by Angel Payne
Deep gulp. Then compelling the breaths in, one by one, until words finally emerged again. “Okay. All right,” she murmured. “You’re not joking. So—so help me understand, then. Help me see—”
“But you see already.” His fingers closed in tighter, pinching until she had to clench against a wince. “You see, Tracy, don’t you?” His stare intensified, starting to remind her of a religious martyr from some medieval painting. “You see the beauty of it. All of it. The world…our world…it has cancer, right? And to cure the cancer, you have to cut out the tumors. Rip them out…at their sources.”
“Oh, God.” It blurted from her, compelled by nauseated shock, before she could think twice. Who the hell was she kidding? She wasn’t thinking. She was only reacting. Struggling like hell to wrap her mind around what she was hearing. That Sol, her vibrant and responsible and frenetic and fervent Sol, was actually a lunatic who bought into this insanity… “Rip out…their sources…”
“Exactly!” He lifted his free hand, snapping his fingers hard enough to sound like a whip. Tracy’s whole body coiled as if he’d wielded the latter. “And filling all that blackness with new light. New energy…”
“A unified world regime.” She could hardly believe she was saying this. That this idea existed outside badly written sci-fi, much less been a fantasy coup in secret development, across multiple countries and continents, for what Sol claimed to be fifteen years.
“A new day.” Sol nodded, once more appearing like the crazed martyr—about to have his eyes gouged out. “A new order.” His head ticked, clicking his weird focus straight back at her. “You do get it, don’t you? Oh, Tracy.” He clutched her by the other shoulder, using the hold to yank her against him. “I knew you did. I knew you would.”
Quadruple shit.
And was it even working keeping track now? If she even could. Panic, hideous and hot, rushed her veins. It collided with a new freeze of fear, spinning her senses and faltering her balance, as she scrambled for what to do. Sol wasn’t spouting the credo of a typical political coup. This was his declaration, proud and bold, of membership in a worldwide cult. A sect of insanity.
“Right?” His eyes, wild and wide, confirmed every drop of her dread. “You see it now. All of it. This is what we saw, fifteen years ago. What we all committed ourselves to achieving.”
“All of us…who?”
How she got it out evenly, she had no damn idea. Despite that, Sol’s head jerked as if she’d slapped him. He stabbed her with an irritated glance before snapping, “All of us, dammit. All of us. We—we were in the same battalion. We were together, hating the senseless terror of it all. The same monsters fighting each other—in the name of what? Of what? Innocent lives paid for their quests. Cities were burned. Families were torn. Planes came down. Malls were bombed. Destruction. Death. Atrocities even the US ignored…” He flinched again, interrupting the mournful trail-off. “We made the resolve then. Promised each other…that we’d spread across the world, infiltrating from back doors…where nobody would notice. We kept recruiting. Revising. Rededicating. Doing whatever was necessary to make all the pages fall into place. To recalibrate it all, in one perfect swoop of decision. All the pages had to fall in place.” One corner of his mouth jogged up. “They almost didn’t, you know.”
“Do I?” It was the bare minimum to keep him talking. The time she needed to buy, still scouring her brain for some way to make him let go. But when a man was clinging to a cliff, even one he’d climbed to, prying his hands free was up to the wind and his resolve. And right now, Sol Wrightman’s resolve was very fixed on her.
To the point of dragging his heated perusal down to her toes again.
All the way back up to her face, where he lingered over her features for unnerving seconds, before restarting his account with a murmur so arrogant, it belonged more on a Hollywood red carpet than the middle of a Kaua’i shore. “So interesting,” he remarked, “that so many were so willing to believe Duane Sanford just keeled over in the middle of the golf course that day. Bet he didn’t even think it would happen.” He tsked, setting the stage for the knowing angle of his lips. “And just three days after his cardiologist gave him the all-clear for another year.”
Once again, breaths were rusty blades in and out of her chest. “I—I don’t want to hear this, Sol. Dammit, why are you telling me this?”
“Because you have to see all the rest, Tracy.” He pushed in closer, the whites of his eyes and the grit of his teeth turning his face ghoulish. “You have to know the rest. How important it was…that they all were taken, and you were spared.”
Her throat closed up. Her stomach roiled.
“Sp-spared?”
He nodded with slow deliberation. “Given back your life, beautiful woman. By me. Because of me.”
And there it was. The cuckoo in his nest she’d suspected…dreaded. Still, she forced herself to blurt, “Wh-why?”
He rushed out a breath. “Come on, Tracy. Connect the dots, baby. They eliminated Sanford, when he balked at following through with the recalibration. But LeGrange was already on board, and the golden boy for the VP nod—until the president defied everyone in DC by appointing you.” He snorted, pushing at once into a quirked smirk. “And just to throw an extra twist into things, you refused to back out of the gig for Dan Colton in Las Vegas—right on the day we were scheduled for global recalibration.”
A new need to retch swelled, but churned at once into rage. “If you’re looking for an apology, you can kiss my ass.” Global recalibration. He declared it like some tech sector guru unveiling a software trend, not the annihilation of the free world’s infrastructure.
Shockingly, that only caused the monster to laugh. “Nah. You just made everything a little more interesting, that was all. We all scrambled a little to pull off the last-minute fireworks show, but as you know, we made it happen.”
“You—you mean finding someone to plant that bomb at the Bellagio.” As the words tumbled out, her composure finally dissolved. Her head throbbed with horror. Her chest crumpled in like an acid-dipped soda can. “A bomb…intended to kill me. And my friends. Oh God.” A sob spilled out. “And my son. Oh God!”
Fool. You have been such a damn fool.
She’d been holding out, even now, to somehow find the scrap of humanity Sol still had left—to discover where the monster could be breeched, then redeemed. And if he could be redeemed, then there was a hope of her escape.
But there’d be no redemption. Insanity had taken over her friend.
Meaning she had to fight now.
With everything she had.
She wrenched. Bucked. Squirmed. Kicked. But Sol, with his wiry stamina and vicious zeal, was stronger. Dammit, so much stronger.
“But it didn’t blow you up, Tracy.” His voice was as savage as his hold, sliding down to manacle her wrists. “It didn’t, dammit—because I didn’t let it.” He hauled her in, forcing her tight, until his mouth was at her ear, shoving his hot, greedy breath into her. “Because I love you, Tracy. Fuck, how I love you.”
The chaos in her stomach threatened to become the mess all over his shirt. Holy crap, how she wanted to give in to the urge but held back, battling to trade the bile for words. “You—you l-love me?”
He let out a long snarl, squeezing thumbs into the hollows of her wrists. “I haven’t told anyone that. You’re the first—and the only. They all suspect now, of course—which is why they’ve sent me now. I’m supposed to prove my loyalty to the movement. Turn you…or kill you.”
A new ice storm raged through her senses. Her nerve endings were its brittle icicles, snapping off and shooting away from her consciousness.
Icicles aren’t options. Burn them. Turn them into steam. Power them into daggers. Push through the fear, Tracy. Transform it. Use it as new energy. Think. Think. Think!
“Or set me free.” She steeled her will, ordering her stare to lift and meet his. Making him see the open plea in her eyes. “Option number three, Sol. Prove you
love me. Let me go!”
His features pinched in, aging him ten years in ten seconds. “Not an option, Trace.”
“And that’s not true,” she countered. “You can make it an option. You can give Luke back his mother. Return the country’s hand of leadership to its rightful owner. Reach inside and find the humanity you thought you sacrificed in those trenches with your battalion—”
He cut her off with a seething snort. “Humanity? That’s what you think I’ve lost? I’ve thought of nothing but humanity for the last fifteen years, Tracy. Humanity has been my goddamned Dominatrix. My unforgiving bitch of a mistress.”
“Then take back the control! All you have to do is choo—”
A gasp of pain took the place of her conclusion. For a moment, she couldn’t figure out why—pieces snapped into place as the sting of Sol’s slap echoed in her right ear.
“It’s time for you to shut up.”
“No, Wrightman. It’s time for you to give up.”
Pain had never become joy with such mach speed. Even the clanging in her ear turned into bells of elation, greeting the booming baritone from across the sand. That baritone. The voice that had curled her toes from its first stroke on her blood. The growling dominance in her soul. The dragon’s song in her heart.
He materialized like a fantasy, his broad, elegant form backlit by the cottage’s porch light—a black handgun braced at the end of his straight, coiled arms. His exotic features were defined by severe, stark lines and utter, violent focus—warrior mode as Tracy had never witnessed in the man before. Even as Sol whipped her around, using her as his shield with his arm clamped against her sternum, she was oddly more afraid for him.
“John.”
Her voice came as another shock. How did she suddenly sound serene as a swan on a glassy lake instead of a hostage in the hands of a lunatic? She only had to gaze through the night, to the man with the eyes of night, to know that answer. She had her strength again. He was here. He was here. As long as her dragon was by her side, she could be as mighty as freaking Xena the Warrior.
“John.” She underlined it more firmly. “It’s all right.”
She heard his harsh breath though his massive form hardly faltered. “With all due respect, ma’am, that’s not an assurance I’m banking on right now.”
“Ma’am.” Sol snorted it into the ear he hadn’t knocked a few decibels from. “Who’s he trying to rattle here, me or you? Or do you just take it from him because the dick is good?”
Tracy drove a heel back into his shin. Though he only grunted and clamped her tighter, she’d gotten her satisfaction—especially when noticing it bought Franz a few seconds to sprint closer.
A short-lived victory.
Triumph replaced by instant terror.
Such a huge sluice of the stuff, she could only react in one way.
“John!” she screamed. “He has a gun!”
A freakish stillness engulfed the air. Even the wind and waves went eerily silent, stepping back to acknowledge the new shift in power along the shadowed sand.
“Thank you, ku’uipo. I’m well aware of that fact.”
“Awwww.” Sol’s derision emerged as a nasal mewl. “Isn’t that just the sweetest? A nickname. What does that one mean, island boy? ‘Piece of sweet Texas ass’? ‘Little bitty fuck toy’? ‘Darling Johnnie dick lover’?”
“Keep going, asshole. Just give me one more reason to really do this.” The growl in John’s comeback gave new meaning to his call-sign. It reverberated through Tracy’s blood, and she eagerly soaked up its force—only to have it all drained by a maniacal laugh from the man at her back.
“Ha! You forget, fancy pants, that I’ve researched you? You’re a good shot, Franzen, but not that good.” He raised his hand, brutally squeezing Tracy by the chin. “And no way in hell are you going to risk putting a bullet through my little piece of insurance out of here.”
John solidified his stance. “There is no way out of here, Sol. No final act left for you to play, man.”
Sol grunted. “Bullshit. They’re going to take care of me. They told me—”
“There is no ‘they’.”
Sol’s entire frame went stiff. “That’s bullshit too. You’re handing me bullshit!”
“And I’d do that…why?” Franz countered. “Because I want to piss you off further, while you’ve a gun in your hand and the woman I love in your arms? Because this is really the way I want to spend a Saturday night?” His head ticked to the side, a sarcastic move in any other circumstance. “Come on, man. Buy a clue here. This isn’t bullshit. My boys finally got a nice, hard cyber-hammer into your club’s fun little black ’net site. Those files are making some fun weekend reading for the kids at the FBI and CIA. In short, the curtain’s down, dude. Take your bow now, and I can ensure you won’t get the death penalty.”
A vibration spiraled through Sol. Tracy winced, feeling his violence by osmosis. “Fuck you, Franzen! Fuck you.”
His fingers twisted harder into her jaw. She fought the pain. Scratched desperately at his forearm. Clawed a hand toward his head. A cacophony filled her ears again, then her senses. More bells, first like alarm clangs but suddenly a beautiful sound, like cathedral gongs—sliced by a scream. Who was screaming?
Her.
It was her.
Screaming in pain as Sol yanked her like a rag doll, dragging her into the darkness, toward the water.
Screaming in hope, as Franzen’s bellow was layered by others. Tait? Kellan? Who?
Screaming in shock, as orange bursts flared in the night. Then pops from phantom guns—aimed at them.
Returning pow-pow-pows from Sol’s gun, spraying bullets toward all the soldier silhouettes—
Toward the distinct form with the hulking shoulders, tapered torso, and beautifully carved legs—
“No! Nooooo!”
Then screaming in slow motion, the sound unstopping in her throat, as she stumbled from the man with the suddenly slack grip—and the dead eyes straddling a flawless crimson head shot.
Then pleading, choking, and trying to breathe past her sobs, while lurching toward the fallen man in front of her.
Then…
No screaming.
No sobbing.
No breathing.
Her throat incapable. Her senses stopped. Her heart shattering.
As she dropped to her knees beside Franz, fisting his shirt. Ripping it as she desperately shook him. Scoring the beautiful bronze pectorals beneath, longing to tear in deeper and breathe her own air into the eerily still cavity underneath.
“John. John. Damn you. Damn you.”
Scraping her hands up to his shoulders, over his parted but still lips.
“Wake up. Wake up! John Keoni Franzen, don’t you dare—don’t you dare—”
Rolling her fingers higher, over the crimson-drenched planes of his beloved face. His strong blade of a nose. His prominent, proud cheeks. His right eye, closed so terrifyingly tight.
And the bleeding gash where his left eye had once been.
Chapter Twenty-Four
‡
For two damn weeks, Franzen searched for the gratitude.
Stretched for it so damn hard, his psyche could’ve touched fucking China.
Force-fed himself every one-liner he’d given so many others, for so many years.
It could have been much worse.
You’re lucky to be alive.
Shot could’ve taken your brain along with your eye.
You’ll get used to it. Your mind will compensate. Your body will heal.
Give it time.
Give it time.
Give it time.
Time.
Goddammit.
All he had was fucking time.
Days of it, seeing half the world he once did. Months of it, adjusting to that new reality. Rediscovering how to function. Relearning how to live.
Then the years of it to come…
Of a life without her in it.
But w
ith her in it too.
Fuck.
With nothing but her in it.
Taunting him every time he turned on the TV, internet news, or any other outlet providing half a coherent concept of what was going on in the world. There his wildcat would be, at the center of it all, guiding the world back to normalcy, security, happiness. Hell, she’d already started. As soon as the FBI and CIA Directors received and read the files he uncovered with Lino, Tait, and Kell’s help, “President” Blake LeGrange had been arrested—and Tracy Livia Rhodes, miraculously back from the dead, been named as the next president of the country.
And because of it, had been ordered back to DC within hours after he’d woken up from surgery. She’d had time to kiss him. To whisper that she loved him too. To tell him she wasn’t letting go that easily.
And then she was gone.
A move for the better.
He told himself that as he watched her emergency swearing-in from his hospital bed, his chest swelling from pride and his sinuses burning from fighting back tears.
Told himself again as she proudly marched to the podium to deliver her first speech as the nation’s leader, wearing a new one of those suits she liked bitching about—instantly fantasizing about ripping every thread of the fucker off her body.
Forced himself to remember it, over and over and over again, every time another nurse rushed in to tell him President Rhodes was on the phone—before he invented a new excuse for refusing to take it.
It’s for the better.
The theme was common rote by now, nearly as comforting as the slosh of the waves through the twilight painting the Kaua’i shore in peach and amber hues. Over the horizon, far beyond where Lino, Maki, and Nani tossed a Frisbee in the shallows, the sky was an explosion of orange and purple ribbons. Nearby, on the lanai, Pops sat with his ukulele, picking out a peaceful rendition of What a Wonderful World. Mom hummed along in the kitchen, her voice still bright with my-son’s-not-really-dead joy, finishing final preparations for dinner. In honor of the guys from the battalion, all of whom had found excuses to “come visit” over the last week, she was prepping a soldier’s Sunday dream dinner: slow-roasted pork ribs, honey-fried chicken, beef tri-tip, corn on the cob, homemade bread, and plenty of fresh-picked pineapple from the local groves.
