“Palomo came out the front; he’s getting in his car,” Shane said. “I’ll follow.”
Charles looked sideways at Ángel, silent beside him with a grim face and his hand tight around his stolen gun. Sakura swung the car onto the road that would lead them to the freeway.
“Uh, guys?” Shane said a couple of minutes later. “Palomo’s heading right for you. Like, right for you. I don’t know how, but he knows where you are.”
“Shit,” said Sakura. She changed lanes and made an abrupt right turn. “I’ll reroute.”
“What’s wrong?” Ángel asked.
“Palomo knows our location somehow,” Charles said. “You dumped your cell—is there another way he could be tracking you?”
“Fuck, I don’t know. It could be anything.” Gazing down at his own body, Ángel unbuckled his fancy watch, rolled down the window, and tossed it out onto the road. The watch was followed in short order by his suit jacket, his cufflinks, and—after a moment’s hesitation—his shoes.
“Okay, they’re slowing down,” said Shane. “They’re definitely confused.”
“Maintain evasive maneuvers for now,” Eva instructed Sakura.
Sakura nodded, taking them on a zigzagging route through a web of quiet residential streets with guidance from Jade, who sat in the front passenger seat with her computer open to a local map. Five tense, silent minutes later, Shane reported that Palomo had ceased pursuit. Everyone but Ángel let out a collective sigh of relief.
“Fury, get us to the airport ASAP,” Eva said. “Sandman, meet us there.”
“Wilco, Valkyrie.”
“Looks like we lost them,” Charles said to Ángel.
Ángel set his gun down with a shuddering exhale, running both of his hands through his hair. He buckled his seat belt, then turned in his seat to face Charles with a small smile.
“Hello, Charles,” he said.
“Ángel,” Charles said evenly. He was stiff in his seat, his handsome face unsmiling, dark eyes as piercing and intense as Ángel remembered. His broad shoulders took up more than his fair share of the back, edging into Ángel’s space.
“Charles,” he’d introduced himself when they’d first met, Ángel fresh out of training and assigned to his first post in Tucson. “Never Charlie.” Ángel had spent a good six months after that greeting him as Charles-Never-Charlie just to watch him fight off one of his rare smiles.
“Dude, that was some intense littering,” said the woman in the front passenger seat, redirecting Ángel’s attention. Her voice was rich and sweet, pouring over his skin like molasses.
Ángel turned to her in surprise. “God,” he said, “you have the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard.”
“Thanks,” she said with a smile. Her brown hair was plaited in a simple braid, her skin smooth and white. She held a laptop on her thighs. “I’m—”
“No,” Charles interrupted. “Code names only until he’s been debriefed.”
“Do you think I’ve gone native, Charles?” Ángel said softly.
Charles’s nostrils flared, but all he said was, “I’m not qualified to make that assessment, which is why information will be compartmentalized until you’ve been debriefed by the appropriate professionals.”
So composed, so proper. Even after everything that had happened between them, and everything that had come afterward, Ángel felt the old familiar urge to provoke Charles, to prick and sting him until all that careful self-control unraveled. He reined it in with difficulty.
“He’s right, though obviously you already know his name,” said the Scandinavian goddess on Charles’s other side. She leaned around him to shake Ángel’s hand. “I’m this team’s supervisory special agent. Valkyrie.”
Aptly named. “Ángel Medina.”
The woman in the front seat lifted a hand. “Siren.”
“Fury,” said the Asian American woman driving the car. She was short but solidly built, the sleeves of her T-shirt clinging to the impressive muscles of her shoulders and biceps. Ángel caught a glimpse of the tail end of a tattoo peeking out beneath one: —ER FI. Former Marine, then.
“Thank you all very much for the extraction,” Ángel said, “but where the hell is Paul?”
His stomach dropped at the uncomfortable silence that met his question.
“His wife reported him missing this morning,” Valkyrie said. “Apparently he never came home last night.”
Ángel sat back in his seat, blood roaring in his ears.
“We’re not sure if it was foul play or if he, ah, went somewhere willingly. His car is gone, and there were no signs of struggle at his home or his office. When Dallas broke into your lockbox, your file was missing too.”
Despite her insinuation, there was no chance on this earth that Paul had betrayed Ángel somehow and then made a run for it. If he was missing, he’d been taken. “Without Paul or my file, there’s no way for me to prove I am who I say I am,” Ángel said numbly.
“That’s not true,” said Charles. “I know you, and so does everyone who worked with us in Tucson.”
Ángel rubbed his eyes. “That’s not the same. There’s no paper trail now.”
“The FBI is looking for Warner,” Siren said. “They’ll find him.”
“You’re absolutely sure your cover wasn’t compromised?” Charles asked.
Lowering his hand, Ángel said, “If it had been, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you now, trust me.”
“So your handler disappearing with the only copy of your file right before your extraction is just the biggest coincidence of all time?”
Ángel scowled at him. Charles glared right back.
With a slight cough, Valkyrie said, “I think we can table this discussion until we’ve had a chance to decompress a bit.”
Breaking eye contact with Charles, Ángel turned to look out the window. He pulled his sticky, wine-soaked shirt away from his chest and grimaced. “You said we’re going to the airport, right? Are we flying to Dallas?”
Valkyrie shook her head. “Given Warner’s disappearance, Dallas Division is concerned for your safety, so we’re taking you back to our own field office.”
“Which is where?”
“San Diego,” Charles said.
Ángel had been undercover for so long that he’d forgotten what it was like to not have to monitor and modify his behavior, speech, and body language every single moment. Over and over, he caught himself adjusting his responses to accommodate the others’ perceived expectations, his brain no longer able to react with natural spontaneity. Underlying it all was his constant companion, fear, warning him that one wrong word, one single misstep, could end in his death.
That’s over now, Ángel reminded himself. You don’t have to live like that anymore.
They arrived at a private terminal at the airport, where Ángel met the fifth member of the team, a cute, preppy white guy code-named Sandman. Forty-five minutes later, they were in the air, en route to San Diego.
Ensconced in a comfortable window seat in one of the jet’s four-top seating arrangements, Ángel accepted the bottle of water Siren passed him and gave her a grateful smile. She’d claimed the seat across from him, her face alight with curiosity; Fury and Sandman occupied the other two seats. Charles and Valkyrie sat across the aisle, the latter on the phone, reporting to the resident agent in charge of the San Diego field office.
“So, two years undercover,” Siren said. “How are you feeling?”
“I think it’ll take some time to adjust.” Ángel sipped his water.
Fury gave him a considering look, rubbing a hand over her short, spiky hair. “All the trouble the Esparza cartel’s been having the past couple of years—that was you, huh?”
“Well, it was a joint task force with the DEA. They had an agent undercover as well, though she wasn’t as central to the operation. I’m pretty sure she requested extraction too, but I lost track of her a few days ago when things went crazy.”
On the other side of the a
isle, Valkyrie ended her call and started texting. Charles was reading his tablet, doing a pretty good job of pretending he wasn’t listening to their conversation.
“How’d you even get undercover with them in the first place?” Sandman asked.
“I was Raúl Esparza’s piece on the side,” said Ángel.
He watched for Charles’s reaction from the corner of his eye, and he wasn’t disappointed. Charles went abruptly, absolutely still, his eyes fixed on his tablet screen.
“His . . . piece on the side?” Sandman said, as if that couldn’t possibly mean what he thought it did.
“We were fucking,” Ángel said, so there would be no confusion.
His three seatmates regarded him with open mouths. Charles’s lips thinned out and his knuckles tightened around the edges of his tablet. Only Valkyrie showed no reaction, continuing to text without acknowledging that she’d heard anything out of the ordinary.
Old resentments flared to life as Ángel watched Charles. The wounds from their last fight had never healed, and knowing what Charles must be thinking now ripped them open further.
“You were Raúl Esparza’s boyfriend?” Siren said, her eyes wide.
“More like his mistress. Kept man, I guess you could say.”
Charles dropped his tablet on the table with a rattle and straightened his jacket, cracking his neck from side to side. Valkyrie glanced up from her phone to briefly meet his eyes.
Fuck, why was Ángel doing this to himself? There was no reason to be so blunt—except he wanted to upset Charles, to hurt him, even if it meant hurting himself as well.
Raising his eyebrows, Sandman asked, “How does a cartel boss get away with having a kept man?”
Ángel shrugged. “He also had a wife and several girlfriends. It was no threat to his machísmo to fuck a man the same way he would a woman.”
“Ah, I love the smell of misogyny in the morning,” said Siren.
Fury nodded with a derisive snort. “Plus, I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell Esparza he couldn’t fuck whoever he wanted to fuck. Sounds like a good way to get your throat slit.”
“You’re not wrong,” Ángel said.
“We heard about his assassination,” Sandman said. “Rival cartel, right?”
“Yes. I was there when it happened. It was . . .” Ángel trailed off, not fighting the tide of memories—the crack of the bullet, Raúl’s head exploding, the spray of blood that had drenched Ángel’s hair and the back of his neck. “Unpleasant.”
Siren tilted her head. “That’s why you had to leave, even though your cover wasn’t blown. You weren’t safe without him.”
Ángel nodded. She didn’t need to know the gory details; besides, she could probably fill in the blanks well enough herself.
“The Esparza cartel doesn’t operate in California.” Siren reached across the table, resting her hand lightly atop Ángel’s. “You’ll be safe there.”
Safe was a word Ángel had lost touch with a long time ago. How safe could he be, really, with Paul missing?
He glanced at Charles, who sat staring out his window with his arms folded across his chest. Ángel had burned that bridge thoroughly before he left, and what could have been a reassuring point of familiarity to ease his return was only another source of pain.
Refocusing on Siren, Ángel mustered a smile. “Tell me about San Diego,” he said. “I’ve never been.”
They touched down in San Diego around midnight. The team split up and headed in different directions, only Charles and Valkyrie remaining to escort Ángel to an ATF safe house. Charles didn’t say a single word to Ángel as they handed him over to the waiting agents, and for once Ángel felt no desire to goad him. He was beyond exhausted, fraying at the edges from the stress of the past few days.
The safe house was a bland suburban ranch, no different from its neighbors if one didn’t recognize the steel-reinforced doors and bulletproof glass in the windows. Ángel turned down the agents’ offer of food and retired to the bedroom at the back of the house, where the windows were further barred with thick shutters. He stood in the center of the room for a moment, struggling with himself, before he gave in and checked under the bed and inside the closet.
Assured that he was alone, Ángel went into the attached bathroom and started the shower. He stood in front of the mirror as he stripped out of his clothes, examining the livid bruises Oscar had left on his arm that morning. They weren’t as bad as the ones on his hips from the night before, or the bite mark just above his collarbone. Fucker had broken the skin.
Ángel frowned at his reflection and then turned away.
A hot shower did wonders to relax him. He changed into the boxers and T-shirt he’d been provided—both a couple of sizes too large—turned off the lights, and slid into bed, lying on his side so he faced the locked door. After a few minutes, he leaned over and switched the bedside lamp back on.
Hours later, he was still wide-awake, staring at that door.
After they dropped Ángel off at the safe house, Charles and Eva changed into street clothes and went to Susie’s, a twenty-four-hour diner near their office. For Charles, there was something comforting about the way diners looked the same everywhere in America. He could just as easily have been back home in Indiana, hitting the greasy spoon a few blocks from his high school with his teammates after a football game.
Eva was kind enough not to address the proverbial elephant until they’d been served their food. “So,” she said as the waitress walked away, “this must be weird for you.”
“You could say that.” Charles stabbed a link of breakfast sausage with his fork.
“Ángel is gorgeous.”
“Yes, and he’s very aware of it, believe me.”
Eva squirted a healthy amount of ketchup onto her cheeseburger, then more onto her plate for her fries. “I’m trying to decide whether or not we need to disclose your history with him to Ed,” she said, referring to the RAC of their field office.
“There’s nothing to disclose,” said Charles. “He and I had a sexual relationship years ago, and we haven’t seen or spoken with each other since.”
“You had a sexual relationship that blew up in your faces so badly it made him leave town.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” Charles said, his voice tight.
Eva popped a fry into her mouth, her silence saying more than words could.
“He fucked my trainer, Eva.”
“You told me you two weren’t monogamous. It’s not like Ángel was your boyfriend; you were sneaking around hooking up in secret.”
Charles snapped a piece of bacon in half. “That’s not the point. He fucked my trainer on my birthday. We’d made plans, he knew I was on my way over, and he just couldn’t have cared less.”
The stunned pain of the memory was still fresh—letting himself into Ángel’s apartment, looking forward to the night they’d planned, and discovering Ángel bent over his couch, taking it up the ass from a guy Charles had introduced him to only days earlier. Charles had stood in the doorway for a full minute before either of them noticed he was there.
“He didn’t even apologize,” Charles said, dropping the bacon onto his plate. When he had recovered from his shock and started shouting, Ángel had shown no sign of remorse—he’d screamed back, and things had devolved quickly from there.
Their relationship had been tumultuous even before that point, a series of thrilling highs and wretched lows, and finding Ángel with Jared had pushed Charles over the edge. It had all come pouring out of him at once—all his frustration and pain and confusion, every insecurity that their secret affair had stirred within him, with Ángel the only viable target. His grandmother would have torn a strip off his hide if she’d heard the pure venom that had come out of Charles’s mouth that night.
“I’m concerned that you won’t be able to stay professional around him, given your history. And vice versa.” Eva took a bite of her cheeseburger, regarding Charles with thoughtful eyes as she chewed and
swallowed. “The way he told us what he’d been doing undercover—that was for your benefit, wasn’t it? He was trying to get a rise out of you.”
“Probably,” Charles said. “He’s like that—or he used to be, at least. I don’t know him anymore. Two years is a long time, especially for someone who’s been deep undercover.”
“If your relationship had ended on good terms, or even neutral ones, I wouldn’t give this a second thought. As it is . . .”
He suppressed a sharp remark about how Eva, with her trouble-free ten-year marriage and three beautiful, perfect children, couldn’t possibly understand how things stood between Ángel and himself. It was petty, uncalled for; Ángel had always brought out the worst in him.
When he wasn’t bringing out the best.
Charles twitched with irritation and shoved the thought away.
“I won’t say anything to Ed for now,” Eva said. “I know you don’t want to come out at work, and I don’t want to be the person who forces you into that position. But Ed does need you to come in tomorrow to give a statement about your history with Ángel at the Tucson office. It’ll help establish his identity since all of his records are gone.”
“That’s fine.”
Eva sipped her water. “It’ll just be a couple of hours.”
“I didn’t have any plans,” said Charles.
They ate in silence for a couple of minutes until Eva said, “He won’t stay here. Once he’s been reinstated, there’s no way he’ll want to stay in the same office as you. I wouldn’t even want to be in the same division. He’ll be gone in a few days.”
Charles nodded. A few days, and everything would go back to normal.
Eva didn’t mention Ángel again. Once they’d finished eating, she drove Charles home. He let himself into his quiet, dark apartment, dropped his keys and wallet in the bowl by the door, and slipped out of his shoes.
The apartment was all but empty; most of the furniture and all of the art and knickknacks had been Amy’s, and she’d taken them with her when she left. A place this size was ridiculous for one person living alone, but it would be more expensive for Charles to break the lease than to just stick it out to the end.
Can't Hide From Me Page 2
