by Megan Crane
It was tempting to give in to the panic churning around inside her.
Instead, she grinned at Jonas. “Army Rangers lead the way,” she said, then set off into the terminal at a jog.
“All the way,” she heard him say from behind her, and then they were moving fast and hard into the heart of Grand Central Terminal.
Over their comm unit, Oz was dripping in statistics. The number of people who went through Grand Central at rush hour each day. That it was the second-biggest train station in the United States. How many trains went in and out of the station.
“Hey,” Bethan said as they made it to the main concourse, where there was already enough of a crowd to make her stomach twist. “Wikipedia. Put a lid on it.”
And she thought that if she died then and there, it would be worth it just to see Jonas look at her like that, then laugh. Not in that private way he’d done when the two of them were alone, but the way she’d heard only one other time before. Smack in the middle of another intense situation.
Whatever it was, was a gift, and it went out over their comm units, and she loved it.
“Let’s split up,” he said when they found a spot near the information desk and the famous clock. “What do you think? Is he going to go for a vantage point? Or blend into the middle of the crowd right here?”
“Who could possibly say?” Bethan asked. A touch sourly, she could admit.
She nodded at Jonas, and wasn’t surprised that the next time she glanced in his direction, he was gone.
Bethan stood where she was, with the famous giant clock counting down the minutes to certain doom, one way or another. She made herself breathe, slow and deep. She tried to make her usual senses do twice the normal work. She scanned the crowd around her, looking for anything and everything.
Anything that snagged her attention. Anything that felt like some kind of flag.
“I feel like we’re missing something,” she said into her comm unit, directly to Jonas. “Is this all a setup? Is he actually climbing the Empire State Building as we speak?”
“Anything is possible,” Jonas replied, unhelpfully. She didn’t look around to see if she could spot him. Even if she could, she knew that it would only be for a moment before he disappeared again. If there was one thing Jonas Crow was particularly good at, it was making himself scarce when he was right there in front of you. Even if she’d always found it far too easy to see him, wherever he was. “But I don’t buy it. This guy likes a show. Or we’d already be dead.”
“What’s the narrative here?” Bethan slowly, carefully turned in a circle as she stood there, never letting her eyes stop moving from this commuter to that. From tourists in their oversized backpacks to a group of schoolkids. “He bears a grudge. Here’s an opportunity to take us out and make it operatic. I’ll take that to mean I hit him pretty hard back in the desert.”
She could hear the sound of loud talking from wherever Jonas was. “The kind of man he is, I’m going to go out on a limb and assume he’s not a big fan of women. Particularly women in combat roles, who made him look like a wuss. No wonder he changed his name. Hid himself away.”
“And no wonder his friends from his old outfit haven’t signed up with him in his new one,” Bethan agreed. “They must know who he is. Someone had to take him out of the desert that night.”
“Once again,” Jonas said. “I have to think he’s in this for the show.”
But another quarter of an hour dragged by, and the only show around them was a typical New York rush hour.
“Maybe he’s not focused on the commuters,” Bethan mused at one point. “There’s a whole food hall downstairs.”
“I’ll do a walk-through,” Jonas replied.
Five minutes passed. Ten.
“No sign,” Jonas reported back. “I’m going to keep doing laps. I have a feeling he’s here. Watching.”
“Watching paint dry,” Bethan muttered.
Another five minutes limped by.
Her comm unit buzzed in her ear, indicating the broader channel was in use.
“Sowande’s being transported to a secure medical facility,” Isaac said, a note in his voice that made Bethan’s bones feel unpleasantly hollow. “But I need to update you on the incubation period.”
“I’d really prefer that you didn’t,” Bethan replied.
“Forty-eight hours is a very generous, very unlikely estimate,” Isaac said anyway.
And Bethan adored him for many reasons, but chief among them was this. That matter-of-fact voice of his. As cool and devoid of emotion as it was possible for the human voice to be. She opened her mouth to ask him how long, then, but she found that her head was buzzing a little bit.
And suddenly she was horribly aware of her skin. Everywhere. She was afraid to investigate, for fear that prickling feeling was actually the beginnings of those sores she’d seen all over Sowande earlier.
“What’s the updated estimate?” Jonas asked, sounding completely detached.
If she wasn’t already ridiculously in love with that man, that would have pushed her over the edge. Because the question was so unemotional it allowed her to breathe. To get some air past the tight band that had suddenly taken over her chest. The great weight crushing her ribs.
“That depends,” Isaac replied. “Factors include the size of the subject and activity levels.”
No one said the next part. Because they all knew. The more activity, the more the blood pumped that poison all over their bodies.
And the smaller the body, the quicker all that infected blood would turn around and start causing trouble.
In a way, Bethan thought, it was clarifying.
“Spitball the window for me here,” she said, and she was proud that she, too, managed to sound nerveless. As if they were discussing a lunch order.
“Sowande says he was infected last night,” Isaac said. “Around eleven p.m.”
And there were too many silences on this comm unit today. Bethan stood there in Grand Central Terminal, surrounded by strangers, but she knew that her friends and colleagues were right there, in her ear. She knew their silence was fury. That they were all filled with the same impotent rage that she would feel if the situations were reversed, in any one of them.
No one called for a moment of silence, because that wasn’t who they were.
This is who I am, she thought, her eyes catching on a little girl who reminded her of herself, a thousand years ago. Clinging to the hand of an important and busy-looking father. A little girl who grew up and became her own hero. A little girl who went from gazing up in awe at her father in uniform to wearing her own.
Bethan didn’t want to die. But all things being equal, her life had been pretty great.
She couldn’t feel the poison that was inside her even now, killing her where she stood. If asked, she would have happily signed up for a far more active death than this, with something invisible eating at her from the inside.
But she had chosen her path a long time ago. She had become the soldier she wanted to be, and then more. She’d rejected all the ceilings and limitations that others had put before her, and while she might not have joined the air force like her father, she had damn well figured out how to fly.
If she’d known how short a time she was going to have here, she would have figured out how to love her family a little better, a lot sooner. But still, she’d had the wedding. She’d had that week, and it occurred to her now, standing here in this unknowing crowd, that she’d been so busy telling herself she was playing a role in front of her family that she’d never stopped to consider that maybe she hadn’t been. That instead, it had been the first time she’d allowed them to really see her. Without her trying to prove anything. Without her trying to hurl her accomplishments in their faces, as if they were whom she was fighting.
All in all, she thought, she couldn’t regret a thing.
She scanned another quadrant, then stopped, dragging her gaze back to that little snag—
It was Jonas.
He didn’t speak into the comm unit. He didn’t come closer. He was a face in the crowd, nothing more, but she knew why he was there. Why he was letting her see him.
And they’d agreed.
So Bethan didn’t say anything. She didn’t tell him she loved him. She didn’t say, I fell in love with you a long, long time ago, sitting in tents in a makeshift base while we were different people. She didn’t tell him how much she admired him. How he had been her hero even then, and more as the years passed. How often she’d thought of him while she’d trained to take her shot at Ranger School, and how much more he’d been in her head while she’d been in and somehow surviving.
And now he was her hero more than ever. The more she knew about him, the more she loved him.
Bethan couldn’t regret that, either.
Because they’d had this last week.
And if she’d learned anything, it was that trying to pretend she had no feelings was the weakness. Not the feelings themselves. Because what she felt made her feel stronger, not weaker.
Maybe she wished she’d understood that sooner, but on balance, she had nothing to complain about.
His gaze was so dark it hurt. And she was sure that he understood all those things she couldn’t say, because he always did.
They had been exposed hours ago, and they’d spent a lot of that time running around New York. Bethan likely had very little healthy time remaining.
They both understood that they were very likely saying good-bye.
Because they had chosen not to be regular people. There would be no crumbling into a heap, sobbing about how unfair it was, or trying to figure out an exit strategy.
Because first, they had to do their job.
“Okay, then,” Bethan said, at last. Five seconds had passed, though it felt much longer. “Then this time, when I shoot him, I’ll make sure it takes.”
Her gaze was still fastened to Jonas’s. She could see too much there. All the nights they wouldn’t have. All the days they should have had.
All that wasted time when they could have been who they really were.
It ached. It hurt like a mortal blow. But she let it go.
Because they’d had so much already. And wasn’t that the point? They’d had more than some people ever would.
She blinked, her eyes too full, and he was gone.
Bethan turned, wondering what the clock looked like now. Not the famous one before her but her own personal clock. She both wanted and didn’t want to know how much time she actually had left.
She started another scan of the crowd, turning incrementally, and went still when a woman staggered into her. Then lifted her head.
“Iyara,” Bethan whispered.
And even as she did, something stung her. Like a hornet, making her entire arm burn. She jerked back, but the other woman was holding her by the elbow and yanked her close.
“Do you remember what you told me?” And though Iyara’s voice was cold, there was something about the expression in her eyes. Almost as if she was pleading. “In that hut where we met?”
“I said a lot of things,” she hedged as Iyara pocketed the syringe she’d just used.
Iyara moved closer, still holding Bethan’s arm. “You should have known that I would take my revenge, then.”
That didn’t make sense.
But as Bethan frowned and opened her mouth, Iyara shifted. And as she did, the open collar of her T-shirt moved slightly, so Bethan could see the wire taped there.
He was listening.
And even as comprehension dawned, she realized something was wrong with her body. Deeply wrong. Her head was starting to feel upsettingly fuzzy, and her limbs worryingly thick.
“This is my revenge,” Iyara said, louder, then began to walk.
When Bethan stumbled, she propped her up, wrapping one arm around her back.
Bethan laughed as the crowd around her dimmed, and her vision blurred, so there was nothing but that clock, ticking away the breaths she had remaining.
“I saved you,” she told Iyara. Or maybe she only dreamed it. Maybe she was already dead. “And you killed me.”
She heard a sound in her ear that she couldn’t identify. She thought about Jonas in her cabin, his hands flat on the door on either side of her head, and both of them laughing because kissing wasn’t enough.
Nothing with Jonas was ever enough.
Then everything went blank.
Twenty-four
You killed me, Jonas heard Bethan say, over and over again in his head, and that was unacceptable. Flat wrong.
He couldn’t bear it.
Worse, he’d lost sight of her. By design, he assumed, because he couldn’t spot Iyara Sowande, either.
He understood that meant Carter was his to find. His to stop. His to take apart, when what he wanted right now was to charge the crowd, find Bethan, do something—
Or, barring that, rip down Grand Central with his bare hands.
And he had already had entirely too much practice with the fury and anguish storming through him. Too much practice today. He had thought he’d lost his two best friends and all the rest of his colleagues, and he and Bethan had been exposed to this poison inside them, and all of that he’d handled the way he was trained to do. More or less.
But not this.
He was actually sweating. Breathing too hard. Acting like some newbie instead of who and what he was—
Jonas found himself hoping that was the SuperThrax, because otherwise, he was imploding on his own emotion, and he had no idea how to handle that.
“Jonas,” came Templeton’s voice in his ear. “We have your back, brother. Believe it.”
“Look out for the NYPD and Fed response,” Isaac said a moment later, so cold and precise that Jonas knew he, too, wasn’t handling this well. You killed me. “They have every intention of taking control of the situation.”
The laugh Jonas let out then was bitter. It made an older man near him flinch. “Then they’d better find him before I do.”
And then, the way he had in water, jungle, city, desert, and mountain too many times to count, he went on the hunt.
Grand Central was packed, and getting more crowded by the minute. And Jonas wanted to go find Bethan more than he wanted to take his next breath. But he also knew that if she lived through this—You killed me—she would never forgive him if he didn’t handle Dominic Carter when she couldn’t.
The way she had done for him without hesitation all those years ago.
And as he melted through the mass of people around him, scanning the main concourse as he went, the fragments of that night that were still with him rose up like a wave. The endless dark of the desert night. The heat like its own implacable weight. The pressure in his head and the pain that rose and fell inside him like a tide—going out or coming in, but never letting him be.
He remembered his own voice spilling out into the space between them. Telling her things he had never said out loud before or since.
He remembered her fingers moving through his hair, gently. Cool, somehow, despite the heat. He remembered the tension in that body of hers—different then, but still spectacular—as she’d lifted her weapon. As she’d fired off a few rounds when necessary and held both him and their position through the night.
Jonas did a loop around the information booth and that clock that stood there, counting down what was left of his life, but there was no sign of her now. Not the faintest trace that she had ever been there. And it took all the self-control he had not to throw back his head and let out his rage and his grief, loud enough to shatter all three of the great windows that hung there above him and let in the last of the day’s light.
He didn�
��t see the point of light without Bethan.
Years after they’d survived the desert, entirely thanks to her, he’d looked up to see her face on that big screen in the lodge in Fool’s Cove. He’d told himself it was resentment that had washed through him at the sight. His past coming to haunt him, when he preferred to be the ghost in any given situation.
And when she’d arrived that first day and smiled at him with pure delight, there on one of those wooden walkways, there had been no audience. It wouldn’t have hurt him any to say hello, explain his position, then treat her the way he had no doubt she would have treated him. But he hadn’t been able to do it.
He remembered how quickly her smile had frozen and gone blank when he’d stared at her as if he didn’t know her, then kept walking.
He also remembered how hard he’d worked—for years—to pretend that didn’t bother him. That she didn’t.
Jonas had spent his whole life putting himself at risk without a second thought, because he’d been prepared to die since long before he’d lived on his own. Since he’d sat in the back of one broken-down car after another and wished for death before morning, because that way he’d escape. In all the years since, he’d never cared much if he went home or not.
Until now.
Until her.
And if he couldn’t have her, if she was already gone, he would do the damn job anyway. The way she would. The way she had.
He would take care of her the only way he had left.
Everything inside him was a howl of rage. A black, crushing grief and a white-hot fury.
Jonas used it.
The rest of his team kept talking to him, but he wanted none of it. He pulled his comm unit out of his ear and shoved it into a pocket. Then he leaned in, hard, to all the training he’d had. All his instincts honed to a vicious, wicked edge. All the things he’d learned to become who he was, a ghost in any crowd.
He cut through the mass of people surging around him like a wicked blade, and they hardly registered he was there.
Inside, his strategic brain took over. If Dominic Carter had sent Iyara into the center of the main concourse, that meant he wasn’t there himself. Jonas moved to the edges of the expansive halls, looked up toward the balconies, and then he knew. There were three grand, arched windows at the top of each stair. And on one, an ever-growing cluster of tourists pouring in from the street outside.
