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“Leo?” Griff tried to concentrate on the road, but the uneasy tone of Leo’s voice had him worried.
“My aunt on our mother’s side is a university professor in America. But before she accepted her professorship, she worked for a pharmaceutical company, a company she and her husband, Ty, exposed for its unethical research on military veterans. The government dissolved the company and used the remaining funds to compensate the families of the victims. This all happened when I was a kid.”
There was more. Griff sensed it in his blood. “Spit it out, Leo.”
“Pharmasyn. She worked for Pharmasyn.”
Fuck.
Jo stared across the cab at him, the rumble of the engine suddenly impossibly loud.
She swallowed, shook her head. “Is that possible?”
Griff rolled his hands on the steering wheel. This was becoming far more complicated than he could ever have imagined. “Leo. Where in America does your aunt live?” Griff’s stomach knotted. He already knew the answer.
“Alaska.”
Of course. Fuck.
28
Leo splashed bourbon into a tumbler and stepped outside onto the deck. Outside, the icy wind whipped off the dark water below like a warning. Balsfjord churned before him, waves tipped white against a steel-gray sky. Winter was coming fast—the endless night creeping closer.
He downed the bourbon in one burning gulp, eyes closed as he focused on the scorching heat rather than the cold dread coiling inside him. This bleakness was his penance. His brothers had found redemption and love through the two amazing women they now shared their lives with, but for him, there would be no salvation.
His darkness stained his soul, the stains too deep to wash away. There was no coming back from that.
“Sir.” Inga’s voice startled him from the dark reverie. He turned to see her silhouetted in the open doorway, arms wrapped tight against the biting wind. “Temperature’s dropping.” She joined him on the deck, pulling her shawl snug around her shoulders.
“Hmm.”
She tilted her head to study him. “You’re still a young man. You need more than bourbon to warm you up.” She crooked a suggestive eyebrow.
Despite the ongoing crap of the last few days, the mess he’d had to clean up at Griff’s apartment, the idiots Abe had dealt with at the airfield, he couldn’t suppress a smile. “Inga Brahe, are you playing matchmaker?”
She kept her gaze on the white-capped water. “I would never presume, sir.” Her eyes flicked to his knowingly. “But a call came in for you earlier on the secure line. A woman. English. She left no message.”
Leo tensed, the name on his tongue unspoken. Clearing his throat roughly, he managed an offhand, “Okay, thanks.”
Inga patted his cheek. “It’s not too late, sir. Not for a good man like you.”
Leo swallowed hard, shame burning through him. A good man. If only she knew the truth. He offered a weak “Thank you, Inga,” unable to meet her earnest eyes.
“You’re welcome, sir. Dinner will be at seven.” With a tip of her head, she left him alone.
Fuck. With a sigh, Leo turned his back on the siren call of the waves and more bourbon, and headed back inside. There was work to do.
* * *
Fucking Pharmasyn. Raptor by another name. Again.
And now linked to his family. His family. He accepted he was flawed as a man, but there was nothing he wouldn’t do to protect the people he loved.
A touch of the mouse woke up the trio of Macs curved around his personal desk. A few clicks brought up the files Kat had sent him when Fox had been protecting Abbie. Pharmasyn had paid the girl’s private school fees as a crafty way of keeping her out of her mother’s reach. It had worked. For a while.
He scrolled down through the information on Pharmasyn, remembering Kat’s words that the company had been shut down for over thirty years. The same company his aunt Sophie had worked for.
Above his computer screen was a framed photograph of him, Eli, and Zak at their grandmother’s house. Three young boys, muddy cheeks, clothes askew, cheesy grins for the camera. Their mother had dropped them off for a week to give her a few days respite from three rambunctious boys. They’d spent the week diving in the lake, building rickety forts with scrap wood and falling out of trees, much to his grandmother’s despair. Behind them stood his mother, wearing her favorite cream dress dotted with red cherries. He picked up the photograph and ran his thumb along the frame edge. She stood side by side with her younger sister, Sophie.
