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down.
    He put a hand on each forearm and turned her to face him again. His intense stare bored into her. “What does that mean?”
    “Back at the office two came in the front, waving guns around. I ran to the back and there were four more out there. Waiting.”
    Holt shook his head. “Damn.”
    He motioned to Shane and each man took an arm of the dead man and dragged him to the porch. They moved fast and kept low. The guy got a quick patdown then she saw a flash. Before any of it registered in her brain they were back inside.
    Shane leaned the broken door against the frame and each took a position on the side of the opening and looked into the dark night. He stopped only long enough to hand something off to Cam.
    “You’re lucky to be alive.” The chain continued as Cam pivoted and stepped between Jana and Connor, holding something in his palm.
    “They clearly wanted me alive to get to Connor here.” She glanced down and noticed Cam held a cell. With a swipe of his thumb, a man’s face appeared on the screen. Eyes closed and face bruised. She leaned in closer to get a better look. “What’s this?”
    “I got a photo of the guy Holt took down outside and sent it to Davis for facial identification.” Cam moved the cell around. “This is it.”
    A shiver ran through her when she recognized the guy as the one who touched her hair. “That’s one of them. One that chased me, I mean.”
    Connor broke his hold on her and tapped a finger against his ear. “Hey, Davis, any luck on the ID check?”
    Shane frowned as he touched his ear. “Davis?”
    Holt followed suit and did a comm check. When he shook his head, she knew they’d somehow lost contact with the Maryland office. The way Cam and Connor crowded around her only highlighted the potential new danger.
    “What happened?” she asked, amazed at how small and quiet her voice sounded.
    Connor motioned for Cam to pocket the phone. “Everyone stay on guard. Could be nothing.”
    The shaking in her bones suggested otherwise. If she shook any more her teeth would rattle. “Or it could be something, like a blocked signal.”
    She knew just enough to be frozen in fear. There were devices, ways to keep people from communicating on an internal system. Ways to cut people off and make them more vulnerable.
    “We’re going to assume the signal was momentarily lost.” Holt swore when a stray piece of wood from the broken door crunched under his foot. “Okay, let’s run through this. There was nothing on the guy outside or the one on the porch. No ID or obvious markings.”
    She knew he meant tattoos and markings. More than once the team had tangled with some nasty international gang types during kidnap recovery, so the team clearly thought that was a possibility here.
    There was no good answer, but trained mob assassins struck her as one of the worst possibilities. She rushed to give the team as full a picture as possible so they could assess. “There were four men here earlier.”
    Connor froze in the act of typing something into his black watch. “What?”
    The news she was about to deliver would get them all moving. It wouldn’t go over well but evading was never the answer with this group. “Actually, there were seven men altogether. Six back at the charity office, including the leader, when they took me. Then when I woke up—”
    “They knocked you out?”
    She nodded because the red wash of anger on Connor’s face and mumbled profanity she heard from the others said enough. She didn’t need to add to whatever was happening inside of him—or any of them—with more words about that.
    “When I got here, I heard another voice,” she said. “A guy behind me, so I couldn’t see him. He seemed to be calling the shots and the one the leader from the attack on the charity office answered to.”
    “We still have four hanging around at the charity. Or we did. They could be mobilizing and on the way here by now,” Shane said.
    Holt nodded but his attention