by Isabel Wroth
“I was tired, still fucked up from my time overseas, still trying to reconcile everything that happened to me wallowing in my own fuckin’ guilt, so I hung back and let them do their thing.
“The supervisory agent in charge told us we had all the evidence we needed to prove she was peddling flesh, and it was good enough to get shit rolling.” Tobias rasped, hissing as the memories got closer.
“The two senior agents—Simpson and Styles—they'd been partners for over a decade and bragged about how they'd been trained by CIA in the eighties, back when the government really got shit done.
“They had a routine they'd built together over the years and practically moved in tandem. They started out easy, verbal interrogation, mind games, the whole—no one is coming for you, you're alone, confess or you'll never leave here alive—all the shit they say to break a person.”
Tobias's voice cracked a little, his hand shaking as he pulled his palm down over his face.
“I believed she was innocent after five hours, but Simpson and Styles weren't convinced, said they had experience and could smell the guilt on her or some bullshit.
“I called my direct supervisor and told him what I thought. He said the intel we had was solid, and we had to be sure because the lives of women and children were at stake, blah blah blah.
"When I came back, I found Simpson and Styles in the wet room. Simpson's specialty was water-boarding. Said he had it down to a science, and he wasn't wrong.
“On someone not trained to withstand that kind of thing, it's a hundred percent effective, and her story never changed.
"She confessed to having stolen the cinnamon gum out of her fifth grade teacher's desk at the age of eight, and replaced it with the shit that's supposed to turn your mouth black.
“She told us about the time she slashed some dude's tires at school, keyed his car, and dumped a load of wet pig shit into the cab for having told everyone at school he'd popped her cherry in the back seat.
“She cheated on her senior math finals, snuck out and stole her grandma's piece of shit car to go to a party she shouldn't have and wrapped it around a telephone pole the same night.
“She said the worst thing she'd ever done was lie to the funeral home to say she didn't have the cash to pay for a casket and a funeral for her grandma, so the funeral home cremated her instead and Dillon kept the money to make sure she had enough to get the hell out of her two-horse town and into college.
“She confessed to putting a laxative in the precinct captain’s coffee because he wouldn't stop hitting on her or commanding her to fetch coffee when she came into interview victims.
"As for the women she was supposedly moving through a trafficking pipeline? Turns out it was part of some group dedicated to helping women escape domestic violence.
“It was her job to identify who needed the sort of help the cops couldn't provide, and if Dillon was there to translate, she could do her work right there in the station houses without anyone understanding her.
“She helped the women through an underground railroad and into safe houses where they could heal before moving on to the next link in the chain. Soon as Dillon confessed to being part of the network,Soon as Dillon confessed to being part of the network, Styles started to press her harder.
“I didn't realize until he was going at her with questions about where his wife was, that Dillon had helped Mrs. Styles and her two boys escape her husband and the abuse he was beating on all of them.
“Simpson gave a weak-ass bleat of protest, but Styles was his buddy—his buddy who was missing his wife and kids—and it was Dillon's fault. So Simpson didn't do anything to stop Styles.
“They left Dillon bound and gagged for two days straight, randomly dumping buckets of ice water over her.
"The other guy, Lewis, didn't do much other than clean his guns and sharpen his knives, like it was just another day at the office.
“Fuckin' psycho asked me if I was uncomfortable with the work. I said ‘fuck yeah, I'm uncomfortable.’ We were standing by while an innocent woman was being tortured because Styles was a fuckin' wife beater.
“He shrugged and said, 'it's just the job,' and I knew right then I was going to quit, but not before I convinced my supervisors that our 'sure thing' was a complete bust and we had our facts all wrong. Terrorists at GITMO were treated with more respect, for fuck’s sake.
Tobias took another long pull on his bottle, wheezing after swallowing, so white now his skin was almost translucent.
"I shouldn't have left, but I did. I couldn't take it anymore. I went to see my supervisor's supervisor in person and got him on board to review the intel we had.
“Took him all of ten minutes to agree we'd gone too far on piss poor information and recognize Styles set the whole thing up, fabricating evidence and shit, all to get Dillon to tell him where his wife was.
“The supervisor gave me full authority to shut the interrogation down, and I headed back. When I got there, even psycho fuckin’ Lewis looked disturbed, which told me everything was beyond FUBAR.”
As the memories came faster, Tobias stared blindly at nothing, and those tears he'd been trying to hold back started to roll down his ashen cheeks.
No one said anything about the display of emotion, all of them struggling to listen, to take in what Tobias told them.
“Styles had her strung up, tied to one of the beams,” Tobias rasped, his voice fading to barely a whisper.
“He'd already laid into her so many times with an actual bullwhip, I couldn't see the skin on her back for all the blood. He wasn't interrogating her at that point; Styles was just hurting her for the pleasure of it.
“I put myself in the line of fire to cover Dillon, and color me fuckin' shocked when Lewis whipped out his piece and shot Simpson and Styles both, no hesitation.
"He helped me get Dillon down. Helped me wrap her up in a blanket and drove the car to the hospital. By the time he got us there, there was so much blood I thought... I thought she was dead when the doctors wheeled her away.”
Tobias finished off the whiskey with a grimace, not bothering to wipe the tears off his cheeks. “As soon as they told me she'd recover, I quit the agency and enlisted, praying to catch a bullet in some godforsaken desert halfway across the world.”
The silence blanketing the room was nearly suffocating as all of them visualized the picture Tobias painted for them.
Just when Nasa thought he couldn't take another second, Tobias shook his head and got to his feet, swaying slightly as the booze started to do its work.
He reached up to touch the edge of a scar that peeked out from the collar of his shirt, rubbing it almost absently.
“Seven days. We had her for seven days, and even after all the hell Styles put her through, she never gave up the wife and kids.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The familiar smell of Elka's fur comforted her. Dillon could feel her heart steadily thumping where Dillon had thrown her arm across the dog sometime in the night, hugging her like Elka was a teddy bear.
Another inhaled breath brought the smell of unfamiliar laundry detergent. The sheets that shifted against Dillon's bare legs were nice, but not spa quality Egyptian cotton.
Dillon opened her eyes and found herself staring at the soft, shimmering blackness of Elka's fur. A turn of the head brought the room into focus, along with the spine twisting lance of pain that came from sleeping on a pillow not her own.
Her neck was tight, sore, her elbows and knees hurt, her palms ached with healing abrasions. Every flex of muscle pulled the already taut skin even tighter, tugging at the edges of the small wounds. Her mouth soured with the uncertainty of not knowing where she was or how she'd gotten here.
“You're safe,” a deep voice rasped, and she lifted her head to find Nasa, sprawled in an uncomfortable looking chair beside the bed.
He looked... wrecked. Utterly wrecked, and she couldn't imagine a single reason why. Before she could ask, Elka shifted and stretched all four legs o
ut as far as she could, throwing her head back to rest her huge head across Dillon's throat, licking her chops right in Dillon's ear.
“Elka! Gross.” Dillon tried to wiggle out from under the dog's bulk, back on the road to Full Freak-Out town when it became clear Dillon was as weak as a newborn kitten. .
Elka's nasty mouth sounds forgotten, Dillon looked at the humongous biker sitting next to her with mistrust pumping right alongside the adrenaline struggling to give her a boost.
“Did you kidnap me?”
Revulsion curled across Nasa's face, the low light in the room making the blond scruff on his jaw shimmer slightly. The leather of his biker vest creaked as he hunched forward to brace his tattooed forearms on his knees.
He wore beat up Harley boots on his enormous feet, acid wash jeans covered his powerful legs, and a black tee with the Punisher skull emblazoned on the chest.
The shirt hugged his muscled torso like a second skin, straining around the width of his biceps. His blond hair was just long enough to pull back into a stubby tail, perversely making her fingers want to comb through the pale gold strands.
There were lines around his fjord blue eyes, a few creases in his forehead, and a wildness to him that was—much to her disappointment—almost unbearably sexy. Unlike their last encounter, the suspicion seemed to be completely absent from his gaze, replaced with something that looked a lot like gentleness.
“No, I didn't kidnap you. Do you remember getting home?”
Dillon scoffed incredulously, still trying to wiggle out from underneath Elka, but the dog was happy to be right where she was. “Of course I remember getting home.”
“Anything after that?” Nasa snapped his fingers, and to Dillon's horror, Elka got up and slid right between Nasa's spread knees to snuggle up to him like he was her new best friend.
It seriously messed with her head to see Nasa's huge hands rubbing all over Elka's slick coat and getting happy doggie grumbles when he dug into a good spot.
“What the fuck did you do to my dog?”
A weak smile curled at the corner of Nasa's mouth, drawing attention to the thick, pouty curve of his bottom lip, and the kissable thinner upper curve.
“We've had a few days to get to know one another.”
“A few days?” She half-shrieked, causing Elka to lose the love-struck look she had going for Nasa and scramble back up on the bed to plaster herself on top of Dillon, as though she were about to have a panic attack.
Nasa took a deep breath and sat up with a weary sigh as he pulled his hand down across his face.
It freaked her out more than Dillon cared to admit, seeing that big hand tremble.
“You drove back to your place on Wednesday. It's Friday now, just past eight in the morning. You wouldn't stay at the compound, so Top put some guys we work with on your tail just to make sure nothing happened to you.”
Dillon opened her mouth to impress upon Nasa how much that displeased her—with much cursing involved—but stopped as memories fired across her brain with all the gentleness of shotgun blasts.
The smell of cigarettes… blue octopus… the coppery tang of blood… a bright red splash across the white paint of her house…
“Easy, Tiger Lily, you're alright. You're safe.” Nasa shoved Elka to her other side and curved his hands over Dillon's shoulders.
He stroked her arms from shoulder to elbow, speaking to her in a deep, commanding voice that at any other time might have instilled a sense of calm.
Right now, she was too far gone to focus on his face instead of the nightmarish memories that boiled and oozed like poison inside of her.
A sickening wave of heat rolled through her, followed by an ice cold rush that made sweat pop out on her upper lip.
“Bathroom. Now.”
Nasa didn't ask questions. He scooped her up and practically flew across the room, out into the hallway, and into a bathroom.
She was too busy being hunched face first over the toilet to notice how gentle he'd been. Too involved with heaving and choking, as nothing but bile came up, to realize he hadn't left her.
When she could breathe again, Dillon let herself rest there, hugging the damn toilet with tears dripping off her lashes. She wanted to be far away from all this bullshit.
To rewind the clock to the day before Ghost had invaded her home.
To have said yes to the transport job instead of letting one of the others handle it.
If she'd gone on that trip, she wouldn't have been home for Ghost to find.
Nasa's hand settled on her back, and without thinking, she hollowed her spine in order to evade his touch.
“Dillon—”
“Don't,” she hissed, both mortified and extremely pissed off, her voice echoing in the damn toilet bowl. “Don't touch me.”
She was so weak she could barely lift her own arm up to flush the toilet before pushing herself backward, the tile squealing and dragging against her bare skin until she hit the far wall.
Dillon sat there with her knees drawn up, resting her head back with her eyes closed, desperate to wake herself up from this terrible dream.
“I understand why you're struggling right now, but I promise you, you're safe here. You're safe with me.”
There was kindness in what Nasa said to her. Dillon heard it. She understood it. Part of her was even grateful for it, but knowing he'd seen her in her wakest, vulnerable state made her react in the same way a cornered animal would.
“You know nothing about me,” Dillon snapped coldly, opening her eyes to glare at him with all the impotent rage she felt inside. “You have no idea what I'm dealing with or how I'm struggling.”
Dillon expected Nasa to get up and walk out, but to her extreme discomfort, he settled in with his back against the vanity.
He drew his feet up to loosely hug his splayed knees, his fingers laced together, meeting her gaze without flinching.
Banked behind a wall of extreme patience, she could see the rage that brightened the deep blue of his eyes.
“I was twenty years old when I went to work for DARPA. Programed a fuck ton of projects for weapon defense systems and strategic military targeting.
"I was running my research division by the time I was twenty-four, and six months later, I was in a federal prison, accused of selling classified research to the Chinese to the tune of a hundred million dollars.”
Dillon knew better than to judge people based on the way they looked, but if someone had asked her to guess what Nasa did for a living, she would have bought ex-con in a biker gang easily.
Computer programmer and defense system creator for the government would have probably been at the very bottom of the list, for the same reasons people would never guess she’d once been on a fast track to work for the United Nations as a translator, instead of the paranoid, safe-house building basket case she was today.
“I waited for two years to be exonerated, and after I got out—not because I was proven innocent but because they didn't have actual evidence to prove my guilt—I was threatened with execution if I disclosed any details of the projects I'd worked on.”
At Dillon's look of disbelief, Nasa huffed a humorless laugh.
“No joke. Some jack-off mother fuckers in black suits told me I would disappear without a trace, never to be heard from again if I made any waves or spoke up against the injustice I'd been subjected to.
“I'd been told by those same jerk-offs I wasn't allowed to go anywhere near a computer, but I wasn't about to obey the people who'd fucked up my life without a shred of hard evidence.
“I cracked that case wide open in a matter of days—something I was told would be impossible—and I watched while a man twice my age with a serious chip on his shoulder was frog marched out of the Pentagon with a black hood over his head.
“Gerald Barnes couldn't handle the fact that a twenty-four-year-old kid had taken his job and done it ten times better than he ever could.
“My stay in prison wasn't a cake walk; I was easily the
tallest guy in there, but I wasn't the strongest or anywhere near the meanest, and more than one dude tried to rape me.
"I thank my lucky stars no one actually succeeded, but I didn't sleep for more than a few minutes at a time, hyper-vigilant to anything that even sounded like some butt-monkey and his buddies after my ass.”
It was wrong to laugh, but the colorful way he chose to describe a truly horrible situation had Dillon biting into her cheek to stop herself.
“I lived for the moments in the yard where I could be outside and have plenty of time to bulk up to deter anyone from thinking I was an easy mark.
"I was white enough to gain the protection of the Aryans inside, but I really didn’t want their help either.
“I remember sitting in my bunk at night, in a room I could reach out and press my palms flat to the walls on either side of me, listening to the guys who weren't so lucky get brutalized.
“I'm not comparing my stay in prison to what it must have been like to disappear into a black site, and the scars I got inside are nothing compared to the ones you've got, but I understand what it's like to disappear into a dark hole because some asshole couldn't take losing something he thought belonged to him.”
Her entire body felt like a block of ice, and not even Elka's warmth against her side could hold the bone deep shivers at bay.
It sounded like he understood perfectly. Like he knew everything, and she wasn't sure how that was possible.
Dillon wanted to speak, to say something, but her jaw was locked. Had she said something, only the guttural sounds of a wounded animal would have escaped.
Nasa lifted one hand up to circle his long index finger to encompass the room.
“I get you don't want to be here. That being surrounded by strange men you have zero fucking reason to trust is putting a massive strain on you.
“In your shoes, I would probably shoot first and ask questions later, especially considering the way you were attacked in your own bed.
"The fact that you've had no one to rely on or trust, except for your dog, makes it that much harder to believe in us.
