Betrayals (Black Cipher Files series Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

she’d left. “Why would the escaping prisoners take the time to kill her and chop off her head? I would think escaping was more important."
    “Yeah. But the warlords had no reason to kill her. They wanted the ransom.” Frank steepled his hands together and pressed them against his lips. “Why kill her and risk retaliation from the government, both theirs and ours?”
    It didn’t make sense.
    Jordan smoothed a hand down his shirt, his fingers dipping past his ribcage to the concave hollow of his stomach. He’d lost weight since Staci left.
    He’d been working like a demon, trying to lose himself in something other than worry and fear for Staci’s safety. Turned out the worry and fear had been justified.
    His mind raced. She had told him that her trip was humanitarian and had nothing to do with the CIA. But what if her capture had nothing to do with how she dressed and everything to do with her work for the CIA? If the prisoners really had killed her, perhaps they had discovered she was CIA.
    Did the CIA know more about her death? Did the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence know that Staci was CIA?
    He couldn’t tell Frank that Staci was CIA. Jordan shouldn’t have that intel.
    “There’s a visual in the file. It may give you some clues,” Frank commented as he stood. “It isn’t pretty, but nothing you haven’t seen before.”
    Frank was wrong. He’d seen Staci many ways: happy, angry, flush with desire, sparkling with vitality and good humor, even mischievous.
    But he’d never seen her tortured, decapitated.
    His stomach lurched at the thought of looking at the pictures. He needed to honor her memory, but he couldn’t sit here calmly and look at photographs of her dead body with Frank McClellan sitting across the break room table from him.
    He couldn’t.
    “You okay? You look a little green.”
    “Bad sushi.” Jordan deliberately set the file on the table.
    “Never touch that stuff.” Frank paused in the doorway. “Back to the grind. Let me know if you come with any ideas.”
    Jordan went back to his office and closed the door carefully. He reached for the file, and observed with detachment that his fingers trembled.
    It was too late to save her.
    But he could find out why her life had been sacrificed. It would be his final tribute to the woman who’d invaded every part of his life. He touched the thick paper and flipped the page to look at the visual confirmation of his lover’s dead body. Forcing the bile back down his throat, he meticulously catalogued every detail of the torture.
    The burn marks on her skin, the scrapes and signs of abuse clearly visible in the stark, graphic photos. There were four close-up shots of her naked corpse.
    With his finger, he traced the lines of her body as if he could caress her one last time.
    Her feet were battered and scraped. There were abrasions along the bones in her shins. Bruises, fist marks on her back and stomach.
    He looked at the bones in her shoulders, noted where the mole had been burned off. Sickness rose in his throat again at the clear evidence of physical abuse and torture.
    His hand shook at the violence. Her skin in the photo was so white, her body looked much lighter than her mixed heritage, and very pale against his darker hand.
    The angle of the shots showed her breasts, flaccid in death. He paused, rubbed back and forth at the underside of her right breast, as if he could feel the raised scar tissue from the procedure she’d had to remove a cyst as a teenager.
    The scar wasn’t there.
    He pulled a magnifying glass out of his desk drawer, slowly, purposefully, afraid to let elation build as he examined the stark picture.
    The scar wasn’t there.
    Relief gushed through him, and he could barely contain his joy. He wanted to whoop with glee, he wanted to scream from the top of his lungs.
    The woman in the picture wasn’t Staci.
    Did the CIA know? Had they already sent a team in to extract her? Except if they had, wouldn't Intelink have