by Trish Loye
Anna smiled. “It will be enough.”
Quinn blinked hard and fast to keep her vision clear. She squeezed Anna’s shoulder. She should say something special, something to ease the last minutes of this woman’s life. A woman she was abandoning.
But she had nothing.
“I will get the information to Fletcher,” she finally said. “And I will kill Pérez for you.”
“Thank you.” Anna wheezed with every breath. It wouldn’t be long now.
Quinn swallowed hard and didn’t move, unable to leave this woman who’d been through so much. She gripped her Glock too tightly and slowly stood. It was time to move. Her mission and now her promise to Anna wouldn’t wait, but her legs felt rooted to the spot.
“It’s okay,” Anna whispered. “Go.”
With her insides twisting, Quinn turned and left, running back toward the unknown soldier. She ran silently, not letting herself think.
The men searching the jungle had gone quiet. Quinn caught glimpses of figures through the trees and slowed. She raised her weapon, sighting on them. Her heart hammered. She took deep breaths to control herself. Maybe if she took out these men she could—
More men came. A bark sounded in the distance. Quinn clenched her teeth until her jaw threatened to crack. Then she slipped farther away from Anna to find the soldier.
He lay in the exact position she’d left him. His breathing and pulse were steady, and the leg bandage was wet but not soaked. Good signs. Quinn focused solely on the task in front of her, rather than on the helpless woman she’d left behind with only ten rounds.
Her hands shook as she wrapped another layer of bandage around the man’s leg. Get a grip, Quinn. You can’t get emotional.
She concentrated on the man lying unconscious before her, on listening for their pursuers, on anything but her thoughts. Time for that later.
If they lived.
She bent down, grabbed the man’s arm, and pulled him into a sitting position before readjusting, using the power in her muscled legs and back to haul him over her shoulder. No matter how many pull-ups she could do, she’d never have the same strength this man had effortlessly shown when he’d carried Anna earlier.
If only he hadn’t been knocked unconscious. And she was the reason why he’d made a noise and drawn enemy fire. He’d done it to save her from exposing herself to one of Pérez’s men. At least he hadn’t died.
Unlike Anna.
She bared her teeth and cursed herself. Later. She could berate herself later. Right now, she had a life to save.
She adjusted her grip on the soldier and turned in the direction of her jeep. It would be slow going without the path, but with the NVGs, she stood a chance. The man she carried was pure, solid muscle. Damn. He must weigh close to two hundred pounds.
After a couple hundred meters, her knees threatened to buckle with each step. Her breathing grew harsh no matter how hard she tried to silence it. She paused and leaned her free shoulder against a tree. She didn’t dare set the man down; she wasn’t sure she’d be able to pick him back up. Sweat dripped into her eyes, and she blinked against the sting of the camouflage paint.
The sound of the searching men wasn’t getting any closer, but it wasn’t moving farther away either. She needed to go faster.
She tightened her grip on the soldier’s legs and pushed off from the tree. If she’d been on flat ground, she wouldn’t have had a problem. Carrying just over two hundred pounds in a ruck and equipment wasn’t fun, but she could handle it. Carrying over two hundred pounds of deadweight soldier over her shoulder in rough terrain was a fucking nightmare.
She almost whimpered when she saw the tree across her path. A tall sucker, it would be as much hassle to go around as to go over. Her legs trembled, and she put a lot of weight on her free hand as she went over it. She hesitated. The tree was almost the right height that she could do a sit-lean on it.
A dog barked.
Too close.
The NVGs slipped on her sweat-soaked skin, and Quinn pushed them back into place. Without them, she and her soldier wouldn’t stand a chance. Her soldier. She almost snorted at the thought.
“Come on, Sinclair. Who dares, wins.” She whispered the motto of the SAS. Her voice had a bit of a wheeze, but she ignored it and pushed away the pain radiating from her shoulders and back. “Time to move faster.”
One foot at a time. Just like training. Up one mountain at a time. Just one more step.
She rested against trees every hundred paces or so. Still, they couldn’t be far from the road.
Gunfire erupted and she jumped. The soldier almost slid off her shoulder. A single shot, followed by the rapid bursts of assault rifles. They must have found Anna. Quinn clenched her teeth. She’d almost forgotten what they were running from.
Quinn lowered her chin and heaved herself forward, pushing hard. She wouldn’t fail, not when Anna had sacrificed herself. Her steps weren’t fast enough, but she moved. The ground leveled out. She pushed through trees and between one step and the next, broke onto the gravel road.
The gunfire continued. Quinn smiled. Anna was giving them hell. A true fighter to the end.
In her mind, Quinn ran to the jeep she made out parked on the side of the single-lane road, but her plodding steps barely picked up pace. At least it was flat here.
Finally, she fumbled with the back door to the jeep. Her breathing sounded close to a sob in her ears. The weight had become excruciating, and the pain of it rushed through her now that the ordeal was almost over. She rolled the soldier off her shoulder, trying to be careful of his head, but she’d lost feeling in her arm, and he might have banged down harder than she’d intended.
“Don’t complain,” she whispered to the unconscious man. “At least you’re not dead.”
Without his weight, her body felt as if it could float away. Pricks of pain started to needle her arm and shoulder where it had gone numb. She hopped in the front seat and took a breath before she inserted the key. If anyone was near, there was no way they’d miss the sound of a car starting up. But she had no better plan.
The engine roared when it came to life. She didn’t bother with lights and took off down the road. She didn’t head straight to town; that road would be watched. She took another winding route of little-known back roads to make a wide circle around Caparrapí, so she could approach from the southern road.
Lights appeared in the distance. Not moving. Quinn stopped the jeep and adjusted the NVGs for the bright light ahead.
A truck idled farther down, blocking the road into town. Shit. At this time of night, it had to be Pérez’s men. They hadn’t spotted her yet but she couldn’t wait them out. Dawn was approaching. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel with the desire to yank it around and get the hell out of there.
But where would she go?
Bogotá. She could dump the soldier at a hospital.
But then she’d be compromising her cover and her mission. No. That wasn’t an option. Especially for a soldier she wasn’t even sure was an ally.
She could try to get around them on foot and make it to the town.
Her body ached with the thought of picking up the soldier again. And she knew that if she took him, she’d never be able to carry him all the way back to the town. They wouldn’t make it.
No.
She was fucking SRR, and there was no giving up or giving in. Plan for any possibility, and take the simplest course of action.
Her heart thundered. It was only one truck, probably three or four men. She had her Glock, enough ammo and the NVGs. Pérez’s guys would be night blinded. They obviously hadn’t noticed her since the truck hadn’t moved yet. She could pick them off from a safe distance in the jungle and then drive their truck off the road.
Easy peasy.
Quinn snorted, but grabbed her gun.
The truck started up and began to drive. Toward her.
She sucked in a breath and aimed at the driver’s side, waiting until they got closer.
This was doable. She slowed her breathing. Her second shot would be the passenger side, and then she’d put a couple in the middle just in case, and then reevaluate.
One hundred meters out. She eased out a breath and started to pull on the trigger.
The pickup truck turned onto an intersecting back road and roared away. Half a dozen men swayed in the back with the fast corner.
Quinn slumped in her seat. Too fucking close.
She started her jeep back up and sped down the now clear road. “You might be my good luck charm,” she said over her shoulder to the unconscious soldier.
Minutes later, she drove up to the garage where she and Ian kept the jeep. Once secure inside the building with the jeep off, Quinn took a few moments to just breathe.
The garage wasn’t small, but with the jeep and a pickup, the quarters were tight.
“Time to move, Quinn,” she said aloud. “You still have to carry an unconscious man to the clinic.”
She briefly debated calling Ian for an assist, but immediately threw out that idea. The less he knew about all of this, the better.
She opened the back door and checked the soldier’s vitals. Still breathing and beating. Exhaustion dragged at her and she scrubbed a hand over her face before straightening. It wasn’t that far.
Quinn hauled him back onto her shoulder and clutched at the jeep as she swayed, steadying herself. Somehow his weight seemed to have doubled.
“Only fifty meters, Quinn. Let’s go.” She swallowed and heaved herself away from the jeep, stumbling. The door was only a few feet away, but it felt as though she’d sprinted a mile when she’d gotten to it. She gazed out into the night and didn’t see anyone. Only a little bit more, just a walk along a wooded path and then up the outside stairs to the balcony.
Move.
The path was flat and cleared of debris, nothing like walking through the real jungle.
Easy fucking peasy.
When the clinic came in sight, with its wrought-iron staircase and balcony, she suppressed a groan of relief. She still had to get the soldier inside. No one could know he was here, not even Ian. If Pérez’s men found out about him, they might connect him with Anna’s escape, and that might endanger Quinn. She could treat him in her room.
The stairs, though. Her knees threatened to buckle at the sight of them.
Shit, Sinclair. It’s one fucking flight of steps. The voice of a particularly grueling SAS instructor spoke in her head. Get your arse up them. The man had believed that women weren’t up to the task. He’d made her life a living hell during her months in training. No matter how well she performed, he still maintained that a woman couldn’t do this job.
Well, fuck you, Trooper Smyth.
She gripped the railing and shoved with her leg muscles up a step. And then the next. One fucking step at a time.
She was grinning like a lunatic by the time she’d made the top. She staggered to her room’s window and managed to squeeze both herself and her soldier through. He might have thumped to the floor, hard. But he didn’t complain.
With some quiet cursing and grunting, she dumped him onto her bed. She wanted to fall in next to him, but it was time to play doctor.
Still using the NVGs, she stripped him out of his webbing and weapons, shoving them under the bed, out of sight and out of her way. His head wound was worrisome. She used her penlight to check his pupils. Responsive and the same size. Tension leaked out of her shoulders.
His leg needed attention. The bullet was still inside, and it needed to come out. She closed her drapes and flicked on her overhead light. Her gaze was drawn to his face. Lean and hard. Even unconscious, the man looked dangerous.
“Hope you’re worth it,” she said quietly.
The words felt like a betrayal. The man had risked his life to warn her about the enemy she’d almost walked into. She sighed. It was almost morning, and she was too tired for self-recrimination. There’d be plenty of time for that later.
She tugged off his boots before she cut off the bulk of the bandages and then his pants to get a better look at his wound. His legs were long and heavily muscled. Someone who was used to going for miles. His chest would probably be equally muscled and powerful.
She shook her head sharply. Get a grip, Sinclair.
His leg looked better than she’d expected. She wrapped it up temporarily and then sighed. His head wound and the fact that he remained unconscious were actually more worrisome than his leg, now that she’d seen it in the light. But it wasn’t as if she was equipped to deal with it. She’d love to get a head CT but that wasn’t happening in her little backward clinic. A gunshot wound though? That she could do.
First, time to get cleaned up. No way would she dig for a bullet while covered in dirt, sweat, and camo paint. She took a quick shower in the tiny bathroom attached to her room, and then got into clean clothes. With another quick check of her patient who lay so still on the bed, she crept downstairs for supplies.
There was a single light on in front of the building. The front door was locked, but if someone pounded enough, they’d wake up either her or Ian. Having someone come in the middle of the night wasn’t uncommon. She scanned the patient rooms. The woman who’d given birth to the breech baby had gone home. Frankly, Quinn didn’t blame her. Sometimes the clinic wasn’t the safest place to be, ever since Pérez had chosen Quinn to be his personal doctor.
Where was Ian? Usually one of them slept downstairs, but maybe because they had no patients he’d decided to stay upstairs.
The clinic had a small locked storeroom at the back of the main level. She unlocked it and gathered her supplies before she crept back upstairs.
In her room, she dragged her bedside table and light closer to her and set her supplies on it, before heading to her sink to scrub her hands again. She pulled on gloves, tugged back the wrapping, and went to work. First, cleaning and then anesthetizing the area, because putting in stitches hurt like a bitch, and there was no way she wanted this guy to wake up screaming, or worse—fighting her.
She made quick work of digging out the bullet. It plonked onto her table, and then she inspected the wound before readying to sew him up.
“You are so lucky.” She looked at his face, still covered in dirt and camo. “Well, except for that head wound.” Please wake up.
She needed to get to Cartagena to retrieve that flash drive. She also needed to make contact with her handler, Damien, but she couldn’t leave with an unconscious man in her bed.
She put the last stitch in, bandaged his wound, and then nodded to herself. “Nice work, Quinn.”
Exhaustion slammed into her, and she swayed. She would be expected to wake in only a few hours. She needed some sleep if she was going to function and act normal this morning.
The soldier mumbled something, and she looked him over. His hand twitched and his eyelids fluttered. A dream must have him in its grips. That was good. It meant he was in a normal sleep.
“Nyet, Ilona! I don’t want to hurt you.”
She froze. His words were in Russian. Why would he know Russian? Her lips twisted. A simple soldier wouldn’t. Unless he was Russian, or he worked for them.
And those words? It could be just a simple nightmare of some sort, but her gut said it wasn’t.
“Why, Ilona?”
A memory in the form of a nightmare from the amount of twitching he was doing. She needed him to sleep, so she could. Tomorrow she’d head to Cartagena and leave him to find his team, who could be either Russian or Russian-backed. Rumors in the town said one of the opposing cartels was supposed to be working on a trade deal with the Russian mafia. Perhaps she’d saved one of the Bratva. Great.
The soldier’s head moved, and his hands clenched.
She leaned in and whispered in Russian, “It’s all right. I’m safe. You’re safe. Go to sleep.” She whispered the phrases a few times in a soothing voice, and his body relaxed back into a deeper sleep.
Now she could sleep. She frowned. The soldier filled h
er narrow bed. The floor it was. She’d slept in worse conditions. Quinn snagged an extra blanket from her tiny closet and rolled up on the floor. Morning would come too soon.
6
Fuck, his head hurt. Marc squinted against the morning light streaming into the room from the large window. Where the hell was he? On a narrow bed in a sparse bedroom. From the level of the trees he saw through the window, it seemed he was on the second floor. A door stood ajar with a sink beyond—bathroom. Another door, this one closed, had to lead to the rest of whatever building this was.
And by that door, a woman slept on the floor.
He blinked. A thick braid of red hair curled over her shoulder; a few loose strands clung to her face. Her skin was golden, with a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She had almost a sweet, wholesome look to her.
Definitely not his type. Still, he’d have liked to see what lay under that blanket. Too bad he didn’t have time to indulge.
From the bandage on his leg, he’d been cared for while he’d been unconscious. Was this woman a doctor? Did she work with the soldier he’d met last night?
Then it clicked. She was the woman who’d gone to see Pérez. Had that been yesterday? Why had she gone? To nurse Pérez or because she was his girlfriend?
Something about that last thought left a bad taste in his mouth.
He shook his head. Now was not the time to be distracted. He needed to figure out what had happened and how he’d ended up here. He focused to clear the fog of his aching leg and head.
He’d laid Agent Bishop down in the jungle, and then he and the mystery soldier had gone to take care of Pérez’s men. The soldier had almost walked on top of one of Pérez’s men, so Marc had drawn their fire by clicking his mag.
What a fucking shit show.
He had to get out of here, find the agent, and get to the RV to meet Cat and the others. He threw off the blanket and sat up. His head pounded and his leg shrieked as he moved it. “Fuck,” he muttered.
The woman woke, shooting upright and leveling a Glock in his direction. Her finger poised on the trigger, her face that of a hardened soldier, all gentleness and sleep gone. He froze.
