by LJ Evans
“What the hell is this?” I asked him.
Malone frowned. “I don’t know. Why the fuck did he call us up here?”
A huge tear formed in my newly pinkened heart. Dani!
I turned to run, hollering over my shoulder, “Get to Brady!”
But he was already running in the opposite direction. I sailed down the steps, using the railing to jump over to the next set and continuing down to the main floor.
My body was in go mode, fluid, fast, with my brain already five steps ahead. When I got to the hallway with the bathrooms and saw the agent lying on the ground, my heart continued to bleed, but my body was too well-trained to react. I’d been taught to focus on the object at the end of my scope while keeping every other sense and space outside that spot on red alert. It’s called situational awareness. Some people say it makes everything slow down, like in a movie when they want to show you every minute detail of what’s happening. I’d had moments when that was true for me, but in my entire career, it had never lasted more than a few seconds.
Now, it pummeled me, making each step I ran take an eternity.
I reached the hallway, barely sparing a glance at the blood pouring from the agent’s head wound as I slammed open the bathroom door. All I could see was Dani running toward me, a montage of every look and every touch she’d ever given me—from teasing, to angry, to sensual—filling my head as I took in the scene with all my senses firing. I lifted my gun at the one trained on Dani’s back as she raced forward, Fiona’s words barely registering as my eye hit the target nanoseconds before I pulled the trigger. And as Dani slid past the bullet into my arms, I pulled again, rotating my body to shield her as I went to shoot the third time, but it wasn’t needed.
Fiona’s shaved head with its bullet wound was tumbling forward, her body following it to the ground as her gun with its silencer fell with a crack that sounded like thunder. She landed next to a blonde wig and Dani’s silver shoes.
I pulled Dani away, lifting her off her bare feet and carrying her as I ran toward the security room we’d claimed as our safe zone earlier in the day. The immediate threat was neutralized, but I was still unable to fight the sense of panic banging against the stillness of my military-trained heart.
“Shots fired! Shots fired!” rang in my ear. “Main level, hallway five.”
I didn’t stop as I’d buzzed past a half a dozen agents running in the opposite direction.
“Who has eyes on Tanner?” I demanded as I slammed into the safe room. On the computer screens, the ants buzzed around the hallways and lobby. Inside the theater, everyone was clapping as some pop diva finished a song, the music onstage having disguised the sound in the corridors. All the attendees were still sitting there, smiling and laughing, while I felt like my entire world had almost ended.
I sank onto a chair as the last agent abandoned the room as Malone demanded the theater be searched.
I cradled Dani in my lap. Her arms were wrapped around me tightly, and I finally got to look at her. “Are you―”
My eyes landed on the red welts at her neck. And my eyes filled with water I wouldn’t let spill. I hadn’t been there again.
I’d been seconds too late.
“You saved me, Nash,” she was saying, voice scratchy and harsh, with her hands on my face as tears poured from her gorgeous eyes.
I crushed my lips into hers, and she let me. Not only let me but returned the ferocious kiss with the same strength and fervor. Lips and tongues joining together as if to reassure each other we were both okay. That she was alive. That we were both here. But the anger at the fact that Fiona had reached her once again, marking her on the outside this time, was enough for me to want to go back and fill the already dead body with another twenty rounds.
“Nash, look at me,” Dani said, voice straining. I put my finger on the red welt, wanting to absorb the pain as my own. I met her eyes with ones that felt like they were bleeding. “Are you listening to me?”
I nodded, a barely noticeable movement because I didn’t trust my voice yet.
“You saved me.” She grabbed my chin to make sure I was focused on her and her words. “You saved me twice. You taught me how to fight, and I did that first. I thought I’d knocked her out. Maybe I had. I don’t know; maybe she just recovered faster than I expected. But you saved me a second time with your gun and your aim. I’m safe because of you.”
I buried my head in her chest, her hands traveling to my hair and then my back, squeezing me tight as if I’d been the one wounded instead of her.
“You weren’t too late,” she whispered, hearing the words I hadn’t spoken.
My thoughts went spiraling to my team in pieces on the ground in the moonlight that slid out from behind the clouds. To my mom’s body, being hit with the gentle waves from the pond as it blew in the breeze in another moon-swept scene.
To the men whose lives I’d taken. To the men I’d fought with who were now buried.
Back to Dani, in my arms, body quivering in the aftershock. And I focused through it all to her. Her eyes boring into me. Her thumb stroking my face, grounding me.
And it hit me that there was blood coming from wounds on her hand.
I took her slim fingers into my own. “You’re bleeding.”
She looked down as if surprised by the fact.
I pulled off my tie, wrapping it gently around the knuckles that were already turning colors.
“You hit her,” I said.
She nodded. “I thought I’d knocked her out.”
She repeated the words, and I heard them this time. She’d saved herself first. I bent and kissed the red welt on her neck, softly, breathing her in. The lemon scent of her clouded with another scent. Fear. Adrenaline. A perfume that wasn’t hers.
The door to the room opened, and my gun came up, trained on the doorway before seeing the one directed at us. Tanner…with hatred in his eyes.
Dani was in my lap, in the line of fire, and as I attempted to shift her, he said, “Move and I shoot her.”
“You’ll die first,” I said, the panic disappearing back into a mission calm as I protected the person I loved most in the entire world.
“I fucking hate you. We had a plan! We would’ve gotten back every goddamn penny they took from us if you hadn’t shown up.”
Money. Of course this was about money. Greed. It was one of the deadliest sins on this planet. It had been behind almost every damn operation I’d ever been on.
“Money. The money in the Caymans?” Dani’s ragged voice was full of shock, and she tried to move, but my arm not holding my gun locked her in place as I stared at his finger on the trigger.
“Money we earned working just as hard as him!” Tanner bellowed. “What did he do? Sing a few songs? Did he ever once think about sharing the wealth? No, not even when we’d been with him since the beginning.”
“You were in on it with her all along?” Dani asked. She was keeping him talking, which was a valid strategy if we waited for support, but I was ready to just be done with it.
“Put the gun down, or I can guarantee you, you’ll be dead,” I told him, the promise in my voice clear.
“How ‘bout we both shoot and see who dies. Might be your little girl here. It’s fair, after all, girl for a―”
I pulled the trigger. The bullet hit him square in the head, and the second hit him in the heart before his body even had time to react.
He crashed backward out the door into Malone whose gun was already raised at him, and we all watched as he fell to the ground.
Malone turned to us, face grim. His eyes took in Dani and me before brushing a hand over his eyes and holstering his weapon. “Thank God,” he said.
“God had nothing to do with it,” I said quietly.
We exchanged a moment of shared respect before the hallway behind him filled with agents. Marco. Trevor. People who should have been watching Brady to make sure the threat was truly gone. Malone seemed to
understand me even without a word, and he turned, directing the men back to their posts and off to the bathroom to secure the scene.
Garner’s words spoke in my ear, “Wellsley, confirm Owl is with you.”
It was Malone who confirmed Dani’s location.
“What’s her status?” Garner asked.
Malone seemed to take in all the spots on her I’d noticed as well—the red welt, the tie wrapped around her bleeding knuckles. “She’s fine. She’s going to be fine.”
The words rounded in my head, and my arms tightened around her.
She was. She was going to be fine. There were still tears on her face, blurring the makeup she’d warned me not to kiss off, and her body was trembling, but she was okay. She was alive. She would walk out of this place with nothing that would scar her physically, even though I knew those were the last scars that should worry me. The internal ones were the ones that lasted.
“I’m taking her back to the hotel,” I told Malone, standing with her still in my arms. I wasn’t prepared to let her go yet.
He nodded. “She’ll have to answer questions.”
I nodded. It wasn’t going to happen until she was ready. I’d be damned if I let anyone force her to live through it again until she could handle it. I didn’t care if that was days from now and they were all screaming at me. It would be on her terms and no one else’s.
We left by a back entrance and entered the hotel via the loading dock we’d been using all day. She didn’t object once to being in my arms as I walked. She just wrapped her arms around my neck and placed her head on my shoulder.
Having heard that we were on our way back, the agent at the elevator had it opened and waiting for us.
I pulled the radio from my ear and shoved it in my pocket.
I didn’t want to hear any of them anymore.
The door shut behind me, I hit the button for our floor, and I was grateful when she didn’t convulse in fear and panic like the night we’d found the knife in her jacket. Instead, she placed a kiss on my neck. Nothing heated. A reassurance. As if I were the one falling apart.
Maybe I was. I needed to examine every part of her. To make sure there were no other marks. Nothing that needed to be seen by a doctor. Nothing that needed a trip to the ER. Just so I could reassure myself that her heart was still beating.
When we got to the room, I sat her down on the bathroom counter, and yet, I was still unable to let her go. She kissed her fingers and touched my lips gently. “I’m giving the kiss back. It’s safe. We’re all safe.”
My mother’s words that I’d given her, the kiss she was giving me back, were all too much. It caused the admission to tear out of me as if it was ripping a hole through my chest. “I love you.”
I crushed her lips to mine again, and she met my tortured confession without words but with her lips and hands kneading into me the truth that she’d already spoken the day before. The fact that she loved me as well.
Two people who’d held the world at bay giving in to each other. Connecting. Joining. The bond more inseparable than the oath I’d taken on the day I got my Trident.
I pulled back, hand gently touching the mark on her beautiful neck, as tears filled my eyes that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to hold back anymore. I unwound my tie from her hand and gently washed it out with warm water. The cuts would need an antiseptic at some point.
“I’m going to get ice. Will you be okay?” I asked, my eyes unable to remove themselves from hers.
She nodded. Only the need to heal her allowed me to drag myself from her. I left with the ice bucket, filled it at the machine, and came back. When I got there, she’d slid off the counter and had removed the heavy chains she’d been wearing as well as the sequined dress. She was standing there in a pair of black underwear and a strapless bra that were almost sheer. Hiding nothing.
She had her hand on the red welt on her neck, the shape of the chains she’d removed already forming, and when she looked at me in the mirror, I didn’t see panic. I saw anger. I set the ice bucket down.
“Fenway threatened to do this to me,” she said.
My entire being convulsed.
“What?”
“A belt around my neck,” she said. She had every right to be angry.
“I’m so goddamn sorry,” I told her gently, self-reproach coloring every word.
She shook her head. “I’m not angry at you.” The rasp in her voice was doing nothing for my waves of regret. “I’m angry at seeing my face like this in yet another mirror. I’m tired of being a victim.”
“You weren’t a victim tonight. You’re Athena and Isis rolled into one. You were—you are—a warrior. Sometimes, there are wounds from a battle, but that doesn’t mean you lost.”
Her eyes filled with tears that she blinked back like I’d been blinking back my own.
She turned the water on, washing the makeup from her face. I handed her a towel and then wrapped ice in two others. I pulled her hand into mine and guided her to the bed. “Lie down.”
She did as I asked, and I placed the first towel along her neck and then surrounded her knuckles with the second one, tying a knot to keep it there. The clip she’d had in her hair earlier had disappeared somewhere along the way, and the dark silk was tumbling about her face and shoulders. I brushed it aside tenderly.
“How’d she get in the bathroom?” she asked. Every time she spoke, her torn voice hit me in the gut.
“She killed the agent at the door,” I told her, and Dani winced, eyes shutting. “That isn’t your fault,” I said with force.
Dani nodded.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked her.
She shook her head, eyes opening. “No, I want to stop thinking about it. For just one damn moment.”
I understood.
As the adrenaline that filled you on a mission drained off, it was hard to shake the scenes that replayed in your mind. As a team, we got rid of them with laughter by ribbing each other constantly. When we got back home, many of us used alcohol and sex. Things that required us to think little and feel even less of what had happened.
“Lie down with me?” she asked.
I took off my jacket, undid the two top buttons on the dress shirt, toed off the dress shoes, and joined her on the bed. I pulled her body so it was curled into mine so I could reassure myself―and her―that she was okay. As the adrenaline left her, she closed her eyes with exhaustion taking hold, even though neither of us would sleep yet. I stared at the ceiling and just breathed her in.
Once, in a different lifetime, I’d seen man after man ring a bell and walk away from BUD/S and SEAL qualification training, from SERE and sniper school. I’d thought then, and every single moment since then, that there was nothing in this world that would make me ring those bells or any other. But as I lay there, with Dani tucked up against me, I realized I would.
There was no question about it. There was no choice to make. I would have rung the bell for her. I would have rung any bell there was to ring, thrown in the towel, and sprinted away if it meant she was safe for eternity.
And I knew what I needed to do. I’d thought it would be impossible, the hardest thing ever, to turn in my Trident and walk away. But it was quite the opposite; it was the easiest thing to do because it meant a life at her side.
My phone buzzing from the pocket of the jacket I’d thrown on the floor never stopped. Dani stirred next to me, and I looked down, noticing her grimace as she swallowed.
“Ibuprofen?” I asked quietly.
She nodded. I left her side to dig in my bag for the pain meds, handing her several. She choked a little, trying to get them down, and my worry ratcheted up a notch.
“Do you want to go to the hospital?” I asked her.
She shook her head.
The incessant buzzing reminded me others needed to reassure themselves that she was safe. That I was being a selfish asshole. I retrieved my phone and saw a string of
messages from Garner, Brady, Lee, and Malone. All checking in, all asking for a status. Some demanding we contact them. I was surprised no one had knocked on the door.
“Can we just get it over with?” she asked.
I looked up at her in surprise. “What?”
“Whatever it is they need us to do. Can we just do it and be done? I want to leave. I want to go home.”
I nodded. I went to her suitcases in the closet and pulled out yoga pants and a sweatshirt, showing them to her. She nodded and pulled them on over the sexy underwear.
I found the earpiece and microphone, putting them both back on. “Owl on the way to the penthouse. Debrief will happen there.”
We passed a range of agents and Garner’s men on our way to the elevator and up to the penthouse, but the crowd in the actual space was small. Just Brady, Lee, Alice, Malone, and the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the L.A. office whom I’d met briefly earlier. Brady and Alice rushed forward to wrap Dani in a hug, and she let them.
“Did you win?” Dani asked.
Brady looked at her for a moment and then chuckled. “Video of the year, but not artist.”
“Well, next year, we’ll make sure it’s in the bag,” she responded, and everyone let out a sigh of relief. Dani was okay. Other than the rasp in her voice and the welt on her neck, she was almost back to the confident, in-charge, ready-to-set-the-world-on-fire Dani we all knew.
I loved her. More than anything I’d loved in my entire life.
There was a first aid kit on the table, and I wrapped Dani’s open wounds on her hand while Alice made her a cup of tea from the penthouse’s supplies, and the SAC debriefed us. Dani drank the tea and then more water, grimacing every time she swallowed.
After listening to what Tanner had said, Brady stood, twisting the leather on his wrist in a nonstop tell of stress. “So, Tanner and Fiona were in on it together?”
No one responded.
“This is all because I didn’t give them enough money?” His voice was sad, full of self-condemnation.
“Stop blaming yourself,” Lee said, landing a hand on Brady’s shoulder.
