Hostile Territory (Blackbridge Security Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Hostile Territory

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Synopsis:

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Social Media Links

  OTHER BOOKS FROM MARIE JAMES

  Hostile Territory

  A Blackbridge Security Novel

  Marie James

  Copyright

  Hostile Territory: A Blackbridge Security Novel

  Copyright © 2020 Marie James

  Editing by Marie James Betas & Ms.K Edits

  EBooks are not transferrable. All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded, or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the publisher’s permission.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Credit: Najla with Qamber Designs and Media

  Acknowledgments

  Readers! Thank you for jumping on this ride! It means the world to me that you’re joining me on this new journey with the men of Blackbridge Security!

  Shoutout to Christine Estevez and Wildfire Marketing for having my back on these releases! Couldn’t do it without them!

  Thanks Natasha Carrere and Read.Review.Repeat for the help with this release!

  Shoutout to my BETA’s (Laura, Brittney, Brenda, MaRanda, Michelle, Jamie, and Shannon for keeping a close eye on this and making sure I start off this world on the best foot possible!

  Mary with Ms.K Edits, you lady are absolutely amazing! Keep that shit up!

  Bloggers! Thank you a million times over! I couldn’t do this without you!

  ~Marie James

  Synopsis:

  Can you call someone an enemy if you haven’t seen them for the better part of a decade?

  Deacon Black is perfectly content with the status quo—work, sleep, repeat.

  Who cares if he’s rigid, structured, and set in his ways?

  It’s a job requirement that keeps his men safe and his company’s doors open.

  One phone call is all it takes to upend his life and land him right back into a past he has tried to forget.

  Revisiting old ghosts is the last thing he needs.

  Especially when the forced trip down memory lane includes the only woman he never wanted to see again.

  Annalise Grimaldi hit the jackpot with her life—from her trust fund to her best friend, she has it all.

  But her world comes crashing to a halt when her best friend vanishes—leaving behind an apartment in tatters and more questions than answers.

  There’s only one person she can think of that can help in a situation like this.

  She hates to make the call, but there isn’t a thing she wouldn’t do to make sure her friend is found.

  Even setting aside her hatred for Deacon Black.

  Prologue

  Deacon

  So this is what broken promises look like. A room filled with people I don’t know and won’t ever see again. Nameless faces who have no clue about the turmoil swirling in my gut. People surrounding me for a variety of reasons, none the wiser that my world is imploding, or would be caving down around me if Dani was ever on time.

  I know she’s late just to spite me, but even with her chronic pettiness, I can’t help but feel saddened by my tasks today.

  I promised to love Daniella Altieri for the rest of my life.

  I made those vows before God and our families.

  She was it for me.

  I hate that she still is.

  I hate that I’ve been gone, serving a country that rewards my loyalty with paltry pay and gripping nightmares, instead of at home loving her and holding her in my arms.

  Can’t she understand that I’m doing exactly what we talked about?

  We wiled away the nights for years, setting up our goals and dreaming about what our future would look like.

  She was never happy about my need to join the Army, but she accepted it. Or at least I thought she did.

  Can’t she see how lonely I’ve been without her? How it kills me to leave her at home alone when I’m gone for work?

  If only she’d been lonely, too.

  My bed was empty.

  Hers hasn’t been.

  I could’ve forgiven her, eventually.

  She wasn’t interested. She was quick to cut ties, and that cut me like a knife, wounding me more than the other scars covering my body from war.

  The low chatter of the packed courtroom only serves to irritate me, but the sight of Dani finally walking in with a ridiculous entourage has my jaw clenching enough to ache.

  I understand Annalise being here. Those two are connected at the hip and have been since I met my wife freshman year of high school. There’s no need, however, for her parents and a couple other friends to bear witness to my annihilation.

  Six years of marriage and Dani can’t even look in my direction as she sits down on the other side of the room surrounded by her support group.

  As we wait our turn before the flustered judge, I take a good, long look at my wife. Her hair is longer, but her once always smiling face is twisted up in a mask of indifference that’s become all too familiar recently. Her eyes are no longer bright and shining, gazing around looking for some sort of trouble to get into. There’s a hardness to her features right now that makes me hopeful. Is she regretting being here? Is she having second thoughts about throwing our love in a fire and watching it turn to ash?

  My attorney clears his throat beside me, no doubt a warning to stop glaring across the room, but I ignore him like normal. He’s a placeholder, a requirement for today’s proceedings, and that’s it.

  Dani nods mechanically when her father leans in to speak to her, shaking her head in response.

  I just need one glance, one sweep of her eyes in my direction and I know I can pull her back in. One quick second to change her mind. Our love hasn’t been a fairy tale, but it’s been close. Meeting in high school, all it took was that one look before we knew we were going to be important to each other. I just need that contact one last time to make her realize she’s making the biggest m
istake of her life.

  Her eyes aren’t the ones that meet mine.

  Annalise Grimaldi, Dani’s best friend since diapers and shit-stirrer extraordinaire, turns her head and sneers in my direction. The woman would be a knockout if she wasn’t evil incarnate. She’s always hated me and going by the animosity flowing from her amber-colored eyes, nothing has changed.

  Without thought, I tilt my head up in a nod, a challenge, the very same way I did years ago when we were teens. Only back then, I had the girl. Back then, Dani would smack her friend on the arm and tell her to chill out. I won the battles between Anna and me years ago.

  Today, that doesn’t happen.

  Today, I lose everything.

  Ten years together, the last six married to the woman of my dreams ends with a fifteen-minute session in front of the judge. A couple of signatures, not one word spoken between the two of us, and I walk out of the courthouse a changed man.

  Walking to my truck stiffens my spine and my resolve, but it’s the sight of Dani wrapping her arms around a man’s neck in the parking garage that will change me forever. Her dad, beaming down at his little girl as she embraces the man is something I never experienced.

  Both of her parents hated me from the jump, and if I ever took a step back and examined the relationship I had with Dani, I’d realize that it started out as rebellion on her side and it’s ending with her going home. Her sacrifice, her choosing me was temporary, and somehow, deep in my gut, I always knew it would be. I was never enough for her, and no matter how hard I worked to be the man she thought she deserved, I was always going to come up short.

  Somehow, my eyes drift away from my now ex-wife to her best friend. Time has been good to her, and the two-and-a-half years since I last saw her sneering face have changed her from the teen queen she thought she was to the woman she has always pretended to be. Gorgeous, thick in all the right places, the face of an angel with a heart as black as midnight. She’s finally gotten what she wanted, but when her eyes meet mine, there’s a shimmer of sadness in her eyes, a hint that maybe she feels sorry for me, and that’s worse than her animosity.

  I don’t need pity, and certainly not from a woman who has spent the entirety of her adult life trying to rip a hole in my relationship with Dani. Knowing that she’s finally succeeded, I look away just completely done with the entire day.

  The heartbreak I felt in the courtroom waiting for Dani to show hardens. The grief washing over me as we signed the paperwork all the while she refused to look me in the eye dissipates, and by the time I climb into my truck and pull away, I’m a changed man.

  I’m impenetrable, untouchable, my heart caged in concrete, wrapped in chains, and tossed into the depths of the ocean never to feel the warmth of the sun again.

  Chapter 1

  Deacon

  “Casing the joint?”

  A smile is on my face before I can even turn around.

  “Nothing around here worth stealing.” Facing Jake Lincoln fully, it only takes a few heartbeats before his arms are wrapped around me.

  I clap him on the back twice, but he seems more reluctant than usual to let me go.

  “Never stopped you before.” He grins wide, the corners of his eyes and laugh lines on his face deepening. The man is always smiling, always happy, always the first one to step up to help someone out. It was like that the day I met him at fifteen and it still rings true today.

  “One time.” I hold up a finger for emphasis. “I stole something once.”

  He doesn’t need the reminder since he brings up our very first meeting each and every damn time I see him.

  “You stole a gun, Deacon.” His brow furrows, face growing serious, much the same way it did seventeen years ago. Only today he’s not in the familiar uniform I’ve seen him wear more times than I can count. There’s no holster belt on his lean hips, no badge pinned to his proud chest. Today he’s dressed to the max in a navy suit and a tie.

  I grin back at him when it’s clear he’s struggling with taking the serious route. “It was an airsoft gun. You make it sound like I broke into a car and jacked a drug dealer’s arsenal.”

  “That would’ve happened a few days later if I hadn’t stepped in.”

  We both pause for a moment, letting reality sink in. He’s probably correct in his assumptions. At fifteen, I was wild and rebellious, ready to prove to myself and everyone around me that I was a badass, that I was street smart and could survive in any situation.

  It didn’t matter that I grew up with two loving parents in a nice middle-class neighborhood. It didn’t matter that I laid my head down at night on clean sheets with a full belly when most of my friends didn’t have those luxuries. None of that mattered. I’d started down a dark road, and if Jake hadn’t been called when I was caught red-handed with a stolen toy gun at a local retailer, my life could’ve been dramatically different.

  “You’re right,” I finally agree, smiling wistfully with the memories of just how hard I thought I was back then. It doesn’t even come close to the way I am now, but life experiences make things different. They set you on a path no one could’ve predicted.

  I’m now officially a badass, at least those around me say that I am. Only I’m on the right side of the law, mostly anyway.

  “How’s your mom and dad?”

  People swarm around us, interrupting to shake Jake’s hand and tell him congratulations on his retirement as we talk, but it’s always like this around Jake. He’s the sort that draws people in. Without even knowing why, people gravitate to him, much the same way I did all those years ago when he offered me something different, something I never thought I’d long for. He offered safety in his mentorship, safety to be around friends who didn’t judge and more importantly didn’t tempt me into doing all the wrong things. Positive peer pressure changed my life and kept me from making mistakes that would eventually be too hard or impossible to correct.

  And he did this with numerous young men and women. Many of those people from my teen years are the ones walking up and greeting him like family, most all of them successful in their own right.

  “You didn’t answer me,” Jake prods as another person walks away. Like always, he never leaves a question unanswered, and he expects the very same from those he interacts with. Accountability is key, according to him.

  “Mom is thinking of retiring. She claims kids are brats more so now than ever before, and there isn’t one conversation we have that she doesn’t lament about how much better things would be if she had gone into accounting rather than teaching. Dad is still working down at the shop, and says he’ll continue until the day he dies, especially if Mom retires.”

  We both smile, knowing Dad is full of it. He loves Mom like I’ve never seen before. I grew up watching that, wanting that for my—

  I clear my throat, refusing to let any of those thoughts infiltrate my head. Eight fucking years since I walked out of that courtroom, and I still get agitated, more over the wasted time than anything else.

  “She still teaching in Ellendale?” I nod. “If she thinks those kids struggle, she hasn’t seen the kids I work with.”

  Jake shakes his head, and I know exactly what he’s talking about.

  Growing up with a mom teaching at one of the best private schools in St. Louis meant free tuition to said school. It also meant I was the poor kid amongst the rich brats, which in turn lead to the constant need to prove myself, only I went in the opposite direction. Instead of working hard to do better, to be better, to show those idiots that I belonged there with them, I gave them exactly what they expected. I was a hardass, skipping school, disrespecting teachers, being an all-around jerk. That is until Jake. The changes were gradual, but eventually Mom’s job was no longer threatened by my behavior and I grew up to be a man that was almost respectful.

  The Army only lasted eight years. There was no point in staying in after my divorce. I only joined to provide stability for the family we were supp—

  Another throat clearing. A
nother smile at Jake.

  “What are you planning to do with yourself now, old man?”

  He scoffs, both of us knowing that he’s still a badass on the basketball court and could chase down a criminal in full uniform if he were challenged to.

  “Retirement just means I can spend more time down at the rec center.”

  “And that means I’ll probably never see him again.”

  Jake softens, opening his arms immediately as his wife Connie steps up beside him. He presses smiling lips to her cheek, and I watch as her hand settles over his stomach, the move so practiced it’s rote.

  “He’s going to have to find a compromise, right?” I grin at Connie. “Maybe you two could volunteer there together.”

  My phone buzzes in my pocket as Jake raises an eyebrow at his wife, as if they’ve already had this conversation and I’m a voice of reason.

  My phone flashes an unfamiliar number, but I press decline even though it’s a local number. I can only be fooled by robocalls so many times. Before I can shove it in my pocket, the phone rings again. For the second time, I hit ignore for it only to ring again.

  “Give me a moment, please,” I tell them as I walk away, accept the call, and hold it to my ear.

  “What?” I snap, angrier at myself for bringing the damn phone in with me than anything else.

  “Deacon?” The voice is an unfamiliar screech, clearly an upset woman. “Is this Deacon Black?”

  Oh hell. A phone call from a hysterical woman is never a good thing.

  “Speaking,” I snap.

  “It’s Anna.”

  “Okay.” I don’t give much away, still trying to figure out what’s going on.

  “Annalise Grimaldi.”

  I nearly drop the damn phone. Never in a million years did I think this woman would call me.

  “I can’t believe you still have the same number.” Her words don’t fit the hysteria she displayed a few seconds ago, but that doesn’t stop the wave of cold chills rushing down my spine.

  There’s only one reason that Anna would call me. I haven’t seen her or heard anything about her in the eight years since my divorce, and we only have one connection.