by SE Jakes
Lucky had to believe in Dash, and vice versa. He clung to his belief like his lifeline, because he needed something strong enough to hold on to in order to get through whatever Cooper had planned for him. “Tell me what you want me to do. Let Sawyer go.”
“No, but good try.”
He flexed his hands automatically, reflexively testing the length and tightness of the cuffs.
Cooper smiled.
He knows more about me than I do.
A sobering thought that led to an even better one. Maybe he could use that knowledge against Cooper.
All of a sudden, the room shifted sharply. That was the first time Lucky realized they were in the lower quarters of a boat, out on the open—and suddenly rough—waters.
“I’ll let you two get to know each other,” Cooper said. “It’ll hurt more that way.”
Lucky strained, trying to see. He turned his head to the left and finally saw another outline maybe three feet from him, this time of a long, coffin-like box. Just like Rex and Dash had described to him.
“He’s trying to recreate the torture,” a voice said.
“Sawyer?”
“Hope you weren’t expecting someone else to be captured. I think we’re enough.” He sounded tired, but lucid.
“Are you okay?”
“What do you think?”
“Fuck.” He strained at the ropes and then decided not to waste his energy. Cooper needed a mental game. Lucky had to trust that, between him and Sawyer, they could do that.
“I wanted him to recreate the torture—but on me.”
Sawyer snorted a little. “Be careful what you wish for.”
“You think he’s recording us?”
“I’m sure of it.” Sawyer paused. “Do you have the scars?”
He drew in a deep, shaky breath and stared down at his hands. “My back, backs of my thighs, just like Rex and Nate and Uncle. They never healed.”
“I think you’re all brave as fuck,” Sawyer told him.
“I don’t remember anything.”
“Doesn’t take away what you did. You’re a hero. Gotta remember that, even with all the shit happening.”
The fact that Sawyer was complimenting him, talking to him like they weren’t captured, like he wasn’t locked in a box, made Lucky truly pull himself together. Because if Sawyer could do it, then Lucky needed to believe that, somewhere deep inside him, he had the same training to pull this off. “Have you been captured before?”
“No. I’ve been cornered though. My teammate and I waited in a cave—it was fight the tide or the rebels. We chose the easier of the two options. And we almost died.” Sawyer sighed. “You’d think you’d only have to go through shit like that once in a lifetime.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t meet you before this.”
“I wanted to. But Rex was worried. Rightly so, it looks like.”
“And who’d have thought it was the goddamned shrink? That’s so fucked up. More fucked up that I didn’t think to be suspicious of him,” Lucky said angrily.
He saw the box shift a little, was pretty sure Sawyer was trying to work his way out. Lucky was doing the same to the ropes, trying to budge the knots until his fingers ached. But he wouldn’t stop.
They would keep talking, to distract Cooper. And each other. Like a final confession they both hoped to hell wouldn’t be final.
“Rex still thinks of you as family—he wasn’t lying when he told you that,” Sawyer continued. “And I’m cool with that. But man, I keep thinking, if none of this had happened to you, if you had your memory, you’d be with Rex. And it’s like, fuck, that’s not fair. You lost everything trying to save someone. Shouldn’t lose the man you love too.”
“Ah, Sawyer, no one can go back and predict what would’ve happened. Maybe Rex and I would’ve stayed together. Maybe we would’ve had too much fucked-up guilt between us to do that. And maybe we’d have fallen apart, no matter what. But it did happen. What matters now is how you and Rex feel about each other.”
“And suppose you woke up tomorrow with a memory? Your last memory of Rex would be…”
“That I loved him? I don’t see how I can wake up with a memory and feel the way I did four years ago. Too much has happened…and it’s not like I’d lose these past four years of memories…or of Dash. You can’t worry about me with this. And you can’t let Rex wade in guilt over it. That’s bullshit.”
Sawyer laughed then. Lucky didn’t think he’d said anything particularly funny but hell, maybe if he’d been locked in a box for hours at a time, he’d be laughing inappropriately too.
Sawyer sobered and said, “The guilt’s been cutting Rex apart.”
Lucky went to respond, but the boat jerked a little. He fell back, his hand landing on something that felt like a lick of fire. He bit his lip to keep from crying out, felt the blood on his hands…and then rooted for the object that cut him.
It was a single, thin razor blade. It hadn’t been there moments before.
“The guilt’s been cutting Rex apart.”
Somehow Sawyer had gotten it to him. How Sawyer got it was another story—but Lucky had spent enough time discussing SEALs with Cooper to know that special forces operators were sneaky, resourceful fucks who never took anything for granted, including their personal safety. For every weapon you saw, there were twenty in hiding.
Cooper had to have patted him down. And he’d be really pissed that he’d missed it.
That thought almost made Lucky smile, but he didn’t, because of the cameras. Instead, he kept his movements small, even as he was cutting his fingers fucking bloody—he felt it, but he went at the ropes as Sawyer talked as cover.
“You know, when Jace and I were waiting for the water to either kill us or let us go, we made promises. We spent what might be the last moments of our lives talking about the guys we loved. I guess that’s where everyone goes when they think they’re in their final moments—to the people they love.”
“Yeah,” Lucky said. “Cuts it wide open.”
“Yeah,” Sawyer echoed, with a smile in his voice. “Your life’s wide open. That’s kind of cool if you think about it. How many people get a true second chance like that?”
“Not many, I’m guessing.”
“Then take it.”
“Cooper got a CD that showed Lucky agreeing to help Allen Gonzalves’s men. And we watched it together. Lucky was upset. I got a call in the middle of the night from my supervisor. But when I got into the building, I heard Lucky’s voice telling me, ‘You shouldn’t have believed me.’ And then I woke up on the floor.”
Dash held the ice to his head as he paced around in front of Rex and Clint and Jace.
“I don’t care if he’s Lucky or Josh. He wouldn’t do this,” Rex said firmly.
“Then who?” Clint asked.
“Cooper said he found the CD in his car. He said he had the guards looking at the videotapes of the lot from that time but…”
Clint was on the phone. “I’ll check on that.”
“Do you have the CD?” Jace asked.
“I grabbed it from Cooper’s office,” Dash said. He handed it to the younger SEAL, who popped it into a computer, put his headphones on and began to watch.
Dash turned away, not wanting to see it again.
Rex said, “Can you get in touch with Cooper?”
“I called him. Figured he crashed—we left his office at three in the morning.” Dash dialed him again. “Do you think he’s in danger?”
“Allen might think that Cooper knows anything and everything Lucky told him,” Rex pointed out.
Jace held his hand up to silence them. He pulled the headphones off and said, “I pulled some talking out of the background. English and Spanish.”
“How’d you do that?” Clint asked.
“My cousin and I used to bootleg records so he could sell them,” Jace said casually. “Don’t judge. Comes in handy during times like this, right?”
“Just play it,” Clint said, and J
ace did. There was English—mumbled and then clear Spanish, although not from a native speaker.
“‘He’s ready to do anything we need—that’s what he said,’ was the Spanish,” Jace said. “And this English is clearer. ‘Make sure not to bring him back to his cell.’”
Dash’s head swam. “Play that again—the English.”
The room was silent as Jace did so again.
Dash pulled another tape out of his pocket—the kind that would go into a handheld recorder. “Can you match a voice?”
“Yes.” Jace pulled up some software as Clint stared at him. “I feel you judging me. I know more than demolitions.”
“I think he deserves a promotion,” Rex said. “You and Sawyer both.”
Jace turned to Rex for a second. “He’s too strong to go down, Rex. We’ll find him.”
And then he loaded the CD into the software. He played it—Cooper and Lucky were talking. Lucky’s voice was a perfect match.
So was Cooper’s.
“Holy fuck,” Rex breathed.
“I know where he lives,” Dash said.
The four men were in the truck, with Clint driving. They decided their plan of attack and made the mutual decision not to call for back-up.
“There’s no way he brought them here,” Jace said quietly.
“But maybe we’ll find a way to track him,” Clint said, put a hand over Jace’s. As Dash watched from the backseat, his throat tightened. He glanced over at Rex, who was watching the hand holding too.
“We’ll find them, Dash. We have to,” Rex said.
Dash looked straight ahead until they were in the parking lot of Cooper’s building. Clint went up first—out of all of them, he’d be the least known by Cooper. The others waited outside the door as backup.
“He’s not here,” Clint called after several tense minutes of silence. The other men tore in, careful not to overturn anything that could trigger a bomb.
But the apartment was clean—Jace swept it and declared there were no explosives or bugs. That’s when they searched in earnest. There was no computer. No paper trail.
But there were two DVDs left right by the phone. Jace raced them down to the truck to play them, Dash right behind him. Clint and Rex remained to raid the apartment.
Jace loaded the first DVD and angled the laptop’s screen so they could both see it.
Cooper. Lucky.
Lucky had an IV running into his arm.
“Probably the sodium pentothal,” Dash murmured.
He was asking Lucky standard questions about his missing memories. Lucky knew nothing. And then…and then Cooper began to talk in Spanish.
“He’s trying to plant memories—new memories,” Dash breathed.
“Attempting to. Doesn’t look like it worked,” Jace pointed out.
“Unless Cooper’s got to hypnotize him to bring it out,” Dash said.
“Why leave this for us to find?” Jace asked.
“Because he’s not coming back,” Dash said.
“So this all failed. Lucky doesn’t remember anything that could indict Cooper at all,” Jace started.
“Maybe he had to make sure? If he remembers anything, he could blow Cooper’s entire operation.”
“What was his operation?” Jace asked as Clint climbed back into the truck with Rex. “Turning prisoners of war into soldiers for terrorists like Allen Gonzalves?”
“Only for Gonzalves,” Clint said grimly, handing a tape to Dash. “We played one in the apartment. Gonzalves is in them, talking to his American-born brother named Cooper.”
“Fuck me,” Dash muttered. “Cooper left that out for me to find.”
“They weren’t exactly hidden well, so yes,” Clint agreed.
“So wait, Gonzalves went missing right after we were released,” Rex said.
“Maybe he’s not missing,” Jace said. “What if Cooper killed him?”
“What if Cooper wants to prove to his brother that he’s still worthy of working with him?” Dash said grimly. The men were silent, because neither theory meant anything good for Lucky and Sawyer.
Cooper came back down to the darkened room about half an hour after Lucky had freed his hands. The boat was still rocking, the wind was howling and Sawyer called out, “Dude, you can’t leave the boat on auto-pilot in this kind of weather. Jesus is not here to take the wheel.”
Lucky bit his lip to keep from laughing. When Cooper calmly began to waterboard Sawyer, he bit his lip to keep from cursing the man.
It was too soon to give away the fact that he was free. Mainly because Cooper had a weapon at his side, and because, with the light from upstairs, Lucky could plainly see that the box with Sawyer inside was wired. That could be a ruse or the real thing, but either way, Cooper must have a bomb planted on board and a trigger somewhere—in his pocket…around his neck. But Lucky couldn’t move without risking Sawyer’s life.
Maybe you’re the fucking trigger.
Christ, that thought made him sweat. He hadn’t moved much at all when he was cutting the ropes, but if he had…
“I know how to pilot a boat through storms,” Cooper said.
“How’d you learn? Your brother?” Sawyer asked.
Brother?
“Did you know that, Lucky? The guy who nearly killed you and Rex and Dash—he was Cooper’s brother. Cooper couldn’t resist bragging about that shit.”
The waterboarding happened again. Lucky screwed his eyes shut, like that could help Sawyer.
Sawyer, who coughed and said, “I was trained for this, you dumbshit.”
“Is it true?” Lucky asked Cooper.
“Yes, it is. I am Allen’s half brother. I was brought up in the States. I’ve been working with him for years, helping him torture and turn American soldiers—”
“We’re sailors,” Sawyer pointed out.
He’s really good for Rex.
It was an oddly inappropriate thought. But one Sawyer would no doubt appreciate.
“So isn’t it better that Lucky has no memories of you?” Sawyer continued to Cooper. “I mean, he doesn’t fucking remember you. Cut your losses.”
“I’m getting tired of you.”
“Ditto.”
More water. More coughing. This time, Sawyer stayed silent, but Lucky let his instincts guide him. Sawyer was giving him the opening this time. Because there was something Josh might know that Cooper needed him to remember. But what? What the hell would Josh have known that Cooper didn’t?
“What are you doing, Cooper? What the fuck do you need from me?” he asked.
“I’m going to let you watch me break Sawyer, since you wanted to see torture so badly. Since you can’t remember and appreciate my hard work, I’ll bring you and Sawyer to Allen and I’ll let you watch every painful minute of Sawyer’s torture. And then I’ll make sure you don’t survive the water.”
“Was I meant to the first time?” he demanded.
“You were supposed to murder Dash’s family, like we primed you to do. They walked on the beach every single night. You were going to kill them. Cut their heads off and send them to Dashiell as a message that no one escapes our family. And then you lost your goddamned memory.”
“Did you hit me during the fucking torture? Because then you’re the reason why all my memories are missing, you asshole. You fucked yourself over.”
Sawyer laughed. The man was tied up in a box, with water being poured inside the small hole he breathed out of repeatedly and he was laughing. “Fuck. I really fucking like you.”
Cooper poured the water in to shut him up. Lucky heard the silence, the sputter, then the coughing.
And then the laughing.
Yeah, he really fucking liked Sawyer too.
“Cooper had a boat,” Jace said. “I just ran it through motor vehicles. It’s parked at the Marina with Rex’s.”
Clint cursed as they drove to the marina, muttered something about never wanting to be a squid in the first place, and Jace dragged him on the boat.
; The weather had turned, violently so.
“I’ll give you a life preserver,” Jace told him as Rex piloted the boat through the waters. It was dark and stormy, which had them rethinking their decision not to call for help. The Coast Guard was already searching for the boat by air and sea. They’d also warned Rex not to go out, but they knew he wasn’t going to listen.
“He couldn’t have gotten far in this,” Rex said.
“Neither will we,” Clint pointed out.
“We will if we follow them.” Jace motioned to the helo overhead that dragged a light through the water ahead of them. “That’s Glen. He knows we’re here. He’s going to help guide us while he looks.”
Lucky heard the chopper before Cooper did. Sawyer started to sing louder, probably to cover that up too. Needed them to get closer as the boat rocked in the choppy water and Cooper kept cutting him.
Lucky could only see the knife going up and down, a sharp glint in the dark. And through it all, Sawyer kept singing. Dirty sailor limericks.
“Soon, you won’t be laughing. You have no idea how many men I’ve turned,” Cooper said.
“How many?” Sawyer asked. “I’m genuinely curious about what number you’ll think I’ll be. Because I’m thinking you thought Lucky was turned too. Maybe he never was. Is that why you’re so pissed now?”
At Sawyer’s words, Lucky was up, brandishing the razor. He moved forward, clicking open the outside lock on the box Sawyer was held in. And then he knocked the gun from Cooper’s hand and had him on the floor, the razor over the man’s carotid.
“One strong rock of the boat and you’re gone,” he warned.
“You took a chance. How did you know you weren’t the trigger?” Cooper asked with a sick-looking smile that twisted Lucky’s gut.
“He was the trigger.” Sawyer was climbing out of the box as a sudden, small explosion from the bilge toward the back of the boat made it shake and then list. It wouldn’t take much to punch a hole in the bilge, which would cause the boat to sink at a rapid pace. “And now we’re fucking sinking, so let’s get on deck.”
