Overture (North Security, #1)

It’s not an accident that Samantha’s music room is right next to my study. The house has thirty thousand square feet. I could have put her anywhere, but I wanted her near me. I’m soaking up every goddamn second until she leaves for good.

Josh leans against the bookshelf and crosses one ankle over the other, the very picture of casual disinterest. I know my brother well enough to see right through his exterior. Unfortunately he also knows me well enough to see through mine. “What’s up?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t go out tonight.”

“And skip Hassan’s bachelor party? He would never forgive us. I would never forgive us either. We haven’t had a break in weeks.”

“She said she wasn’t feeling well.”

He frowns. “Samantha?”

“No fever. No cough. I could call Dr. Foster.”

“Is it the tour?”

I make a growl. “Maybe. It’s a hell of a lot of pressure. She wants us to think she’s all grown-up, but an eighteen-year-old has a lot of growing up to do.”

“We enlisted when we were eighteen,” he says.

“And I’d take a battle zone over Carnegie Hall any day.”

“She’s more mature than you were at eighteen.” He pauses. “Well, maybe not. You were an old fucking soul even as a kid. But so is she. You have that in common.”

The press will be all over every conference. Press with interview questions about her father? Red carpets. Meet and greets with VIP guests who are heads of state and A-list actors. And then there’s Harry March, the celebrity tenor headlining the tour, known for being volatile.

I hate that I can’t protect her from any of it. “There’s no way I can make her stop the tour. She’s got her heart set on it.”

“And you can never say no to Samantha.”

That makes me scowl. “I said no to concerts if they interrupted school for the past six years. She deserves to make her own choices now.”

“Not to mention she’ll be eighteen by then.”

My heart thumps against my chest in useless protest, but I make sure not to show any sign of it to my brother. Christ. I ignore the way my pulse thrums. It would be too easy to rise to the bait. Too easy to take the stairs two at a time and prove to myself that Samantha’s still there, if only for a short time more. “Kiss my ass.”

“You’re really worried about her.”

“Is there actually a reason why you’re here, or do you just love to annoy me?”

“Annoying you is reason enough, in my opinion, but I do actually have something work related. The Red Team has gone dark.” He stands almost at attention, as if we were both still in the navy.

That makes me pause. Three highly trained operatives could handle themselves in the frozen tundra. There were reasons they might go dark in order to maintain cover. “How long?”

“A week.”

Of course. For all that Josh acts like he doesn’t give a shit, he manages the daily operations of North Security with sharp intelligence.

He wouldn’t have brought me this unless it was serious.

“What did their last report say?”

“I’m sending you the full file now, starting with the last entry, but it doesn’t indicate a problem. We have their coordinates to the south of the Ural Mountains. No injuries or major setbacks.”

“And the target?”

“Local intelligence indicated he might be hiding in the wilderness.”

That left a lot of terrain to cover, but that’s why I sent the Red Team. They’re the best. Efficient. Skilled. And goddamn discreet, though that is really a job requirement here.

I stand and pace across the marble floor, something I do when I’m faced with a problem. It would be better if there were music being played by a world-class musician, but she’s not feeling well. Why isn’t she feeling well? Focus, North. “What’s your read on the situation?” I ask because Josh has been with me through a hell of a lot of campaigns.

Those blue eyes are a little darker today. “It’s a long time for what should have been a straightforward task, but they know the stakes.”

The stakes, meaning detection by the local law enforcement agencies. Identify a traitor to the United States with enough survivalist tendencies to last ten years in the forest. All while remaining invisible to Russia’s police and military. Straightforward? Yes, that’s one way to describe it. Fucking dangerous, too. That’s what we do.

“The Red Team is the best,” I say, sitting down again. “We trust them. And if they went dark to stay off the grid, sending in another team could risk the entire operation.”

Josh nods, looking about two percent relieved. He’s a genius at operations, but it takes something different to be in command. The hard truth is that it takes heartlessness. I care about the men and women under me, but I still send them into the line of fire. I still risk their lives so we can all make a few bucks.

That’s the cold and utterly honest reason why I’m the one sitting in this chair.

Neither of us mention that our brother Elijah leads the Red Team.

The three of us are related by blood, but it would be a stretch to call us a family after our upbringing. I’m the one who founded North Security, but I gave both my brothers a stake when they joined the company. Elijah insists on leading the Red Team, with its dangerous missions and its near-constant deployment.

“Oh, and Josh?” I say as he turns to leave. “Put the other men on standby.”

I’m responsible for their lives, which means I’m also responsible for their deaths. It might be a bullet from the traitor or even local military taking umbrage to American mercenaries. It might be tomorrow or in five years, but whenever it happens, their blood will be on my hands.





CHAPTER SIX





A violinist burns about one hundred seventy calories per hour, almost twice as much as masturbating.


SAMANTHA

Zero. That’s how many times I’ve stopped practice early.

I’ve never been someone overly interested in breaking the rules. A people pleaser, that’s me. Especially if the person is a hard-ass. My dad wanted me to play the violin perfectly to impress his diplomat friends? I did that. He wanted me to clean our little apartment and cook dinner? I could make roast chicken with a side of green beans by the time I turned five. He wanted me to follow him around the world without uttering a single complaint. Done.

When he died, some part of the twelve-year-old girl thought it had to be my fault. My mother was from Indonesia. She met my father when he lived there—and she died a long time ago. My older brother had no interest in coming back to take care of me.

It was Liam North who stepped up to do that duty.

I knew, without anyone telling me, that I couldn’t mess this up. We weren’t even related by blood. He was friends with my father. Or as he’d said to the reporter, I felt it was my civic responsibility to step in. I was just a kid, but even kids understand basic math.

There was no one left on this earth to care about me.

I took every independent thought, even the tiniest shred of rebellion through my teenage years, and poured them into my music. Something safe.

Suddenly it’s not enough.

I want to do something wild and crazy like go skinny dipping in the lake down the hill. I want to ride in fast cars and parachute out of a plane. I want to do something shocking.

My room looks the way I left it this morning, everything neat and orderly, my books in alphabetical order. Alphabetical order! I can’t even blame that on my quasi-military surroundings. Liam North does not require this kind of precision from me. Well, he also doesn’t really read anything that isn’t a classified brief, but that’s beside the point.

I pull out A Concise History of Western Music with its worn spine and shove it next to The Rose That Grew from Concrete.

And then clench my hands into fists to keep from moving it back.

“Such a rebel,” I mutter to myself. “You’re the actual worst at this.” It’s going to take a lot more than unalphabetized books to fix this ache inside me, and I can’t even manage to do that much.

Rest, Liam told me.

He’s right about a lot of things. Maybe he’s right about this. I climb onto the cool pink sheets, hoping that a nap will suddenly make me content with this quiet little life.