way to buy some time with council and prevent them from contacting her.”

“And what if you’re wrong?” Ranger asked the one question Sean had been wrestling with since he’d got on the bike. “What if you’re off on a wild goose chase, hours away from council offices, and they call it in that we’re not all there. Kyle is the one who will pay for that.”

“I know,” Sean said, “but Kyle was my responsibility the moment I bit him. If he… if something…” he stopped that line of thinking. “Either way, I don’t have much of a life ahead of me without him, do I?”

“Don’t try and be a freaking hero, Sean, not now.”

Sean could hear Tron’s voice in the background, yelling into the phone. Ranger must have put me on speaker.

“I’m not a hero,” Sean yelled back. “I’m an assassin and I’m doing exactly what you trained me for.”

Disconnecting the call, he double checked the route on his phone for the location that his nose and a few shards of a broken memory were leading him to and squinted into the sun. 

Sean had about eight hours before it set, and the ride was five hours away. He opened up the throttle of his bike to full speed.

He’d make it in four.