Page 69 of Undercover Shadow
TAG
My Glock was raised and tracking as splinters of ancient oak settled across the floor. Con swept left while Ash went right, and Gus covered our rear with the synchronization that came from carrying out countless missions together.
The tower room stretched before us—circular walls, narrow windows showing the night sky, medieval architecture that had witnessed centuries of violence. But nothing like this.
Then we froze.
Every single one of us stopped dead in the doorway because of who stood in the center of the room—Ambrose Ashcroft. Next to him sat Nightingale, who was bound to a chair, with cold steel aimed at her head.
Brose.Ash’s uncle, the man who’d wandered through our childhood summers with his stories about art and his absent-minded charm, the doddering fool we’d tolerated at family gatherings, who’d asked me countless times about purchasing pieces from Glenshadow’s east gallery, now appeared calm and amused with a weapon in one hand and his mobile in the other with his thumb pressed firmly against the device’s screen.
I surveyed the scene in a heartbeat. Nightingale’s wrists were zip-tied to the seat’s arms, and her ankles were bound to the legs. Bruises marked her throat and arms. Blood had dried at the corner of her mouth. But her eyes tracked everything.
“What the fuck…” Con’s sharp intake of breath cut through the silence.
Beside me, Ash staggered as if he’d taken a blow to the chest. “Brose?”
The man barely looked at him. The absent-minded uncle had vanished. This was someone else entirely—someone who’d hidden behind eccentricity for decades.
“Evelyn?” Lex’s voice was just above a whisper when she came around us and saw her mentor alive, standing near a computer terminal.
McLaren didn’t acknowledge her. She kept typing, her fingers moving across the keyboard with determined speed. Whatever she was doing, she wasn’t going to stop.
Renegade’s voice carried a betrayal sharp enough to cut.“MacLeod?”
His family’s estate manager stood near the door with his head down, refusing to meet anyone’s eyes. The man who’d welcomed us to Dunravin, whose wife had fed us, who’d warned us about dangerous passages, was part of this. The hits kept coming.
There were two other men in the room—Dalgleish, who’d positioned himself by the window, with his weapon drawn and tracking our entry, and Ian MacKenzie, who stood near the door, blocking the only other escape route.
“Hello, boys.” Brose’s tone was conversational, as if he were greeting us at the pub for drinks. “It’s been quite a while since we were all together.” He raised the device. “If my finger leaves this screen, AIWS will launch. So let’s all remain calm.”
The standoff crystallized with brutal clarity. We had the numbers—five armed operatives against four hostiles—but Ambrose controlled two things that mattered above all else—Nightingale’s life and the AIWS trigger that would activate the moment we took him down.
Con’s weapon tracked between Ambrose and Dalgleish, his stance perfect despite the shock of betrayal. Ash kept his aim steady despite his uncle standing before him as the enemy. Lex stood beside me with her sidearm raised as she stared at McLaren.
Silence stretched between us. Then Ash broke it with a single word that sounded ripped from his throat. “Why?”
Ambrose’s expression shifted. The mask slipped, and decades of resentment crawled out from underneath—raw and venomous after a lifetime of being buried.
“Why?” His laugh was bitter. “Your father took everything from me. The title. The estate. The inheritance. George received all of it because he was born first.” His words built in intensity. “Birth order gave George everything and left me the scraps.”
His knuckles had gone white around the weapon’s grip, but the barrel never wavered from Nightingale’s temple. She sat absolutely still, reading him the way she’d been trained to read targets. His thumb remained pressed against the mobile’s screen, steady despite the tremor in his voice.
“Do you know what it’s like?” Ambrose continued, his voice rising. “To grow up in the same house, receive the same education, have the same blood running through your veins, but know that you’ll always be less? George got Ashcroft, the London townhouse in Belgravia—seven bedrooms overlooking Hyde Park. The Scottish estates—three of them, including the grouse moors that brought in two million annually. The art collection—a Rembrandt, two Turners, a Caravaggio that museum curatorsbegged to display. I got a trust fund that wouldn’t buy a decent flat in Mayfair and the expectation that I’d be grateful for it.”
He laughed again, ugly and sharp. “I was smarter than him. I understood culture in ways he never could. But none of that mattered. And then he took Alexandria.” The words came out quiet, which made them worse. “The woman I loved was happy with me until my older brother decided he wanted her. We’d been together for a year, we were planning a future, and then I brought her home to meet my family. Six months later, they were married and I was invited to the wedding. I had to stand in the chapel at Ashcroft and watch him marry the only woman I’d ever loved.”
Beside me, Ash stilled. He knew the story, just not the tragic ramifications of it.
“Then I met Fallon Wallace.” Ambrose’s expression hardened. “At an auction at Sotheby’s ten years ago. She was bidding on a Caravaggio, driving the price up just to watch the aristocrats squirm. She saw me watching and approached during the champagne reception. She knew exactly who I was—the forgotten younger brother of the Duke of Ashcroft. She’d done her research.”
He shifted, but the barrel didn’t move from Nightingale’s head. “She introduced me to others like me. Dalgleish is the Duke of Moorheath’s younger brother. His sibling inherited eleven estates and an art collection worth fifty million pounds. James got a gallery startup loan and a pat on the head.”
Dalgleish’s expression didn’t change, but his grip on his weapon tightened.
“MacKenzie—the spare heir of Stormbridge—works as a shipping broker while his older brother runs the family empire. He takes orders from men he went to school with, men who treat him like hired help because his brother holds the title.”
MacKenzie’s jaw clenched, but he remained silent.
