I nod, feeling a little dizzy.
“Listen to me,” he says sharply and I snap to attention, meeting his eyes. “If one of these men, even unarmed, gets within five feet of you, you are dead. Do you hear me? Dead.”
I narrow my eyes at him. No way.
He heaves air out of his chest and steps backwards several paces. “Hold the gun at me. Don’t worry, it’s not loaded.” I lift it, pointing it at his chest. “I’m five feet away from the gun, right?” I nod. Then I blink and the gun is gone and I’m staring down the barrel.
How did he do that?
He lowers it and puts it back in my hand. “Point it at me again.” He backs up. “Ready?” he asks. I nod and, dammit, the same thing happens again. Within a second, he’s stripped me of the gun and is holding it to my face. “You cannot let them get close to you or they will fucking kill you. Understand?”
I swallow and nod. He’s right. Reality is a bitch sometimes.
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing I’ve done self-defense wise has prepared me for someone like him.
Like him.
A killer.
I look at him and shiver.
Chapter 5 – Duffy
I see the moment it hits her, really hits her. So far, everything after the explosion has been almost fun, even with her injury. We’ve laughed a thousand times. We’ve screwed until my dick is nearly raw. We’ve played house. Even got a fucking dog.
I can’t blame her. It’s been everything I could ever want in a relationship too, even before the explosion, when I was simply falling in love with her. Needing her. Seeking her out.
But we can’t hide from the cloud that’s hanging over our heads. She needs to understand the danger we’re in. The kind of man I am.
“Do you think they’ll send another helicopter?” she asks me, looking out the window.
“Possible, but somehow I doubt it.”
“Why?” she asks and a tear falls down her cheek. She swipes it away angrily. “Why do you doubt it? You aren’t like those people.”
If only she knew.
“I think a team of mercenaries are after us. Have been after everyone who survived the raid. I don’t know who has sent them or why, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Mercenaries? Like pillage and plumage cold hearted horrible people mercenaries?”
I grin at that. She’s watched too many movies.
“There are mercenaries like that. There are also mercenaries who work for security companies. They protect. Clean up problems. And many of them are ex-military. Men with my level of training or even better.”
“Better than you?” She wraps her arm around herself. “Any guesses as to why they want us dead?”
I shake my head. “That’s the puzzle I haven’t solved. If they, in fact, were hired to kill me because I survived the failed raid, then they probably believe they are oiling some kind of squeaky wheel.”
She looks confused.
I clarify. “Whoever hired them thinks I know something I’m not supposed to know.”
Her eyes widen. “Oh. But you don’t?”
I lift a shoulder. “I know all kinds of things that, if I chose to reveal them, would create a lot of problems for people in Washington. All of us do. There’s a widely believed theory called Extortion 17 that promotes the idea that the twenty-two Seals killed on a helicopter a few years ago was done to shut them up, to effectively kill what they knew about the Bin Laden mission.”
She stares at me, eyes wide.
“I don’t think this is a shut-up problem,” I go on. “This feels different. Someone didn’t want us to succeed on that mission. And not just ISIS.”
“In Washington?”
“Perhaps. It has to be someone with knowledge of the raid and who has a list of special ops names and information. Or it could be that someone’s computer was hacked or their office tapped and they, inadvertently, gave the information away. There are many possibilities. It could be ISIS after us, or the Russians, or the White House.”
“Why the White House?”
I inhale and blow out a long breath, trying to be careful of what I say. “Soldiers walk on a thin line sometimes. A line that separates doing the right thing with not fully backing what we’re doing. Sometimes our orders just don’t make sense.”
I stop. Giving myself time to process the things I’d normally think but never say.
“ISIS is an embarrassment. The US has thrown billions of dollars at it and we’ve been less than effective at shutting them down. And it’s not our fight. We aren’t supposed to be there. We’ve gone in and trained Kurdish soldiers. We’ve armed and spent enormous resources helping them form an army for themselves. It’s not working. Only a handful remain. On top of that, ISIS is gaining more power. Hell, Grace, there are Americans who are going over there and joining their fight. And they own a shit load of oil. Their financial resources are enormous.”
I run a hand through my hair, knowing I’m saying too much, but dammit, it feels good to get this off my chest. “I love the Army. I love the United States of America. I love the idea that something I do makes the difference in the lives of the people in this country. And other countries. Yet, right now, I’m so pissed. If we weren’t trying to be so politically correct, if the fucking government could send people like me in there and not tie our hands behind our backs with political correctness, we could have stopped this horror. We would have freed those people. But no, we stand there with our dicks in one hand, tossing butter knifes at them with the other. And good men die. And children starve. And millions of people flee. They put themselves and their children on a rubber raft and push it out onto the ocean, facing certain death because it is a better death than what they are facing in their own home.”
I stop, thinking of Sami. A little boy who wanted to help us help them. And we didn’t. We failed. No, we were brought in there to fail. We were all supposed to die that day.
Why?
“I didn’t know,” Grace says, interrupting those thoughts, tears streaming down her face. “I mean, I knew of the beheadings and the horror of that. I knew ISIS was terrible. But … I didn’t know what you and your friends were going through. I wasn’t paying attention. I was arguing with my husband, going to work, watching cat videos instead of the news.”
I sigh, deep and long. “It’s a paradox. We want the citizens of the United States to feel safe enough to watch cat videos. We want you to get in your car and go to work and come home to your family, laughing and talking about your day. That’s what we do, Grace. We face the trouble for you. We signed up to do that. To slap down the problems hoping you never discover those problems ever existed.” I shake my head. “But in the world we live in now, it’s too easy to overlook the injustices in the world and only watch cat videos. It’s too easy to keep our heads down, peering into a smart phone and not see babies washing up on the beaches. It’s too easy to not see behind the dirty politicians who make decisions based on what’s best for them. I want America to open its eyes and see the ugliness in the world and refuse to tolerate it. At the same time, I want America to feel safe and see beauty. Like I said, a paradox.”
She’s crying harder and I want to go to her. Lose myself in her. Let her lose herself in me.
I don’t.
I can’t.
“I’m running on feeling and instincts right now. We are in danger. If we’re dead, I’ll never get the chance to discover who killed my team. I’ll never get the chance to avenge them.”
“You mentioned Russia,” she says, wiping at her face with her sleeve. “Why would they be after us?”
“I say Russia, but it could be any country. I just know that Russia is very interested in bringing ISIS down. Think about it. Whoever stops ISIS gets control of all that oil. They will also be considered heroes by the world. Money and adoration is a compelling combination.”
“So it could be them?”
“It’s possible. If they want to beat ISIS so ba
dly, they might have wanted to stop our mission. But … how they found out about the mission, set up the ambush and gotten the names of survivors is still a mystery.”
“And you think whoever it is, they hired mercenaries to kill the survivors?”
I nod. “It could be CIA, but that doesn’t feel right. The way they dropped on us in Malibu feels different. Plus, over the past month, survivors have died seemingly normal deaths. Infections. Brain embolisms. Heart attacks. Car crashes. My captain’s death is being blamed on a robbery gone wrong. Whoever tried to kill you and me were desperate. But I don’t know why they got desperate.”
“And there are companies out there, like Mercenaries-R-Us?”
I grin. “Exactly. And here’s another paradox. Most of those guys are well-trained and very good men. Excellent men. They may have gotten tired of government bullshit or they may have simply wanted a bigger paycheck, so they join these companies and fulfill important security positions. Do damn good work.”
She opens her mouth to speak and I hold up a hand. “But… if they are told we are threats to national security, they will take us down because they believe what they’re told. They are simply doing their job and they won’t give me time to explain that I’m not on the bad side.” I take a step toward her. “But believe me. I will kill them if they try to hurt you. I will kill them protecting you. I will kill them in order to survive so I can find out who hired them. Then, I will kill that person.”
She shudders. The vibration passes so violently through her that her teeth chatter. I ignore the punch in my stomach when she, for the first time, looks at me in fear.
It’s better this way.
I’m not 007. I’m not Fabio. I’m not Terminator or whatever other action figure she has in her mind. I’m a trained killer. I could reach out and snap her neck. I could kill her quickly or draw it out. I could torture her until she begs for death and then torture her further without blinking an eye.
I’ve done all those things.
Worse things.
She walks away from me and goes to stand in front of the window. In a small voice, she asks, “If you were them, how would you come after us?”
I walk to the window, but stay several feet from her and point. “If it were me, I’d come in from that direction, L-formation. Two teams of four.”
She looks at me. “Eight men. You’d send eight men?”
I nod. “Minimum. They know my training. They know I’ve escaped an explosion, taking a woman with me. They know I have money and resources. They know I’ve managed to be underground for three days. They would have found the building and supply list for this house. They will know this is bullet-proof, one-way glass. They will know of the alarm system. They will suspect that I’ll have many weapons and security measures.” I nod again, more emphatically.
“The safe room down stairs?”
I shake my head. “Only me and one other person know of that. It was never discussed on the phone. There was never an electronic message about it. I covered that up to the best of my ability. They will know of the decoy safe room, but that’s it.”
She nods. “Then what?”
“I’d cut power. Bypass the alarms—”
“You could do that?” Her eyes are big again.
I lean against the bullet-proof glass. “Yes.”
She shakes her head, and looks out again. “Then what?”
“I’d pick the locks, enter as quietly as I could. Four men in. Four outside, holding perimeter. I’d search the house and once I found me.” I pull an imaginary trigger.
Her chin quivers, but she bites down, making it stop. “Why not just bomb us again?”
“I’ve thought through that question a lot. I could be wrong, but I don’t think they will. They’ve failed once and they now know exactly how public anything about me becomes. They will want to keep this quiet. With all the publicity of the explosion, they will want to take us down nice and easy this time. If they get us, our bodies will never be found and we’ll continue to be a mystery.”
She shudders again. “How much do you think they’ll get for killing you?”
The question surprises me. “Why? You going to throw me over for a couple million?”
She wrinkles her nose and gives me a sideways glance. “If you keep calling me stinky, I might.”
God. Adorable.
She changes the subject. “If this is connected to the raid, why did they wait so long?”
“Good question. Could be that they didn’t have easy access and got desperate for some reason three days ago. Could be that they intentionally waited weeks following the raid to make it not look connected. It drives me crazy not knowing.”
She turns to me, leaning on the glass too. “When do you think they’ll come?”
I want to lie to her. I don’t. “Tonight at the earliest. Tomorrow night at the latest. They know now that there were no human remains. They’ll be digging through all my records, trying to discover where I’d go. This house isn’t under my name or my companies names, but they’ll find a connection. They will find a thread and they’ll pull it until they discover this place. Then, they will send in a team, almost always by night, to see if their suspicions are real.”
She looks out the window and then back at me. “Then why are we staying?”
Lie or truth?
Truth.
“Because I want to catch one of them.”
Chapter 6 – Grace
After Link forced me to practice our escape over and over.
After he’d given me a tour of the underground safe room and forced me to remember all the pass codes.
After he scared me to death with his talk about the mercenaries and how he plans to catch one—like some people would catch a mouse.
After I refused to let him take me to a hotel. After I promised him I’d hike my way back up if he sent me away.
After we’d screamed at each other for a while, we’d made love again. Desperate, clinging love that made me cry as he pounded into me.
And after all that, here I am in the kitchen again, doing something so normal. I’m dropping dough into a boiling pot of chicken.
My life has turned into the twilight zone.
The front door squeaks as he walks inside and I turn, throwing up my hand. “You live in a million dollar house and all your doors squeak,” I say, feeling exceedingly grumpy. “There’s this magical stuff called WD-40. One squirt and no squeak.” I turn back to my pot and drop another spoonful of dough into it.
Link bends to unhook the dog, then pulls off his coat to hang it on the hook. Squeeeak, the door goes as he closes it behind him. “Security measure, Miss Grumps-a-lot. All the outside doors squeak. A natural warning system. One squeak will stop a bad guy cold for at least a few seconds.
I turn to him, eyes wide. My mouth nearly to my chest. “Why didn’t you tell me that? You know how long I looked for WD-40 today? I was going to fix them.” I slap a hand over my forehead. “You have to save me from screwing everything up!”
The corner of his eyes crinkle as he kicks off his boots and heads my way. He sniffs the air. “Smells delicious.” Then he hugs me from behind, leaning his chin on my shoulder and watches me continue to feed in the dumplings.
“This is my nana’s recipe. She’s a wonderful cook. Basic southern dishes, but the pure definition of comfort food. I made some sweet tea too, if you want to pour us a couple glasses. It’s not too sweet, more like half and half.”
He kisses my cheek and pulls away, grabbing the pitcher from the fridge. I look at the clock. It’s going on six and I really want to be done before the vigil begins in half an hour. As horrible as it sounds, knowing what I’m putting them through, I really just want to see my family’s faces.
Glancing at the TV I’d placed on mute, I’m shocked to see Rob’s face. I drop the spoon and reach for the remote. Holy hell. He’s being interviewed. I turn up the volume just as his face cuts away and there’s a reporter saying, “…don’t miss the e
xclusive interview we had with Grace Johnson’s husband earlier today during our exclusive Where Is Link Duffy? segment beginning shortly.
Husband?
Oh no he didn’t!
It was a teaser. A freaking teaser. I knew they were covering the vigil, but didn’t realize they were having an hour-long show!
I turn to Link. “Those people are crazy. Are you really so famous that networks would interrupt their regularly scheduled programming to cover this?”
He lifts a glass of tea. “Billionaire playboy, baby.”
“Millionaire,” I say back grumpily. Then I remember a question I’ve been meaning to ask him. “How did you fall from billionaire to millionaire anyway?”
His grin disappears. “You know I gave money to Hulk’s family.” I nod. “Did that with all of them. Paid for medical expenses, long-term expenses for the injured, shit like that. Ended up being a few hundred million.” His face darkens. “Funeral costs this past month.”
My heart squeezes. “That’s so generous of you. I’m sure the families appreciated it so much. It had to make dealing with the aftermath a little easier.”
He lifts a shoulder and I try to lighten things up. “So you’re like still almost a billionaire, like a couple hundred million away?”
I’m relieved when the grin is back. “Yep. Do you think you can live on eight-hundred million?”
I pick up the spoon and stir, separating the dumplings, then place a lid on them to steam. “A small country could live on that much. Heck, maybe a large one. My mind can’t even comprehend the scope of all that.” I glance over at him. “How did you get it? I mean, how does anyone get that rich?”
“Well, as I told you before, I didn’t earn it. It was given to me through my family. Both sides of my parent’s family tree were very wealthy. Gold. Oil. Banking. Land. Then technology. Good investments. Over the years, the money grew exponentially. Now, my dad runs several multi-billion dollar companies. My mom is an only child and my dad has a brother with no kids, so the money funnels down to me and my siblings. For me, it sits in bonds and various investments. I have an advisor who deals with all that. If I need something big, he transfers it to my account. Otherwise, it sits there and grows.”
Badass - The Complete Series: A Billionaire Military Romance Page 33
