“No, get the team on it. Ozzie could be high, but there’s no love lost between him and Dracon.”
“But why wouldn’t there be? We’ll beat the crap out of him ourselves for touching Izzie.”
“You can bet that Bullard didn’t know,” Quinn said. “He would never have tolerated it.”
“So we’re assuming that he didn’t know, and we’re assuming that she’s run away for whatever reason and won’t want to have too much to do with anybody at this point.”
“But it was a year ago, so hopefully she’s landed in a much better place.”
“Yeah, but where?” Ryland asked.
Quinn pulled out his phone and called Kano. “Hey, I need help running down Izzie. You know her the best.”
“Izzie, Izzie?”
“Yeah, Bullard’s half niece or whatever the hell that relationship is called.”
“I haven’t heard from her in a long time. She and Bullard had quite a fight over her boyfriend, last I heard.”
“Is that this Dracon guy?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly who it is,” Kano said. “Can’t forget that name. Sounds like a cosplay character.”
“We’re at her last known address,” Quinn said, looking around. “According to the neighbor, her boyfriend Dracon beat her and potentially, according to Ozzie, kept her captive.”
“Son of a bitch! Well, you can bet that Bullard didn’t know,” he said. “He would have gone in there and taken her away. How long ago?”
“According to this neighbor guy, it was quite a while, one whole year ago.”
“It would have to be,” Kano muttered. “Where is she now?”
“That’s why I’m calling. Do you have any idea where else she hangs out?”
“She was in college, had a problem there, but she did end up graduating, though I know an incident happened there too.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, Bullard said she was really vulnerable. Mostly still struggling over her father.”
“And that just makes her a target in so many ways,” Quinn said. “I need a location though.”
“Bullard had her phone number, which hopefully she didn’t change after their big fight,” Kano said. “Let me see if I can rattle around and find it.”
“You should have it somewhere. I know he left you with all his important contacts.”
“We all had it at one time. I think I’m the only one who kept up with it.”
“And why is that?”
“I don’t know,” Kano said. “I think at one time Bullard hoped the two of us would get together.”
“And that wasn’t happening?”
“No,” he said, “we weren’t the same people at all, and she was younger, still experiencing growing pains.”
“Okay,” Quinn said. “Send me the number as soon as you find it.” And he hung up. He filled Ryland in. “I’m not sure what’s going on,” he said, “but it sounds like she and Bullard had a fight over a boyfriend, and maybe it was this one,” he said, “but apparently another incident occurred at her university.”
At that, Ryland frowned and stared off in the distance. “I remember Bullard having quite the confab over it all. He was pretty apoplectic about it all.”
“Do you know what the details were?”
“One of the profs, he was stealing some of her material and then was trying to get her fired from the campus.”
“Oh, good. At least it wasn’t a sexual assault or anything like that.”
“Actually I think that was involved too,” he said. “The same prof.”
Quinn stared at Ryland and added, “The guy’s got more ego than brains.”
“Yeah, and I think Bullard stepped in, although I’m not sure that she wanted him to. I think soon afterward the prof was gone. And things got pretty ugly between Izzie and Bullard.”
“No surprise there,” Quinn said. “If you think about it, that’s not exactly something Bullard would let slide.” Just then the phone rang again. It was Kano.
“I found her number. I haven’t dialed it yet.” And he passed it on.
Quinn quickly punched it into his phone and said, “Okay, talk to you in a bit.” He hung up the call and dialed the new number. When a woman answered, he asked, “Is this Izzie?”
*
“If you mean, Isabella,” Izzie said, with some exasperation, “yes.” Would she ever outrun that nickname? It had driven her crazy for the longest time. Although now it was bringing on a bit of nostalgia.
“Good, this is Quinn,” he said, “Where are you?”
“I am in Africa,” she said, “just outside Johannesburg. I was wondering about contacting Bullard for a visit.”
“In that case,” he said, “we need to talk.”
Her voice froze. “Why?”
“In person, please,” he said gently, giving her the meeting place. “We’ll see you in a few minutes.”
“Good enough,” she said and hung up on him.
She sat here, trembling. She could do this. She hadn’t done all that training to lead to a normal life for nothing. This was her chance to prove she’d gotten over that sick bastard Dracon. Even now she looked back in time, not understanding how she’d ended up where she had and with the man she had.
He wasn’t her type; he wasn’t anything like what she would normally have gone out with.
Yet she’d been so lost and alone and desperate after her best friend had died that she would have taken anyone who looked like they’d cared. Only he didn’t care.
And after Bullard had bullied her to leave Dracon, she’d been determined to stay. Fool.
And she’d paid for her temper. In many ways, she was more like Bullard than her father, even though they were half brothers. It hadn’t taken long for her ex to drop the smooth-talking persona and to show the real asshole underneath. They went from never fighting to her never doing anything right to him slowly threatening her to downright beating her.
Then it got worse.
She hiccupped, trying to hold back the tears. Not so much about what she’d been through—because she’d survived—but that she’d lost herself, so much so that she became someone who’d stayed with him.
She was a different person now. It had taken a year, a hard year, but an important one. She’d grieved for her friend she had lost and also for the loss of her own innocence. Izzie had come to see that not all that glittered was valuable. That sometimes the shine wore off faster than anyone was willing to acknowledge.
Her phone rang again.
Quinn snapped, “And make sure you show up. It’s important.”
Chapter 2
Izzie stared at the phone, surprised. Quinn of all people. And what she had said was true; she was thinking about contacting Bullard. She missed him. When her father had disappeared after a mission, while he’d been taking off a few days, she’d been devastated. They hadn’t been super close, but the realization that she’d lost that opportunity to bond with her biological father had sent her to connect with Uncle Bullard. He, being the man he was, had opened his heart and home and had given her a sense of belonging. Then they found out her father had been kidnapped and Bullard, who’d never stopped looking for his half brother, managed to free him from a foreign prison some five years later.