11. The Billionaire Space-Time Continuum

Navy SEALs are team players, not lone wolves.

Contemplating his solo status on Sarah's remote farm dredged up the African proverb: If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.

Blaze and Sarah needed to go far, metaphorically, if not literally. Safety for her wouldn't be simple or nearby.

Thus, Blaze spun his virtual Rolodex and tugged on his connections.

Approaching people in the correct order was crucial. His asks would create ripples in the billionaires' space-time continuum, gossip and repercussions, and thus he had to leap from contact to contact in the correct sequence.

He stood beside Sarah's kitchen table, staring at the glowing screen of his phone and contemplating strategy.

Sarah was twisting freshly churned butter in a red-checked kitchen towel. "Your cell phone's cord is still plugged in. You know they make those things with batteries now."

"I'm going to talk to dozens of people today," Blaze said, mentally flipping through his contacts. He'd signed into his usual phone account, doubtlessly allowing Twist to track him, not that it mattered anymore. "Mary Varvara Bell is coming. We need to be prepared. You have your community here in Kalona, but now it's time to call in my community."

While the phone rang next to his ear, Blaze watched through the dining room window, surveilling the tall corn and road outside.

The wind tiptoed over the corn tops, and the dirt road behind them was vacant, no dust clouds marring the clear air.

No intruders.

Not yet.

The first call he made was to the owner of Rogue Security, an old acquaintance who'd served in the Swiss Special Forces Command when Blaze had commanded DEVGRU, and they had a long conversation about logistics.

"Sorry to call you again so soon, Dieter," Blaze said.

A pen clicked in the background. "Same bratva goons as your house in Chicago or new ones?"

Dieter's smooth voice was an amalgam of European accents: more fluid than a staccato German accent, steadier than lyrical French notes, and an upper-crust calmness more like a commander than a soldier.

Basically, he was Swiss.

"Same bratva goons, different location," Blaze told him.

"Are you still in the US?"

"Yes. Iowa."

Shwarz's voice dropped lower. "That's a problem."

The Rogues couldn't help them this time. Shwarz's entire staff was providing security for a royal crowning in an unspecified European country, even though a glance at the internet headlines made it obvious which country was getting a new king that weekend. None of the Rogues could reach Kalona in less than five days.

So Dieter Schwarz, mercenary extraordinaire, passed the phone to his wife, who had connections of an entirely different sort.

Flicka von Hannover had been a few years behind Blaze at Le Rosey, the billionaire boarding school Blaze had attended with those other three guys who now made his teeth grind in his head.

Plus, Blaze had climbed a harbor wall in Monaco during Flicka's rescue the year before.

She didn't owe Blaze, exactly. The rescue operation had been massive. The Princess of Hannover was not personally indebted to dozens of mercenaries.

But it was a connection.

Thus, Flicka listened and passed Blaze's conundrum on to her older brother.

Through the dining room window, Blaze watched the corn rustle and the road from the country highway do absolutely nothing. The cornstalks' shadows stretched eastward in the late afternoon sunshine.

His phone rang in his hand five minutes later, and the caller's phone number was nothing but a line of zeroes.

Neat trick.

Wulfram von Hannover's British accent was the most upper-class of all the upper classes. His quiet cadence and clenched jaw sounded like Prince William on a particularly refined day when he was not pandering to the British tabloids' readership. "Blaze Robinson, I presume."

"Yes, and thank you for calling."

"You were part of the Rogue Security operation that saved my sister."

Not that Blaze was calling in a quid pro quo, but, "Yes."

Thus, Wulfram von Hannover wired a substantial amount of money without further discussion.

An hour and a half had passed already.

Blaze's next text was to the Bully Boys, his dried-beef eaters from the Navy, to explain the situation and call for anyone who wanted to participate in a tour of duty sniping mafiosos from an Iowa cornfield, and that's when his phone started pinging like crazy.

No one had been near New York City after midnight when Blaze had needed help two nights before, but several of them were Midwestern Angus bulls at heart and thus within driving distance of Kalona.

While most of his fellow former combatants bore a wounded heart, many longed to return to battle where the only goals were murder and survival.

Civilian life was as tedious as lining up toothpicks for a living.

Calvin Jones called first, asking, "You got a problem?"

"A big one," Blaze said.

"Does it involve government-sanctioned violence?"

"It's not government-sanctioned."

He sighed. "Tell me about it anyway."

Blaze was two minutes into explaining the scenario when Sarah's phone rang. He looked away from the cornfield to her.

Sarah set the gun she was cleaning aside and tugged her phone from her jeans' hip pocket, a sexy move that drew Blaze's attention to the curves of her ass and made him want to commit all kinds of breaches of operational security.

Her startled glance worried him.

He held his phone away from his ear. "Who is it?"

She frowned. "I don't recognize the number."

Wulfram von Hannover shouldn't be calling her and had no way of knowing her digits. "Is it just a line of zeroes?"

"No, it's a two-one-two area code. That's not from around here."

Blaze said into his phone, "Calvin? Let me call you back in a minute," and hung up. "Sarah, that's New York City. Don't—"

But Sarah was already lifting her phone to her ear and saying, "Hello?"

Damn.

Sarah stood straighter like she was trying to balance while buffeted by a windstorm. "But we didn't do anything wrong."

Blaze dropped his phone on the worn-smooth wood of the dining table as he hurried to the kitchen. "Who is it?"

Sarah glanced up at him, her warm brown eyes wide, and said into her phone, "I don't know, Logan."

Blaze held out his hand. "Give it to me."

Sarah frowned and turned away, putting herself like a shield between him and the phone she held.

Fine. He'd wait.

Sarah's posture crumpled, cringing, like someone was beating her back and shoulders and she was curling in to protect herself. "I'm sorry I made her angry. I'll apologize to her in person if she wants. Or over the phone, anyway."

"At least put him on speaker," Blaze said. "I won't say anything."

"But why would she do that? Logan? Logan?"

She held the phone in front of her and stared at it. Only the lock screen showed on its face.

Blaze's phone rang.

He answered and, holding his fingers to his lips, put it on speaker. "Yeah, Logan. What do you want?"

"I know you're right there with her," Logan's voice said from the phone.

Sarah leaned back against the kitchen counter, her hands white-knuckling the edge of the laminate top.

Blaze said into his phone, "I asked what you wanted."

Logan Bell's voice was pitched low and angry as he whispered in Blaze's ear above the muttering crowd and growling car engines, like he was walking outside in New York City. "Mary Varvara Bell is pissed. She's done with both of you. You'll be dead by the end of week."

"The end of the week? That's a long time, Logan. Has the team left yet?"

"No. They're assembling and planning. It's an all-out tactical assault."

This was good information. Blaze had to keep him talking. "Tactical? Is the team ex-military?"

"She hired someone to hit you, and I don't fucking know or fucking care who."

"What kinds of weapons?"

"I don't know."

"Timing?"

"I don't know!"

A thousand tactical plans spun in Blaze's head like stars, but it all depended on whether Logan was warning them about MVB or merely stating a fact. "You're betraying her by telling us this, Logan."

"I'm not telling you. I'm pissed asfuck at you. Dr. Bell doesn't trust me worth shit now, and it's all because of you and her. Once again, Sarah came flouncing into my life and fucked it up."

So this wasn't a warning, just a courtesy call so he and Sarah could get their affairs in order and make peace with the Deity. "You can't blame her, Logan. Your father remarried after your mother died, and then Sarah was born. She's an innocent."

"Innocent, my ass. They threw me out."

"Your father did that, and maybe your stepmother, I don't know. But Sarah was seven years old when it happened. She didn't have anything to do with it. You need to let it go."

Logan launched the fury that had built inside him his whole life, a black, swirling darkness Blaze had sensed as far back as when they were thirteen and lying on opposite walls of their narrow dorm room.

Logan started, "How fucking dare you?"

A torrent of hate for the world and his natal family poured from the phone speaker, an unceasing spew of vile agony and festering wounds.

"My father hated me because I was clinging piece of shit from his former life he couldn't shake, and because my mother's family was wrapped up with Sokolov bratvas, and because his father liked me, even if my grandfather was evil old vampire who killed my mother—"

"He what?" Blaze asked.

"He had her killed. Whacked, as Italians call it. Because my father made contact with authorities. And when he killed her, the White Russians went to the mattresses with the Sokolov bratva. The war lasted two decades until Sokolovs were wiped out last year."

"But—but you were tight with your grandfather," Blaze said, the phone heating in his hand, shock reverberating in his head. "You stayed with him during school vacations. You took us to his apartment above Central Park with you."

"I had nowhere else to go!"Logan yelled in his ear, and the farmhouse around Blaze sharpened like the walls were knives. "I was a kid, and I had nowhere else to go. He was only relative who would take me in."

"The Malefactor killed your mother, Logan. He indentured you and your friends with those loans because he knew we were going places and wanted us under his thumb when we did. He was a monster."

"So what if he was monster? And if I had to become a monster to survive with him, I did, and I am, and I don't give a flying fuck about what you think of me. This is who I am. It's who I've always been."

"You're an adult now," Blaze told him, summoning his speech for veterans who'd joined the military at eighteen and walked into a war. "You're a grown man. You can make your own decisions. You don't owe loyalty to the dead."

Even though Blaze did.

"Yeah, I fucking do owe loyalty!" Logan's guttural voice yelled from the phone. "I'm boss of the Obshchak, the Security Group for the bratva. I'm second in line after Mary Varvara, our Vor, andI can't leave."

"Yes, you can," Blaze told him. "We'll help you."

"I won't leave," Logan said. "This is my life. The Malefactor and Mary Varvara and White Russian bratva took me in and gave me a home. They are my only family who hasn't thrown me out, and I will never betray them."

"Wewere your family, Twist, Micah, and me. We never betrayed you, but you betrayed us. You sucked Micah and Tristan into the bratva somehow, didn't you? Was it your grandfather's money to begin, like you did with me? Was it blackmail or threats?"

"Yes," Logan spat. "All of it. And I would do it again. And I will kill you and Sarah Bell because that's my job and my honor."

Blaze had been coaching damaged veterans for too many years to miss what was going on, but when someone was trying to kill Sarah, everything was a weapon, especially information.

He said, "It sounds to me like after your father abandoned you, you replaced your father with his, and then formed an oedipal pair-bond with your biological aunt who just happened to be an organized crime boss because you thought she would love you and fill that gaping, sucking mother-wound of yours. Am I reading that right?"

The gasp and a moment of shocked-cold silence in the signal between their phones told Blaze he was correct, but he'd known that.

Logan's voice ceased, and the background echo from the phone's speaker dissipated.

Blaze looked at the phone screen to make sure Logan had hung up on him. Figured.

Sarah's dark eyes flared wide as she stared at the phone. "I didn't know that about his mom."

"Me either, and I lived with him in a tiny dorm room for four years," Blaze said.

Maybe he hadn't really known Logan that well.

"Say, did you guys ever move away from the farm? Like, did you ever take an extended vacation or anything?"

Sarah squinted at him like he'd lost his mind. "Of course not. In case you haven't been listening, I can't leave the farm."

"Because Logan mentioned several times when we were at school that he'd come back here during some summer break and found the farm abandoned. He said your neighbors didn't even know where you'd gone."

She rolled her eyes so hard that she must've seen the back of her skull. "No. If it was during the summer when the corn was growing and we had to monitor it all the time, absolutely not. Even in the winter, we've always had animals to care for. Plus, we had more livestock when my parents were alive. We never left the farm for longer than a few hours, and even then, our neighbors had our cell phone numbers."

So, that had been a lie.

"Okay," Blaze sighed, nodding. "Okay. Really, nothing's changed. We knew Mary Varvara Bell would send hired killers here, and we knew it would be soon. It's going to be soon. I need you to leave."

"I'm not leaving."

He had to convince her. "I'll stay. I'll stay and milk HowNow and turn them out to pasture every day, and I'll defend your farm. But I want you to go someplace safe."

"This is my home. I will stay and defend my home."

"It's going to be different this time," he told her. "Last time, they thought they were dealing with one naive farm girl, so they sent a few guys to the front door with handguns. This time, they'll know they're dealing with a retired Navy SEAL. Logan said they hired someone from the outside to hit this place."

Her dark eyes were steady as she stared right at him. "Then why aren't you leaving?"

"Because I won't bug out unless you do. We'll throw the cat in the car, and you can take HowNow and Charlie right back over to your neighbor in the trailer. We'll hit the road after that."

"We don't have anywhere to go. We can't just drive around the country for the rest of our lives."

"Grab your birth certificate, and we'll expedite a passport for you. We can be in Paris in a few days. Heck, I know a guy in British Intelligence who has a manor house on the outskirts of London. We'd have nation-state security there."

"Didn't a bratva kill that Russian spy guy in England twenty years ago?"

Blaze laughed at the ridiculousness of this conversation, a breathy huff that was a gruff imitation of other people's laughs. "Damn, how does an Iowa farm girl even know things like that?"

She lifted a hand in an exaggerated shrug. "Dude, I read books."

"Yeah, okay, but that was probably Russian intelligence services who murdered Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210, and it was in 2006. And it was in a crowd in a small town, not on the secured estate of a high-level MI6 intelligence officer."

Sarah squinted at him again, a dubious stare that was as frickin' adorable as a suspicious hamster. "How do you know he's a real spy for MI6 and not just faking it? A guy in my high school class told everybody that he worked for the CIA."

Blaze shook his head. "We met on a military exercise where my Navy SEAL unit was conducting an operation with the SAS. He was the UK's special forces' intelligence liaison, and we realized we had mutual friends from boarding school. He's the real deal."

She frowned, a tiny line between her eyebrows. "I suppose that tracks."

"We'd be safe there. We can leave right now."

She shook her head.

"I can gather up Foghorn and the hens. Remi would love to go for a ride in your truck. We can evacuate every living thing off this farm in an hour."

The resigned sadness in Sarah's eyes frustrated him. "I can't, Blaze. I can't leave."

Even though she didn't have a vestigial Russian accent like Logan, the cadence and stolid refusal to walk away from where her loyalties lay was exactly like him.

"Then I'm not going anywhere, either." Because Blaze was evidently as pig-headed as Sarah was. "But this house needs to be fortified, and we'll need reinforcements."

A call jiggled his phone, and the name Kyle Mortimer displayed on the screen.

Blaze wasn't surprised Kyle had a fast trigger finger. "Hello?"

"Robinson! What's going on?" his gravelly voice asked. The Iraqi burn pits had not been kind to Kyle's throat.

"I've got a situation."

"I love a good situation."

"This is a bad one," Blaze admitted.

"Even better."

For anyone else, staying was an absolute suicide mission, but Blaze Robinson was a Navy SEAL with highly trained friends.

And he had only begun to fight.