“Dylan’s checking with his CIA resources to see if McMannus is running ops for them, but so far, nothing,” Vivi added.
“He thinks McMannus could be working undercover?” Reid asked.
“He’s not ruling anything out,” Vivi said. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I learn more. Dylan said to be careful.”
Kell cut the line, and for a long moment the men just stared at each other, both knowing that Teddie had heard everything, including what Vivi said about her story not existing.
It was time for Kell to work on her.
Teddie kept her eyes closed tight even as the words her story doesn’t exist echoed through her mind. Witness protection had buried her well and it was frightening to think she might not be believed because of it.
She hadn’t been tired at all when she’d gotten out of the truck—she was practically jumping out of her skin—but she’d forced herself to lay on the couch and pretend to sleep so she could listen to Kell and Reid’s conversation.
What she hadn’t heard was Kell walking toward her, so she jumped when he murmured into her ear, “Guns. Spying. Quite a repertoire.”
She opened her eyes, because there was no point in pretending. Looked into those silver-rimmed eyes and stared for a long moment, trying to find something in there to hate.
Again, she came up empty.
“If you wanted to know what we were talking about, you could’ve just stayed in the kitchen,” he told her, looked sincere about that, and she wished her emotions weren’t getting in the way of everything.
It had been so much easier when she came into Mexico with only one thing on her mind. She’d been so intent on revenge that she’d let it blind her into thinking she could do the job alone. “Do you think I’m telling the truth?”
He sat next to her on the couch and studied her. Reached out to brush some hair from her face. “I think you’re scared. You believed you’d thought all this through but it’s falling apart.” His voice was almost hypnotic and she really hoped he couldn’t read minds.
“I am who I say I am. I’m in witness protection. I’m sure if your friends look hard enough, they’ll find me.”
“They’ll look, trust me. If there’s anything else I need to know, it’d be a good time to spill it.”
“Are you all right?” she asked instead, noting the bruises on his cheek and the side of his neck. She was sure there must be a lot more under his clothes, but he didn’t move like a man who’d been on the receiving end of a near kidnapping recently.
“You’re worried about me?”
She was, couldn’t help it, any more than she could help the way she responded when he looked at her. He’d practically seen her naked and her body seemed to vibrate when she thought about it.
She reached out and ran a light finger along the bruise on his cheek and almost pulled back when his eyes flashed with desire. Desire, from that simple touch—and the flare ran through her too, made her fear melt a little. “I did come back to help—you chose to yell at me instead of thank me.”
“How rude of me to try to save your life. I didn’t want you to have to see any of that. Not because of what you’d find out, but that violence … it stays with you. And it sounds like you’ve lived through enough of it already.”
She drew her legs up to her chest at the mention of her family’s murder.
It takes like to fight like. “Are you? Like those men?”
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, answered, “Yes,” with little hesitation.
So much for reassurance. “Then yes, I’m scared. Really, really scared.”
He looked over at her. “I figured—hyperventilation’s usually the first clue.”
“I was hiding it well until then.”
“Yeah, you were,” he said quietly. “I’m like those men, but I also work hard to not be like them.”
She couldn’t imagine anything scaring him … but maybe sometimes he scared himself.
“Those men in the photo … they were like ghosts—no one could find a trace of them. If I hadn’t seen them, no one would even know who to look for,” she said. “I was put into protection but I couldn’t do anything but hide. I thought I’d go crazy.”
No human contact, and that had never bothered her before. This time, it left her time to think about everything that was missing from her life. Too much time to wonder if things might’ve been different if she’d told her father about the night Samuel had tried to rape her … if that would’ve kept him away from their family and from framing her father … or if it had been inevitable.
It was too soon to reveal any of that to Kell, though. And it might always be.
“What did you do before you went into protection?” he asked.
“I was a photographer. If you Google me, you’ll find my work.” She didn’t want to brag but she was proud as hell of what she’d accomplished. “I took photos in poverty-stricken countries—I was a goodwill ambassador for the UN as well, combining the two in order to bring attention when and where it was needed.” She’d traveled to more places on her own than she could remember—could document her entire life through film. The only thing was, it was through other people … never herself. Outside, looking in; actually, she preferred it that way.
But who really liked being an outsider?
“Did you always take pictures?” Kell was asking.
“My father bought me my first camera when I was eight.” From that point on, she’d been enthralled with being able to capture moments in time, forever. “The whole idea fascinated me. With a picture, sometimes you get to see beyond the surface. That’s the best part.”
“And probably why so many people are uncomfortable with having their pictures taken.”
Smart man. Why did he seem to get it—and her—so easily? Was this part of some game he was playing … or was he sincere? “Giving it up was really hard. The marshals told me I shouldn’t even own a camera, that I might unintentionally expose myself that way.”
“They’ve hidden a lot of people successfully.”
“I wouldn’t call having to give up everything a success.”
“They kept you alive.”
“You don’t understand—I had to give up my career and I loved my career. Taking away my camera was like cutting off an arm. I still ache from not being able to take photos.” She stared at him, willing herself not to cry. Why she was trying so hard to make him understand was beyond her.
“Why wouldn’t I understand?”
“You love what you do?”
He didn’t answer that but emotion crossed his face—anger and pain—and if she’d had her camera she would’ve captured it, taken her time studying it until she could figure it—him—out. But just as suddenly as it came, it passed and his expression looked like it always did, serious and fierce.
A warrior’s face. Different than some of the soldiers she’d met over the years, and yet still oddly similar.
“You were safe for a year. Why expose yourself now?”
“I had to,” she said fiercely. “Wouldn’t you, for your parents?”
“Never.” The word came out equally fierce.
The look in his eyes stopped her from questioning him further.
Kell waited for Teddie to really fall asleep, watched her slow, easy breaths and figured she was good for an eight-hour crash.
Reid had heard everything. Kell had nothing to hide, but the attraction Kell felt for Teddie … there was no denying it.
“You think she’s bullshitting us?” Reid asked, turning up the radio so they couldn’t be heard as easily as before.
“About some things, yes. But about the main part of her story—who she is, no way,” Kell said.
“It’s those little things that could get us killed.”
Reid was right, Kell knew that.
He sank into the kitchen chair opposite Reid and his friend slid a soda can across to him. He opened it and drank half, needing the sugar. He felt old tonight. Older than he h
ad in a long time.
This was his first mission back and he was slowly wiping aside the heavy cloak of vengeance with its heady scent.
You love what you do, Teddie had asked him, and he’d wanted to tell her that he hated it as much as he loved it, and that was something he’d never thought would happen. Not until last year, when he had walked into an empty hotel room in Sierra Leone, took in the scene of what had obviously been a struggle and looked past the mess to zone in on a note, left in a small pool of blood on the floor.
An eye for an eye, Kell Roberts.
His hands shook hard, even when he fisted them, and he stared at the words, letting the rage flow through his blood one last time before he quelled it.
Anger wouldn’t help him now, no emotion would. DMH—short for Dead Man’s Hand—a homegrown terrorist group turned extremist and international with ties that Delta Force was determined to cut, had taken Reid and three other Delta operatives captive during a mission cloaked in complete secrecy, something Delta Force operatives counted on for survival. The mission was fraught with danger, as they all were, and as always his four teammates treated it as such.
What the team didn’t know at the time was that they had been tracked from the moment they’d landed in Sierra Leone.
The operatives’ food was poisoned and DMH took full advantage of their weakened state, kidnapping all four of the Delta soldiers. And then they’d contacted Kell, who’d been off on another mission, and taunted him with what they’d done.
Kell spent the next three weeks burning and killing and torturing anyone remotely related to DMH in order to find his missing Delta Force teammates. Refused to think in terms of before it was too late. The men were trained to know how to stay alive, to save themselves. Kell was counting on that as the hours ticked away, and finally, after a relentless search, there was a ray of hope.
He’d gotten intel on where his team was being kept. He’d slit the informant’s throat ruthlessly, refusing to leave any live trail behind.
None of the DMH men would survive his wrath when the time came. But first, he made it to the underground prison in time to save three of his four men.
He boarded the chopper that brought them to Morocco, as the U.S. Embassy made arrangements with the local hospital to get Mace the urgent help he needed. Mace wouldn’t have made it farther than that without emergency surgery. As it was, the flight seemed to take forever, the blades beating the air in time with Kell’s pulse and the throb in his head.
It was controlled chaos. Gray’s body, tucked in the back, a medic hovering over an unconscious Mace, Caleb passed out and Reid … fuck, Reid had been so still. When he’d first seen his best friend and teammate, Kell had been sure he was dead, lying facedown on the dirty floor.
He’d picked the man up and felt the warmth of his body—an unnatural heat of fever or infection, but it still meant life.
It wasn’t until they started to strip Reid on the chopper to look for wounds that Kell saw the swollen bite marks on his calf from the poisonous snake. That bite had ultimately, ironically, saved his life.
Learning he’d fucked up and gotten made had chilled Kell to the bone. Now the remnants of his mistake surrounded him—dead and broken and none of them would ever be the same again.
His conscience ached as he visited them in the hospital, one by one before he left to smoke out the missing DMH kidnappers and any other men in the organization who’d been left alive to rebuild.
Mace’s eyes were open, although he couldn’t talk yet. He would live, thanks to Caleb’s quick thinking. They would later discover that the rescue attempt caused the DMH men to try to kill Mace at that moment.
Another scar on his conscience.
Caleb was also awake but confused, the memories wiped from him as seemingly easily as shaking an Etch A Sketch.
Kell had almost bypassed Reid’s room. Reid would see right through him, would know how he felt.
The worst part was, he would understand.
Kell didn’t want forgiveness. Didn’t want his conscience to pulse with the white hot throb of a heartbeat. But he opened the door to his friend’s room, he forced one foot in front of the other until he was next to Reid’s bedside.
Reid had just been told about Gray’s death—their CO had taken on that burden. Soon, the three remaining operatives would be transferred to Germany before going back to the States.
“They knew you were coming, because of me,” Kell told Reid bluntly. “Gray’s dead because of me.”
There was no blame in his friend’s eyes at all. But the guilt settled on Kell the way it had from the second their CO, Noah Wright, explained that the DMH had chased them down purposely because of Kell’s assassination of one of their most influential members.
And even though Reid asked him to stay, Kell refused, didn’t make the trip to Germany with the men. No, he left Reid that afternoon and lost himself in Sierra Leone and beyond, tracking anyone who had even the remotest association with DMH, hunting, burning down, killing anyone and anything to assuage the guilt until the only place he felt comfortable … normal … was in the jungle, alone.
He hated himself for it, despised what he’d become. And three months later, he’d come out of the jungle with great reluctance—and mainly because Reid had asked again.
He wasn’t ready for this, didn’t want to be dragged back into society or into this woman’s problems.
He was back, with both feet in, and Reid and the others relying on him to not fuck up, and he didn’t like it at all.
Reid, who’d been watching him intently, no doubt knew Kell had just gone down memory lane. “Welcome back,” his friend said with a small smile.
“I don’t want to do this, Reid.”
“So we’ll turn her in and get out of Mexico.”
His friend was saying all the right things and that was exactly what they should be doing, but …
He’d already smelled her fear, understood her desperation. He’d been there for so long himself.
“You’re invested in this woman,” Reid said finally, after a long moment of silence.
“What the hell do you want from me?” Kell asked, all the while knowing the answer to that.
Reid wanted Kell to be the way he was before all this shit started.
If Kell had stayed away, he probably never would’ve found his way back … and that would’ve been fine by him.
“Kell, come on, man, this is me you’re talking to.”
But Reid and Kell hadn’t done much talking at all lately, beyond mission planning and banter, because all that was at least familiar, if not easy.
It hadn’t been easy from the first moment he’d walked back into Mace’s bar and agreed to work with Dylan as a merc.
Before that, he’d been gone for three months, intent on his personal mission of revenge. He’d returned only after finding the DMH kidnappers, with Caleb’s guidance as to where he’d buried them. And then he stayed close to home, traveling between his place in North Carolina and Mace’s for the next six months because he hadn’t felt ready to return to anything more strenuous. During that time, he’d felt horribly removed from everyone and everything. This disconnect hadn’t been lost on Reid—but thankfully he’d known Kell long enough to let his friend pull out of it on his own.
And Kell had, in a small sense, by coming out of the jungle and going to Mace’s house in the Catskills. Meeting his team, deciding he was done with the old and ready to dive into the new.
But he wasn’t. The teamwork, saving innocent people when he’d failed to save his own team.
“You shouldn’t count on me,” he’d told Reid, who in turn had told him to “shut the fuck up.”
“I don’t think I can do this,” he’d told Dylan earlier that afternoon when he’d first showed at the bar after months of being away.
“Then why are you here?”
Because he still had some semblance of humanity left, something he couldn’t erase completely. Something Dylan seemed d
etermined to bring back to him before it was too late.
“You stay out there alone, after a while you lose yourself,” Dylan said.
“You stayed out,” Kell pointed out.
“I came back just in time.”
Kell wasn’t sure he had—the look in Reid’s eye when he’d returned haunted him. His friend took his absence as a personal affront and Kell hadn’t fully regained his trust. And although they still worked together like a well-oiled machine, Kell knew it would be a long time before Reid stopped expecting him to disappear again without a word.
“Go if you want,” Reid said irritably as he settled in on his own cot in the back room of Mace’s bar.
And Kell had simply unfolded his cot and slept, because he owed his best friend at least that, and so much more.
Beyond that, his actions against DMH had nearly gotten his best friend and teammates killed, although Reid always called bullshit on that.
“Any of us would’ve done the same thing, given the opportunity,” he would argue.
“You’d have made sure you didn’t get made,” Kell would shoot back. DMH had traced him, probably ended up knowing more about him than Delta did.
The damage had been done. Whether or not he was beyond repair remained to be seen.
All of this would be so much easier without a conscience. And yet he’d never been able to push his down for long. After a while, Kell would simply pretend that none of it bothered him, because things went much easier on him when he did.
“I fucked up, Reid.”
“It could’ve happened to any of us.”
“But it didn’t.”
“You’ve done everything you could over the past months to make up for it, even though you didn’t need to.”
It hadn’t helped. It scared the hell out of him to look back and see that he was becoming, someone he—and Reid—didn’t recognize. “I can’t do this, Reid. Can’t risk fucking up again.”
“You walked away from me. You’re trying to do it again without giving me a goddamned chance to help you.” Reid paused. “You haven’t lost your edge, Kell.”
“Maybe I want to.”
Night Moves: A Shadow Force Novel Page 7
