by Regan Black
“Claudia.” He lay on his back, prepared to listen.
“Rob, glad you’re okay. From your GPS and phone I see you’re safely ensconced with Trina Lopez.” There was nothing invisible or unreachable for Trail Hikers. The super secret shadow agency had every technological capability available to any nation on the planet.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“We’ve had a development. I hate to ask you to participate with your injuries, but I need you to go in and get one of our agents. She’s stuck up there, with the ROC group you’ve evaded.”
Rob sat up and swung his legs over the bed. “Do I know her?”
“No. She’s newer than you, and her background is human trafficking. There’s a corridor of trafficking between New Jersey and Silver Valley, straight through the Poconos. That’s why Vasin was holed up there. We have reason to believe Ivanov is in the vicinity, ensuring this latest effort goes off without a hitch.”
“I could have told you that.” He didn’t want to say too much within earshot of Trina. He trusted her implicitly but this was about mission integrity—operational security. Other agents’ lives were at stake.
“Our agent has been posing as the solicitor for underage girls who will be sent to work in strip clubs. They have jobs during the day as domestic help, mostly housekeepers. What ROC hasn’t figured out is that we’ve kept these girls out of the bars. A onetime payment is made to ROC for them, and they don’t follow up.”
“That’s unusual for them, isn’t it?”
“In the past, yes. But with the weight of law enforcement coming at them from all angles, they can’t afford to maintain ties to any shipment—be it drugs, weapons, underage girls. They take their cut and take off.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“Take Trina Lopez to the nearest bus stop—she’ll get back to Harrisburg on her own. Use the SUV you’ve rented and go back to Vasin’s hideout. There’s a trailer park on the premises.”
“I saw it.” But it had looked abandoned even to his trained eyes.
“They moved the girls there three hours ago. Our agent was supposed to pick them up last night but with the recent events Ivanov pulled up all his feelers and ordered the young women and our agent into the park. We’ve overheard conversations that indicated he’s going to issue an order to kill them all.”
“How many captured and how much time do I have?”
“Twelve, and you’re already behind by an hour. But don’t go in there until I send the word. Situate yourself within fifteen minutes of the location I’m going to text to you and sit tight.” Claudia ended the connection. She wasn’t one for small talk during an op.
“What’s the plan?” Trina’s sleepy voice made him pause before he replied.
“We’re splitting up. I’ve got to report somewhere ASAP. You’re on the next bus to Harrisburg.”
Trina let out a string of obscenities that made him smile in the early-morning darkness. You could take the woman out of the Navy, apparently, but her Navy vocabulary remained intact.
“What, you don’t like buses?” He was already putting on his cargo pants, his adrenaline surge masking the pain he knew was still there.
“There is no bus, Rob. I’m going with you.”
“Like hell you are.” As he spoke her phone rang.
“Corey, what’s going on?” He watched her silhouette by the fuzzy light of the bathroom night-light. She nodded, gave one-word responses. Relief mingled with dismay in his gut. Relief that she’d have to listen to her boss, who was obviously telling her what Claudia had just told him. Dismay that he might not see her again. If he was smart, he’d let go of his plan for any more closure, his hours with the counselor be damned. This was about all the closure he could handle.
“What you don’t get, Corey, is that I’m here, on the ground, and with a man who was with the fugitive I was supposed to pick up. And this man, Rob Bristol, is in no condition to go into an ROC vipers’ nest on his own. We’ve helped with ROC cases before, why not this time?”
A short pause as Trina listened, then her shocking reply.
“Fine, Corey. Put me on an official leave status starting now.” She put her phone down and clicked on her nightstand light. Rob was struck by her stunning beauty, but kept it to himself out of self-preservation. He didn’t want her phone slamming against his skull.
“I’m going with you, Rob. Either we both go rescue the girls, or they get hurt or worse. Your choice.”
“Your boss told you the whole story, then?”
“Enough to know that this is time-sensitive and we’re the closest, most capably trained law enforcement—” she snorted “—or whatever the hell you are, nearby.”
He stared at her, knowing that if he agreed to allow her to accompany him, he was putting her life on the line, too. To let her go put his heart on the line, but it might not be life-saving for Trina. Because he knew ROC, and they didn’t give up easily. At the first sign of Trina they’d be all over her like rain in April. Ivanov had to know by now who she was, what she’d been doing on his compound. The security system on the storage building was directly connected to the ROC’s systems headquarters, which meant Trina’s face was plastered probably in a text message to every ROC bad guy within a thousand miles.
Trina’s life was at stake no matter what Rob did.
“It’s my mission, my orders.” He’d never forgive himself if anything happened to her. She had a kid now, for heaven’s sake.
“I can help you with the girls, Rob. Corey said there’s a dozen or more, smuggled from Ukraine, being prepped to go to Harrisburg. We’re going to need another SUV or two.”
“My orders, Trina.” She’d fought him when he was a SEAL, too. She’d been the pilot in charge of a support mission and wanted to give him suggestions that he didn’t have time for—his team had already considered all options. Not something he’d expect a non-SEAL to completely comprehend. It’d turned out her concerns had saved the lives of his men during that deadly raid.
“But—”
“My orders. Or the bus stop.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
She’d relented. Now Rob had fourteen women to save—twelve young girls, a Trail Hikers agent, and Trina.
* * *
“You never thought I was going to get on a bus, did you?” Trina sipped hot coffee with cream from a foam cup as Rob drove back through winding roads and heavily treed countryside. She’d agreed that since it was his mission, he should drive. She understood—it was a way of letting your brain and body know that you were in charge and in need of top performance.
“No.” All of their conversation since they’d left the hotel had been clipped on his part. Trina got why Rob didn’t want an extra body tagging along on his op, but she knew that his ribs were still hurting and at risk of complete fracture. She’d be his backup if he collapsed a lung. “The dog, Trina. We need to do something about the dog.”
“He’s a good little puppy. He can stay in the car—we’ll leave the windows open. My guess is he’ll be happy to smell us, and stay put. It’ll be cooler than being outside, especially if you park this under a tree.”
“I’ve got a better idea.” Without fanfare, he turned off the highway and onto a winding country road. After about a mile he pulled off onto a farmhouse drive, and she saw the Paradise Creatures sign. “We’re taking him to a kennel?”
“Until you are able to come back for him, yes. I’ve already reached out to the owner and they’ve agreed to open for us.”
She smiled inwardly, inexplicably buoyed by his concern for the tiny dog. “Thank you.”
Rob grunted his acknowledgment as he put the SUV in Park. “If you don’t mind, could you take the dog in?”
“Of course.”
Trina signed the papers for the puppy, and when the attendant asked her his name, she thought a minute. “
Renegade. His name is Renegade.”
She returned to the car, where the motor was still running and the air-conditioning divine.
“How is your arm feeling?”
He shrugged. “Fine. Sore, like I pounded out too many reps in the gym. If it had been broken, we’d both be on a bus right now.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do, Trina. You’ve single-handedly decided that you’re going to get in on this mission when you’ve never worked something like this before. You usually apprehend one person at a time, right?”
“Not always. It depends. And no, I have no clue whom you’re working for or what you’re doing, except that Corey mentioned young girls being trafficked and I had to help. They’re being sent to my neck of the woods. Have you spent a lot of time in Silver Valley in between your missions? It’s peaceful, a rolling green-and-blue horizon atop woods and farm fields. Not usual for a place so close to three major cities.” She referred to Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, DC.
“I’ve recently become acquainted with Silver Valley, yes.” He’d lived right in her backyard for three months. And she was furious with herself for caring, for wanting to know where he lived and how long he planned to stay.
“Then you know it’s worth fighting for, to keep these evil bastards out.”
“I don’t think that ROC is interested in settling in there anytime soon. They only want their cut for the girls.”
“Maybe.” She didn’t know what he did, and wasn’t trying to pretend to.
“What I want to know, Trina, is why aren’t you more concerned about your kid?”
“I’m very concerned about my child.” She bit her lower lip. It was so very difficult to not just spill it all, tell Rob that Jake was his. But not like this, not in the midst of an op that could go south at any point. “I’m also lucky to have supportive family.”
“Yes, you are.” His judgment couldn’t be clearer. It stung that he thought her career was a threat to her child. She’d asked herself the same question, and it always came back to accepting that law enforcement was a calling for her. And so was being Jake’s mother.
“What should I know about what we’re walking into?” She had training, but knowledge was the best weapon in any op. And an open mind.
“Have you ever worked any kind of SWAT?”
“Only training. I’ve been pretty lucky as far as ops go—most of my apprehensions have been textbook. If there’s any chance something is going to get risky, we go in pairs and ask for backup when needed.”
“Great. So you forced yourself on this without the skills to be of any help.”
“Excuse me. I have plenty of skills. And it won’t be just the two of us, will it?” She’d assumed they’d be going in on the tip of a large spear of LEAs. “We’re wasting time talking. Let’s go.”
He shook his head. “We can’t do one thing, make a single move, until we get the go-ahead from my boss. I’ll drive to our waiting point and we could be there five minutes or five days until the call comes. It’s how these things go. We won’t have backup at the start. We’re going in clandestine. The ROC group won’t hesitate to kill these girls in order to keep how they got them this far into the States from being revealed. Until the girls are placed where they’re being sold, and the money is in ROC hands, they’re a liability. I have no desire to have the deaths of these young women on my conscience.”
Cold dread made her blood feel as though it was thickening, pumping too slowly through her body.
“You okay?” She heard Rob’s voice, but her vision blurred as she remembered the cold stone basement, the hours that she’d been certain would turn into days. “Trina.”
His forceful tone shook her from the hell that had been the first major turning point in her life. “I’m fine.”
“You’re thinking about the time in high school, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” She placed the empty coffee cup into the holder on her door. “I’m in this for whatever it takes.”
“I forgot about it until you got so quiet. Look, Trina, this is not the mission for you to prove yourself on. It’s not a hill worth your blood.” His twist on the military adage about whether a hill was worth dying on wasn’t missed. He was trying to get her back to herself.
“I’m good. That was a long time ago. I’ve been through wartime ops since then.” And had birthed a baby, his baby.
“You’ve got a kid, Trina. I get that you’ve changed, you’re not the same woman I knew, but you’re still you. You’ll never forgive yourself if you get hurt, or worse.” He shifted onto a new road and started the long twisting way into the deepest part of the Poconos.
“J—he’s fine.”
“You have a son.”
“Yes.”
“His father—are you with him?”
“No. He—he’s never been in the picture.” Crap. The flashback to when two male high school classmates had grabbed her off the abandoned path between the girls’ locker room and the track, locked her in the football storage garage, promising to come back later for the “real” action, had left her raw. It felt like Rob was ambushing her with everything she’d worked so hard to leave in her past. Including him.
“Did you do in-vitro or adopt?” His curiosity was sincere, his expression open. Fury flashed hot and potent, making her turn in her seat and look at him as he drove.
“Damn it, Rob, you can’t come back to life and interrogate me about what I’ve been doing for the past five years that I thought you were dead. It’s not your business anymore!”
He matched her previous litany of profanity as he slowed the SUV and drove off the road into the space between two copses of trees. They’d be invisible to any passersby, but she wasn’t concerned. In this remote part of the mountains they’d be lucky to see one other vehicle per hour if at all.
The SUV was shielded from the bright sun by the evergreen forest, which provided a better canopy than any stretch of canvas. Rob rolled down the windows to allow for airflow, and to Trina’s surprise, goose bumps appeared on her forearms. It had to be ten, maybe fifteen degrees cooler out of the blazing sun. The early-morning dew still glinted from the tiny green plants that grew at the base of the tree trunks.
“Trina. Look at me.”
Damn it, she was trembling again.
“Please.”
She wanted to ignore his demands, his arrogance, his sheer ignorance of the hell she’d been through, believing he’d been killed. Rob’s gentle persuasion, however, had always been her Achilles’ heel. She sucked in the pine-scented air and faced him.
* * *
Rob’s initial fury that Trina refused to take orders and go back to her office in Harrisburg had been pierced by the stricken expression that he could only attribute to what he remembered as the scariest time of her life. She’d told him the story of the two teens who’d terrorized her in high school, and he’d wanted to go back in time and kill them. As her story unfolded under the desert stars, he’d put his arm around her and listened, giving her all the comfort a SEAL on deployment could. And he’d thanked God that her school had a security system that prevented her captors from doing any physical harm to her. The security guards had caught them and freed Trina.
Her life’s purpose had changed, though. Once on track to become a doctor, she’d decided to do something more physical to help others. And, Rob suspected, to make her feel more empowered. The US Navy beckoned. He understood, because his desire to become a SEAL had been born out of wanting to get out of the chaos that had been his childhood.
Now as he looked into her eyes, eyes that had haunted him since he’d said his private goodbye to her five years ago, he saw the woman he’d made love to in the midst of the highest operational tempo both of them had ever experienced before now.
“I’m sorry if I’m coming across like a tank. But I want to ma
ke it perfectly clear, Trina. I moved to Silver Valley, took the job with my current employer, to be closer to you. Even if we only met for coffee once, had one conversation where I’d told you I was still alive and wished you well in your current life, it would be worth it to me. We shared something when we were deployed that few ever do. Forgive me if it’s been too long, and you’ve buried the memories too deeply.”
“I didn’t bury the memories, Rob. I relived them every damned day. For a long time. And I’m still not understanding why you didn’t reach out sooner.” Tears were forming and leaking out of the corners of her eyes, trailing down her cheeks. He couldn’t stop his hand, and his fingers brushed away the sign that he’d hurt Trina far more than he’d imagined. They’d both needed closure.
“I wanted to, babe, but it wasn’t possible.” He hadn’t thought enough of himself to do it for him, but he should have done it for her. Walked across the street and—
His gut clenched in the certainty that a person had less than a handful of times in life. When he was a kid and saw his first SEAL movie and knew that was his path. When a bombing raid had gone terribly wrong and he’d ended up severely injured, only to be captured, tortured as a POW, and once back in friendly hands had endured the most excruciating pain yet—rehabilitation. Knowing his SEAL days were over, and that he’d be able to keep up the good fight in the CIA, but only if he had no shot with Trina.
He’d thought he’d had no chance, but this moment of clarity pierced through everything. His thoughts and planning for what they were going to accomplish once at the ROC Poconos compound took a back seat, and Rob had never allowed a mission to take a back seat.
He didn’t care that she had a child, either. Usually he’d dated only single women without kids, not wanting to involve another potential casualty in his very fluid lifestyle. An adult woman understood “no permanent ties,” but a juvenile didn’t. He paused. If the toddler he saw Trina with had been around two, then he’d be what, five by now?
A bolt of truth pierced him.
