by Megan Crane
Too bad for them that wasn’t how this was going to go.
“Why can’t you understand her?” she asked the man with the gun at her head, and cowered a little bit more, on the off chance he might think she really was scared. “Out of the three of you, not one of you knows how to communicate with her? Why would you come all this way, then?”
“In position,” Jonas said into the comm unit.
“You have ten seconds,” the man with the rifle to her head snarled at her. “Then I’ll shoot your head off.”
“Is that smart?” Bethan asked him. “You don’t know what she told me. And it sounds like you can’t ask her.”
The barrel jammed into her forehead. Harder. “Then you both die, bitch.”
Bethan blew out a breath.
“Ten,” the man said. “Nine. Eight.”
“On his three count,” Jonas said.
Bethan had the stray thought that she liked his voice in her ear.
“Seven. Six, puta. Five.”
Beside her, Iyara began to murmur what sounded like a prayer. Or a very long curse.
Bethan shrank, there on her knees, trying to make herself as small as possible. And in so doing, angled herself even closer to the long muzzle of the gun.
“Four,” the man snarled.
“No, no, no,” she cried, the way a victim might. “Please don’t hurt me—”
“Three,” he said.
And then a lot of things happened at once.
Jonas burst in through the front door like a reckoning.
She heard shouts and loud thuds at the same time, which told her that at least two other members of her team had come in through the windows.
But there was still that gun at her head, so she handled it.
Bethan grabbed the muzzle of the rifle and wrenched it to the side Iyara wasn’t on, removing them both from the line of fire. He fired in the same instant, a deafening blast that she’d expected, but it still slammed into her like a wall of noise. The barrel was hot in her hand, but that was a lot better than a bullet in the face, so she kept going.
She controlled the weapon, yanking it so hard the man lost his balance and came down to the ground. Then she was rolling with him, over him, battering him in the face with his own weapon until he let go. She surged to her feet in a tidy little flip, taking the rifle with her. Then held it on him.
The way he was moaning and grabbing at one hand, she was pretty sure she’d broken at least one of his fingers.
“Stay down,” she told him, calmly, her ears still ringing. “I want you on your belly with your hands laced behind your head and your ankles crossed. Do it now.”
She flicked a glance at Iyara and found she’d scrambled back to press herself against the nearest wall. She was panting, her eyes wide, but she looked fine. Bethan kept her weapon trained on the man she’d taken down as she listened to Jonas and the others clear the house.
Had she really been thinking about his voice in her ear?
Get a hold of yourself, Wilcox, she snapped at herself.
There was a brief electric sort of silence. And then outside, the sound of a body hitting the earth. Hard.
“Bomber down,” Griffin said without inflection.
Then Jonas was beside her, tall and forbidding, his own weapon aimed at the man on the floor. His dark gaze moved to Bethan, then away. “Get her brother’s location. I’m going to see if I can find out why we didn’t know there was going to be a welcoming party.”
“Yes, sir,” Bethan replied.
Then froze, because she hadn’t meant to say that. They weren’t in the military anymore. And Jonas was in command of this op, but he certainly wasn’t her commanding officer. The way he took his time sliding that dark, reproachful gaze of his back her way told her exactly what he thought of it.
She was a soldier. She did not flush. “Force of habit.”
“Break that habit,” he suggested.
Then without another word—or another searing glare—he headed back out into the blinding light of the desert.
Bethan ruthlessly shoved the entire interaction out of her head, because what was the point of treading that worn ground some more? Jonas was Jonas. Always and ever. She could sit here, seething and fuming over things that would never change, but they were still in the middle of this creepy, dangerous desert town. And just because they’d handled this particular group, it didn’t mean there weren’t more lurking around or heading for the same quarry.
Besides, she knew from experience that the little cabin she lived in now, stuck in the woods on the rocky, green, fog-shrouded hillside of a remote Alaskan island, was solitary enough that she could spend night and day brooding over the things Jonas did or didn’t say to her. And had or hadn’t said to her for years.
No need to do it now, when it could get them all killed.
But it was far easier to tell herself that she wouldn’t brood about it than it was to stop doing it.
“Are you going to tell me where your brother is?” she asked Iyara, squatting down next to her and digging into the pack she carried so she could start addressing the woman’s cuts and bruises.
But Iyara knocked her hand away. “Why should I tell you anything? Because you speak my grandmother’s dialect? It’s just another trick. At least they”—and she jerked her head at the men lying in various degrees of pain on the floor, moaning—“never disguised their real intentions.”
“Here’s the difference. I know what kind of scientist your brother is. I know what he’s made.” Bethan kept her gaze as steady as her voice. “I also know what’s likely to happen to the world, and to him, if this invention falls into the wrong hands. I think you do, too, or you wouldn’t have tried to hide in a place like this.”
Iyara let out a bitter laugh. “You can’t possibly think American hands are less dirty?”
“I can’t tell you who has clean hands,” Bethan said. “I like to think it’s a sliding scale, but none of us come out fresh on the other end of it. I will tell you this. Our client is an individual whose concern here is not building himself a weapon but studying the effects of the science involved in controlled, nonmilitary environments.”
“Why should I trust anything you say? Because you’re a woman?” She shook her head. “I know better than that.”
Bethan held her gaze. “I’m not asking you to be my friend, Iyara. I’m asking you to think about what future you want. A brutal death at the hands of men like these? Because you must know that’s what’s on offer if we leave you here. Or a chance at a real life?”
She saw something like hope move across Iyara’s face, quickly blinked away, but Bethan knew she had her.
“How can I trust that?” Iyara asked, but Bethan heard the ache in her voice for the first time.
Bethan handed her the pack she carried, with the medical supplies. This time, Iyara took it.
“The world is a grim place. We both know that,” she told her softly. “Don’t trust it. Trust me. You can, Iyara. I promise.”
Two
Jonas called in the cleanup crew on their way out of the decrepit old mining town, despite his serious doubts that anything would be there when they arrived. Not when this particular sector of the Atacama Desert was home to far too many desperate and dangerous individuals—not to mention whoever was behind the group that had met Alaska Force there with so much unexpected force.
Then it was a long four days to get back out of the high desert, made more precarious this time because they were transporting the scientist’s sister. Iyara Sowande might have held her own against the men who’d held her in that run-down building, but that didn’t mean a civilian recovering from a traumatic event was prepared to travel at the same pace as the team. But she did her best without complaint, and once they made it to their waiting jet in the port city of Antofagasta on the Chilean coast, i
t was a comparatively smooth and quick flight to Lisbon.
And once there, Iyara took them directly to a nondescript flat outside of Lisbon proper, in an unremarkable suburb that wasn’t notable in any way.
Jonas called into command back in Alaska. Oz, resident computer genius, listened to the mission rundown in silence, though Jonas could hear Oz tapping away on his keyboard.
“Should I let the client know the package is incoming?” Oz asked when Jonas was done with his report. “Or do you think there will be more roadblocks?”
Jonas took a quick scan of his team, the scientist and his sister, all crowded into the small apartment in a Portuguese city half a world away from the desert where they’d found Iyara. “We’ll be wheels up inside an hour and on our way to Montreal. Make sure the client is ready.”
“Roger that,” Oz replied.
When the line was terminated and his duty done for the moment, Jonas stayed where he was in the farthest corner of the flat, not quite ready to rejoin his team.
Who was he kidding? It wasn’t his team that he needed to keep his distance from. It was Bethan. Jonas had been working with Griffin for a while now. He’d always liked Rory. And August, one of the new crop of Alaska Force members, could more than handle himself. Jonas had spent his entire adult life in militaristic scenarios like this one, in and out of the service, and had always been good at teamwork.
Better than good.
He just wished that Bethan Wilcox wasn’t quite so good at what she did.
If he’d had his way, she never would have been accepted into Alaska Force in the first place, but no one had asked him. And he hadn’t had it in him to veto her selection, which he could have done. Not for her sake, but because he had no intention of telling anyone why it was she got to him.
Not even the only men alive he considered brothers and friends, Isaac Gentry and Templeton Cross. Together they’d been in and out of too many fires to count. The three of them had started Alaska Force after the last mission they’d all been on had gone so spectacularly wrong.
But Bethan was his very own ghost. She’d been haunting him for years.
Jonas hadn’t been prepared for the kind of damage she could do to him by actually being there, in the flesh.
He still wasn’t.
As usual, Bethan was aware of it when he stared at her too long. She looked up from her position next to Iyara on the small couch, and he saw that deliberately blank look take over her face.
The same expression she always threw his way, and more power to her.
But he remembered too well. That was the problem.
He remembered her eyes wide and terrified. And worse, determined. He remembered her hands on him, checking him, coaxing him, then somehow, while he flickered in and out of nothingness, physically dragging him across rough ground.
He remembered those long hours of consciousness, too, and that was worse.
He remembered too much.
And he found it all as unforgivable as he always had.
She rose and crossed the room to him, which didn’t help.
“Are we good?” she asked.
Not for the first time, Jonas wondered why no one else seemed to hear the challenge in her voice. As if she were forever daring him to say the things he really thought. About her or anything else.
Because she, better than anyone, knew that he wasn’t the ghost he liked to pretend he was. She knew he bled. That he was flesh and bone, and both too fragile.
He didn’t think that would ever sit well with him.
“Everything’s fine,” he said shortly.
Griffin stood over by the door, that cold gaze of his out the window beside it, watching. Waiting. Rory was directing Dr. Tayo Sowande, their scientist, to pack his things. August had point at the far end of the apartment, where there was potential access through another window.
Jonas didn’t scowl at Bethan, because that was the same as broadcasting an emotion, and he’d stopped making mistakes like that when he was still a kid. But if he expected the blank look he trained on Bethan to get to her, he was disappointed.
He always was.
“Shouldn’t you be tending to the sister?” he asked in a low voice.
“She’s had enough tending,” Bethan replied.
She irritated him by not standing before him, searching his face for answers, as if she wanted something from him. He would have known what to do with that. Instead, she treated him the way she always did now that she was in Alaska Force. Now that she’d distinguished herself by being one of the few women in history who’d made it through Army Ranger School. Now that she was, indisputably, a superhero in her own right. Something he would have celebrated, had it been anyone else.
But it was Bethan. And she stood next to him, shoulder to shoulder, the way she always did. As if their history bothered only him.
Insult to injury, as far as he was concerned.
“I can’t help thinking that this was all a little too easy,” she said.
That was what he should have been thinking about. The mission. Not a murky, tangled little knot of personal history that he had no intention of discussing, anyway. With anyone.
“I would agree.”
One of her eyebrows lifted, but she only replied, in the same even voice she always used when speaking to him, “The mining town was packed with C-4. They could have taken us at any time. Instead, they let me walk right into that house.”
Jonas nodded. “The shed was a diversion.”
“Yes, but not necessarily for us.”
“None of it felt right,” he agreed. And then, accidentally, he glanced over at her. She glanced back.
It was that same somersaulting sensation again. The one that made it hard to remember if it was then or now, when either way it was clear that they could communicate without words.
He didn’t want to remember that, either.
That must have shown on his face, because she stiffened. Almost imperceptibly, but he saw it.
“My apologies,” she said, with excessive politeness behind that smooth, blank mask. “I know you prefer to discuss your missions with the men you trust.”
Emphasis on the word men.
Jonas didn’t take the bait. There was no point to it. Because the truth was, he would rather she think he was a sexist idiot. He wished he were a garden-variety Neanderthal, because that would be easier. Also, he wouldn’t care.
What he would give to not care.
Instead, he held her gaze until she dropped hers. A few moments later, Rory came out of the second room with the scientist and a suitcase, and Jonas happily ordered everyone to get moving.
And then he went out of his way to ignore his Bethan problem all the way back to Alaska.
They landed in Juneau on the same day they’d left Lisbon—give or take half the planet and some nine time zones. The team, in various states of sleep or agitation, depending on how each member handled their adrenaline, shuffled from the jet to the seaplane that would carry them back to Alaska Force headquarters, tucked away on the back of a little island that was hardly notable among the more than a thousand others off the coast of Southeast Alaska.
Jonas took a deep breath of the Alaskan air. Clean, cold. It was the end of March, with a temperature hovering somewhere in the midthirties. The sun was still up, though it was a gray, blustery day, which made a nice change from real winter, when the sun barely made itself known. Given that he’d grown up being dragged through the least hospitable parts of South Dakota, Wyoming, and the Alaskan interior, Jonas felt right at home in the relatively balmy Juneau version of March. And he’d lived through enough to take the feeling of home pretty seriously.
And maybe that was why he resented it so deeply when he looked to his side and there was Bethan.
The proverbial thorn.
She’d showered
on the flight from Montreal, after they’d delivered the scientist and his sister to the safe house waiting for him near McGill University. Things Jonas did not need to notice included the fact she’d showered at all, when he had yet to note the freshness of, say, Griffin. The subtle scent of her shampoo, like coconuts. The way the brooding Alaskan light shifted over her face, making it impossible not to notice the faint spray of freckles across her nose and cheekbones that made her something perilously close to cute. A word he’d banished from his vocabulary a long time ago. And worst of all, those hints of red in her hair, which reminded him of things he refused to let himself remember.
Of all the ghosts that haunted him regularly, too many to name, Jonas never would have imagined that a woman he’d first known as an intelligence asset under his protection would be the worst. The most insidious. The one he never seemed to get any peace from, no matter what he did.
The one who’d lived.
“After you,” Bethan said, with scrupulous courtesy that wasn’t quite sarcastic, waving him in front of her to head up the stairs onto the seaplane.
A typical challenge. Jonas could have explained to her that it wasn’t that she was a woman that made it hard for him to take the lead the way he would have if she were any other soldier. It was the fact that she was . . . her.
But he would rather she think the worst of him than know anything about that.
He went up the stairs, then suffered the further indignity of having her right next to him for the entire flight back. It was a short enough hop from Juneau to Fool’s Cove. He knew that rationally, but it still felt to him like an eternity.
When the seaplane finally landed, skipping a few times across the cove, Jonas thought he might actually come out of his skin.
He knew no one could see it. He was far too well trained.
But he could feel it inside himself, that jumping, skittering feeling that brought him back to the worst time of his life. It was that quick and encompassing.
No way was he going back there.
It was one more reminder, not that he needed it, that there was no satisfactory remedy for the problem that was Bethan. He’d thought about quitting Alaska Force. He’d thought about requesting a deep-cover mission somewhere far, far away. He’d rejected both of those options for a variety of reasons, but right now, he would have taken either one. Anything to get away from this . . . torture.
