KITT

  FEDERAL PROTECTION AGENCY

  BOOK TEN

  EVIE RILEY

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Dear Reader

  Other Books By Evie

  About the Author

  Kitt

  Federal Protection Agency

  Book Ten

  Copyright © 2026

  Evie Riley

  ISBN: 978-1-77357-774-6

  978-1-77357-775-3

  Published by Naughty Nights Press LLC

  Cover Art By Willsin Rowe

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author.

  Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as "unsold or destroyed" and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

  No part of this book may be adapted, stored, copied, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  KITT

  One witness. One chance. No room for mistakes.

  Kitt Doyle has waited years to bring a trafficking ring to justice. Protecting a witness who can bury them should be simple—until he’s trapped in a safe house with Jordy and fighting an attraction that threatens his focus on the case. Kitt has his own reasons for wanting these men locked away, and he won’t fail this time.

  Jordy survived a lifetime in captivity. Testifying is his chance to make them pay—if he lives long enough. Falling for the irresistible lawyer assigned to protect him risks everything he’s fought to reclaim.

  Can Kitt keep Jordy alive long enough to testify—or will desire be their undoing?

  CHAPTER 1

  Jordy

  Water ran out of the sink faucet in an uneven trickle. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. What could I expect from plumbing that probably hadn’t been replaced, or even repaired, in thirty years. Yet, I couldn’t help cursing under my breath as I fiddled with the faucet’s handles.

  Today was important. Everything had to be perfect.

  Giving up on the faucet, I turned my attention to the box of hair dye on the sink next to me. The smiling model stared back at me, teeth too white, and hair a blinding bubblegum pink. That color was obviously photoshopped. Even my hair, which was already a pale blond on its own, would never look that blindingly bright without some drastic bleaching beforehand.

  That was fine. I didn’t want anything too extreme anyway. It was just time for a change.

  My hair had been a cause for contention most of my life. Today, I wanted to finally look in the mirror and not cringe at what I saw.

  Grabbing the box of dye, I ripped open the packaging with enough force to send the contents flying in all directions. Cursing again, I chased after the various packets, bottles, and papers before carefully lining them up on the bathroom counter so they couldn’t escape me again.

  Then, after reading the directions through several times to make sure I knew what I was doing, I started mixing the dye.

  The whole time, I kept my gaze pointed away from the bathroom mirror.

  Blond hair, blues eyes, and fair skin. This was an ideal beauty standard that all people apparently strived for. I’d been told more than once how lucky I was to have such features naturally.

  “Ha!” My laugh came out in one sharp, unpleasant sound, as I carefully poured the newly mixed dye into its applicator bottle.

  If people wanted my looks, they were welcome to them. So far, my features had brought me nothing but trouble.

  My blond hair and blue eyes were the exact reason I’d been taken by…

  My thoughts came to a screeching halt and my hand dropped from where it had been reaching for the protective gloves that came with the hair dye kit.

  Something deep inside me started to shake.

  Setting everything aside, I braced my hands against the counter and closed my eyes. Words from the several different therapists I’d worked with while living at the recovery center flashed through my mind. I needed to center myself. Breathing deeply through my nose, and out through my mouth, I fell into a familiar meditation routine, and after a few minutes, the shaking stopped.

  A year ago, this kind of episode would have sent me into a panic attack that lasted all day. Now, I was able to overcome it in just a few minutes. It was a sign of the progress I’d made.

  Yet, I still couldn’t help feeling like a failure every time it happened. It was over. I was safe now. Everything should be fine.

  “Bell ringers,” I said out loud. The name still sent a shiver up my spine, but I held it together.

  It was one of the first things my therapists had focused on once I’d been brought to the recovery facility. Words had power, and I needed to be able to say the name of my abusers out loud. It allowed me to take the power back from them and reclaim it for myself.

  Somehow, describing what the bell ringers had done to me, kidnapping me as a child to be used by a bunch of pedophile monsters, was easier to talk about. Though not pleasant to recall, it was clinical. An action that someone else did, rather than something that happened to me.

  Saying their name out loud, however, had been nearly impossible at first. Giving my abusers a name felt like I was making them real and inviting them into the room with me.

  “Bell ringers,” I said out loud again, just to prove that I could name them now. “Fuck you.”

  With my hands no longer shaking, I reached once again for the bottle of hair dye.

  I could do nothing about the color of my skin and eyes. I’d tried wearing colored contacts and fake skin bronzer once, but both had left me so irritated that I’d had to give up on them.

  My hair, however, was easier to change.

  After escaping the bell ringers, I’d just buzzed it all off. For years, I’d never let it grow longer than peach fuzz. Now, I’d finally gotten comfortable enough to let it grow out a few inches. It was still very short, but long enough for the natural pale color to be evident.

  As I held the bottle of dye up to my hair, I decided that I wouldn’t cover all of it. My therapists insisted that I needed to learn to accept my looks. So, I would do them proud by letting some of the blond color remain, and I only applied the dye to the ends of my hair.

  Once everything was applied, I had to wait twenty minutes for the dye to do its job. Until then, I was stuck in the bathroom.

  So, careful not to let the dye on my hair touch anything, I hopped up onto the counter and started scrolling on my phone to pass the time.

  This phone was another of my accomplishments. When I’d first arrived at the recovery center, I didn’t have more than five dollars to my name. Everything had to be provided for me, including a phone. It had been a low-tech flip-phone, mostly just for emergencies, that I’d barely ever used.

  However, as part of my recovery, I’d gotten a part time job at a restaurant as a dishwasher. It wasn’t much, and honestly, I hated spending my days elbows deep in soapy water washing away the remnants of other people’s meals, but it gave me my own respectable income.

  The very first thing I’d bought with my paychecks was my own phone.

  Enjoying the fruits of my labors, I flipped idly through a few online articles as I waited for the dye on my hair to do its job. It was mostly just clickbait titles, like “DEADLY OBSESSION: The Twisted Love Triangle that Led to a Brutal Murder” and “A Mother's Love Knows No Bounds: Watch This Dog Save Her Puppies from a Flood”. The topics varied so wildly that a person could get whiplash just from reading the titles. A few even looked interesting, but I knew better than to click on them. Most were just ads in disguise, and the few that held actual news weren’t worth wading through the proverbial muck to find.

  I was just about to leave the page and go watch some funny cat videos instead, when the last article on the list caught my eye. The title wasn’t nearly as sensational sounding, but the unassuming words still brought goosebumps to me skin.

  “The End of a Long Fight: Door Closing on The Bell Ringer Case.”

  No way. I’d heard nothing about them since entering the recovery center.

  What were the odds that news of them would show up on my most important day?

  Maybe speaking their name out loud really had summoned them.

  I roughly shook my head, then flinched when some of the dye from my hair went flying and landed on the wall.

  Grabbing some paper tow
els, I cleaned off the wall as best I could, then turned back to my phone.

  Should I click on it?

  I could always just ignore it and pretend I didn’t see anything.

  No, that would never work. Now that I knew the information existed, I’d never be able to rest until I saw it for myself.

  Biting my bottom lip hard enough for my teeth to leave a dent in my skin, I clicked on the article.

  Other than the title, the article had very few words. All it really said was that there had been an unexpected disturbance in the case, followed by a link to a YouTube video. Since I’d already gathered up the courage to open the article, I couldn’t turn back now. So, without hesitating, I clicked on the video.

  It was a clip from a news broadcast. The info sitting on the bottom of the screen under the reporter’s face said the footage was live, but based on the date of the article, I knew it had actually taken place a few days ago. The reporter stood outside a courthouse, surrounded by a small crowd of other reporters all shoving their mics into the face of a man I didn’t recognize.

  “Before this trial started, you said your client would be proven innocent without any doubt,” the reporter lucky enough to get closest to the man shouted over the noise of the crowd. “Now that the case has been put on hold, do you consider this a victory, or a setback?”

  Despite all the chaos around him, the man looked completely unfazed. Not a single strand of his overly oiled hair stood out of place, and his suit had been ironed to such a sharp perfection that he could probably use it in place of a letter opener. He stared straight down the camera, completely confident over every word that came out of his mouth.

  “Although this delay is not ideal, it’s just one more step toward our inevitable victory. It’s clear why the prosecution’s lawyer has dropped out of this trial. My client is innocent, and the opposing council knows it.”

  A new microphone was shoved in his face and another reporter asked him a new question almost before he’d finished answering the first one.

  “The prosecution is certainly going to take this break to try and gather more evidence against your client. Does this worry you or change your plans for the trial going forward?”

  The microphone came close enough to the lawyer’s face that it almost bopped him in the nose. With a smile that was just a little stained around the edges, he pushed the microphone back to a more reasonable distance before answering.

  “The prosecution has no solid evidence tying my client to these so-called, ‘Bell Ringers’ and now they are scrambling. But it doesn’t matter. No matter how long the case is delayed, they won’t find anything because there is no evidence to be found.”

  I couldn’t bear to look at this sleazy lawyer any longer, but I also couldn’t bring myself to shut off the video. I’d tried not to obsess over the bell ringer case, but of course I knew the details. One of the bell ringers hidden facilities had apparently been found in the middle of a swamp in Louisiana. It wasn’t one of the main facilities and taking it down didn’t put much of a dent in the bell ringers operation, but it was the first time any evidence against them had been found. Until now, there hadn’t been any proof that the evidence even existed.

  Even more embarrassing was the fact that the raid on the swamp facility hadn’t been carried out by official law enforcement, but by a group of private investigators. It was a slap in the face of government law enforcement, and now the police of several states, as well as the FBI, were jumping on the bandwagon to make it look like the they’d been a part of the investigation all along.

  I snorted out loud.

  Where was this eagerness before?

  Of course, it was easy to join an investigation once someone else had already cracked it open, but everyone wanted a piece of the credit without doing the work. Meanwhile, victims like me continued to suffer at the hands of these monsters that the so-called “police” didn’t bother to stop.

  The lawyer continued droning on, and a dark part of me wondered what had compelled this man to take on such a case, trying to help pedophiles walk free.

  Was it just a matter of money, or was he also a member of the bell ringers and it was a matter of personal interest?

  The latter option wouldn’t surprise me. The bell ringers had gone unnoticed for so long, and been so successful, because they had a lot of powerful people among their ranks.

  As more of these dark thoughts raced through my mind, something in the background of the video caught my attention.

  The front steps of the courthouse were filled with people. The mass of reporters around the lawyer took up one side of the staircase, but on the other side of the staircase, a different group of reporters surrounded another man.

  At first, I thought it must be the prosecution’s lawyer, but the man at the center of the chaos was wearing a much more casual suit, paired with blue jeans rather than proper slacks.

  This was no lawyer.

  The man turned to the side just enough for me to get a better look at his face, and I gasped when I realized I recognized him.

  Logan Hollingsworth.

  It was the detective that had shown up in San Francisco looking for Clay. I’d helped him in his search, and in return, he’d been the one to get me a place in the recovery center.

  Why was Logan at the trial?

  He wasn’t testifying, and he wasn’t one of the private investigators that found the hidden facility in the swamp. He’d been hired to find Clay, but last I’d heard, that was where his connection to the case ended.

  Had he joined the investigation into the bell ringers since I’d last spoken to him?

  Although my question went unspoken, it was still answered when Logan took a step back and I could see Clay standing next to him. The young man looked better than I’d ever seen him. His blond hair hung down to his shoulders in thick glossy waves, and his blue eyes shone with life despite the stressful environment. At least a dozen microphones were being shoved into his face, but he barely seemed to notice them.

  How?

  Where had such a drastic change come from?

  A couple years ago, the two of us had been in exactly the same situation, practically living in a gutter while selling ourselves to survive. Living in a nightmare that was only marginally better than the hell that we’d escaped.

  Since then, I’d gotten help just like he had. I was on the road to recovery, but it felt like every step down that road took a lifetime to achieve. Yet, Clay was practically glowing.

  We may have started in the same place, but there was now a drastic difference between the two of us, and I had no idea how he managed it.

  Apparently, all of my unspoken questions were going to go answered today, because just as I was thinking about the miracle of Clay’s recovery, I noticed Logan’s arm settled around the other man’s waist.

  Oh. That explained it. Of course he was in such good spirits when he had a man like that at his side. Plus, I heard that he’d also been reunited with his family. It seemed like everyone was in his corner, helping him along his healing journey.

  Lucky bastard.

  Ugly jealousy bit at my heart, sinking its teeth so deep into me that I tasted bile at the back of my throat. I could practically hear my therapist’s voice in my ear, telling me that I was being unfair to both Clay and myself. The two of us had both come a long way, but everyone was different, and I shouldn’t compare our progress. It wasn’t a race and there was no prize for getting there faster.

  Still, I couldn’t stop the tears that welled up in my eyes.

  It wasn’t fair.

  Why did everything have to be so hard?

  Before the tears could fall, I was startled by the sudden sound of an alarm beeping. The timer on my phone was going off, telling me that it was time to rinse the dye out of my hair.

  Shutting off the video, which was mostly over anyway, I hopped off the counter and turned my attention to the bathroom sink. Rinsing out the dye would have been easier in a shower, where I could get my hair wet all at once, but I’d only gotten permission to use the sink for this. The recovery center’s communal showers were new, and the staff didn’t want to risk ruining them. However, the sinks were old, and no one cared if they were accidentally stained.

  It took a while, and a lot of grumbling and cussing, but eventually, I managed to get my hair washed and dried.