by Lea Griffith
“You think?”
She nodded and smiled. It felt good.
“Francisco is going to stop by periodically to check on you. And you’ll have to go back to the doctor for clearance, but we’ll get you better, El.”
“I know. I never doubted. It’ll be good to see Francisco again,” she murmured.
Ella glanced out the big window he’d placed the chair beside and noticed the river winding below them. “I need to tell you some things.” It was past time, and better she do it now, so that as she got back on her feet, they had nothing between them, none of her secrets or lies.
Worry passed like a cloud over his face, but he pulled up an ottoman and sat in front of her. “I’m here.”
Just like that. He had always been a rock for her.
“You didn’t get rid of the beach house, did you?” she asked suddenly.
“I rented it out, but the lease expires in a month,” he said. “Why?”
Ella took a deep breath, locked down her pain, and opened her box of secrets. “When I woke up in Dresden’s cell, I smelled the sea, and for just a moment, I heard your voice in my ear. I’d like to visit the beach house soon.”
“What was I saying?” he asked cautiously.
Ella met his gaze. “‘Move heaven and earth to get back to me, El.’” She swallowed thickly, and Jude handed her a bottled water. She took a healthy swig and stared at him. “That morning, before we left the beach house you said you’d move heaven and earth to get back to me. Those words gave me strength because, Jude, he made me suffer in that cell.”
“Give it to me, Ella. Let me help you carry it,” Jude demanded softly.
She nodded. She could do this. “I told you about the first few days with Dresden and Savidge. And you know Savidge was responsible for the scars on my back. But it’s what they did to Brody that nearly broke me.
“Brody saved me in that hellhole. As they’d work him over, he’d stare into my eyes, and I tried to take as much as I could.” She sobbed and caught herself before more came out. “I tried to give him as much of my strength as I could. I hurt so bad, and I remember the feel of dried blood because they never had anyone treat the bullet wound on my temple. Sometimes, it would split back open and the blood would flow into my eyes. But I always gave Brody my eyes because he needed that. He needed someone to witness his pain, because he refused to give them what they wanted by screaming and begging. They did things to him, Jude, I can never tell another soul because it would betray Brody and he deserves so much more than that. But they hurt him until I gave Dresden what he wanted—confirmation that Allie Redding was Gray Broemig’s daughter.” Ella hung her head, still unable to believe she’d given over an innocent, yet convinced she’d do it again to prevent Brody from being hurt.
“He put up with so much pain in that cell with me.” She took a deep breath and reached for the calm. “But Brody didn’t break until I did. I couldn’t stop screaming the last night Savidge cut me. He’d brought acid that night, and he dribbled it on my cuts, never letting it drip down my back, just making sure it stayed in the cuts. I screamed and screamed, and they made Brody watch. I couldn’t give him my eyes, and eventually he screamed too. He pleaded for them to stop, to give him any punishment they felt I deserved. He screamed because he hoped that’s what they wanted, for him to break in my pain. I screamed in pain and despair, and I screamed because I wasn’t strong enough to hold my silence for him, like he’d done for me.”
She broke apart then, tears flowing down her cheeks, and through it all, Jude sat there, holding her hands, saying nothing, just giving her his gaze as she struggled to put her pain in place.
“Brody screamed because of my pain. And he yelled until he bled from his mouth, his vocal cords shredded, and he was choking on blood. Then they laughed, hit the lever, and let me fall to the floor beside him. We lay there the whole night, broken.” She drew in a shuddering breath. “They took him from me the next morning, and I didn’t hear his voice until about nine months later…in fact, right before I saved King’s ass in Spain.”
She glanced out the window, watching the river flow. “When I first agreed to work with Piper, I was all God and country. I knew Dresden wanted Endgame—you, Rook, and King specifically—but my purpose wasn’t solely selfish.” She went quiet and looked back at her man. He continued to gaze at her with acceptance, love, and strength that she could draw on. Her rock. “God help me, Jude, but neither God nor my country meant a damn to me when I found out you were searching for me. All I knew was terror that Dresden would find out and cut you down before I could take him out.
“I lost my mission. It became personal for me. When I saw you in Beirut, all I wanted was to run to you, but I knew, I knew, Dresden would find out and come for you.”
“Dresden was a master manipulator. Much like the Piper. We have all been tools in this game they’re playing. But Ella, make no mistake…I never stopped loving you. I don’t care what you’ve done, where you’ve been, or how you came back to me. I love you. You’re the air I breathe, the food I eat. I’m so proud of you, lady, because you came back to me. You survived, and you’re here.” He picked her up and settled her in his lap, taking her place in the big chair. “I’m not going to let you go. Ever. If I have to follow you into death, by God, I’ll do it, because there is no life for me without you. I know. I’ve tried it and wasn’t very successful.”
She lifted a hand and traced his lips. “All I’ve known the last year is fear and longing. I didn’t think you’d want me once you realized what I’d done, no matter my reasons for doing it.”
“I won’t lie to you and say it doesn’t bother me that you didn’t trust me enough to come to me in the beginning when the Piper approached you,” Jude told her. “But I can’t equivocate over that. He’s good at what he does, and he’ll answer to me for that. But maybe part of the fault for that lack of trust is mine. I know I’m an asshole sometimes, taking more than I give.”
She shook her head. “This isn’t on you. I do trust you. I didn’t trust myself. And that’s what it comes down to. I haven’t made many bad choices in who I surround myself with. I’m a pretty good judge of character, but I didn’t trust myself enough to trust anyone else.”
He nodded. “I’ve been there.”
“You came for me, refused to let me go. I believe you when you say you love me. Can you forgive me?” she asked, unable to stop the tremor in her voice.
Her heart stuttered as she waited. Without his forgiveness, they couldn’t move forward no matter how much love was between them.
“There’s nothing to forgive. You’re the other half of me,” he murmured at her lips.
Ella sank her hands into his hair and held on. He parted her lips with his and drank her in. It wasn’t a kiss of need; it was a kiss of absolution. He soothed her soul and put balm on her heart.
He healed her.
“I need to talk to Brody,” Jude said when he released her lips.
“Be careful with him, Jude,” she warned.
“I owe him. He kept you alive and killed Dresden. You need to warn him to be careful with me,” Jude said with a laugh.
A knock sounded on the door, and Harrison Black stuck his head in.
“Nobody said to come in, Brit,” Jude grumbled.
“Whatever, Keeper. You want privacy, lock the door. Meeting in the war room in an hour,” he said before tipping his head and waggling his eyebrows at Ella. “Rook said there was a bet in Russia over you two. Since nobody won, there’s a new one.”
“Yeah?” Ella laughed around her reply. “What’s the bet?”
“Everybody’s giving it two weeks before they hear the headboard knocking against the wall,” Black told them, then snickered. “I put five on it.”
“Five hundred dollars?” Ella asked in disbelief.
“Ten dollars, Ella-Bella,” he said with a frown. “
We Brits leave nothing to chance, including our money. I personally only give it a week. It wasn’t such a nasty hit you took, but you are a woman, so…”
Ella flipped him off, but she couldn’t stop the laugh that bubbled up. Harrison Black truly didn’t understand that women were universally the stronger sex.
Jude snorted, but she felt his chest rumbling with his own laughter.
“See you both in an hour,” Black called and then shut the door on his chuckle.
“Want to change?” Jude asked her.
“Nah, I think my pajamas are about all I can handle at the moment,” she said as she snuggled deeper into his hold. “In fact, I’m going to take a short nap while we wait.”
“Go ahead, woman. I’ve got you.”
Ella knew he absolutely did, so she closed her eyes. Surrounded by her man and all the love they shared.
Chapter 26
Jude placed Ella in a chair and took the seat beside her. Rook and Vivi were already in their seats. Black and Brody were across the war table from him and Ella. He’d asked Brody a few minutes ago for a moment after the meeting. He had some words to say to the man who’d saved Ella in that cell.
Because Jude had no doubt that had Brody not screamed, Savidge would have devastated Ella and she might have died that night. He owed Brody his life. Without Ella, Jude didn’t have one.
Vivi stood as King walked in and began to set up her boards. Allie Redding followed King, and behind her came Anna Beth Caine. Jude had only seen her once they’d returned to the States. She stayed holed up in her room and didn’t say much to anyone. Jude had no idea why Anna Beth was there. Normally, war room meetings were reserved for the team.
King, Rook, Knight, Chase, Black, and Madoc settled in their normal places. Jude reached for Ella’s hand and felt the sun shine in his soul. She was still so pale, but her gray eyes were clearing of the clouds she’d carried with her, and she was alive. It was more than he’d dared hope for. She had news she needed to impart at this meeting, and he worried about the single name she’d given him earlier.
“We ready?” King asked, pulling Jude from his thoughts.
Vivi nodded. “Let’s do this.” Rook’s wife cleared her throat and pushed her glasses up her nose. “Nina Lassiter is very much alive, according to my facial recognition software.”
“Lots of people we thought were dead are showing up alive,” Rook mused, tossing Ella a look.
“There are a lot of threads here, Rook. It’s why we’re meeting. We need to work up an angle, figure it all out, and determine what our next move is,” King reminded him, motioning for Vivi to continue.
Chase tapped the table. “Not to overstate the obvious or repeat what Rook said, but we’ve got Ella and Madoc, both of whom we suspected were dead. And now we’ve got Nina?”
“Best way to hide is to die,” Knight said from his point at the end of the table. He’d know, Jude mused, because he’d hidden his presence after the failed mission in the Hindu Kush with Dresden and Rook.
“Truth,” Harrison Black chimed in. “It’s why MI6 demands irrefutable proof through a body and matching DNA before they’ll accept the death of one of their agents.”
There’s a story there, Jude knew. Black had left MI6 amid scandal. He had fit right into Endgame.
“I can only speculate as to her reasoning. I’ve done everything I can to determine how she’s hidden from us and what happened when she disappeared, supposedly dying of poisoning. I’m working on it, but I’m only one person. Allie is doing what she can, tapping some of her resources, but it’s hard because King has put an information blackout on Endgame. He doesn’t want anyone knowing what we have and where we’re heading.” Vivi pulled up a video feed on the screen that hung from the ceiling. “Here’s Nina buying the ticket in Provo, and here she is disembarking in Anchorage. I have no idea where she went from there. Surveillance video shows her leaving the airport on foot, and I’ve lost her trail.”
“Why Alaska?” Jude asked suddenly, something scraping at his memory.
“She’s changed,” Ella said softly. “Thinner, leaner, and her hair is longer. Nina hated long hair.”
“Wig?” Vivi asked.
“No, I think it’s hers,” Ella answered, running her index finger along her lower lip.
Jude noticed that the bruises from Dresden’s blows were gone. Ella glanced over at him, seeming to read his mind because she licked her lower lip. Jude’s heart turned over in his chest.
This woman. She’d changed him.
King cleared his throat and gave Jude a look. Jude smiled and engaged in the conversation again. “I gotta ask again, why Alaska?”
“Nina had no family. She was like me when she joined the Agency…from the foster system. I think she was originally from Vermont. She graduated from MIT, went to school with you, right, Vivi?” Ella asked.
Vivi nodded. “She was a year behind me.”
“She never mentioned Alaska to me, and when we talked about her past, it was pretty cut and dried. She had no one,” Ella told the team.
“Did she have a man?” King asked.
Jude felt something click in his mind.
“She was a loner. If she had dates, I never knew about them. When we weren’t on ops, she was at the condo we shared in DC. You know what though? The last few weeks before Beirut, Nina had been dressing up, using makeup and such. I just remembered that. I was going to ask her if she’d met someone but, well…Beirut,” Ella finished in a near-whisper.
Jude reached for her hand again and squeezed. He remembered Nina as a behind-the-scenes analyst who backed up her team from base. She was almost as good as Vivi and Ella with information analysis and computer programming. The difference between Vivi, Ella, and Nina was that Nina had trained with Rangers at Fort Benning in Georgia. She’d gone through Ranger training and graduated top of her class. She’d been a soldier through and through. Jude didn’t remember ever thinking of Nina as anything other than one of them. He’d never seen her as a woman.
“She’s either in Alaska, or she used that as a jumping point. Thing is, she used the card, and that just smells to me,” King murmured. “Why would she use a card that she had to know would ping with us?”
“Maybe she thought we would have shut that card down?” Rook offered.
Vivi shook her head. “No, she knows how we operate. She knows we never close cards unless we have proof they’re compromised. It’s how I was trained to keep track of rogues for the Agency. Someone gets burned, they go to ground, but they are trained to have three cards memorized. The Agency refuses to leave one of their agents, even a burned one, without resources to survive. They always hope they can retract the agent and determine what happened. Anyway, once an agent goes rogue or gets burned, those cards are put into a special system that monitors activity so that when they ping, we can track the agent. Nina knew this.”
“That means she did it on purpose,” Allie said, confirming what Jude had been thinking.
King nodded. “Why? She didn’t look hurried or scared on those videos.”
“Desperate people don’t always look desperate,” Ella reminded them. “And Nina was really good at hiding what she was feeling. We were friends—I think out of necessity and convenience rather than because we were so much alike—but I didn’t know much about her. Hell, I’m just now realizing I hardly knew her at all. Just basics.”
“She was good,” Vivi said. “And now she’s in play. I’ve heard talk about a rogue agent with information for sale.”
“No way,” Ella said, slapping her hand on the wooden table in front of them. “She’s not a traitor.”
Jude winced. He’d once called Ella that. Hell, they all had when they thought she’d been the one to betray their spec ops for that Beirut mission. “There’s something we’re missing.”
Black snorted. “Lately, that’s the name of
the game.”
Brody nodded.
“Alaska though…” Jude trailed off. Something about that niggled at him and wouldn’t leave him alone.
Then it hit him. Micah had set up property in Alaska. Between the western edge of the Denali National Park and Preserve and a tiny village called Nikolai.
Jude had thought Micah had met someone. Micah had mentioned it before that Beirut mission, had said Jude wouldn’t believe who it was when he told him.
“I think I know where she went.” Jude breathed out.
King narrowed his gaze on him.
“Micah and I both purchased property about three years ago under shell corporations Micah set up for us. We wanted off-grid homes where we could bury ourselves so deep nobody could find us,” Jude began. “I purchased in New Mexico. Micah bought property in Alaska.”
“I’ll start a search there. Can you give me coordinates like those you gave King for your property?” Vivi asked, making notes on her iPad.
“I don’t have them, only a general location,” Jude explained. “Look, Micah was my best friend, but when it comes to someone’s personal safety, or that of any family they planned on having, they don’t trust anyone with that information. It can be pulled out of even the strongest ally by the right person, by the right torture.”
King grimaced. “True. Can you give us the approximate location and let Vivi begin searching?”
“I’ll give it to her, but it’s a long shot. There are hundreds of thousands of acres out in that wilderness. I’m just throwing it out there, hoping it sticks. Micah had started dating someone, said I wouldn’t believe who it was, but we never got to talk before Beirut. He was always busy, and I was too,” Jude said, glancing at Ella.
She smiled, and her lips curved in that secret way she had. She’d told him earlier that she remembered every time they’d ever been together, and he thought she was thinking of one now.
“But he was preoccupied before Beirut.”
“None of that matters,” Brody tossed out. “Micah died in Beirut. I have no idea why, but they buried him in one of the only Christian cemeteries in Lebanon. He’s dead. Why would Nina head to his property? How would she even know about it?”
