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he’d made a serious mistake trusting Noah Armstrong.
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    Noah had baited Sean on purpose, and he regretted it.
    He was letting his personal feelings cloud his interactions. How could he not? Rogan-Caruso Protective Services had a long-standing reputation worldwide, long before “Kincaid” had been added to the masthead. Sean’s three older brothers had built the company from the ground up after the deaths of their parents. They had their fingers in a lot of pies and didn’t always play by the rules. Noah had been an officer in the Air Force for ten years, and rules were there for a reason. Noah had indirectly butted heads with Rogan-Caruso operations, so when he met Sean nearly a year ago he assumed he was just like the others. Especially his brother Liam, whom Noah had dealt with several times overseas. Rogan’s parents were inventors who created gadgets for the military, and after their deaths Liam and his twin sister had taken over the overseas operations until they left RCK to start their own enterprise.
    When Noah had first met Sean, he’d seen Liam in him. Arrogant. Cocky. Manipulative. But Sean had something that Liam didn’t, and it took Noah months to see it.
    Honor. It’s what separated Sean from his brother, what made Noah not despise him. Unlike his brother, Sean had proved he was willing to risk his life for others. Noah didn’t always like how Sean got results; he didn’t like private security companies like Rogan-Caruso-Kincaid taking the law into their own hands. But in the end, Noah reluctantly looked the other way because sometimes the system failed and RCK could right wrongs.
    Besides, he’d wanted Sean as part of this investigation, knowing full well what he was getting into.
    But everything Noah knew about Sean made him wonder if he had really changed. He’d fallen comfortably back into his old gang. There were crimes he’d committed that he could never be prosecuted for because the statute of limitations was up. And these new crimes were protected by Sean’s current immunity agreement with the FBI. Sean was a lucky guy in so many ways, skirting past the law, making his own rules, using his wits and charm to get his way. The potential hiccup in his life plan—going to prison for a nine-year-old crime—was being cleansed as they spoke, simply because there were worse bad guys than Sean.
    For ten months, almost for as long as Noah had known Sean, Noah’d been quietly investigating U.S. Senator Jonathan Paxton. No easy feat considering that Paxton was a senior-ranked member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversaw the FBI. But there were too many questions after two former FBI agents with a connection to Paxton went to jail for running a vigilante group that targeted sex offenders. Paxton had funded the front organization, and while so far the white-collar division hadn’t been able to find any financial evidence that he had paid for hits, Noah’s gut told him Paxton had been involved.
    But neither of the agents was talking, and terms of their plea agreements allowed them to remain silent. Noah thought they’d gotten off far too easy, but he understood the pressure that the U.S. Attorney’s Office was under. The agents had killed known sex offenders—brutal rapists and child molesters who had been released early. The media attention, not to mention finding a jury pool that would convict, were both obstacles the Justice Department didn’t want to deal with during an election year.
    But Noah thought there was far more to the scheme than killing sex offenders. After talking to Paxton in the course of another investigation over the summer, Noah got the feeling that Paxton was involved again in something very shady. Only it was impossible to get a warrant on a hunch and Paxton would use the law to his advantage.
    In the course of his off-book investigation, Noah had learned that Paxton had paid Colton Thayer a substantial sum of money for consulting. Research into