by Lexi Blake
His eyes narrowed. “Rebecca, Argentina was where her secret lab was located. That was where she held Theo. If she was taking you there, she would have kept you there, too. She likely wanted you to solve her Theo problem.”
A chill went through her.
“Do you remember who was around you at dinner?” Tucker asked.
She shook her head. “Honestly, I don’t remember much. I remember walking into the cafeteria and then waking up. They told me there was something bad in the salad.”
“Or someone dosed you. We know she’d worked on the time dilation drug by that point. Tennessee Smith knows what that feels like.” Tucker started to pace. “I don’t understand why she would have done it if she was planning on taking you.” He stopped. “I did it. I did it to get rid of you. I did it to keep my place.”
It was easier to talk to him now that she could see a bit past who he’d been. The old Reasor never paced. He’d been almost preternaturally still. It had been unnerving. “You don’t know that. The only way to know that is to uncover the memories.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to. I know the others are hoping there’s some kind of cure out there, but not me. I won’t take it. I won’t go back to who I used to be. Would you? Would you unlock your Mr. Hyde?”
“Knowing what you did for McDonald could help the others,” she said, her doctor brain working on how she would do it. She would need scans and blood work. If McDonald had used Becca’s own research to perfect her treatments, then she should be able to do something about it. “Have you tried hypnosis? The human body will always attempt to heal itself, and it can be shocking how much it can do given time and rest.”
“Yeah, Ari’s tried that with all of us. Some of the others get flashes sometimes. I get feelings. Like I should be doing something. Like I left something undone. I don’t know why but I think about old-looking places. Places that look like London, but they’re not.”
She nodded. “That’s because she can’t erase your mind. She could potentially destroy the sections that deal with memory, but that would be a delicate procedure and one that would as likely hurt the parts she wanted to function as not. She needed to break down specific communication between brain synapses, and do it in a way no one has before. Not that anyone who isn’t psychotic would want to. I’m trying to do the opposite. I’m trying to find a way to break down the plaque that cuts off…damn it. She found a way to build it up and very quickly. In a targeted way.”
She could work with that. Especially if she had a lab. She needed those damn notes. McDonald wouldn’t have gotten rid of them and she would have had a failsafe.
“I’m sorry.” Tucker sounded tired.
The words burst through the momentary excitement of discovery, and guilt swelled inside her again. These men had been broken utterly and she was excited about a new project.
Because if McDonald figured out how to build up walls around sections of the memory center, then she had also known how to break them down. The key was here. She knew it was. It was held in these men and that research.
But the man in front of her was real, and she was shocked by the tears that ran down his face. Everything else about him was controlled, but those tears…
“You aren’t the same man you were.” That particular truth hit her soundly as she stared at him, unsure what to do. “You have nothing to apologize for because you aren’t the one who did it to me.”
“I don’t know who I was, what I did. I meet people and I wonder how I hurt them. I don’t ever want to know. I don’t want to lose this me. I don’t have any right to ask you this, but can you help me stay me?” His jaw tightened and he was obviously on the edge. “Please. I have to stay me or I need to…I can’t go back.”
She could walk away from him. She didn’t have to promise this man anything.
Except he was giving her a chance to choose. If it had really been Steven Reasor standing in front of her, she could have walked away, but this was a man named Tucker and he wanted to be good. She had no idea what forces had molded Reasor into a man they called Razor, but this man was different.
And he was in pain.
She’d promised her mother that she would be happy, but happiness sometimes wasn’t a choice. Happiness could be taken away, made into an impossibility due to circumstance. Maybe what her mother should have asked her was to always be true to who she was because then, even if her world got ripped away, she could be content.
She could hate this man for what he’d done to her in another life. Or she could see him as a man who needed help, and she’d dedicated her life to giving help when and where it was needed.
Becca stood and crossed the space between them. “I promise you, Tucker. I’ll do what I can to help your friends, to help any of them who want to get back what they lost, and I’ll make sure we don’t need your memories. I can do it. I can make this work.”
He broke then and his hands came out, as though he couldn’t not ask for comfort.
When his legs went out and he slumped to the floor, she went with him. She let her arms go around him and finally let go of that day. She’d been a victim, and nothing she could have done would have likely fixed the situation.
“Get your hands…” Owen stopped when she looked up at him, his words halting and face transforming from anger to confusion as he looked down at them. “Are you all right?”
She nodded as she felt a shudder go through Tucker. “I am.”
“I wasn’t going to hurt her,” Tucker said, his voice tortured. “But you should know that I did. I hurt her, Owen.”
“You didn’t,” a feminine voice said. When Becca glanced up she saw they weren’t alone. Ariel stood in the doorway next to Ezra, with Robert behind her. “You didn’t hurt her, but someone who wore your skin did. I think we should talk about this. I’ll make us some tea. Why don’t the rest of you go back to bed?”
Go back to bed with Owen. That seemed like a bad idea. Even being in the same room with the man was dangerous, and after her talk with Tucker, she was on the edge again.
Ezra stepped away, pulling a phone from his pocket.
“Thank you, Dr. Walsh,” Tucker whispered. “I’m still sorry. I’ll try to stay away from you. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
But he was the only one who knew anything about medicine, and she wasn’t certain he would have forgotten what he’d learned from Dr. McDonald. That kind of knowledge could remain even when personal memories did not. She might be able to coax some of that information out of him and might lead them one step closer to a cure.
Sometimes bad things happened, and it was up to her to make the most of them, to try to see the positive that could come from it.
“I’m okay. You’re Tucker. You’re not Steven. And we’re okay, you and I.” She let Owen help her up. “Good night, Tucker. I’ll see you in the morning. We can fight it out over the last raspberry yogurt.”
“It’s all yours.” Tucker managed to make it back to his seat.
Owen didn’t let go of her hand. “Good night. We’ll see you all in the morning.”
She followed him out, a piece of herself settling. But the larger piece was still in turmoil and it was all about Owen. Maybe it was time to have it out with him, too.
Ezra stepped back in. “We need to move out now. There’s a team on the way. I don’t know how the fucker found us, but he did. Big Tag says we’ve got maybe five minutes. Owen, take Dr. Walsh in my SUV. Ari and Robert, go with them.”
Owen’s hand found hers and he started into the living room.
“I’ll go wake my sleeping prince,” Erin said. “We’ll stay behind and deal with the fallout. I can’t wait to answer all those questions.”
“Tucker, take Nina and hop in the van with River and Jax. I’ll take Dante and Sasha,” Ezra said, reaching for his backpack. “You know the protocols. Let’s move.”
Owen frowned at his boss. “You know what this means?”
Ezra nodded tightly. “I do. We h
ave to deal with it later. Scatter now and implement a twenty-four-hour blackout on communications. See you on the other side, brothers.”
It looked like her night was taking a turn for the worse.
Chapter Nineteen
Owen looked out the window from his place in the back seat, his eyes on the blue and red lights in the distance. Though they’d gotten miles away, he could still see how close it had been.
“Will Tom…Theo and his wife be okay? Shouldn’t they have run, too?” Becca was looking at those ghostly lights, too.
“I assure you Erin will take care of the situation. Leaving two safe people behind will actually slow the police down. They don’t know the whole story, and Erin will use that to her advantage. And to ours,” Ariel said, sitting back. “There’s no reason for the police to pick them up, and if they did, they have connections who would move swiftly to get them out. The Lost Boys don’t have those. Big Tag can hide them, but he can’t make global warrants disappear. If they’d caught Jax or Dante or Sasha, or even Robert, there would be trouble. Some of them have Interpol red notices out on them.”
“Red notice?” Becca asked.
Owen took that one. “It’s an international warrant for their arrests. Ezra explained how McDonald funded her research after she left Kronberg. She was involved in several criminal operations, including robbing banks. She didn’t do it herself.”
Even in the moonlight he could see the way she paled. “She used her strike team. She could get the money she needed and see them in action.”
“I don’t actually have an Interpol notice on me,” Robert corrected, “but I am wanted for questioning about a couple of things, including my association with the others. Big Tag made sure Theo’s records are perfectly clean. He’s good.”
“Though I assume this isn’t about the lads,” Ariel said.
“It’s about me.” Becca was holding herself apart. While they’d been rushing to the car, she’d let him hold her hand. The minute he’d closed the door, he’d felt a wall come up between them.
There was no forgiveness for him.
Robert pulled out onto the highway. They needed to drive at least a hundred miles, find a motel, and settle in for the night. Though he was certain he wouldn’t feel settled. He wouldn’t be comfortable until she was safely ensconced in The Garden and protected by people he trusted.
“How did he find us?” Becca asked. “They got rid of my cell phone. I thought everyone did.”
“We were working off burners, anyway,” Robert said. “No one except the team, Damon Knight, and Big Tag know the numbers.”
“Then how did they find us? Do you think it was CCTV?” Becca’s hands were balled in her lap, a sure sign of her tension.
He wanted to reach over and hold her hand, promise her everything would be all right, but she wouldn’t take comfort from him. “Maybe.”
What he wasn’t saying, what Robert and Ari had to know, was that there was only one way Green could have caught up with them.
Someone had betrayed the team.
What did they really know about Nina Blunt? She’d hired on to McKay-Taggart and Knight only a few months before.
But then hadn’t something gone wrong with the Colorado mission? Nina hadn’t been around for that one. Pieces were falling into place, and he didn’t like the way this puzzle was filling out.
“So you think he wants me for the same reason Ezra does?” Becca watched the road out of the window. “I would think I was useless without the actual drug. Do you think he has it and he wants someone to reverse engineer it?”
“He could have any number of people do that for him,” Ari replied. “He needs you to figure out the protocols. Her techniques were about more than drugs.”
“He wants me to be the new Hope McDonald. Why would I ever do that? I’m certainly not going to sell my soul to get my career back. I love my work, but I would be dishonoring every vow I took when I became a doctor. He would have to kill me first. How does he think he’s going to get me to help him?” Her eyes widened and she turned in her seat. “Owen, my family. What if he uses my family to get to me?”
“I’ve already got someone watching over them.” It was the first thing he’d thought about as he’d held her in the back of Jax’s van. He’d made the call to Big Tag and someone would be monitoring her father, stepmother, and sister.
“Levi has to be careful about how he works in the States,” Robert pointed out. “He might draw attention to himself if he pulled a stunt like that. That’s why we believe he isn’t the one who was setting you up. Not only does the timing not work, if it could be tied back to him, he would be in trouble with his bosses. I’m almost certain he walked into the situation, assessed it, and decided his best shot was to use the embezzlement scam as leverage. Add in the fact that there was an MSS agent already working the head of the Huisman Foundation, and he cut us loose fast and quick.”
Becca had no way of knowing what they thought. He was certain Ezra would likely want it kept that way, but she was part of the team now. Her life was on the line, and he wouldn’t leave her ignorant. “Levi Green sent us here. We think he intended to let us do the dirty work and he would have shown up at some point and grabbed the prize.”
Or let his plant grab it for him.
His mind sought any other explanation for what had happened tonight. Maybe they’d been unlucky. He didn’t want to think about the fact that one of them could have been lying for years, waiting and watching for his time to strike.
“I don’t understand any of this,” Becca said with a long sigh.
“I’ll answer any questions you have,” Owen replied.
A long silence followed and he watched her in the moonlight, half her face shrouded by night. He should have told her everything that day in the lift. He should have trusted his instincts. There were so many places where he could have turned this thing around, and time and time again he’d missed the moment.
“What you did for Tucker tonight was amazing, Rebecca,” Ari said, her voice soothing. She’d turned so she could get a glimpse of the woman she was talking to. “I wish they’d let me go with him, but I’m glad he’s got River and Jax. I can’t imagine how hard this is on him. He’s been afraid of this since the moment he heard the name Razor.”
“It wasn’t him,” Becca said, the words sounding dull out of her mouth.
He hated how the light in her eyes was dim again. Briefly he’d seen her come alive when she’d been comforting her enemy. He wanted desperately to see anything in her eyes but this grim sadness.
How much time would they have together? In twenty-four hours, they would get the new orders that would move her out of the country as quickly as possible. Somewhere Big Tag had a team together and they would be making plans that would separate him from her.
Was he willing to let her go without a fight? He wasn’t sure she would be alone with him again. She might cling to Ariel, and he wouldn’t have a chance to talk this out with her.
“I’m sorry, Becca. I need you to understand that I didn’t walk into this with the thought of hurting you,” he said. “It wasn’t supposed to go down this way, and I’ll do anything I need to do to make it up to you.”
“There’s nothing you can do.” She leaned against the door, staying as far from him as possible. “This isn’t like Tucker. You knew who you were when you walked into my life.”
“He forgot who he was supposed to be really fast, though,” Robert added, sounding cheerier than he did before.
Ari turned to Robert and send him a wilting look.
Robert shrugged. “It’s true. One minute I had an exotic Scottish lover and the next I was a lonely man. I was looking forward to playing twink to his bear.”
He was about to tell Robert to stop with the sarcasm, but Becca had sat straight up.
“What?” She leaned toward where Robert was sitting. “I thought he was sent in to seduce me.”
It was the most animation he’d seen on her in half an hour.
This could get embarrassing, but if it made Becca smile, he would suffer through it. “Not exactly.”
“Not at all is what he means,” Robert replied with something akin to glee. “He wasn’t supposed to get close to you. I was.”
“Really?” Her nose wrinkled up. “No offense, but you’re not my type. I mean you’re attractive and all, but I don’t know that I would have responded to you.”
A deep sense of satisfaction welled inside him. Robert turned women’s heads wherever they went, but he wasn’t Becca’s type. Owen was. “She likes a bit of the bad boy in there. And she loves this accent of mine.”
Becca glared his way. “I think I’ll stay away from bad boys from now on since I got taken by one.”
Before Owen could reply, Robert was chuckling. “I wasn’t going to seduce you. I was going to befriend you, and trust me, you would have wanted to befriend me. I had plans. I bought board games and everything. A couple of rounds of Ticket to Ride, some wine and a nice dinner, and you would have been eating out of the palm of my hand. You would have been thrilled to befriend the new couple in the building. Of course we would have bonded over talking about my surly husband there. He wasn’t going to talk much.”
She finally glanced his way. “You and Robert were going in as a couple? You didn’t mention that to me. When did that change? Did Ezra order it? Speaking of couples, why were Ezra and Ariel posing as a married couple when it’s obvious she’s involved with Robert?”
“I wouldn’t say involved,” Ariel began.
“Because I looked better with Owen than Ezra. I was the obvious choice, and no one consulted me about the whole married to Ezra thing,” Robert continued as if Ariel hadn’t said a thing. “I would have gone with sister.”
Ari snorted. “Seriously, you think I look like lily-white Ezra’s sister? And how would you explain the accent?” She shook her head, but there was a smile on her lips. “He’s insane.”
“He was also staring at the two of you like he was going to rip Ezra’s head off that night at dinner.” It was way better to talk about Robert’s flaws than his own. He noticed Becca had moved closer to him. He wanted to reach out and get a hand on her, but he wasn’t about to push his luck. “You two should be damn glad I got her out of there early because I think she would have figured out something was wrong if you’d spent the entire dinner glaring at Ezra every time he touched his wife.”
