Luckily Eli had done a damn good job of relaxing me last night and this morning. And the satisfied ache in my thighs and core agreed.
“What’s that grin for?”
I turned wide eyes on Eli, realizing he was right. “I guess I was grinning, huh?”
Eli reached for the dashboard, then flipped a switch I hadn’t noticed before. Shot me a wink. “Gives us a little privacy,” he said.
I glanced through the window separating us from the rear area of the vehicle, the same one Eli had used to escort us to his house that first day. Titus and Monty were talking back and forth, Rhys frowning down at something on the handheld computer on his lap, but I couldn’t hear a single sound, from movement or voices. Assuming the phenomenon was mutual...
“Is there a reason we needed privacy?”
Eli snorted. “Are you trying to ask if I’m starting some freaky stuff with you, Mikaela? Because if you want me to...”
I crossed my legs though my heart felt light. “Keep that thing away from me. Some of us need recovery time.”
His grin really should be a jailable offense; he could probably fell fifty women—or men, for that matter—in one go with the damn thing. As it was, I had guns and knives all over me and a bulletproof vest strapping my breasts down flat, and what was my body doing? Flooding my panties with cream in a way that was a disgrace to the battlefield. In this moment I was a soldier, not a woman. I shouldn’t be—
Oh shit, maybe Rhys had been right.
“What?” Eli asked.
“What what?” I responded automatically. I wasn’t sure what he was reading in my face, but I knew for damn sure I didn’t want to talk about it.
Eli didn’t respond, his stare on the road, his grip tight on the steering wheel. I could see the emotion pulsing through him no matter how hard he might be trying to lock it down—he could never be an emotionless soldier, reacting on automatic. The kind of soldier I’d been trained to be since I was a child. I’d always believed I had to fulfill that role perfectly, be the ultimate soldier, to be valued. Anything less was a failure.
But Eli... Was he a failure? When I first met him, I might have answered that question with a yes. Tonight? I took in his features in the green glow of the dashboard. Somehow, despite being so different from me, I thought Eli was exactly who he needed to be. And exactly who I needed him to be.
I closed my mind to the questions that awaited us on the other side of this mission, to all the shoulds and have tos and musts that had ruled my life thus far, and there, as we sped toward danger, I let myself just be. With Eli. Nothing else.
A half hour later the squeeze of Eli’s hand on my thigh woke me from a light doze. “Time to wake up, Sleeping Beauty.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen her drool,” Titus joked from the rear, proving Eli had turned the sound back on at some point.
“At least I’m not the personal expert at Dutch ovens,” I shot back, taking a sharp look around. Woods, woods, and more woods. That’s all there was to see.
Eli nosed the Humvee off the one-lane road we’d ended up on and turned the engine off. He turned to me, leaned close, and before I could protest, gave me a hard, quick kiss that nonetheless included tongue. “Let’s light this fucker up, Beautiful.”
He slid out the door, leaving me still sputtering.
At the back of the Humvee Eli was strapping on the mini computer the men had been investigating earlier. Monty had a duplicate on his wrist. The men climbed out settled night-vision goggles on their heads. We would hike in a couple of miles before reaching the area where the suspected entrance should be. I pulled on my own goggles, and the world turned green instantly. My eyes slowly adjusted as I put in my earpiece, and we tested our communications before heading into the woods.
The Agozis had been adamant about not using deadly force until we reached X. With this complex being a government facility, we couldn’t know who was involved, if X was the only player on the grounds, if any innocents or civilian staff were present. My team was used to hitting enemy camps with known murderers, but Eli had told me they researched their targets thoroughly before agreeing to take them out. Here, with the various personnel, that hadn’t been an option. Each of us wore dart guns with a supply of ketamine darts, but non-lethal takedowns were also authorized—and would likely be much faster. We would only take out someone permanently of that were directly and obviously in league with X.
We fanned out, took our time picking our way through the woods toward the entrance. Given that there were no formal blueprints for the tunnel, no records of it being built, we assumed it had been concealed somehow. We also assumed they would have cameras on it. Eli couldn’t control those without a connection to the building security system, which we needed to establish. When we got close, Eli raised his fist and the rest of us fell back to varying degrees, keeping us off camera for now.
I moved up to a right-angle view of Eli as he began inspecting what looked like a ragged limestone cliff face. He ran his hands over the surface, back and forth, edging farther along until he found what he needed. He keyed in something on his computer that I couldn’t see, then, after retrieving a light-colored cord from a pocket, he hooked one end to the computer, gripped a piece of the rock face with his free hand, and jerked hard. A hard crumbling sound reached me as the piece came off the surface.
A keypad. Somehow Eli had found a camouflaged keypad where I’d seen nothing. He fiddled with it for a moment, then attached the cord he held, looked back to his computer, and clicked a button on the screen.
I motioned my men forward. Eli should now be hooked into the hard line at the door, his computer running code until it found the combination to open the entry. In the background, he’d told me, the program would also be searching for a back door into the building’s security systems—cameras, comms, locks. We couldn’t shut everything down, but we could ease our way inside.
We waited, crouched, for Eli’s signal—a raised hand. Rhys and I rushed forward just as a section of the cliff detached itself and slid open.
The guards were waiting, backs to the walls on each side of the entry. Weapons at the ready. We went in low, rolling through the door to avoid their notice as long as possible. A mere split second, but that gave us long enough to shoot both soldiers with darts. If they noticed, they didn’t hesitate, simply dog piled onto us without taking the time to check their flanks. Monty and Titus used strategic punches to knock both men out before the drugs could take effect.
“I hope this doesn’t represent the highest quality of X’s defense force,” Rhys said as he laid his guard out against the wall. “I was hoping to at least break a sweat.”
Eli moved inside, sans computer. He held out his hand to Monty, who passed him the second one. “Cameras down; jammers on,” he said.
“Levi’s signal?” Titus asked.
Eli tapped the screen in his hand. “Come on, baby.” One, two seconds went by. Three. Four. “There you are, bro.” He brought the screen to his mouth and kissed it. “Mwah.”
“I put my hands on that thing, you know,” Monty pointed out.
“Me too,” Rhys said.
“Me three.” Titus shuddered. “Anyone got some GermX?”
“As long as his lips don’t touch anything else,” Rhys said. On cue, all of them looked at me.
“For fuck’s sake!” I brought both my middle fingers up, very close to their faces. “Are we on a mission or a high school girls’ sleepover?” I shot Eli a glare. “Are we ready?”
His grin would’ve gotten him a smack if we had time. As it was he skirted behind the rest of the team—on the opposite side of the tunnel—to pass me. “We’re ready, Beautiful. This way.”
“They’ve got no cameras and no comms, right?” Rhys asked. “They’re expecting trouble. What are we expecting?”
Monty held up a separate device similar to a small video camera, with a wide, flat disc at the camera end. “FLIR will tell us.” He pointed the thermal toward the tun
nel. “So far, two ahead.”
Rhys and Titus moved forward, Eli directly behind with Monty, me bringing up the rear. As we neared the end of the tunnel, two wide glass doors opened into what appeared to be an empty concrete receiving room. The guards inside that room knew someone was coming—they’d have been alerted by the original two, but had no way of knowing they were facing five soldiers. One was almost to a phone hanging on the north wall of the room; the other was heading for us.
A beep sounded, and the door swung open. Rhys and Titus were through it and on the two guards before they could alert anyone else to our presence.
Monty took up a spot at the far end of the room, which opened onto a blank white hall, no signs. “Clear.”
Eli glanced at the computer strapped to his wrist. “Looks like we are going down. Stairs will be in the corners.”
Rhys and Titus joined us, and we moved as a group toward the hall and Monty. “We’re going left,” Eli said. “How’s it look?”
Monty held up the FLIR, first in one direction, then the other. “Good.” The camera in his hand beeped. “Scratch that. We’ve got six on their way.”
Monty and Eli stashed their electronics and the rest of us holstered our dart guns as we waited. Monty held up an open hand and counted down—five, four, three, two, one.
The first guard rounded the corner, gun first. Monty grabbed the man by a fistful of clothing and yanked him forward. He went flying—right into Rhys’s fist.
Titus let out a whoop and leaped into the group in the hallway. The rest of us followed, and chaos erupted. The guards had made a mistake; they’d bunched up in too small an area. With a fight in a confined space, guns were useless unless you wanted to shoot your buddies, which meant all those hands holding weapons were now a liability. I caught a quick glimpse of one smart soldier punching Rhys in the face with the gun still in his hand, finger not behind the trigger guard, thank God, but most took those precious few seconds to holster or drop their weapons—and regretted it.
Taking advantage of Titus’s bowling-ball move on the right side of the hall, I got a running start and jumped. My right foot made contact with the wall, pushed off, and I was zigzagging back toward the center as I landed behind much of the group. The only guy outside the fray was big. Very big. When he got a good look at me, his body relaxed and he laughed.
And that was Mr. Big’s mistake.
In a move that would’ve done Black Widow proud, I ran for my target and, knowing he was too stunned at my aggression to move, used his thigh as a step up his torso. My ass hit his shoulder as my leg swung around, pulling my body around as it wrapped his neck. My stomach pressed against the back of his head, my legs locked in front of his throat, and I threw my weight forward to push him off-balance. The man tumbled forward, and my body added to the momentum, forcing him into a somersault. He landed, sprawled on his back, legs on a couple of downed soldiers, head still locked between my thighs.
He never saw the punch I threw at his temple coming. “Nighty night, asshole.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Eli —
The man who’d threatened my family, who’d put us through hell at a time when our focus should have been on our own, was somewhere in this fucking building. We’d gone through two teams of six soldiers to get to the stairwell, jogged down two flights, and probably faced another maze of hallways before we reached the man we needed to kill.
I stopped at the stairwell exit door and turned back, assessing our team. Mikaela’s men were in top shape, not even breathing hard. Though Mikaela brought up the rear, watching our backs—and the couple of darts I’d heard from her vicinity as we descended to stairs said she was watching well—I didn’t even wonder if she was out of breath. The woman could run circles around me, I had no doubt. Still, I swept her with my gaze, unsurprised to find her ready and waiting to move forward.
That same sweep moved past her to the stairs, steel-gray against the stark white walls. And yet the stairs weren’t pristine—wet red drops glistened against the steel, caught by the blinding fluorescent lights mounted at each floor.
“Who’s bleeding?” I barked. It had to be one of us; we were the only ones here. I glanced down at my feet.
Clear.
“Who—”
“I got it,” Mikaela muttered, bending over.
My throat tightened, threatening my breath as I shoved through the team. “What happened?”
She was tying a bandanna around her left thigh. A small puddle of blood had dripped from her boot and collected on the step. “Just a little nick, no worries. Fucker didn’t like getting his ass kicked by a woman half his size.” She tilted her head back as she jerked the knot tight. “Bigger isn’t always better.”
“She would know—we always save the big ones for her,” Titus joked.
I took my cue from him; I had to because, yeah, my first instinct was to totally lose my shit. Only the fact that no one else seemed concerned help me to keep it together. “But sometimes bigger is definitely better.”
She winked my way, and I noted that her eyes were clear. “Sometimes.”
“How deep?” I asked roughly.
Mikaela straightened. “Not even a hitch in my step. We ready?”
I admit, I hesitated. I mean, the woman I cared about was bleeding with every step. But this was an op, and Mikaela was a soldier. “All right, let’s go.” I moved back to the door, the team ready behind me. “Monty?”
He glanced at the screen of the FLIR, squinted. “Looks like they’re in a line along both sides of the hall, same amount as before.”
Six more. I nodded an acknowledgment of the intel and clicked on my computer’s screen. The red light on the box to one side turned green.
I opened the door.
Rhys went through first. We entered one by one, and I flanked Mikaela as she passed into...not a hallway like we’d expected. Instead it was one enormous room filled with tiers of desks, glassed-in offices, conference areas, and a large, clear area near the front where Levi stood with Sullivan and a tall black man I immediately identified as X.
While I was taking in the room, Mikaela’s team was taking out the guards converging around us. I headed straight down the center aisle, darting the two guards who stepped into my path before a one-two punch shut off their lights. Neither man pulled their weapons—not that I cared. The bastards could be Mother fucking Theresa for all I cared; I turned back, hit them each with a second dart, just for the hell of it.
“I told you we wouldn’t play nice,” Levi said, watching my approach. I raised a brow at him. We had played nice; no one was dead. Yet.
“Yes, I see that,” X murmured. He, too, was watching, his dark eyes intent behind Clark Kent glasses, but not only on me—he was watching the team perform. Assessing. Weighing every action, no worry or concern on his face. The lack sent rage through my entire body, and I dropped my dart gun on the last step, raising my GLOCK on the return.
“Eli, no!” Levi stepped toward me, and only his body blocking my aim stilled my finger on the trigger.
“The bastard needs to die,” I growled. For what he put us through, what he put Mikaela and her team through. Hell, just on fucking principle, he needed to die.
“You don’t want to do that,” X said, voice a cultured slide that put my back up.
“Why fucking not?”
Those words weren’t mine; they were Mikaela’s. She moved up beside me, and I fought the need to angle in front of her, keep her covered.
“Because,” X said, “if you kill me, you’ll never find out why you’re here.”
“That is why we’re here, asshole,” Rhys growled, approaching from the left. On the right, Monty and Titus appeared. Each man had a gun up, and a closer look showed they had all switched to lethal weapons, not dart guns.
“I told you,” Sullivan said from where he stood with his back against the front wall, head just beneath the massive screens displaying every kind of data I could think of. “There had to be
a reason for him to have you target me.” He gave X a nasty glare. “I’m not going to forget those doctored images. That was Robbie, wasn’t it? Looked like his handiwork.”
X slid the geeky glasses down his nose and stared blandly back at his agent, puppet, whatever Sullivan was. The man grumbled but subsided.
That’s when the tingle down my back warned me that this man was definitely not the benign bureaucrat he was attempting to portray.
I looked to Levi, noted how he hadn’t given the guards around us a single glance as we swarmed in. No, his intense gray stare was all for X. He’d figured out the same thing I had: the only person in this room that mattered was right in front of us. The question was, what the hell did the guy want?
“What is going on, Levi?” I asked softly.
My brother shrugged. “We were waiting for you all to arrive before whatever great unveiling dickhead here has planned.” He held his hands out to his sides. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here. Shall we get the fuck on with it?”
X didn’t smile, didn’t look pissed. That was what unnerved me about the guy. No reaction. No emotion. Nothing. It made me want to punch him just to see what would happen, but if life with Levi had taught me anything, it was that the quieter a man was, the more you had to worry about.
Walking slowly in our direction, X eyed both of us, moved to Mikaela beside me. I felt her tension, knew she was preparing for whatever the fucker had planned. But he simply walked between us without a pause. Each of us turned to watch X move up the aisle to the next tier, where he pivoted to look down on us. A king surveying his subjects.
My hand tightened instinctively on my gun, and I knew he saw it. I felt the imminent danger in the air, not just from me but from every other member of our team.
And then he spoke.
Assassin's Game Page 24
