by Megan Crane
She ordered herself to focus. One looked like some sort of scientific equation. The next was an address in New York City. The third was a little bit of doodling. The longer Bethan stared at the curly little doodles, the more she thought that they were actually numbers. She reached over and traced them with her finger, and Jonas’s gaze sharpened as he took pictures of each of the three papers and sent them to Oz.
“Threes,” he said.
“Could be a clue.” Bethan traced one of the bigger ones. “Or it could be a doodle.”
“A containment unit is mobilized,” Blue said into the comm unit in a brisk, furious voice that was almost as bad as something sentimental. “ETA is forty-five minutes or less.”
“Let’s hope for less,” Jonas replied.
Bethan didn’t expect an immediate response from Oz, not with so much else going on. But that left the two of them, standing here. Locked in this room. Maybe already halfway dead, though she still felt fine. She took another breath, to test it.
Nothing was happening. Nothing was wrong, yet, and still she felt as if she were being squeezed too tight to breathe.
Because she wasn’t sure SuperThrax was something she could fight off. She couldn’t shoot it. She couldn’t disarm it. She couldn’t strike it in the face and bring it to the ground. She wouldn’t have let herself think such a thing before the explosion, but it was possible she was really done this time.
“Jonas,” she said very quietly. “Everything is terrible. But I want you to know—”
There was a loud, shocking noise.
It took her a panicked moment to realize that it had come from him. That Jonas Crow had pounded his fist into the lab table between them.
“Don’t,” he belted out, a harsh one-word command.
“I only want—”
“I have spent my entire life more than ready to die,” Jonas told her, not raising his voice. But then, he didn’t have to raise it. Not when it seemed to fill the room. “I signed up for it. I courted it. And I would have been perfectly happy to go at any time. But not now.” His gaze was so dark it made her heart kick at her. “In three days you can tell me anything you want, Bethan. But not here. Not now.”
And Bethan thought that her sister and all her sister’s friends, or her mother for that matter, might not appreciate those words. They might not understand them for what they were.
But she did.
Jonas had ripped out his heart, placed it on the table between them, wrapped it in a bow, and made it hers.
“I love you, too,” she told him quietly.
And he looked . . . haunted. Wild and electric. Furious.
But he reached across the narrow table, fitting his hand to her cheek in a manner she could not quite describe as tender. It was too hard. Too intense.
His gaze was boring into her so intently she almost thought that look alone might save them. She was surprised it didn’t.
“Don’t you dare say that to me when you think you’re going to die.” It was possible he was whispering, harsh and low, but she heard every single word like a shout. Deep inside her and all around her, so loud it drowned out the world. “Don’t you throw it at me like some kind of Hail Mary.”
“I felt like it needed to be said.”
“Love is for the living,” Jonas growled at her. “Which is why I’ve never wanted any part of it. You want to love me, Bethan? Figure out how to keep us alive.”
Some women might like flowers. Chocolates. A sonnet or two written in their honor.
But Bethan got Jonas, big and pissed off and more animated than she’d ever seen him while he was fully clothed, ordering her to live. Then love him. In that order.
If she were the kind of woman to swoon, she would have, but she was too afraid she might not come out of it.
“I’ll love you any way I want,” she told him. “But you’re right. I would like to do it for more than forty-eight hours and a steep decline.”
“Bethan,” he began, and she could see the torture on his face. All over him. All the things she’d always known had lurked there beneath that cold facade of his. “You have to know—”
There was a crackling burst of sound in their comm units. They both jerked back, each putting a hand to the ear where the noise was coming from. Once again, their gazes were locked together.
Another long, loud crackle.
“Who has an open channel?” Griffin demanded, sounding arctic. “This is not the time.”
There was a pause. Then a long, fluid, creative string of curses.
But Bethan’s heart leapt inside her chest. Because there was only one person she knew—
“Templeton,” Jonas said, his voice cracking slightly. He coughed to cover it, but it didn’t matter. Bethan felt the same.
“Templeton, you beautiful bastard,” came Blue’s voice, sounding as suspiciously intense as Bethan felt. As Jonas looked. “Tell me some good news.”
There was another long crackling sound, another loud spate of swears and invocations, but again, all clearly Templeton.
“We are all present, accounted for, and intact,” came another voice, cool and measured.
Isaac. Bethan sagged a little against the lab table, while across from her, Jonas dropped his head for a moment.
“The warehouse was leveled, and it blew up our vehicle,” Isaac said. “Kicked out the comm router.”
“Would’ve taken us with it,” Templeton said, sounding mildly irritated and a little bit lazy, and Bethan had never been so happy to hear him being perfectly him in all her life. “But there were some disgusting bunkers to hide out in.”
“Old garage bays,” came Lucas’s voice. “I think this place used to be a chop shop.”
“I’m a little banged up,” Isaac said, sounding clipped. Pissed, Bethan thought, and that was enough to make her straighten her spine. “My ears are still ringing. I thought I was about to bite it, and I have to tell you all, the idea that this lowlife could take me out remotely did not sit well. I want him ended.”
“Hear, hear,” August said.
“But first,” Isaac continued, all leashed rage and tempered fury, “what’s this I hear about a containment unit?”
“Oh, just SuperThrax exposure, no big deal,” Bethan said.
She could see the half smile on Jonas’s stern mouth. The hope in his eyes where before it had been nothing but that darkness. “Bethan and I have forty-eight hours. Then the painful death begins.”
“Before that party starts,” Bethan continued, “I’d kind of like to find this guy and hurt him. And while we’re at it, locate the Sowandes and see if maybe they have an antidote.”
“That works for me,” Isaac said, sounding official and alive and in charge, the way he was supposed to be. “You two hold tight. Everyone else, lock down that house. Then tear it apart. I want anything and everything. We’ll be there within the hour.”
“We found a few things of potential interest here in the death lab,” Bethan said, because Jonas was too busy smiling. “I’m guessing that now Oz knows we’re all alive and kicking, he’ll get it all out to everyone shortly.”
“You all need to hurry up and figure this out,” came Oz’s voice, all the way from Alaska, and he, too, sounded different. Because the worst had happened, but then hadn’t, and they were all still reeling. She knew she was. “And then come back to Alaska, where you’re all obviously safer with the grizzlies.”
Templeton’s laugh boomed in Bethan’s ear then. Miles away, she and Jonas smiled at each other, the way they had when they were locked up tight in her cabin. And she knew that everybody here in this farmhouse probably had that same half-goofy smile on their faces.
And for the rest of that hour, it was almost easy to forget her own death sentence. Oz kept feeding in updates and clarifications as he worked overtime to track the transmission that had co
me into the lab, find the remote detonation trigger down in New Jersey, and try to run diagnostics on the clues they’d sent in.
Inside the farmhouse, the team tore each and every room apart, looking for anything that could give them a clue as to what had gone on here. Bethan and Jonas had to sit it out, trying to out-calm each other when she knew he was probably as close to coming out of his skin as she was.
Then the containment team arrived, and everything was hazmat suits, invasive checkups, and stripping down naked while pretending not to notice or care that Jonas was doing the same, so they could get sprayed down. Repeatedly.
Anthrax wasn’t contagious. SuperThrax showed no signs of being contagious, either—people couldn’t share it between them like a virus; they had to be exposed the way Bethan and Jonas had been. Still, abundance of caution was the watchword in situations like this.
By the time they’d been hosed down enough to start taking it personally, examined repeatedly, and tested so many times that Bethan was surprised she still had any blood left in her body, another few hours slid by.
Given that she currently had so few left, Bethan found she resented that. Deeply.
She and Jonas had been moved from the lab to a makeshift quarantine unit set up out in the field in front of the old farmhouse. It looked like a crime scene. Isaac and the warehouse team had taken a chopper up, allowing medical attention only once they’d arrived. The containment team had come in a different helicopter, and an Alaska Force support unit in a third, so everywhere she looked, there were very serious people doing very serious things, while her life had turned into an hourglass.
And she was sure that she could feel each and every grain of sand as it slipped away.
“They need to let us out of here,” Jonas growled from behind her.
They’d been issued new clothes because theirs were potentially contaminated, and Bethan chose to focus on how annoyed she was by that. She’d had to surrender her weapons as well as her clothes, each and every item of which she had personally selected and, more, relied on. Better to let herself feel grumpy about that outrage than to focus on her own impending death.
They were both wearing gray T-shirts and cargo pants now, but Jonas looked much better in his. The shirt wasn’t quite big enough for him, so his biceps were doing the Lord’s work, there against the sleeves that strained to fit him.
If that was the last thing she was going to get to see, Bethan couldn’t complain.
“Here’s what I keep thinking,” she said before she lost it and either touched Jonas or broke down into sobs. “Why dose us with SuperThrax?”
Jonas looked suddenly intense in that way he got when his head started spinning out strategies.
Bethan pushed on. “That was a sealed room. If he wanted us dead, surely there were more efficient ways to do it.”
“Good point. Why two to three days?”
She considered. “I guess it’s possible he just wants to torture us.”
“Back in the desert he blew up the convoy, then came in on foot to finish the job. He doesn’t strike me as a hands-off kind of a guy. In Santa Barbara, he made sure he shook hands with both of us.”
“Literally hands-on,” Bethan agreed.
While Jonas turned that over in his head, Bethan watched their friends and colleagues outside. All a little bit battered and bloody, maybe, but alive. Her comm unit had been confiscated with the rest of her gear, and a part of her wondered if that was for the best. No chance for sentimentality that way. Isaac had come and put his hand on the other side of the thick plastic walls that kept Jonas and Bethan quarantined. Jonas had lifted his in return. Bethan had only smiled, so bright and wide she thought her jaw might crack.
Templeton was putting on a show out there, laughing good and loud while Blue pretended to be irritated, and that, too, was comforting.
“I have to think that he didn’t leave random pieces of paper behind by accident,” Jonas said. Bethan shifted around to look at him.
“Maybe it’s an invitation,” she suggested. “That address at three o’clock.”
He nodded. “I’m sure we’re supposed to think that the recipe is an antidote, but I’m betting it’s not.”
“That would be easy,” Bethan agreed.
Jonas’s mouth crooked up in one corner, as if that were easier for him now. “Isaac specifically told us both to stay put.”
Bethan grinned. “That he did. He seemed pretty serious about it, too.”
Let us figure out how we’re going to handle this, he had said. And then he’d looked each one of them straight on and ordered them to let that happen.
“Good thing this is a private security company,” Bethan mused, still grinning. “And not the United States Army, where I would feel duty-bound to obey that order.”
“I couldn’t agree more.” That crook at the side of Jonas’s mouth deepened. “We’re losing our hours here, Bethan. You ready to go rogue?”
Bethan did not say, I would follow you anywhere.
But she thought that was implied when that was what she did, moving swiftly after him when he picked up one of the medical implements the doctors had left behind, cut a slit through the plastic sheeting, and made a break for it.
Twenty-two
They were a good forty-five minutes down the Taconic Parkway when the call came in, lighting up the SUV’s console. Jonas debated ignoring it, but a few hours ago he would have killed half the world to have a pissed-off Isaac in his ear. He couldn’t bring himself to squander any opportunity, whatever it looked like.
“What exactly do you think you’re doing?” came Isaac’s voice, not in the least bit cool or controlled.
“I’m not dying standing still, brother,” Jonas replied, switching lanes and taking the curves of the winding highway with far too much speed. “I can tell you that.”
“Then I hope you and Bethan are taking a little joyride,” Isaac retorted. “Taking in the sights, maybe.”
“I’ve always wanted to see Niagara Falls,” Bethan piped in from the passenger side.
Isaac grunted. “I don’t believe you.”
“That’s why you’re the boss.” Bethan laughed. “I actually saw the falls when I was in high school. Very loud, it turns out.”
Isaac sighed. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in asking you to turn that vehicle around and return to the containment facility.”
“I can’t do that,” Jonas replied. “For one thing, the containment facility is no longer contained.”
“You mean because you cut your way out of it?”
Jonas and Bethan exchanged a look, because that was a lot more temper than Isaac normally displayed.
Then again, it had been a long day.
“We think there’s a personal component to this,” Jonas said after a moment. “I’m betting if you look at the air-filtration system in that basement, you’ll find that there were other options available to our guy.”
“Actually, yes.” Isaac made a sound that wasn’t quite a sigh. “The support team just finished testing down there, and there was cyanide, loaded and ready to go.”
Bethan was nodding. “That would have killed us right away, wouldn’t it?”
“Correct,” Isaac said.
“But he chose option B.” Jonas passed a slow-moving sports car. “There has to be a reason for that.”
“You can’t really think this guy went to all the trouble to kidnap a scientist, build a secret lab, activate fail-safes, and create a biological weapon, all to flush the two of you out.”
“I think we’re the icing on the cake,” Bethan said matter-of-factly. “It’s no secret that I work for Alaska Force. All he had to do was ask my father what his daughters do for a living and he would’ve gotten chapter and verse. And there’s no way he didn’t know it was Alaska Force out there in that high-desert ghost town.”
/> “That doesn’t justify—” Isaac began.
“So you’re this guy,” Jonas interrupted him. “Years ago, you have a near-death experience out in the desert, but you don’t think better of your life choices because of it. You double down. You go underground, nurse your grudges, and wait. And then, look at that, the perfect opportunity presents itself.”
“I understand that this guy has a hard-on for the two of you,” Isaac said. “But I have two competing issues. First is the fact that you have a death sentence on your heads. I don’t really think you should be running around and encouraging your bodies to process all that poison even more quickly.”
“That’s a legitimate concern,” Bethan said in her soldier’s voice, basic acknowledgment without offering a solution. Why did that make him want to smile?
Isaac clearly chose to ignore that. “The second issue is bigger. It’s that this man, proven unstable already, has a biological weapon in his hands. Maybe he was just testing it out on the two of you. Either way, where will he test it next? I’m thinking, if I’m in the business of war and defense contractors and I’m out here on the East Coast, I’m going to take down to New York City, create chaos, and profit from it.”
Jonas made a low noise. “That’s why we left. You focus on saving the world. Bethan and I? We’re going to focus on taking this muppet down.”
Isaac muttered something uncharitable.
“We have a death sentence coming at us,” Jonas reminded him. “We’re not contagious. What’s the harm?”
Jonas knew his friend could think of all kinds of harm, but all he did was blow out a breath. “You know where our safe house is in Manhattan,” he said after a moment. “I don’t want you out of contact. And the minute you start feeling symptomatic—”
“I have no intention of dying today,” Jonas growled, and he was aware of how Bethan reacted to that, beside him. He could feel Isaac do the same. “Or tomorrow, while we’re at it.”
