Cael left school early the next day, and he lay in wait for Zane’s bullies. And because Zane wouldn’t touch them, Cael had. Beat them up and told them if they ever touched Zane again, they’d regret it. And then he’d taken the blame, refused to say why he’d done it.
That night, Zane sat at the dinner table with them for the first time.
From that day on, Zane and Cael had an uneasy truce. Cael still bugged his brother far too much. Zane pretended to be less annoyed than he really was, and for the most part, it worked. Dylan definitely balanced them out.
This was the worst possible time for Zane to get himself in trouble. Caleb had his own brand of the stuff waiting behind that door.
The faster Vivienne got the safeguard on the security program working, the faster he could help Zane out.
First, he had to figure out whether or not Vivienne Clare was in danger—or worse, if she was the danger.
With that in mind, he unlocked the door and stuck his head inside to take her from the interrogation room. Little did she know she was about to be out of the frying pan and walking directly into the fire.
As the sun came up, Zane attempted to keep them comfortable. He’d spread out the blanket on the floor—it was made of a material that thankfully helped them remain cool. Within a few hours, they would be roasting in here anyway.
He’d boiled enough water in the large pot he’d taken from her house to fill both canteens. While she’d tended to the baby, he’d grabbed a few threadbare towels as well, plus homemade soap and all the food she’d had in the house.
Most of it would go bad if they didn’t eat it soon, and so Olivia unpacked it and spread it between them. They sat across from each other—she picked at the food while Zane ate with the vigor of a man who viewed food as fuel.
It inspired her to choke down more than she normally ate. And when the food was mostly gone and the water finished, he said, “I still can’t believe …”
But he stopped, shook his head.
“What?”
“A baby. In the middle of all that, a baby was born.” He looked stunned as he thought about it.
“Yes, well, their timing is usually pretty impeccable,” she said wryly. She looked down at her hands again. They’d stopped shaking from the adrenaline a while ago, but they still felt like they were moving without her direction, the way it sometimes happened when she was lost in a big surgery.
Zane was right. The baby was a miracle in hell. They didn’t happen often and most of the beauty was in the unexpected.
The look on Dahia’s face when Liv handed her the infant and told her to go and hide—well, it was indescribable. It gave her chills just thinking about it now, even as a thin trickle of sweat made its way down her back. “I was scared to death.”
“You got the job done.” Zane stripped his shirt and lay back on the cloth, hands behind his head. He wore no dog tags, had a few telltale scars … and he looked so good.
She forced her eyes away and pulled up her borrowed pants.
“You should take those off instead.”
“What?”
“Take your pants off before you overheat.”
He was right—it would get hot in here, despite its shaded location. She shimmied out of them and lay like Zane was, the T-shirt coming to the tops of her thighs.
She wouldn’t look at him to see if he was looking at her, but saw out of the corner of her eye that he’d already laid down on the blanket.
Now, their bellies comfortable, they rested, although neither was fully relaxed. Both on guard, she mused. So many damned enemies. “No one’s tried to hurt my parents, have they? No threats?”
“They wouldn’t be that stupid. Your parents are too visible. It would be too much of a risk,” he said.
Thank God for that. Her father was part owner of an NFL team, her mother the daughter of something akin to the closest thing to royalty America had as the daughter of a beloved actress and philanthropist. They’d been together for thirty years, a golden couple, marred by the tragedy of what had happened to their daughter when she was young. They were constantly written up in the society pages—and they’d employed security since that fateful day she’d been kidnapped at nine years old. “They’ve believed I’m alive the whole time, haven’t they?”
“Yes. Your dad told me that you’re a fighter.” He touched the side of his head where she’d beamed him. “I didn’t know he meant literally.”
“I didn’t hit you as hard as I could’ve, you know.”
“Trust me, I do.”
She packed up the remains of the food carefully, sealing it back in the bag, and felt the tiredness spread over her body along with a strange sense of peace. Odd, because she knew Zane was waiting for her to tell him about DMH. He’d probably also like to know about her near panic attack at the door earlier, but he wasn’t getting that.
It was as good of a time as ever. Never was the optimal time, but that wasn’t happening. “You want to know about DMH.”
“I have to know, Liv,” he said quietly. “Big difference.”
Somehow she knew he wouldn’t force the memories from her unless they threatened national security. Her stomach roiled from the small amount of food she’d eaten and she sat up and soaked a towel, put it on the back of her neck and breathed in deeply. She would not get sick in here, not now.
She would not be weak.
Maybe telling him would help. It couldn’t make her feel worse, for sure. “I don’t know how helpful I can be.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Olivia. DMH doesn’t come after people for nothing. They wouldn’t waste time on you unless you know something.”
“That makes sense, yes. But I figured, because of the clinic thing, they want me out of a need for revenge.”
“Could be part of it, sure.”
“They told me that if I tried to escape, they’d find me. Hunt me down like a dog in the street.”
“They won’t find you.”
“Maybe not, if I stay lost. If I go back home and talk to the CIA, I’m vulnerable. I know too much about their operations. Names. Dates.”
“Can you tell me?”
She could, because she could still leave Zane behind and not feel the consequences of her spilling this intel. And so she did, rattled off names and descriptions and numbers and he took notes on his phone as she talked. She’d memorized everything because she’d never had a safe place to write it all down.
And when she was done spewing out the information to him, she remained silent for a while. Zane wasn’t pushing her, but he also didn’t tell her it would all be okay, didn’t tell her not to cry … all he did was reach out and touch her arm lightly, but there was so much strength in that. So much comfort.
It would be so easy to fold into him, to roll with him on the soft dirt and cry out his name, the pleasure sweeping every other thought from her mind.
Too easy. If it was easy, it couldn’t be right.
In the OR, she used to waver between surrendering control and trying to retain all of it. But in the end, she knew she could do everything right and it was up to the human body to decide whether or not it would all work together.
She truly believed it was up to the will of the person on that table, and there was little more she could do than attempt to influence it with her scalpel. In her personal life, control was imperative. “What else do you want to know? You want to hear everything those men did to me?”
His jaw clenched for just a second and then, “When did you escape from them?”
“It took over two months.” It all felt like it happened to someone else, as if she’d simply been observing. And then, when she’d escaped, the drugs wore off and she’d realized … it had been her. And all those people … the things she’d done during that time … the things they’d forced her to do …
No. No one had forced her. She’d had a choice, could’ve refused and been killed. And she’d lived with the fallout.
“How did they treat you?” he as
ked after a few minutes passed.
“Did they torture me, you mean? Yes, but not in the way you think. I mean, the drugs were one thing. I’ve always hated them—the loss of control—but that was the easy part. After that first day, no one hit me,” she said tonelessly. “They just kept me in a room alone and the drugs took the edge off everything. It took me weeks to build up a tolerance but I continued faking the symptoms so they wouldn’t up the dose and I wouldn’t become even more addicted. I heard Elijah talk about the different operations of DMH. He wanted me to know about them. It was his way of bragging, like he’d hoped I’d be attracted to all the power he had.” She stared down at her hands. “He told me that my hands held equal parts healing and destruction, and that I had a power I could use to further my own career.”
She glanced at Zane, wondered why him, why she was able to reveal all of this to him.
Nevertheless, she did. She’d never been one to dwell and she didn’t see a reason to start now. “They never had me harvest the organs. But when I tried to refuse to do the transplant operations, they would put me in a room with a timer, the organ and the recipient. The patient was usually close to death and it was like, How can I do that? Whether the recipient was guilty or not, I couldn’t stand there and let another death happen on my watch.”
“I’m sorry, Liv. I know that doesn’t mean much, but I am.”
“It helps.” She played with the edge of the borrowed T-shirt she wore, fraying the hem a bit with her fingernails. “That’s how the other doctors began to trust me, because I started performing the transplants. I pretended that I understood what DMH was doing—that it was free-market enterprise, that we were saving people’s lives. It’s why the other doctors told me things about DMH’s organization. I mean, Gabriel Creighton—Skylar’s father—had told me some when when we were locked up together. It was enough to know what I was up against, that they had a long reach.”
That night she’d been dragged onto the plane, she remembered screaming until her throat was raw and she was sure she’d damaged her vocal cords for good.
Her throat had been sore for weeks after that. She closed her eyes. “They first took me from my car. I called Skylar.”
“You were right to do so. It was a better move than calling the police.”
“If you say so. When I woke up in that house, Skylar’s dad was brought in to me and I tried to help him. But they were torturing him. He told me he was ex-CIA. Said he might not survive. And then he told me that I might not either.”
She bit her lip and wondered why this all seemed so fresh, as if the wound had opened and begun to bleed again. “Elijah would try to have philosophical conversations with me,” she said. “He wanted to know if I thought the future of organ transplants should be a buy/sell deal. He asked me how it felt to know one person’s death meant another’s life.” She shook her head slowly. “He’s a really smart man. Scary smart. With the right intentions, he could’ve done so much good.”
“He’s a psychopath.”
“Probably.” She shrugged, dipped the towel into the water and rubbed it along the back of her neck again, since the nausea came back just thinking about him. “He told me about DMH. How it started. He was so eager for my approval. And things might’ve gone easier if I’d given it, pretended I admired him. But I couldn’t. He was … being in the same room with him, I always just felt cold.”
“What else do you know about him?”
“He called me Mariana a few times and didn’t realize it. It’s not like I corrected him,” she said. “He wants me because I resisted. Because I got away. He can have almost anything in the world and what he wants is someone he doesn’t think he can have.” She paused. “It was always very important to him that I thought he was smart. I think he has a learning disability—dyslexia. I recognized some signs when he made me spend time with him.”
“You’d be able to recognize him if you saw him again?”
“I would recognize Elijah anywhere,” she said, her body shuddering involuntarily. “He loved to spend time with me. Would say things like You could be my equal. Like I wanted to be anything to him—or like him.”
Zane’s face tightened. “Just the thought of you spending time with him makes my fucking skin crawl.”
Hers too. But it hadn’t been the first time she’d been too close to evil.
Would she be that lucky if it happened a third time?
She glanced into the concerned eyes of the strong man who sat next to her and looked away, drew her knees to her chest, whispered, “I feel like they’re coming for me—I feel it all the damned time, Zane. And I don’t think they’ll stop until they’ve got what they want.”
Elijah had no choice but to let Kieran’s parents know about their son’s death, could still hear his aunt’s muffled scream, and then her persistent, No, no no …
They would blame him—the family always did. Not more than he blamed himself, although he knew that collateral damage couldn’t be helped.
Recruiting family was the best way to keep DMH alive and running smoothly. Perhaps Kieran hadn’t been ready for such responsibility, but he’d been young and strong and reconnaissance was the best way to learn.
Elijah had no idea there were military men in the area, and while he stared at the picture of the blond-haired man and waited for his information to process, he knew that this mess … all of it was because of Olivia Strohm. She’d escaped, done damage to DMH by destroying the clinic and now, if not recovered soon, she could easily fall into the hands of the CIA.
He’d been playing cat and mouse too long, pawing with her, enjoying watching her think she’d escaped his reach. Now he realized that she, like Mariana, had become his weakness.
Mariana, his former lover, mother of his child, had taken his son from him; Olivia, his cousin. Losing the two family members so close together caused a pain in his heart he never thought he’d be capable of feeling. Hadn’t, since his older brother had been killed in combat.
His brother’s death had been the original turning point. From that moment on, Elijah had thought of nothing else but taking the DMH operation global—and of getting revenge on the USA and its military.
He couldn’t get revenge on Mariana, as she was already in her grave, but the doctor was still out there, ready to disseminate information about his operations.
Maybe he’d gotten too far removed from the game. In the beginning, he would’ve been the first one with a pistol in his hand, ready to defend the then small, essentially unknown organization with his own hand, had been willing to give up his life for the cause.
Kieran had reminded him so much of himself at that age, full of bravado, ready to take on the world. Elijah had taken him under his wing, shown him the ropes, even gave him a seat at the poker table, an honor Kiernan understood.
Now that would never happen. He’d given Kieran the best training he could, but his cousin had been no match for this man, this … Navy SEAL. Zane Scott. Elijah stared at the serial number and the official picture of the Navy SEAL who was supposed to be invisible to most of the population.
Thanks to a key player in Homeland Security, Elijah could get any information he wanted. And still, that couldn’t ensure that DMH wouldn’t crumble like a house of cards.
Ace walked into his office without knocking, the familiar sneer on his face. By rights, the son of Elijah’s father’s best friend was second in command—would take over operations completely if Elijah was killed.
Lately, Ace had been looking at him as if he wanted to do that job all by himself.
“You weren’t supposed to allow the program to go online. Now it’s leaked that we’re the ones who have possession of it.” Ace stared at him, the contempt undisguised. “We’ve got a major problem.”
“Then fix it.”
“I was trying to. I’ve taken it offline, so all we have to deal with are the rumors, which are enough. You need to focus on your own problems, not mine.”
“I am.”
&nb
sp; Ace stared at the picture of the man named Zane Scott sitting on the desk. “Meddling in military business is not helping us.”
“My source is secure.”
“You wouldn’t need to use the source if you’d taken care of Dr. Strohm properly in the first place,” Ace sneered. “You had to bring in another woman to screw things up. Couldn’t let it rest.”
Elijah resisted the urge to bite back. Being called stupid—even inferentially—was something he was used to from his younger years. But he’d learned to compensate for the dyslexia, and ruled an empire in the making with DMH.
Years ago, it had simply been a dream.
Now Ace was telling him that it was crumbling, and Elijah refused to believe that, to buy into the other man’s panic. “You need to deal with your own situation, or our plans will be irrevocably ruined. Make it work, any way you can.”
He didn’t point out that Ace’s recent attempts to grab the creator of the software had failed miserably, or that he’d been right to tell Ace to kidnap the woman at the same time he took the software. No, Elijah wouldn’t say a word, would save that ammunition for another time and place.
“I’m taking the jet,” Ace announced.
“I’ll join you in a day.” For his plans, Elijah would need cooperation both here and in the States, and he had the perfect contact to make sure neither Olivia nor Zane Scott survived for much longer.
CHAPTER
6
Zane hated to keep pushing Liv for intel but he had to. And he wouldn’t risk sending it to Dylan in a text or e-mail. No, he’d tell him when they spoke next, a call he was putting off as long as he could.
“You can’t run for the rest of your life, Liv. Not like this—and not all by yourself.”
She nodded as if she knew that. She was too smart to think she could, but she was in full run mode still. “If you give the CIA the information I gave you, I can stay here until they do something with it.”
“That could take a while. No one wants you out here unprotected. And I promised I’d get you back.”
“To what, Zane?” There was no pity in her tone, no woe is me. Only steel.
Promises in the Dark Page 7
