“Work on your tracker, Khani. I’ll research Filipov and see what I can find.”
She nodded, her gaze far off in some version of possible outcome for this nightmare. That in itself, his trooper, the fiercest person he knew glassed over and near catatonic, had his fingers striking the keys at lightning speed.
Only he didn’t research Filipov. He knew all he needed to know about the monster. He harkened to the file hidden on his hard-drive labeled Slaughter. It opened to two files Zeke and Khani. He never touched the latter, knowing it would breach a trust he needed to earn. He’d only riffled through Zeke’s enough to know what the bloke looked like, his current address, and his former employment history. Street had purposefully steered clear of the US Elite file under the bloke’s name.
US Elite was a private security firm. Though he’d tried not to jump to conclusions, he’d guessed Zeke had moved to the States to contract for them. There had been a possibility he’d been ordered to infiltrate their ranks for Queen and Country, or hell, even the Base Branch. They dealt in covert ops, which sometimes meant, unless you were on the top tier of power, one team didn’t know the tasks another was commissioned to do. Heck, when he’d made LTC he’d found out about three units under the London command he hadn’t known existed. Surely there could’ve been more. But if Khani didn’t even know about it, chances were good Zeke had turned his back on his ethics and now worked for the almighty pound or dollar, as it were.
He clicked on the US Elite file and scanned its contents. Most recently Zeke had been ordered to penetrate the New York associate of the Stas, the Russian mob named for its leader Lev Stas. The man’s reputation preceded him the world over.
Access to the Queen’s clearance codes worked to his advantage quite often, opening doors otherwise unyielding. Street clicked through a manifest and mission plan he shouldn’t have. The company had been contracted by an anonymous source the same day a small Russian nuclear warhead became a supposed item on the black market’s most exclusive auction block.
“I’ve got him.” The legs of Khani’s chair scraped across the floor. She shot up from the chair. “We have to add to our packs. Sleeping bags, more food, and way more ammo.”
Street closed his laptop and stood. “Where is it?”
“He,” she corrected. “On a mountain ridge a little past the coordinates where Isay left him.” Khani slammed the laptop closed and shoved it in her small pack. “Get ready. If we leave in twenty we should be able to make it halfway to the pass before nightfall. It’ll take us the rest of the night to make it to the beacon, but we’ll reach it by daylight.” She slung the bag onto her shoulder. “Meet downstairs in fifteen.”
Apprehension leaked from her pores, but he knew she’d die before she gave voice to it. Khani rounded the table, leaving him staring at an ugly print of an uglier acrylic painting of a maroon flower. She brushed past, headed for the door behind him, the scent of her fear strong in the air.
His hand snaked out and latched onto her wrist, nearly wrapping his fingers around her thin bones twice. She stretched his arm so far back he thought she’d take it with her, but she finally stopped. He held perfectly still, prepared to take the brunt of an attack without blinking. “Isay left him nine days ago.”
Her wrist jerked. Street lowered his eyes, tuning into his other senses since he couldn’t see her. The air around them stiffened. She held her breath.
“If Zeke were able and unrestricted,” he continued, “he’d have marched himself off that glacier, found the kid, and pounded him into the pavement for ditching him, or he’d have explored on his own and made it back in time to call you.”
“He might be injured, taking shelter in a cave. You don’t know he’s not there,” she argued.
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t go. We should and we are, but we can’t kill ourselves trying to get there by dawn. We’ll do him no good dead. You need to step back and look at this dispassionately.” Street released her wrist, and then slid his fingers across the heel of her palm. He pressed slowly. She un-balled her fist, allowing him to thread their fingers.
“I don’t think I can be dispassionate about this anymore. It’s too close to my heart,” she whispered.
Did she only mean the deal with her brother?
“Then let me help you.”
She slipped her fingers from his hold. Her steps retreated. The door opened. When it should have shut it didn’t. He waited, his heart knocking.
“Okay,” she said, and then the door latched and she was gone.
Street sat, opened the computer, and read.
Three members of Elite’s security force had been assigned to permeate Stas from different angles. Zeke had been tasked to become a member of the security detail. A hacker named Derrick Coen had been charged with aiding his acceptance, tracking their moves, and trying to trace the warhead. A woman, Greer Britton, had been loaded with gaining access by enticing the upper-level Stas by any and all means necessary.
His stomach churned. What assholes.
With a couple of clicks he opened two other dashboards for more information on Greer Britton and Derrick Coen. Both were reported missing two days ago.
12
Khani fancied herself impervious to annoying sounds. When Zeke had been a kid he’d steadily built her tolerance for incessant mouth farts and machine gun fire, sirens, and even foul-mouthed rants. The relentless crunch of ice under her boots, however, shaved a layer off her frazzled nerve endings one step at a time. Multiply that by four determined feet and she considered throwing herself down the next ravine they skirted.
“Talk about something?” she begged. Street had been mummy quiet since they’d left the hotel. His silence had given her time to assimilate to the situation at hand and shift to mission mode. For that she’d been grateful.
Now the sun hung low in the sky. The peak they sought took one step away for every one they steadied toward it. Intermittently, swirls of blue marbled in the ice. White, shades of drab, and deeply shadowed black stretched as far as her field of vision. Thick fog mimicked her mood, hanging low and dire.
“Nice ass.”
Her snorted laugh echoed off the sheer slab of ice on their right and tickled her even more. She continued up the incline, painfully aware of the heat increasing between her thighs. At least it fended off the cold. At most it made a detour into Street’s pants, which was too inviting a possibility for her own good. “You say nothing for nearly six hours, and that’s what you open with?”
“Why do you think I haven’t said anything since we started? I’ve been staring at your perfectly-formed keister jostling about. When that thing’s distracting a bloke there’s not room for intellectual conversation. I could tell you all the ways I’ve thought about touching it, kissing it, penetrating it.”
Khani’s chest flushed so hot she feared she might give off steam. She jerked to a halt.
“You thinking about giving any of those a go?” He laughed.
But damn it, she wasn’t laughing. There was no room for laughter between fear and lust. “You take the lead,” she muttered.
“Last time I tried that you didn’t like it and I ended up taped to a chair. Not that I’m complaining.” His boots crunched the ice until they pulled even with hers. A lopsided grin quirked his face.
“Just get in front of me.”
“Oh, you fancy a look at my rear, troop?” He winked. “Still not complaining. You might though. I have kind of a big arse for a chap.” His powerful legs pulled ahead with ease.
At least his round cheeks and thick thighs gave her something else to think about besides her missing brother and the never-ending iceberg. It didn’t do much for her restraint though. She fought the insane urge to unbuckle his pants, shove them down to his knees, and spank his smooth cheeks with her open hand. Again and again. Until he begged her to straddle his hips and ride the orgasm out of him.
They marched on for an hour and a half with her fantasizing about his body in various compromise
d positions with a diverse assortment of bonds. She pulled off another layer so she wouldn’t break out in a sweat from her mental adventure—it was more exerting than the physical one.
Street cocked his head over his shoulder. “It’s that good, huh?”
“Yep,” she admitted, unable to deny the I-want-to-fuck-you look staining her face.
“I aim to please.” He hiked another few hundred yards, and then pointed at a black spot in the mountain face. “It’ll be pitch soon. I say we huddle into that shallow outcrop and get some sleep. You need it for tomorrow. We don’t really know what we’re up against yet. I could use some too.”
“As long as nothing else has claimed it first.”
They picked up the pace and made it to the shallow cave, though calling it a cave stretched the meaning of the word. It looked more like a pothole in the side of the steep rock formation.
“Looks like you don’t have to run from a grizzly…today.”
“Silver linings, I guess.”
“After you, my lady.” He used a formal Brit accent, extended his left arm, crossed the other over his middle, and bowed low.
She yanked the knitted wool cap off his head as she tucked into the low, reaching space. The ground level stretched probably twelve feet long and about five feet deep. A jagged ceiling hung at her eye level at the entrance, but gradually tapered until she decided to shuck her pack and sit in the far corner.
Street scrubbed his stubbly head several times, and then crawled into the opening. His bulk sucked up the space and all the free freezing air with it.
Her lungs seized. She scrambled to her knees embarrassed and completely unable to stop the anxiety attack that bore on her without warning. She’d been so comfortable around him. So at ease. Too at ease that she’d dropped her guard, the one she constantly adjusted and repositioned to keep anyone from knowing that being trapped in a small space with a man was enough to kill her.
“What’s your call sign, Slaughter?” He barked in command.
Her vision tunneled to his face, but some autonomic system in her brain powered by years of training took over. She heard her raspy voice say, “Lima. Echo. Oscar. Papa. Alfa. Romeo. Delta. One. Nine. Nine. Four.”
“Height?”
She syphoned a breath. “Five-eleven.”
“Weight?”
“One-thirty-seven.” Her throat quit convulsing and she swallowed past the dryness. “You’re not supposed to ask a woman how much she weights.”
Street smiled and leaned his back against the rock wall. “Welcome back.”
Khani collapsed onto her heels and let her clenched fists fall into her lap. Now that she could breathe her chest rose and fell in mad waves. A plastic canteen entered the field of her lowered gaze.
“Drink a little. It’ll help with the head ache.”
She swallowed a few sips and returned the container. “How’d you know what to do? Only two people have ever seen me freak and both tried coddling me.” Her teeth scrapped across her bottom lip. “It didn’t go over well.”
“A kid in one of the foster homes used to get panic attacks. It helped curve the worst of it if he recited inane facts. Multiplication tables. The periodic table.”
“Smart kid. The boys I knew could only recite the names of the players in their favorite football club.”
“Sometimes, if it didn’t subside after the others, I got to that.”
Her gaze lifted to his green eyes and easy expression. “Do you ever feel like the world is shrinking in on you these days?”
“No. Not in a long time.” He shed his pack, took a long swig, and then stashed the water inside. “My world keeps growing.”
“I moved to a different country, across an ocean, and sometimes it’s not enough.”
“The question…” Street stopped, seemed to toy with the words, discard them, and then chuck the new ones. He yanked his sleeping bag from the bottom zipper of his pack, and then eyed her. “The question is, what’s tying you to the past?” His stubbled chin waggled. “You figure that out, and then confront it or set it free.”
Khani considered the answer to that question so attentively that until the zipper of her sleeping bag whined open she didn’t notice Street had retrieved it from her bag. She wiped at her frosty nose with the back of her gloved hand. “Thanks.”
“No problem. Can I have my hat back? I’m freezing my nuts off over here.” His torso disappeared into a puffy winter-camo cocoon, the bottom of which thrashed around as he rubbed his feet together so fast he might start a fire.
She grinned and tossed over his hat. “If you say we could snuggle to stay warm, I’ll punch you.”
“Nah. I was just thinking how good a sewer vent would feel right about now.”
He’d threatened to check up on Zeke if she didn’t talk. Had he? And if he did, what did he know about her past? Her headache, incited by the panic attack, charged back to life, ramming her forehead dead center. The impact rippled across to her temples. Did he know she’d spent too many nights to count huddled next to steam vents, her body wrapped around Zeke’s more susceptible one, trying to stave off pneumonia? Did he know how often she’d prayed for a foster home? Punishments or not, didn’t he know how lucky he was?
“Do you think that’s funny?” she bit.
“No.” He tossed back the top of her bag and motioned her inside. “I think it’s smelly as fuck, but damn warm when you’re soaked to the bone in thirty-eight degrees and you haven’t seen the sunlight in months.” When she stayed frozen the icy rock of his gloved hand wrapped her wrist once again and tugged her forward. “Get in before your lips turn blue.”
Khani tucked her feet into the stuffed nylon, boots and all. She levered her bottom up and wiggled her legs and hips in as well. Warmth collected around her ankles and seeped through her pants, warding off the chill. The position of the sleeping bag had her as close to Street as she’d been on this trip with the exception of the kiss.
She swallowed past the warring emotion he knotted in her throat. “How do you know that?”
Tiny lines crinkled around the corners of his eyes. “Firsthand experience, winter of ninety-five and the five after.”
She probably flashed the not-so-rookie more defined lines on their way to wrinkles, but she couldn't care about that. The shock of what he said resonated. “You would have been seven years old then.”
He chuckled. “Eight and a half. The first winter after I told my fourth foster mum to shove it.”
“Bloody fucking Christ.” She poked her fingers into her beanie, and then tugged at the hair at her nape. A force she hadn’t experienced in a long time swept over her. It weighed a thousand tons and made her want to collapse onto the floor. Helplessness. It zapped her energy and her ability to hold up the wall she’d erected around herself for so very long. Because Street—as much as she—knew the fear and inferiority of being an unkept child.
“Zeke was twelve when we split. I was sixteen. We barely survived and we had each other.” She didn’t complete the thought. He was smart enough to figure it out anyway.
“You had someone to count on,” he nodded. “You also had someone to hold you back.”
Every fiber in her being wanted to deny his words. She’d only whispered them in her head once. It was the weekend. No school. They’d gone without a meal for two days. Things looked so bleak. The sinister thought scribbled itself on a tiny corner of her brain. Guilt had forced her to eat only half of her food at school and save the rest for the following weekend and everyone after. That way she’d never think those awful things about the only person in the world who loved her.
“It was probably easier for me. I didn’t have anyone on my shoulders.”
“Or in your corner,” Khani added.
“Not for a long time, but then…” The sage of his soulful eyes cast to the uneven rock above, without really seeing it. His inspection turned inward for the briefest of seconds. “But then, Father Tommy took a scrapper under his wing, tutored me
, and threatened me with the eternal pits of hell, if I didn’t quit pissin’ my smarts away.” A faint smile rounded his lips. “His words, not mine.”
The territory on which she treaded was rugged and unfamiliar, but she stepped anyway. “What about your parents?”
His expelled breath drifted over her neck. One thick brow hiked. “What about your parents?” he asked in a whisper.
All the bravery that had fortified her moments ago vanished. Her open mouth clamped shut and refused even the air in her lungs passage. Why was it so hard to talk about them? They’d haunted her childhood. Why did she hold on to the terror to this day?
Because she knew no other way.
Khani reclined onto the unforgiving ground. She tucked her head into the mummy top and cinched the zipper tight. The roughened ceiling faded with the sunlight. A minute passed in total silence, but for the wind howling at the entrance.
At her left fabric rustled. Then cold silence took hold.
How close they’d been to… What? Honesty. A connection. As much as her heart ached … it was how things had always been. Lone. Cool. Detached. Save for her brother’s love and her love for him. She clutched a fist to her chest and covered it with her other hand. Sleep hounded her heels, but refused to make the kill.
“A bartender heading home from work found me swaddled in a blanket inside a cardboard box on the corner of Studland and King Street.”
She compounded her grip, hugging herself hard enough to steady the heart quaking her entire chest. Desire willed her to wrap him in her arms and hold him tight. Khani rolled, facing the back of the cave, and huddled into the bag. She cursed Street’s cunt of a mother for abandoning him. She cursed him for making her love him. She cursed herself for being too chicken-shit—as Tyler often said—to confide in him.
Khani forced her breaths to steady and low, mimicking the sleep that would surely not take her tonight. The blackness she stared into became the promise of her future, one she’d never given much thought to, one that suddenly looked eerily bleak.
Minutes passed. They morphed into an hour, and then two. Street’s breathing grew long and deep. When she felt certain he couldn't fake the easy snores rumbling in his chest she twisted to face him.
Danger Mine: A Base Branch Novel Page 11
