by Rachel Caine
“Are we back to this?” he asked. “All of a sudden it’s just that I’m concerned? Are we just friends now?”
She didn’t want to have this discussion, not now, not here…not with the video evidence of it left behind on Joe Fideli’s cameras. She and Joe were tight, and he was trustworthy, but this was deeply personal business.
“I don’t know,” she said very evenly, although what was going on inside her was full of sharp edges and sudden drops. “Aren’t we?”
Pat shook his head, not to answer her, but just to indicate he was done with the conversation. She set her unfinished glass of scotch aside and stood up. “I’ll meet you back at the house,” she said. “We can talk there.”
He wanted to push it, she could tell, but he was just as private as she was about their relationship, whatever it was. “I’ll be up late.” He meant, Don’t go to bed without talking to me. She didn’t acknowledge that at all, just offered him a cool kiss on the cheek and left without another word.
Outside, the night air felt damp and heavy with mist. She went into Joe’s house through the back door—keypad lock, to which she had a code—and found Joe and Kylie in the kitchen finishing up the dishes. Without a word, Kylie handed her a towel, and she helped wipe down the damp china and put it away.
“So,” Joe said. “That was a short conversation.”
“Yeah.”
“Something you need to share?”
“I didn’t know this was an AA meeting, Joe.”
Kylie shot her husband a warning look. She was exactly the kind of woman Bryn would have expected to attract Joe, actually. Lovely, strong, intelligent, and sensitive. She reached over with a soapy hand and picked up the half-full wineglass sitting by the sink, which she finished off. “Cheers,” she said. “It’s not, so ignore my nosy-old-lady husband. Thanks for coming over. The kids love seeing you and Mr. French.”
“Mostly Mr. French,” Bryn said, but she smiled anyway. Right on cue, her bulldog wandered into the kitchen, panting. He flopped down next to Bryn’s feet, clearly exhausted, and gave her a piteous long-suffering groan, complete with puppy-dog eyes. “I think he’s ready to go.” She wiped the last plate and put it away.
Kylie dried her hands and hugged Bryn close, kissed her cheek, and whispered, “Be careful.”
“I will,” Bryn whispered back, then let go and hugged Joe, too. He didn’t bother warning her, and there was no cheek-smooching from him. It was like hugging a block of concrete. It always surprised her how densely muscled he was; he carried himself so casually that it was easy to miss. “See you tomorrow.”
“I’ll wear my best gun,” he said without a trace of irony.
Mr. French groaned again, heaved himself back to his feet, and followed her out to the car, where he jumped up on the passenger seat, turned around three times, and flopped down with a sigh that said, more clearly than anything, how run out he was. He didn’t even beg for the window to be down. By the time she’d driven to the end of the block and made the first turn out of Joe’s neighborhood, her dog was completely, utterly asleep. And snoring like a little old man.
Bryn rested one hand on his warm, short fur. He woke up long enough to twist around and give her fingers a sleepy lick, then fell right back to sleep. “Everything’s all right, dog,” she told him. He snored. “We’re going to be okay. I promise.”
She wasn’t talking to the dog, of course, not really. Apart from being asleep, Mr. French had total faith in her ability to make everything right. In his doggy universe, that was her job—to make him happy and safe, to keep the food and water coming, and to toss the ball.
Simple.
There were times Bryn ached to have that simplicity for herself, though she knew full well she’d hate it if it came. Life was never simple, and it wasn’t meant to be.
She took the long way home. She stopped at the beach to walk on the sand, shoes off, breathing in the mist and listening to the timeless, steady hiss of the surf. She wasn’t alone out there, but she could pretend she was; that was what all the other shadowy figures—sometimes entwined—were doing, pretending they were invisible, locked in their own private universe. Nobody bothered her, or even spoke to her, and after ten minutes she was chilled to the bone but only a little soothed.
The drive home was uneventful until her phone rang. Bryn hit the hands-free button on her steering wheel and said, “I’m on my way,” because she knew it would be Pat, checking on her slow progress.
But the voice that came out of the speakers wasn’t Pat’s. It was her sister, Annalie’s. “Bryn?”
Bryn steered hastily to the curb, put the car in park, and said, “Annie? Annie, where are you?”
“Bryn, I need you to come get me. Please come get me.…” She sounded desperately scared and lost. “I need to see Mom. I need to get home.…” In a much softer voice, her sister said, “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
“Sweetie, where are you?”
“I—I don’t know. I think I’m dying. Please come get me.…” Annie was crying Bryn realized with a wrench; she sounded disoriented. “A boat, I think I’m on a boat. I can’t get out. I need help. Please—” Annie sucked in a sudden breath that sounded almost like a scream—it was so drenched with alarm—and then there was a soft click, and the call died.
“No,” Bryn whispered, and fumbled for her phone in her purse. “No, no, no, Annie, no…” She checked the number: CALL BLOCKED. She dialed Pat McCallister’s number. Her mind was clear, cold, and running very, very fast. When he picked up, she said, “I need you to pull my cell phone records and trace the call I got right before this. It was Annie, Pat. Annie called me. She said she thought she was on a boat.”
He was silent for maybe a second, and then said, “I’ll have the intel ready before you get here.” She didn’t doubt for a moment that he would have someone, somewhere, who owed him enough of a favor to make it happen.
“Pat—” The line was already dead. He hadn’t said good-bye.
Mr. French, who’d been woken up by the sudden stop and the emotion radiating out of her, whined in concern and licked her arm. She leaned over and hugged him, and said, “We’re going to find her, baby. We’re going to find my sister.”
He barked as if he agreed and settled down in the seat as she put the car in gear and headed home with absolute disregard for speed limits. God, if he’s decided she’s of no further value to him…Mercer was not a nice man. If he decided that Annie wasn’t useful, he’d dump her like a bad date. In Annie’s case, that meant no more shots, and no more shots of Returné meant a slow, agonizing, and gruesome death. She could already be far along the path.
He’s luring you, the cooler part of her brain warned her. That wasn’t just Annie being resourceful and getting her hands on a cell phone. He wanted her to call. He wants you to go rushing in to save her.
Maybe. But honestly, Bryn couldn’t see how else to play it. Annalie was her sister, and she’d been innocent in all this, a victim. There was no way Bryn could play it safe if there was even the remotest chance that Annie could be rescued and out of Mercer’s hands.
She also knew what Pat was going to say. She just didn’t want to hear it.
Chapter 5
The first words McCallister said to her as she and Mr. French rushed inside the mansion’s big entry hall were “This way.”
“Do you have the information?” Bryn asked, dumping everything but her phone next to the door.
“Yes. Come with me.” He’d taken off his suit jacket and tie, and his pale blue shirt was wrinkled, the first two buttons opened—he looked unexpectedly vulnerable to her, somehow. She was so used to seeing him completely together. As she followed him, he said, “Bryn, you have to expect that this may be—”
“A trap,” she said, well aware of the tension in her voice. “I know. Just help me find her, Pat. I need to find her. Please, don’t tell me the dangers, just…help.”
He said, “I will,” in a soft, flat voice, and closed th
e door behind her. She hadn’t paid attention to where they were going, but in the sudden rush of stillness, she realized that they were in Patrick’s personal office…a place she’d rarely gone, simply because the door was always shut, whether he was inside or not. It was a warm, book-lined room of dark woods and maroon fabrics, with soft gold light fixtures that lit but didn’t dazzle. The desk was massive and heavily carved, and the chairs matched. It was all very masculine and Victorian, except for the gleaming, ultramodern laptop sitting on the tooled leather desktop.
Pat lifted his gaze to hers and said, “Info’s on the laptop screen. I printed a copy for you to take. But make no mistake, Bryn: I might be willing to accept letting you go alone on Pharmadene’s black flag op, but not on this. No way in hell. So I’m coming, too. I’m not entertaining any arguments. If you tell me no, I’ll just take another car and beat you there.”
“I wasn’t planning on trying to shut you out,” Bryn replied. “I’m scared. I’m scared for Annie.”
“And I’m scared for you. You’re too desperate to find her, and that’s a liability. Slow and careful. That’s how we’re going to find her, and how we’re going to get her back safely, without losing anyone else. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Do you think he ordered her to make that call?” Jonathan Mercer’s moral compass—if he’d ever had one in the first place—had shattered into a million sharp pieces when he’d helped create Returné. What was left was something Bryn didn’t really understand at all. Mercer was capable of anything…of luring them in to be killed, most obviously, but he was utterly unpredictable. He might just be screwing with her to entertain himself. Or to let Annie go…If Annie was still under his control, she’d be a perfect Trojan horse.
Or maybe, just maybe, her sister had somehow won her freedom and needed, desperately, to find safety.
Pat sank down in the desk chair, holding both her hands in his. “I think if Mercer wants to have a chat with you, he’d think using Annie to arrange it was just good business,” he said. “So until we find out differently, we have to assume that he knew she was calling, at the very least. It wouldn’t be safe to do anything else.”
She looked past him at the screen. It had a cell phone number on it, but he quickly crashed her hopes by saying, “The number’s not useful in itself; it’s a throwaway. But I have the cell’s last GPS location. It’s been switched off, but you were right. It was at a marina, right here.” He brought up a map, and pointed. “It’s not exactly the yacht club. The place is a favorite for drug smugglers. If we go, we go in armed and ready.”
“If we go?”
“Mercer—”
“Pat, Mercer didn’t set this up. If he had, he’d have at least had her give the location to feed to me, wouldn’t he?” Even as she said it, it had a hollow ring and she knew it. She wanted to believe that Annie had gotten free of him, that she could be saved. Could be fixed.
And at the same time, she knew that was bullshit, but she couldn’t let it go.
Pat, however, was going to make her do it. “Knowing we could grab the number off your records and get the GPS coordinates? No. He gives you more credit than you give him, Bryn.” He leaned forward, capturing and holding her gaze in his intense stare. “I will not let you throw yourself away on this. We’ll play the game, but we’ll play it safely. You don’t go charging in, are we understood? Say yes and mean it, or I zip-tie you and leave you here while Joe and I go on our own.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“You think not?”
She couldn’t actually swear that he wouldn’t. McCallister could be coolly ruthless when he needed to be, and he might think that he did need to be right now, with her. “I could probably get those zip-ties off. I mean, skin and bones do grow back on me.”
A smile shadowed his lips but didn’t show itself plainly. “Probably,” he said. “But it’d slow you down.”
“So does a bag over the head.”
The smile, never really present, disappeared completely. Pat’s grip on her hands tightened, then deliberately loosened. “I will never, never do that to you,” he said. “You believe me?”
She did believe him, and always had—from the moment she’d first seen him on her second birth, she’d somehow believed in his essential goodness. And on impulse, she leaned forward and kissed him—caught him by surprise, for once, and for a second his lips were soft, yielding under hers before pressing forward, parting, meeting hers with equal amounts of need and longing. His tongue stroked gently over her mouth, and there was a buried wildness in her that broke free when she allowed it entrance. His body was tense against hers, and his hands traveled slowly down her sides, curved inward, cupped her hips, and pulled her tighter against him. She had no idea what drew him to her with such constant and consistent force, but it was always there, that buried attraction that required only a moment’s slip of control to surface. It was wildly sexy, but more than the pure attraction of him, there was a kind of beautiful strength to Patrick that she couldn’t begin to define.
Why he wanted her was such a mystery to her, but there was no question in her mind, no question at all, how much she wanted him. She wanted to blot out the world with the red race of pulses and bodies, the damp solace of kisses and sweat and hot, mind-wiping sex. She needed to feel alive, with Pat, now.
But she couldn’t. Because of Annie.
So she sucked in a deep, angry breath and backed away.
McCallister reached for her, but when he saw the look on her face, he let his hands fall back to his knees. He pulled in a deep breath, dropped his head against the cushion of the chair, eyes narrowing. “I still mean it about the zip-ties.” He almost succeeded in making it sound as if nothing had happened between them. Almost. But there was color in his face, and his lips were damp, and she couldn’t stop zeroing in on them.
On the shining focus in his eyes.
“I know,” she said. “And I want to…continue this. But if she’s out there, if Annie’s out there and loose, we need to find her before Mercer can. Please.”
It had been unfair of her to do that to him, but he only nodded and said, “Then we go in five minutes.”
He meant five minutes to tell Liam where they were going, put on body armor (Bryn didn’t need it to survive, but she did admit that not being shot was still preferable), and arm up with what Patrick kept on the premises—almost as complete a selection as Joe Fideli had in his workroom. Patrick and Joe had been friends a long time, and there was no doubt that part of what had built that foundation was how similar their backgrounds were—if they’d served together, they’d never spoken of it, but Bryn wouldn’t have been surprised.
Joe almost certainly provided Patrick’s armory.
It was five minutes on the dot when she met him downstairs. He was holding a shotgun and sliding a handgun into the holster he wore.
“Are you sure that’s enough?” she asked, as she checked her own sidearm. He handed her extra clips for her belt pouch, and after ensuring the magazine was ready and there was a bullet in the chamber, she safetied the weapon and put it away. “Remember who we’re dealing with.”
“I’m well aware,” Pat said. “But your sister’s in the middle of it, and as much as he probably deserves it, we can’t take the risk of killing Mercer. So pick your shots. Joe’s our backup. He’ll have the heavier stuff.”
She hadn’t seen him call Joe, but it didn’t surprise her that he’d managed to fit the call in while her back was turned. As she watched, Pat readied a small bag with more extra clips, shotgun shells, and three sealed preloaded syringes. “You said that Annie didn’t sound so great. She’ll need boosters, if so.”
“Manny’s formula?”
“No,” he said. “Pharmadene standard’s all we can spare. We don’t have enough of Manny’s to use for anyone but you.”
He strapped on his own bulletproof vest with smooth, competent, almost instinctive motions, and Bryn was suddenly struck by th
e fact that he was the at-risk one in this equation. She could take a bullet. So could Annie. So could Fast Freddy, Mercer’s slimy little thug, equally Revived.
But not Patrick McCallister. He was still alive, and vulnerable. “Pat, you don’t have to do this with me. I can go alone and just check it out. I promise, I won’t do anything stupid.”
He glanced up at her and smiled—a real smile, one that lit up his eyes, crinkled the skin next to his mouth, and made her shiver somewhere deep. “I’m not that fragile,” he said. “Trust me. And I need the practice.”
She sincerely doubted that last part. Pat looked about as comfortable with weapons as anyone she’d ever seen; his movements with them were precise, careful, and had the grace of incredible familiarity. He’d never told her exactly what his military experience had been, but it must have been far, far more intense than her own. And the fact that he’d survived it without too many visible scars told her that he was either seriously good at it or lucky, or both.
It was a very good combination, if so, because right now, she could use some serious luck.
And so could Annie.
Pat was right about the area of the marina.…It was murky, industrial, poorly lit, and in a part of town where the police traveled in numbers if they came at all. As she braked the dark sedan in a spot as far from the wan security lights as possible, another vehicle coasted to a stop beside her—a big pickup truck, in the same basic, lightless black. She knew it by sight: Joe Fideli’s vehicle. It wasn’t a surprise when he stepped out, dressed for battle in dark gray urban camo, with a black watch cap over his shaved head. As Pat had promised, Joe held the heavy arms: an FN P90, or a look-alike. The military had classified it as a PDW, a personal defense weapon, but it was capable of some fearsome offense and was probably highly illegal to carry around in the wild.
That was the weapon she could see, but she had every confidence that Joe had a selection at his fingertips. He was the kind of Boy Scout who came prepared.
