Dean Bannon was across the table from Victoria. An ex-FBI agent, Dean thrived on fieldwork. He loved the thrill of the hunt, and Sarah knew he would go to any extremes to find the missing.
Wade Monroe sat next to Victoria. Wade was a former Atlanta detective and, in general, a hard-nosed guy who would do anything to get the job done. He was currently glaring—intently. But he wasn’t glaring at Sarah. His golden stare was fixed on the tall, blond man who stood with his back to them all. A man who appeared to be staring out of that massive picture window and down at the city below. A man who—
—turned toward her.
Not him. Not him.
“Hello, Sarah,” Jax murmured.
She could actually feel all the blood leaving her head and flowing right down her body. No, he could not be there. She’d left him that morning. Wait, why would he be there? Her gaze jerked to Gabe. Gabe was staring at Jax.
“I think you know Jax Fontaine,” Gabe murmured.
Um, biblically, yes, she did. But did the others realize that?
“He’s our new client.”
Sarah grabbed tight to her control. She’d already revealed too much with her rapid breathing and her startled response to Jax. It was a good thing that Dean’s fiancée, Emma, wasn’t there. Emma could read people so very easily. The woman had a gift—or, rather, a wickedly honed talent. Emma would see right through her act.
But Emma isn’t here . . .
She stepped away from Gabe and advanced carefully toward Jax. He was dressed in a suit—not what she expected from him at all. He didn’t look like the leader of one of the biggest motorcycle gangs in the South—which he supposedly was. Instead, he looked like a too-in-control businessman. The tattoos on his arms were covered up, and the only markings she saw were the dark tats on his fingers.
“Who is missing?” Sarah asked Jax. But she really wanted to know . . . why hadn’t he told her sooner? Why waste any additional time on a case? With victims, time was always of the essence, even on cold cases.
Gabe had learned that lesson the hard way. If he’d found his sister just a little bit sooner, Amy would have been alive.
“That’s the tricky part,” Wade called out. His voice was mild, though, despite the frown that still pulled at his features. “Seems we have the missing, right here in this room with us.”
Her head cocked as she gazed back at Jax. She wasn’t sure what those words were supposed to mean. Normally, they were hired to find someone who’d vanished. Only once had they worked a different type of case.
Back then, a woman calling herself Eve Gray had come into the LOST offices in Atlanta. Eve had possessed no memory of her life, and she’d wanted the LOST group to help her figure out just who she was. They’d found out the truth for Eve, and along the way, Gabe had fallen for the blonde.
But Jax Fontaine wasn’t suffering from any memory loss, she’d stake her life on that. Was he just trying to play some game with them?
“I was seven when I was taken,” he said softly.
Goose bumps rose on her arms. Staring into his eyes, she saw how very serious he was. This is no game.
“I don’t remember where I was before then.” His voice was flat, so odd, without any emotion. “I know that the man who took me was a sadistic freak. He’d hit me, he’d threaten me, and . . .” Now his gaze seemed to see into the past. “For days, he’d lock me in a closet. He did that until I stopped begging to go home.”
Helpless now, she reached out to him. “Jax . . .” Her fingers curled around his arms. No emotion was in his voice or his face, but she could feel his pain, all but hanging in the air between them.
“After a while, I learned not to ask for home.” He glanced down at her hand, as it curled around his arm. “But I’m asking now. I’ll pay whatever price LOST demands, but I want to know where I came from. I want to know who I was . . .” His lips twisted. “ . . . before I became Jax Fontaine.”
Jax . . . a man who’d been arrested over a dozen times before his eighteenth birthday.
A man rumored to be the boss of the New Orleans underworld.
A man who’d . . . been a victim?
“So tell me the price,” Jax murmured, “and I’ll pay it.”
Her fingers tightened around his arm.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Gabe said, his words soft but laced with sympathy. “We don’t take a case, not until we’ve researched it more. We have to make sure—”
“—that I’m not bullshitting you?” he asked bluntly.
“Yes.” Gabe’s equally blunt reply.
“I’m not.” Jax’s gaze dipped to Sarah’s hand. “The man who became my—my father . . .” His lips twisted with disgust as he said the word. “He . . . took me. That I know with certainty. I was someone else before, and I need to find out who the hell that kid was.” His breath heaved out. “He didn’t work alone. There was a woman with him. Her name was Charlene. Charlene Fontaine.” His lips curved the faintest bit. “She became my mother. She . . . loved me.” He pulled away from Sarah and looked back out the window. “She used to tell me that my old mother was gone. But that she’d be better. And . . . in her way, she did take care of me.” After a moment, he said, “When I was fifteen, she killed herself.”
Sarah’s hand fell back to her side.
“I tried to save her, but I couldn’t. I figured my past died with her.” His fingers pressed to the glass. “But then I learned all about the LOST group, thanks to Emma. And I realized I might just find out where I’d come from, after all.”
She wanted to help him. No, more than that. Sarah needed to help him. She’d thought that Jax was strong, dangerous—he was. But there was so much happening beneath the surface with him.
Sarah glanced back over her shoulder. Dean had tensed at the mention of Emma’s name. No big surprise there, considering that the guy was in love with Emma Castille. But, once upon a time, Emma had been involved with Jax. Intimately involved. Sarah knew Dean didn’t exactly like having Jax anyplace near Emma but . . .
Don’t worry, Dean. Jax has moved on. Sarah just wasn’t going to get into the specifics of that whole moving-on bit right then.
Gabe’s intent stare was on Jax. It was Gabe who would make the final call about the case. He’d be the one to tell them if they could go ahead or if—
Gabe nodded, a small inclination of his head. “We’ll see what we can find for you.”
Instead of relaxing, Jax’s powerful shoulders tensed even more.
“But you should be warned,” Gabe continued, “you might not like what we discover.”
Jax just laughed as he turned to face them all once more. “Obviously, you don’t know what my life has been like. Nothing can be much worse than what I’ve lived through already.”
Sarah believed him.
Seven years old.
A chair leg scraped. Sarah glanced back and saw that Victoria had risen to her feet. “We’ll need your DNA,” Victoria said. “We should do some blood work. We’ll check NamUs and see if any reports match your case.”
NamUs—the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Yes, they could check the database and see if there was a report of a seven-year-old boy vanishing around a timeline that fit Jax’s story. They could see—
“Don’t bother with NamUs,” Jax said, his voice close to a growl. “Did you think I hadn’t already tried them? Hell, I’ve hired three PIs in the last two years. No one ever turns up anything.” His gaze bored into Sarah’s. “I want you to be different.”
“We don’t give up easily,” she whispered.
“Good. Neither do I.” There was a deeper, harder note in his last words.
She shivered.