Hidden Impact

by Piper J. Drake

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad whoever it is isn’t trying to kill me, but why?” Maylin took smaller bites in case something one of them said might make her choke. It’d been that kind of day.

  “Couple of reasons come to mind.” Victoria licked olive oil from her bottom lip. “If you’re injured and an ambulance is called, it’d be easy to intercept and snag you before you ever made it to the hospital. No one at your apartment would think to look for you at the hospital for quite a while, am I correct?”

  Victoria was right. Maylin swallowed hard. “Everyone would assume family or friends would meet me at the hospital. None of my neighbors know me well enough to know An-mei’s missing or that she’s the only family I’m in touch with.”

  “Easy way to catch you off guard and whisk you away, then.” Victoria took a hearty bite of the sandwich. “This really is delicious, dear.”

  Maylin smiled.

  It was a kind of relief to know someone wasn’t trying to kill her. Only a marginal one, though, because being kidnapped was a close second on the scale of things that freaked her out.

  “Well, we’ve learned a couple of other things about our mystery friends.” Marc took the napkin Maylin held out for him with a nod. He’d inhaled the sandwich. “Those devices are completely enclosed, tiny, and custom made. Probably limited range, so we’re okay now that we’ve put a few miles between us and their receiving device. But I won’t feel completely good about it until I can take what we’ve got apart and disconnect whatever power source they’ve got. I’ll try to do that while we’re on the move, before we get back to our base of operations. I’ll know more about any signature the maker might have once I take them apart, but those details alone are telling.”

  Gabe looked up into the rearview mirror so he could see Marc. “Lay it out for us.”

  “First, the clean and enclosed packaging means whoever did this had these ready for this specific purpose or for regular use. Either way, the maker put a lot of tech into tiny devices, which says to me some deep financial pockets. That kind of work isn’t cheap.”

  Maylin put her half-eaten sandwich down. She wasn’t sure how she was going to counter adversaries with such money at their disposal.

  “The smaller a device is, the shorter range it has, so the listeners had to be close.” Marc cleared his throat. “They were close enough to have eyes on the apartment, and even with the curtains drawn they could see enough shapes to take a shot at someone in the kitchen. I’m going to propose they thought it was our Maylin here, since anyone who’s observed her for more than a few hours knows she tends to hang out in there.”

  A grunt came from Gabe up front. “Go on.”

  “Once we get back to Centurion Corporation facilities, I’ll take these apart. I’ll be able to tell us more about their make. Power supply design, battery type, parts and mode of assembly should give us a few leads. One or two of the parts might even be 3D printed.” Marc sounded excited to dig in and find out more.

  “Anything else?” Gabe’s words were still short, but there was a hint of amusement there. Or maybe Maylin was imagining it.

  Marc didn’t comment on it. “Didn’t find any video devices. Not surprising, because it’s a crazy effort to rig the place for both audio and video when they already had such a clear view of the apartment. Those were some big windows. Not too many places hidden from view if the curtains were left open.”

  And obviously, they could see at least shadows with the windows closed in the late afternoon to evening. Maylin shuddered.

  “Was that big cooler just for these sandwiches?” Lizzy spoke up.

  “I brought more.” Maylin dove back into the cooler and came out with small mason jars of layered graham cracker, cheesecake and fresh fruit. “Dessert?”

  “Pass it up here.” Lizzy accepted hers enthusiastically. “This is way better than pain medication.”

  “Get it looked at once we get back anyway,” Gabe admonished. “Maylin, can you hold on to mine till we get back? Can’t drive and enjoy that at the same time, and I don’t want Marc to eat mine.”

  “Hey, I haven’t even got mine yet,” Marc protested.

  Maylin laughed and passed him his serving.

  Victoria was just finishing up her muffuletta and accepted one of the cheesecake jars too. “You pack a wonderful picnic.”

  “I figure it’s what I can do to contribute.” Maylin drew in a breath. “Anything I can do to keep everyone fueled up and ready to find An-mei is completely worth it.”

  Up front in the driver’s seat, Gabe took another bite of his sandwich and chewed. Maylin watched him and wondered, was it all going to be enough?

  Chapter Six

  Gabe started and swallowed half a dozen suggestions to move along as he walked Maylin from the SUV back to the guest cabin. She wasn’t moving fast, but he figured she might have a lot on her mind and she was reasonably safe here on Centurion ground. He decided to rein in his hyperawareness and let her take her time. She stopped to study the wooded area around them—the worn path between the main building they’d just left and the cabin, even the freaking leaves of a random shrub.

  “Look.” There was something he should clarify. He’d get straight to the point and it wasn’t going to get any better if he dressed it up. “We’re going for one goal at a time. Find your sister first. It’s very possible she’s going to be irrecoverable.”

  Maylin turned to face him, her eyebrows raised. “You mean dead.”

  Yes.

  “Or worse.” And wasn’t he the biggest ass out here?

  Her face became a porcelain mask. “I don’t want to believe that.”

  No one ever did. But it was better to face the possibility than operate under delusions of happy endings. He started to say...something. Not sure what, but she lifted a hand.

  “No. I get what you’re saying. I do. I’m also saying I don’t want to.” She looked down for a moment and then back up to him. “Is it possible to be realistic and hopeful at the same time?”

  He rolled one shoulder in an attempt to ease some of the tension across the back of his neck. “In my experience, planning for the worst hurts a lot less in the long run.”

  She laughed then, and it was so sad it cracked his carefully built wall a little. “So what would you say this is? Giving me the hard truth?”

  When she made it sound like that, he reached for a better fit. “More like managing expectations.”

  And wow, way the hell more awkward.

  “Liáng yào kŭ kŏu. A good medicine tastes bitter.” She huffed and turned away to study a tree trunk. “Thanks for the medicine, but you sound more like a guy trying to set boundaries with his girlfriend.”

  Oh, even better.

  “I don’t do relationships.” He gritted his teeth. This conversation had jumped the tracks. “And what’s with the Chinese proverb?”

  She shrugged, traced a random pattern in the bark. “Every interaction with every person is a relationship. What kind is up to what each person makes it. And I grew up with random proverbs tossed at me whenever they seemed most likely to teach me an intended lesson. Some of them fit and some of them get lost in translation.”

  Didn’t everyone have one of those sage personalities in their families? At least one whose advice was like a repeating track on an overplayed music list, and maybe one whose comments were the kind that stuck with you for life. He was guessing from the bitterness in her tone she was remembering the former.

  “You mean from Chinese to English?” He’d heard enough of both Mandarin and Cantonese to recognize the languages apart from something else, like Japanese or Korean. But he didn’t know enough of any of those languages to actually understand even the simplest phrases. Most of his language skills were based on his more recent deployments in the Arabic and Balkan regions. Each language
had a cadence to it that helped him separate and identify as opposed to trying to pick out familiar sounds or words.

  “I mean from the one culture to another. What seems suitable based on the situation might not be, depending on the perspective.” She chuckled. “And to be honest, having been born and raised here I might not use all of them in the right moment either. I very much loved my parents, but there were a lot of awkward moments through the years. I grew up on a lot of proverbs and I take the sayings I like to heart, but I apply them my way.”

  “And the ones you don’t like?”

  She lifted her chin. “I prove them wrong.”

  He liked her. Hell, he’d appreciated her looks since the night before and approved of her resilience after the scares she’d had. But here, talking directly to her was comfortable. He’d settled into it without thinking. And he couldn’t remember the last time he’d conversed with anyone beyond a specifically business-related exchange of information. Not a detail worth tracking down. It’d been a long time.

  It only made this job harder. Even if they did find her sister, depending on where she was and who was holding her—assuming she was alive—the effort to extract the girl could be incredibly expensive. Maylin wouldn’t be able to afford it.

  But, following his own advice, one step at a time. If the girl was someplace they could infiltrate as a single fire team, there was a chance to keep costs reasonable for Maylin without making his superiors at HQ squawk.

  “We can’t change everything that isn’t the way we want it.” He’d watched people try. Demand he make it so. “My team isn’t going to create a miracle for you.”

  She nodded. “That’s fair. And thank you for telling me the truth.”

  “Not many people thank me for truth.” They cursed him. Screamed at him. Blamed him. Or shot him in the back.

  “Well, I’m at least one.” There she went, practical again. No snark in her tone or mocking. “You don’t seem to have had enough in your life and I’d think you’ve done a lot to deserve gratitude.”

  The memory of his last client’s wife’s catty attitude was so fresh in his mind, he almost added it to Maylin’s words inside his head. Only it wouldn’t have been fair to Maylin. She might be one of the most straightforward people he’d met. Ever. “People tend to remember the bad.”

  “And take the good for granted?” She whispered her question and tipped her head to the side. “I can see it. My experience isn’t the same, but never good enough was a recurring theme for a long time.”

  If she was going to be fair to him, he should make an effort to do the same for her. “It’s a lot of the reason I didn’t want to take on this mission for you in the first place. You, your sister...you’re family. Everything about this is personal and emotionally driven. You aren’t going to remember anything about this but the outcome, and the outlook is not as good as you want to hope.”

  There was a long silence. Yeah, he was harping on the realistic outcome of this whole thing, but it was damned hard to find neutral in all this.

  “What kind of jobs would you have preferred?” Her tone was carefully measured.

  He’d upset her and he didn’t want to. Ultimately, it might be for the best. She shouldn’t like him and definitely didn’t have to. Course, here he was getting to know her better. And there she was making a postcard moment out of every time she paused to look at a piece of greenery. Picture-perfect beautiful without even trying.

  He cleared his throat. “The best contracts are the business driven ones. Escort cargo from point A to point B, for example. Easy. Straightforward. Harder ones are when there’s a need for a team to infiltrate or take down an enemy site. But it’s still impersonal and if we can manage it with good planning and optimal timing, no body count.”

  “But sometimes there are casualties.” Her very serious gaze met his and he didn’t look away.

  “Yes.” Most of the time. In truth, any well-guarded facility was going to have somebody on duty at all times. And there were other contracts, other missions he didn’t want to talk about. Those were the kind of thing a person could only understand if they’d been there too.

  “I started looking online for other cases of missing loved ones and kidnappings when I first tried to figure out how to find help.” Maylin started to wander through the trees alongside the trail. She wove in and out of them as if being a little lost would help her talk through her worries. “The things I read about... I didn’t want to think could happen. At the same time, I truly believe they happen every day. We’re lucky we grew up here, in this country, where to us, it’s all the stuff of action movies. Only, our father isn’t alive to rescue her with a very specific set of skills. There’s only me.”

  Movies and television. She really did watch a lot of it.

  “Your father didn’t have the skills for this.” Shit, that came out harsh. Not what he meant.

  Maylin swung around a tree trunk to pin him with her startlingly clear green gaze. “No. You do. Even if Daddy was alive, I wouldn’t have gone to him for help. My stepmother would’ve said it was An-mei’s fault for putting herself where she’d be vulnerable. Would’ve said to leave it to the proper authorities.”

  And her father would’ve ceded to her stepmother. Okay. No wonder Maylin was so independent. And alone.

  “This kind of job is full of emotional baggage.” He laid it out there since it seemed like she’d eventually get into it, struggling to present it in a rational way. Reasonable. Trouble was, he didn’t like to think about why it stuck with him as much as it did. “Bodyguard jobs always end up messier than they’re supposed to be. If something goes wrong, it’s not goods or property lost. It’s a person.”

  “A loved one,” she whispered.

  “Somebody’s loved one.” He’d give her that. “The last mission I was on, I went personally to the home of the person I’d failed to protect. I figured it was the least I could do. Give them the news face-to-face that I’d failed to get him out alive.”

  Maylin waited, motionless. No judgment in her eyes even after he’d admitted failure.

  He shook his head. “His wife was ready to hand him divorce papers when he got home. She’d been cheating on him while he was overseas and even while he was being held prisoner. When she found out he was dead, she was relieved. No messy divorce. And then the bitch tried to sue Centurion Corporation for emotional damages, playing the bereaved widow after she’d pulled herself together and put on the front the public expected to see.”

  People were shit to each other. Scavengers.

  “Cào bī.” Her face reddened and her hand flew to her mouth. “Okay, that one was pretty bad. But seriously, she’s an awful person.”

  He’d been okay with her original statement, no translation needed. It sounded right. He’d bet she could curse a blue streak in English if she got over the idea of curses being unacceptable in polite company. He wasn’t polite. “I didn’t stick around for all of it. I had follow-up surgery on my back and was laid out in recovery by the time she tried her nonsense.”

  “Follow-up?” There was real concern in her eyes.

  His walls cracked more. And damn but he didn’t even mind somehow. “I got shot in the back during the mission. When I went down, the man my team had gone in to rescue was killed. My team got out and dragged my sorry ass with them.”

  But they’d been betrayed by several of their own. And he really wasn’t ready to share those details.

  “So you’re all in Washington State.” She reached out until her fingertips touched his chest. “I’m very glad you were here in this part of the world last night.”

  His brain turned off. Yup, just like that. It’d been one thing to look, listen to her. She’d had to go and touch him. He took her fingertips and ran his thumb over the tops of her knuckles, enjoying the electric connection from the barest skin to skin contac
t. When he stepped into her space, she didn’t back away. He liked it about her, the steel in her spine and the spark in her eyes. Challenge.

  She swallowed.

  “Run out of words?” Maybe he should go to hell for how much fun he was having with her in this one moment.

  Her delicately arched brows came together and the spark in her gaze flared to temper. “I didn’t realize I was supposed to have something to say.”

  “You’re full of questions.” He brushed her hair off her shoulder because he liked to watch the light play when her hair moved. It was literally a black cascade. Gorgeous and silky. “I like listening to them.”

  And she had about a hundred questions piling up behind those very kissable lips of hers. He wanted to push her into a flood of them.

  “What are you...?”

  He kissed her. Shouldn’t have. But her lips were every bit as soft as he imagined and her words tumbled into his mouth. Her hand tightened around his, her fingertips still caught in his grasp. And she didn’t pull away. Didn’t slap him.

  So he wrapped his other hand around her waist and pulled her slender body close.

  She melded against him, soft and pliant and he couldn’t keep his hands from wandering. Especially since her own were tracing their way across his shoulders and up the back of his neck. No resistance. So he lost himself in the sweet, tart taste of her mouth.

  He’d discovered a lot of contrasts in her so far. Different from the women he’d been with in the past, sweeter and genuinely kind. Soft. But with an underlying strength and flexibility. Her ability to adjust each time something went insane was nothing short of amazing. And as he bent her backward a bit, enjoying her mouth and soft little moan, he wanted to see just how bendy she could be in other ways.

  When she gasped for air, he let his grip on her loosen. She might not be ready for all that...yet. He straightened, bringing her with him. But when she looked up at him through her long eyelashes, there was a storm of want waiting for him. He could give her time and let those feelings smolder some.