by Kate Rudolph
They rode back to the hotel in Ruth’s car. Sandra knew it might be a bad idea to leave those men alive, but killing was never a task easily done. And unless she was in immediate, life-threatening danger, she’d choose a different path. So, it seemed, would Ruth.
The closer they got to the hotel, the more anxious Sandra felt. She wanted to tell Ruth to drive faster, but they were already pushing eighty.
“Why were those men after you?” Sandra asked. She figured they had grabbed her by mistake.
Ruth’s hand tightened on the steering wheel. “They weren’t.”
“Excuse me?”
Ruth glanced over quickly and then back at the road. “It’s my fault they grabbed you, but they weren’t after me. They wanted you.”
Could she possibly be vaguer? Sandra gritted her teeth. “And why was that?” She asked it just as they turned in to the hotel parking lot. But if Ruth answered, Sandra didn’t hear it.
A mind screamed through the parking lot. What the fuck are you?! OW!
The rest of the thought was unintelligible cursing, the tell-tale sound of a soldier in pain. And hovering around it was a blurry mass of rage.
Oh, no. That thought was her own.
“Shit. Shit.” She spit it out.
Ruth pulled into a parking space near the room she’d rented. “What?”
“I think Derek’s doing something stupid.” It wasn’t a charitable thought, but neither Sandra nor Ruth had time to be kind. She’d worry about his feelings later.
“Who’s Derek?”
Sandra cut Ruth a glance. She didn’t know about him? And Sandra had thought that Ruth knew everything about her life here. “He’s my...” Her what, exactly? Boyfriend? Lover? Neighbor? “He’s mine.” Was what she settled on. She’d figure out the details later.
Ruth grinned, “Mazel tov.”
Sandra rolled her eyes. “Let’s stop him before this gets fucked all to hell.”
Sandra could sense that Derek and the pained man weren’t in Ruth’s room, so Sandra walked slowly from door to door, listening for the man’s thoughts and seeing if she could feel Derek’s. It didn’t take long, but she didn’t find him because of her abilities. Morse ran up to her carrying a large metal first aid box.
He dropped the box and enveloped her in a hug, lifting her off the ground by an inch or too. Sandra batted at him to be let down, but even knowing that she needed to hurry, she smiled. Then Morse’s gaze shifted to Ruth and he tried to shove Sandra behind him.
Sandra didn’t budge. “I appreciate the sentiment, but we need to get to Derek.”
“Isn’t this the chick we’re after?” he asked.
“You’re not very good at finding people if this is the best you can do,” said Ruth.
Sandra glared at both of them, but turned her questions to Morse. After all, he had to know where Derek was. “Which room?”
A shadow fell over Morse’s dark eyes. “I don’t think you should go in there.”
Sandra fixed him with her steeliest gaze. “Which. Room.”
Morse clapped her on the shoulders and stooped a little so they were the same height. “I know that you’re tough, but Derek is on the verge of going loco. If you go in there, it might be enough to push him over the edge. Or it might... no, it’s too much of a risk.”
A part of her was touched, just a little, that Derek cared about her this much. That he was nearly crazed with worry. She didn’t want to think about what she would do if something happened to him.
A scream rent the air, coming out of the room right behind Morse. Sandra held out a hand. “Give me the room key.”
Morse only took a second to think about it. “He can’t see me with you, and don’t touch the guy in there. If any mate-shit is going down, he could get very jealous at the drop of a hat. Just move slowly.”
Mate shit? Sandra snatched the key from Morse and filed that away for later. “If I give the signal, come in after me.”
“What’s the signal?” he asked.
Ruth laughed, “I’m sure we’ll figure it out.”
Sandra left the two of them and quietly opened the door to the hotel room. They were on the ground floor now, but the room was nearly identical to Ruth’s. The door to the bathroom was closed, but light escaped through the crack under the door. Sandra could hear someone moving around, struggling.
She crossed the room and leaned against the door, straining to hear. She pushed aside the thoughts oozing from Derek’s prisoner. Right now, he was focused too much on his pain to be of any use to her.
“Tell me where she is!” Derek yelled.
That was her cue.
Sandra eased open the door and slid inside. “Derek,” she said it quietly, in stark contrast to the tone he’d used. “Can I talk to you?” She didn’t want to have an emotional reunion in front of their prisoner. But she needed Derek to know that she was fine.
Except it was like he couldn’t hear her. The man in the tub could—he stared at her, practically begging her to make the torture stop. His face was bloodied, nose broken, and his hands were tied to the bar bolted to the shower wall. He looked pathetic. Sandra didn’t pity him. After all, he’d tried to kidnap her. But now that they had him, they could use him.
If Derek didn’t beat him senseless.
“Derek.” She said it with more force this time. And still he didn’t turn. He leaned in towards the guy, but instead of hitting him, he turned on the water.
Oh no, she wasn’t risking a drowning on her watch.
Enough trying to be gentle. Sandra took the two steps forward she needed and grabbed Derek’s shoulder, wrenching him towards her. He turned and for a moment his green eyes were blank, unseeing. It was like he didn’t recognize her.
That hurt a lot more than she thought it should.
But emotions had no place in the middle of an op. “I’m safe,” she said quietly, leaning close to him, letting her arms circle his waist as she breathed the words into his ear. “I got away.”
And he was back, just like that. He clasped her to him, hugging her so hard that he cut off her air. “How?” It was a desperate whisper.
But she didn’t need to explain it, not now. In Derek’s arms, even with the hostage in the room, she was starting to feel safe enough for all the panic and dread caused by the last few hours to start licking at her feet.
She was on the verge of tears and, strangely, deliriously happy just to be reunited with the man crazy enough to try to torture a hostage to figure out where she was.
That feeling lasted for about a minute, right up until something went wrong.
She could feel a shift in the atmosphere. With Derek right next to her, the hostage’s thoughts had been muffled. But she heard a clanking sound and it caught her attention. She pulled back from Derek a step and turned her mind to the man in the tub.
Take the shot while his friend’s away. Recover the girl.
Crap, crap, crap, crap. Sandra tried to yank Derek back out of the room before she even confirmed that the hostage was armed. But in that same second, a deafening shot went off and Derek stumbled into her, a red stain blooming in his shoulder, dyeing the gray shirt he’d been wearing.
Sandra screamed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
At first it just felt like he’d been tweaked with a rubber band. It stung. Then the pain began to radiate outward and blossomed into a sharper, stabbier feeling. Sandra screamed. It didn’t last long, but it was enough to ground Derek.
They were in trouble. There was a gun. He was injured.
He stumbled forward until he’d pushed Sandra out the door. She shoved herself under his uninjured shoulder and pulled him towards one of the beds. Derek hissed in pain when his back connected with the mattress, but already the ache was lessening. He could feel the bullet in his shoulder. It felt like a hot rock under his flesh.
The door burst open and Morse came running in with a short, dark haired woman close behind him. He hoped they hadn’t just sucked an innocent bystan
der into this mess. That was all that they needed.
“He’s got a gun!” yelled Sandra almost on top of the sound of more bullets being fired. She was crouched between the beds, messing around with a mass of pillows. Derek tried to roll over to get closer to her, but her glare stopped him in his tracks. She’d put him on the bed for a reason, so he’d stay put.
For the moment.
Morse charged the man, tackling him back to the ground. The gun went flying and the woman kicked it away from them. Only then did she walk back across the room to shut the door and lock it.
His wound itched. And Sandra’s glare didn’t keep him down this time. Derek sat up, careful not to put any weight on his arms, and concentrated, shifting his muscles minutely to push the bullet towards the surface of his skin. After a minute of sweating and grunting, it popped out and rolled down between his back and his shirt, staining the dark colored duvet with his blood. The wound started to close almost immediately. It would hurt like a bad bruise for a few hours, but by dinner time, he’d be as good as new.
But Derek wasn’t concerned about his own well-being right now. How had Sandra gotten away from those men? They’d drugged her and it had barely been an hour since they’d left. She was human, more or less—there was no way the effect would wear off so quickly.
She stood up, her hair a mess, eyes darting to Morse and then back to him, only flicking briefly to the brunette who peered out the window as if looking for witnesses. He was beginning to doubt she was a bystander. Sandra’s hands hovered over him, like she was afraid to touch him.
“I’m okay,” he promised, wrapping his good arm around her and pulling her close until their foreheads touched. “It takes a lot more than a peashooter to take me out.”
When her fingers touched him, they were lighter than fairy’s wings. But she ran them over his back where the bullet had torn through his shirt. Her fingers were cold. “How?”
“Can we hold off on this touching moment for like five minutes?” the other woman asked.
“Who’s she?” No one spoke like that to a stranger, especially not after she subdued a gunman at close range.
Sandra turned back towards the woman, but she didn’t take her hands off of him. “Can you make sure he’s secured this time? And unarmed?”
And then it dawned on Derek. There was exactly one person who was in town, who knew Sandra, and who presumably had experience detaining a hostage. “You brought—” Sandra cut him off with a finger to his lips and a harsh look. He shut up and looked over at Morse and Ruth. Yes, he supposed she could be described as a short Latina with hell in her eyes. But only if hell was a frozen wasteland of competence.
She trussed the man up using torn strips from the spare bed sheet, tying his hands behind his back and then tying his feet together. She rolled up both of the cuffs of his pants, one revealing an empty holster. Then she pulled a wicked looking blade from behind the man. Neither he nor Morse had thought to pat the guy down after they had him tied in the shower. They hadn’t seen any weapons and both of them had gotten close enough that they would have felt a holster under his arms.
It looked easier in the movies.
Morse and Ruth hauled the man back into the bathroom where they spent several minutes securing him. The man struggled every inch of the way, crying out before his shouts were muffled by another length of sheet, this time used as a gag.
“Did they teach this at spy school?” Derek asked.
Sandra sat next to him, half on his lap. She hadn’t stopped touching him, her fingers brushing lightly against his shoulders as if she couldn’t quite grasp that he was okay. She kissed his cheek, “I wasn’t a spy.”
Ruth and Morse came out of the bathroom and shut the door behind him. Sandra sat straight up, but didn’t move away from him, not even when Ruth’s eyes lingered on them for several seconds and her eyebrow shot up.
Sandra reached back for the television remote and turned on the TV, turning the volume up to an annoying level. Derek realized that she did it so that the man in the bathroom wouldn’t hear them speak. And neither would anyone just passing by the room.
“We can’t stay here,” Derek said. Someone could have heard the gunshot and the cops might be on their way. Not to mention Morse’s mother. Penelope Morse was not a woman to cross.
“And where do you suggest we go?” Condescension dripped from Ruth’s mouth. Derek got the idea that Ruth wished he and Morse would just sit back and let her take control. She did not appreciate a civilian viewpoint.
“You’re Ruth, right?” he asked. She nodded. Derek clamped down on his anger as he turned to Sandra. He couldn’t think about how that woman had pointed a gun at Sandra, how she had threatened her. “I didn’t think the plan was to have her over for dinner.”
“I’m still not quite sure why she’s here,” said Sandra, “But I’ve decided to trust her. She saved me.”
Morse leaned against the wall between the door and the TV. “As happy as I am for this reunion, shouldn’t we have it, you know, elsewhere?” He pointed his thumb out the door, indicating that they should leave.
“It’s broad daylight,” Ruth said as if that explained everything.
It didn’t. “They took Sandra during the day!” And Derek wanted to tear apart the people responsible. He hadn’t done enough to the man in the bathroom. “And they could come back here at any second. And what about the cops?”
“What about them?” Sandra asked. She laced her fingers with his. “I don’t hear any sirens, and I’ve been listening,” she pointed to her temple, indicating she’d been reading people’s minds, “And no one is thinking about us.” She paused. “Except for Paul in there, but he’s mostly thinking about escape.” She grinned, “And punching you.”
“Paul?” he asked.
Sandra just pointed to her temple again. It was strange how normal she made the mind reading seem. He supposed he should be offended at the invasion of privacy, but he couldn’t summon the emotion. Sandra was an honorable woman, he knew she would never cross an uncrossable line.
Ruth scowled, but Derek was almost disgustingly happy despite the situation. Sandra had laid her claim to him in front of her friend - or if not friend, someone from her old life. She was letting her people know that she had claimed him.
“So we just stay here like sitting ducks? What if the men who took you come back?” asked Morse, his voice just a little panicked. He didn’t look it, exuding an almost supernatural calm.
“It’ll be hours before they make it back to their base. We sort of stranded them,” Sandra was proud.
Ruth pulled out the chair from the little desk and sank down into it, leaning back so that only two of the legs touched the floor. “We can’t stash them at your place,” she said to Sandra. “I think they’ve got it bugged.”
“I’ve got a basement,” Derek said without thinking. But he didn’t regret saying it. He’d always help Sandra, even in taking hostages.
Sandra and Ruth exchanged a look and seemed to have a conversation based on expression alone. Of course, Sandra could read Ruth’s mind, so perhaps it was more than expression. “You’re not talking about the cave, right?”
“Of course not, the cellar is underground. There’s only one entrance and it can easily be locked from the outside.” They’d skipped right past the morality of holding a man prisoner and straight to the logistics. Somehow, it didn’t bother him. “But I still want to know why she’s here before we do anything.”
“You did say you’d give me answers,” Sandra concurred. It didn’t surprise Derek that she’d taken Ruth on faith. They had a history.
Ruth leaned forward until her chair legs thunked against the ground. She crossed her arms and didn’t say anything for a long moment. When she spoke, she kept it brief. “I came across some information that I wasn’t meant to see. No operatives were meant to. The Sector broke a very important promise to me. But that’s why I left, not why I’m here. Also included in this information was a note that your
,” she was talking to Sandra, “Location was compromised and your file exposed. Leadership made the decision not to warn you for reasons unknown. I couldn’t leave you hanging.”
Derek had about a hundred questions, but he didn’t know how to ask them. They lapsed into silence, the only sound coming from the weather report on the TV. But silence couldn’t last forever. When no one had any more questions, Ruth stood with a nod. “We’ll move him tonight. So let’s figure out how.”
The atmosphere in the hotel room had deteriorated before they left. Sandra could feel a headache blooming behind her eyes and she thought she’d shatter into a thousand pieces if one more thing went to shit. Every time she closed her eyes, it was a struggle to breathe as she remembered that black bag sliding over her face and tightening around her throat.
At first she’d thought she’d escaped this useless, hysterical reaction. But then she stopped moving. As long as she was planning, was doing, she could ignore the panicking girl at her core. All those years in the Sector and she’d never been kidnapped or held prisoner. And now less than a month in Montana and she felt like she was in more danger than she’d ever been in before.
Derek’s own anxiety was a flicker of sharp wings against her psyche. She’d never doubted that he was on her side through this, had never contemplated that he had something to do with the men who’d taken her. Maybe she should have. But his emotions were real, his reaction had been almost scarily violent and just a bit touching. Even if it had been flawed.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
They were driving back to his place. It was two hours past nightfall and the highway felt packed with cars, though they’d only seen a dozen or so on the fifteen minute drive. She and Derek weren’t even doing the dangerous job. Though it felt a little wrong - this was Sandra’s mess, after all - Ruth and Morse were driving the hostage, Paul, back to Derek’s house. It had almost been a fight. Sandra had protested Ruth’s suggestion, but Ruth had a point. If the kidnappers tried to take her again, it would be better that she wasn’t delivering their man back to them.
