Labyrinth, The Second in The Cave Sun Series
Unauthorized
Military intelligence colleagues summon attorney Craig Malcault to testify against his client, a sensual, provocative socialite with a suspect divorce case. But he decides to destroy her file and risk all he's got to guard her secret. Craig was chasing informants a decade ago when his client built an international conglomerate and founded Ara Pacis, the code-named territory in Latin America, with the two men in her life as protection against threatening extermination. The bloodcurdling discoveries Craig now makes about her case are a human rights attorney's stellar dream come true.
That dream quickly becomes a nightmare when Craig learns what life is like, imperiled on government watchlists with unauthorized identities. Craig's client grapples with illusory confessions from the men she propelled to success. She needs a payback mechanism to even the scores of their embattled lives. It is always an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth on the ground where spies and mercenaries make their fortunes, and Craig knows it all so well, unlike management in Washington, D.C. Management brutally uses the client's lover, George, secretly a double agent, as its tool, its sole goal to destroy Ara Pacis for its military intelligence work.
But George, a survivor of torture resulting from a sting operation by management, has his own ideas, and Craig is looking for help to find the chilling secret that keeps Ara Pacis the secret bulwark against armed forces expanding their dominance in multi-domain operations.
Excerpt
I don’t know how he arrived in front of me. I was waiting to be shot with my eyes closed. He whipped me across the face with the diamond necklace. Oh Mort, the man’s got aim. And speed. It lacerated half of my forehead; then it fell to my feet.
“You keep what’s yours,” he said in a sing-song tone. It slashed my insides, my entire heart, that he made himself sound like Stefan laughing at the river last night. When Stefan had kept himself from laughing, that is. How could he have known; he had not been there. He never followed me.
That’s when I did something mechanically for the first time, even though it had not been planned. I turned to the sink and thought of pressing a wet cloth against my forehead, but then I remembered to have read somewhere that laceration wounds have to be left to bleed, but then I wasn’t sure. I decided I had to look it up; I had to educate myself on how to dress different wounds, from beatings, stabbings, and slashing. These ideas were unexpected since I had never thought of them before or had ever thought I would consider them. Past pains had just passed, but now these thoughts were just there as if they had been planned, meticulously and with forethought.
“You keep what is yours,” he repeated. I felt his breath on the side of my face when he said so while blood pooled into the sink. I desired his breath would remain there, for it felt warmer than the hate he directed at me. It felt warm, at one with the blood. Mort, hate is hate; there is no other way, and a prayer in hatred is sometimes heard. He picked me up and carried me to the bedroom.