by Mari Carr
Wrath’s Storm
Mari Carr
Lila Dubois
Copyright © 2021 by Mari Carr and Lila Dubois
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Suggested Reading Order
About the Authors
Chapter One
Walt stretched his arms overhead, working the muscles in his shoulders. He’d been hunched over for an hour reviewing slides of bloodwork, something most doctors didn’t do again after college biology, or maybe a virology class in medical school.
In his type of medicine, he often had to do it all.
Normally, this was the kind of thing he’d assign to the shiny new doctors who rotated through. Working in a high-volume clinic where they’d see a diversity of issues—from acute traumas to routine care—was a great way for doctors to get tons of hands-on experience. But it was late, his current set of docs had all gone to their bunks, and, frankly, he was faster than they were. He didn’t mind teaching, but between instructing and the natural nervousness of baby docs, everything took a hell of a lot longer than if he just did it himself.
He stripped off his PPE and washed his hands before grabbing his computer and taking it out onto the concrete patio. The patio area served as a waiting room, a triage center if things were really bad, and his living room, since every bit of space in the clinic besides his bedroom was devoted to medical care.
He sat back in one of the woven chairs and popped open his computer. He’d only been working for half an hour when he heard footsteps approach from the darkness.
He repressed an exhausted sigh and stood, turning back to the building, where various doors led out onto the large patio. Instead of his “lab” room, he headed for one of the exam rooms, leaving the door open behind him.
There were people who wouldn’t come to him during the day. Oftentimes women with more personal concerns, but sometimes the occasional man who was experiencing anything from embarrassing ED, to injuries they’d ignored so that by the time they came to him, it was a salvage situation.
“Come on in,” Walt called out in English, then again more hesitantly in French and Spanish, just in case. He was supposed to be studying Arabic in his free time. Free time. Ha. One of the nurses at the clinic was local and acted as a translator. She’d taught him a few helpful phrases in Nafusi, the Berber language many of the locals spoke, but not enough for him to confidently communicate with a patient. He’d call her to come in if needed.
He listened to the sound of footsteps on concrete as he put on a fresh mask and gloves. Whoever was coming was a large person, most likely male, and wearing shoes.
It was surprising how much information something so simple as a footstep could reveal.
“Hey, Doc.”
Walt frowned in surprise and turned. A massive figure stood in the shadows just outside the door, where the overhang of the roof kept the bright light of the moon and stars from reaching.
The voice had a distinct Scandinavian accent. Danish, maybe. And it was familiar.
It took him several seconds to place it. “Oh, uh, Eric?”
Eric was the leader of the Masters’ Admiralty, a European secret society founded around the time of the Black Plague. Honestly, it hadn’t really surprised him to find out there was a secret, shadowy organization in Europe. What had surprised him was to find there was also a society in the United States—the Trinity Masters.
He and his siblings had been offered membership to both societies. Sylvia had fallen in love and moved to Europe to join the Masters’ Admiralty. Langston had joined the American secret society and then fallen in love with the couple chosen to be his trinity. They were married now and living in Texas.
Oscar had joined the Trinity Masters as well and was about to be “called to the altar” to be placed with his trinity. Not that Oscar knew that yet. Langston and the Grand Master and a few others were in the process of planning a surprise New Year’s Eve wedding.
Everyone expected Walt to follow suit—pick a society, join, and agree to an arranged ménage marriage, which was the foundation of both secret societies. Walt wasn’t in a hurry to do that.
He hadn’t had a lot of time for romance or relationships, given all his years spent in med school, with the military, and then with Doctors Without Borders, before taking over this small clinic. His career had kept him too busy to date. Regardless, he wasn’t sure he wanted someone telling him who he had to marry. Personally, he preferred to fall in love the old-fashioned way, though he’d never admitted that to his brothers, who would most likely give him shit for the romantic sentiment.
Walt had only met Eric once, and he’d found him to be irreverent, though clearly commanding.
“Yep.”
“What are you doing in Libya?”
“That’s a long story. But not why I’m here.”
“Sylvie?” It had taken Walt’s brain a moment to get over the surprise and process what Eric’s being there could actually mean.
“Your sister’s fine, but I need your help.”
“What’s wrong?”
In response, Eric stepped through the open door and into the electric light of the exam room.
At well over six feet and heavily muscled, his nickname of “the Viking” fit him.
Especially now.
Because Eric was covered in blood.
Walt turned to the counter, snapped up a pair of safety scissors, and started for Eric. His questions, and he had a lot, no longer mattered. All that could wait until after he found out where all that blood was coming from. Eric’s calm tone probably meant he was in shock.
He grabbed the hem of Eric’s shirt and started cutting.
The Viking grabbed his wrist, stilling his hand. “Hey, Doc. This isn’t my blood.”
He’d heard that one before. “Take a deep breath for me.” He tried to shove off Eric’s hold. “I’m here to help. I won’t hurt you.” It was absolutely horrific how many times he had to repeat that phrase on a daily basis.
“Seriously. Not my blood.” But Eric released his hand.
Walt finished cutting the shirt up the middle, then cut through the sleeves at the shoulders, quickly pulling the fabric away. The baby docs who came here to both help and learn were usually shocked by how brusque he was. He had to teach them that it was more important to get the patient into a position where they could be cared for than it was to gently remove clothes.
Given how much blood was on Eric’s upper half, Walt expected long, shallow cuts. An arterial cut and Eric wouldn’t have been upright and walking, which meant he needed to have a lot of bleeder wounds.
Instead, the
man’s chest only sported a few old scars and some fresh bruises around the ribs. Walt looked at Eric’s scalp. It had to be a head wound. But there wasn’t blood on his face.
“We done with the weird foreplay?” Eric was leering at him.
Walt pushed aside his doctor instincts—which were telling him to strip off the rest of Eric’s clothes to do a complete check. “Whose blood is this?”
Eric’s expression sobered. “That’s why I need your help. Can you come with me?”
“Where?”
“I need you to patch up someone.”
“Where?”
“About half an hour from here.”
If they were bleeding this heavily, there was very little chance that the person would still be alive when they got there. Walt grimaced but grabbed his kit—a large duffel bag—and threw it over his shoulder. Eric followed him out of the exam room. Walt stopped only long enough to knock on the door of the small bunkhouse where the visiting baby docs slept, calling out that he was going out for an emergency.
Eric led him to a rusted jeep, and Walt hopped in, turning to see that one of the doctors—a young French woman—had opened the door. She raised her hand to wave at him as Eric started the vehicle. She was the most experienced of the lot and, though still slow in the way of new doctors, she was competent and confident.
There was no opportunity to talk on the drive, given the speed and open top. Walt was sorry he hadn’t grabbed a jacket. While the weather in December was fairly mild, it was chillier tonight than normal. They drove too quickly over rutted dirt roads here on the very furthest outskirts of the Bani Walid area. His clinic was in a densely populated, underserved area, but the direction they were headed…
Walt tensed because he was fairly sure they were now in an undeveloped area that was considered so dangerous, the local health authority had made it off-limits for him. For any foreigner. Even locals avoided it.
They came around a corner, the narrow road—which was more of a dirt path—opening up into a clearing with a few buildings.
Eric stepped on the brakes and dust spat up from under the tires as he stopped. When he turned the headlights off, Walt couldn’t see anything for a moment—the only light here was a very faint orange glow coming through an open doorway in one of the three white buildings surrounding a small dirt courtyard.
Eric grabbed Walt’s shoulder, guiding him toward the open door.
The long, low building seemed to be a storehouse and had probably started out as a barn. There were stall areas now full of army-green trunks. A table with four chairs near the door boasted a lantern.
He took all that in without actually acknowledging it because his focus was on the people in the room. Six men in mismatched camouflage were either kneeling or lying on the floor, their hands behind their backs.
Standing over them, holding very large guns, were a dozen girls, ranging in ages from what looked like ten to fourteen. The smallest girl turned to point her gun at them, teeth bared in a snarl that was no less terrifying coming from a little girl.
Eric gestured to the men. “I need you to patch them up.”
“I won’t work with someone holding a gun on me.” Sadly, it was not the first time in his life Walt had used those words.
Eric looked at the girls. “Up to you.”
“If I want to shoot them?” one of the older girls asked in soft, lovely accented English.
“Your call.” Eric shrugged.
“What…” Walt wanted to channel his brother Oscar and say, “What the actual fuck is going on?” but he refrained because, despite the guns, the girls were still just children and his mama had raised him better than that.
“I need you to patch them up so we can finish questioning them.”
Walt closed his eyes. “It’s their blood. You’re torturing them.”
“Yep.” Eric’s hand came to rest on his shoulder. “They’re the bad guys.”
Walt glanced sideways at Eric. “If you’re torturing them, you’re a bad guy.”
“But they deserve it.”
“No one deserves—”
“They do.” The same girl’s voice cut through the room. “They deserve death.”
Walt blew out a long breath. He’d been avoiding thinking about what the presence of the girls meant because even he had his limits to what his heart could handle. He’d seen far too much in his years as a doctor, on battlefields, traveling to ravaged, desperate places most people wouldn’t dream of stepping foot in. But this… Walt fought hard to distance himself from what he was seeing. It was either that or walk back outside to throw up.
Walt set down his kit and dropped to a squat next to one of the girls. He was a big guy, though not as big as Eric, and could be intimidating for kids. “Are any of you hurt?”
What a stupid fucking thing to say. Of course they were hurt.
The reason he never came to this part of the region was because cells of extremist groups, with ideologies and fanaticism imported from other parts of the world, had started popping up here. The kind of extremists who thought they had the right to kidnap young girls.
She looked at him and spoke in Arabic. Walt shook his head, responding with one of the handful of phrases he knew in Arabic. “Sorry. La atakallam arabi.” I don’t speak Arabic.
He should have been doing his Arabic language lessons instead of blood slides.
Many locals assumed he spoke their languages, that he was local. It was a common enough mistake since he was black, though lighter skinned than many of the people here.
Walt asked the question again, this time in Nafusi. It was one of the first phrases he’d learned.
The little girl brightened for a moment when he spoke what was probably her native language, then shook her head. Walt glanced around, from the other girls to the captive men. It was stupid of him to ask in front of all these people. He’d have to make sure the girls either saw doctors in their home villages or came to his clinic.
Walt stood and stepped back, not wanting to loom over the kids. The girls would need to be looked at in more private and comfortable settings, which left the men. “I won’t treat them just so you can go back to torturing them.” He glanced at Eric.
“Sure it won’t change your mind if I said they deserve it?” Eric sounded only mildly interested.
“No.”
“Stupid Hippocratic Oath.”
“You don’t need a doctor. You need the authorities. And…and these girls’ parents.”
The littlest huddled against the girl beside her and started speaking rapidly. The bigger girl nodded. “We want to go home, but not until Eric has the names of all their co-conspirators.”
Co-conspirators? Walt looked at Eric, widening his eyes a little. No way the girl had known that word. Eric had taught it to them.
Eric grinned. “You don’t cut the head off a hydra. You stab it in the fucking heart then rip out its guts.”
The girls nodded.
“I will patch them up so they can be handed over to the authorities.” Walt enunciated each word. He glanced at Eric and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Please tell me you didn’t teach these children torture techniques.”
“Of course not. I just made sure the fuckers couldn’t move while the girls hit them. They went for the face. Most of the blood on my shirt was from broken noses.”
“There are so many things wrong with this situation.”
“And letting kidnapping victims beat the shit out of their abusers isn’t one of them,” Eric growled.
Walt wanted to argue with that—wanted to point out the psychological damage that could have been done—but honestly it was hard not to see his point.
The sound of a vehicle’s engine charged the air in the room. One of the girls leapt for the table, dousing the light. The men on the floor started to make noise and were met with a flurry of kicks.
Eric pointed at two of the girls, who went to the door, dropping onto the floor, their guns at the ready. Walt flattened his
back against the wall where he could keep an eye on the men and the girls.
Eric crouched near the door. “Don’t shoot me,” he stage-whispered. “Just shoot the bad guys.”
The girls giggled. It was such an innocent, sweet sound that Walt had to swallow hard to dislodge the lump in his throat. The fact that they could giggle after the horrors they’d experienced, the nightmare they were all still swimming around in, actually gave him hope for their futures.
Eric slipped out the door and disappeared into the shadows. There was enough moonlight to just faintly see what was happening as a jeep matching the one he’d arrived in pulled into the courtyard. Four men jumped out, two of them pausing to light cigarettes. The flame from the lighters illuminated their faces—they were barely older than the oldest girls. Not quite children but not yet adults who could think and reason through the bullshit the extremists fed them.
They got within ten feet of the door—Walt saw the girls with guns tense, and he really, really hoped he wasn’t about to see children committing cold-blooded murder—when Eric slid out of the darkness behind the men. He was easy to see, the pale skin of his bare chest silvery in the moonlight.
The Viking grabbed the guns slung over the rearmost guards’ backs, using them as handles to hold them still as he stomped his heel into the sides of their knees. Walt was too far to hear the crack and pop, but the way the men dropped told him Eric knew what he was doing and had just broken and/or dislocated the knee joints.
The two who’d been in front whirled, fumbling to get their rifles off their shoulders. Eric grabbed one man’s gun by the barrel, yanked it off him, then swung it like a baseball bat, hitting him in the ribs. This time Walt could hear the crack. Then Eric jabbed the butt of the other gun into the last man’s stomach and kneed him in the face as he fell.
