Marcus hauled back and punched her.
Mercedes grunted and staggered a little, but then straightened and laughed. “You hit like a girl.”
Oh, for God’s sake. They didn’t have time for this. Leah grabbed the gun from Mercedes’s hand and slammed the butt against Mercedes’s head. Mercedes’s eyes widened, then a dopey smile spread over her face. “Nah,” she said, words slurring. “I was wrong. She hits like a girl. Take notes, Deangelo.” Her eyes rolled back and she collapsed.
Marcus stared, jaw hanging open. “Leah. Holy shit.”
“We didn’t have time for you to pull your punch. She wants to stay behind with these psychos, who are we to argue?”
“You’re right.” Marcus shook off his shock and held out a hand. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Nine
Hornet Headquarters, Wyoming
The kid was useless.
Ian scowled as his trainee, Remington “Remy” Hale, again blew himself to hell and back. Metaphorically. Though he was currently wishing the explosive ordnance simulation had been real. At least then he’d no longer have a headache.
Last fall, when Quinn had ordered him to start training Remy in explosive ordnance disposal or else he’d be out of a job, he’d figured all he had to do was be his usual charming self and the kid would quit.
But Remy was like a tick. He stuck, no matter what Ian threw at him. An eternally happy, annoyingly optimistic tick.
“Well,” Remy said and grinned through the visor of his bomb suit. “I didn’t need that hand anyway.”
“Kid, you didn’t just take off a hand. There was enough explosive material in that ordnance to blow this compound from the map.”
His smile faltered and he looked down at the fake bomb. “Oh.”
How this kid had made it through Quinn’s vetting process was anyone’s guess. Ian certainly wouldn’t have picked him out of all the other trainees for EOD. He didn’t have the patience or the attention span necessary for playing with things that go boom.
Ian’s eyelid was twitching. He pressed a palm to it to make it stop. “Run the sim again.”
He watched the kid’s every move closely, still scowling so hard his jaw ached. The faint reflection on the safety glass in front of him showed deep lines carved into his forehead and around his mouth. In that instant, he saw his father staring back at him, and it startled him so much he took a step back.
Fuck.
His phone rang.
He gulped back a surge of bile and ran a shaking hand over his mouth. Even at thirty-four years old, any reminder of his father scared the living hell out of him. Some badass he was.
The phone rang again. He snapped it from his pocket and answered without checking the number. “What?”
“Aw, sweet as ever, I see,” Mercedes Raya said.
He looked at the screen. The number was unavailable. Harvard and Sami, HORNET’s computer gurus, would laugh at that unavailability if he asked them to track down the number. But, then again, did he really want anyone to know she’d contacted him?
No. That might stir up questions he’d rather not answer. As of right now, everyone blamed Marcus for her escape. Since the guy had been so shit-faced, he had no memory of that night, and Seth also had a handy bit of amnesia from the blow to the head, it all worked in Ian’s favor. He’d like to keep it that way.
He put the phone back to his ear. “What do you want?”
“I missed you.”
His heart did a traitorous little tap dance. Fuck, what was that? He didn’t miss her. He didn’t even like her. He ground his teeth to quash the feeling. “You have ten seconds then I’m hanging up. Ten, nine—”
“Your buddy Deangelo is in trouble.”
Ian stopped the countdown. “How do you know?”
“Same way you know where I am right now.”
Sumba, Indonesia. At least when he’d checked her whereabouts on the app last night, that was where she still was. Exactly the same place she’d been for the last few months. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Sure you don’t.” He could practically hear her eye roll. “I haven’t kept your jacket all these months out of sentimentality, asshole. I figured I’d need your help someday. That day has come.”
“Give me one good reason to help you.”
“We both want Harrison Stead to suffer and Defion to shrivel away to dust.”
Fuck. The one thing he couldn’t resist. “I’m listening.”
“I’ve been keeping an eye on Marcus.”
“He’s there on Sumba?”
“I thought you didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.” She scoffed, then added, “Forget it. Doesn’t matter. Danny Giancarelli’s widow showed up. I thought she meant to drag him back to civilization, but shit went sideways. Guys with guns showed up. Leah apparently had some kind of flash drive in her possession that they want. And—” She cut herself off as male voices sounded in the background. Not English. Russian.
After several long beats of silence, she said, “I’m out of time. I’m with the guys that attacked Marcus and Leah. They’re mercenaries but won’t tell me who they work for.”
“Defion?”
“No. They would’ve known me and probably would have killed me on sight. These guys think I’m interested in joining them for the right price.”
The back of Ian’s neck prickled with warning. “Are you?”
Another pause. Again, he heard the muffled sound of male voices in the background and started to lose his patience. “Mercedes, listen to me. Trading Defion for another merc group won’t solve your problems.”
“You did it,” she whispered.
“You side with them, you’ll end up dead.”
“So I should side with you?”
“HORNET wouldn’t accept you. You helped kill one of our guys.”
“I didn’t help—”
“Nah, you slept with Sebastian Haly after he made the kill. Gave him a nice congratulations fuck. Aren’t you a saint.”
“You fuck.” Her anger seethed over the connection. “I hate you.”
“Feeling’s mutual, babe.”
“I’m not trading one for the other.” Her voice vibrated with emotion. “According to Leah, Xander is alive and these bastards know where he is.” She hung up.
Ian stared at the phone for a long moment. Alexander Cabot, a.k.a. Xander, Mercedes’s younger brother, was alive? He’d dropped off the grid more than a year ago after trying to leave Defion. The thing was, with Defion, once you were in, you didn’t get out. Ian being the one exception, but he was a special case. Harrison Stead didn’t like loose ends, and Ian thought for sure Defion would have tracked Xander down by now and given him the Sebastian Haly treatment, leaving him dead in some remote place for the carrion eaters to pick apart. If Xander had managed to stay alive this long, it was with the help of someone worse than Harrison Stead.
Jesus. At this rate, Mercedes was going to get herself killed.
He pocketed his phone and looked down at the two dogs sprawled out at his feet. Tank had taken an instant liking to Remy’s dog, Ginger. He lay with his head pillowed on her side. Both of their tails thumped when Ian looked at them.
He knelt and rubbed a hand over each of their heads. “Should I go to the bosses about that call?”
Tank gave a soft woof that Ian took as a no. “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”
Ginger gazed over at Tank, then up at him with soft brown eyes that seemed to say, You two are idiots. This will come back to bite you.
“And you know a thing or two about biting, don’t you, sweetheart?” He’d found her at the local pound, where she’d been sent after biting her owner, who had been in the process of beating the shit out of his wife. The wife didn’t press charges and the husband sent Ginger off to be eutha
nized. After learning her backstory and seeing how good she was at taking direction, Ian had known she’d be a perfect addition to HORNET. Unlike Remy, the gold German Shepard was a good trainee, a fast learner. She was good at finding remains—a handy skill to add to HORNET’s repertoire, since Tank excelled at drugs and chemical scents. The two made a great team.
As Ian straightened, he saw his trainee blow up again. Both dogs gave a huff of exasperation.
“Yeah, I know,” he muttered and pressed a palm to his twitching eye.
It wasn’t just Mercedes’s neck on the line here. At this rate, they were all fucked.
…
Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia
There were only a handful of flights from Sumba each day, and Marcus booked them the first off the island the next morning. That meant staying on the island overnight while mercenaries searched for them, but it couldn’t be helped. He reserved them a room at the overpriced resort under fake names and spent the whole night pacing the room, hoping like hell this wouldn’t play out like the clusterfuck on Martinique that had taken Danny’s life.
He didn’t breathe a sigh of relief until they touched down at the airport in Bali. Bigger island and more people equaled easier to hide.
“I don’t think we were followed.” He said it out loud as much to assure himself as Leah. “Do you have your phone?”
“Why?”
“I need to call the team.”
“No.”
“Leah, we don’t have clothes, we don’t have ID, we’re short on money. Unless you want to sleep on the street until we figure out what the hell’s happening, we need their help. We need their resources.”
After a mulish second, she dragged her phone from the back pocket of her jeans and slapped it into his hand.
He didn’t blame her for her reluctance. In her eyes, HORNET was just as responsible for Danny’s death as the man who pulled the trigger.
He didn’t have to ask for her code to unlock the thing. Her anniversary—the same code Danny had used on his phone. Because those two were peas in a pod. They were meant to be together. They should still be together. If it wasn’t for him, they still would be.
Once he had the phone unlocked and faced the keypad, his mind went blank, his thumb hovering over the numbers.
Damn. He didn’t want to make this call.
In all honesty, he’d have preferred to keep HORNET out of this. Calling them for help felt too much like crawling back with his tail between his legs, and it left a bitter taste in his mouth to even think about it. But with Mercedes Raya back in the mix and gunmen chasing Leah across the globe, what choice did he have? This wasn’t something he could handle on his own.
Instead of calling Gabe or Quinn, he punched in Eric “Harvard” Physick’s number. The kid was the safest bet. He’d find them a place to stay here in Denpasar the fastest, and he wouldn’t condemn Marcus for his many mistakes.
The phone rang a handful of times. Marcus checked the time on the airport monitor and winced. It was the middle of the night in Wyoming. What if Harvard didn’t answer? He’d have to call Gabe or Quinn. Or maybe he could go straight to Tucker Quentin. Tuc would be the one footing the bill, after all.
Just as he was about to end the call, Harvard answered with a groggy, “Hello?”
“Harvard—”
“Holy shit!” He sounded wide awake now. “Marcus, where the hell are you?”
Marcus spotted a tall man dressed in black coming their way. Could be nothing. Was probably nothing, but the guy moved like he had some combat training. He wasn’t about to take that chance and grabbed Leah, pulling her into an alcove by the drinking fountain. He pressed her against the wall and used his bigger body to block her from view, since he figured the bad guys knew what she looked like, but it was still debatable whether they knew about him or not. He leaned down as if he was going to kiss her. To any passersby, it’d look like they had stepped out of the flow of foot traffic for a make-out sesh.
“I’m in Bali,” he told Harvard, keeping his voice low and watching the man in black from the corner of his eye. Dread prickled at the back of his neck. Guy didn’t have any luggage and he was definitely looking for someone, though he was doing a good job of seeming unhurried.
“What are you doing there?” Harvard asked.
“Being chased by asshole Russian mercenaries.”
A beat of silence. “Uh, say again?”
“Leah showed up at my place and so did Russians with guns. And then Mercedes Raya made an appearance, too. It was a clusterfuck.”
Harvard sputtered. “Uh…uh…hang on. Am I still asleep?” A woman’s voice murmured something in the background and Harvard said, “It’s Marcus. He said Defion attacked him.”
“It’s not Defion.” He knew that for sure. If it was Defion, they would have killed Mercedes, not let her join their ranks.
“I thought you said Mercedes—”
“She didn’t know them. They had a V symbol on their gear, made to look like a wolf head. Do you know of any PMCs using that logo?”
“I can run a search.”
“Do it. And we need a safe house, stat. I think they found us.”
“Shit. Okay, give me ten minutes and I’ll get you a place. What city are you in?”
“Denpasar.”
“All right. Ten minutes. And I’ll have Sami start the search for that symbol while I’m working. Are you safe right now? Is this a good number to reach you?”
“I don’t know if we’re safe.” At that, Leah drew in a sharp breath but remained silent. “The phone’s Leah’s. I’ll have it on me for the next ten minutes then I’m ditching it. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll find a burner and call back.”
“Ten minutes,” Harvard said. “You better stay alive, asshole. I have things to say to you.” The line disconnected.
“Roger that,” he muttered and slid the phone into his pocket. He grasped Leah’s hand, felt her fingers tighten around his. Her complexion had drained of color. Her eyes were too wide and a little dazed. The shock was setting in. “Hey. We’re okay. Harvard’s finding us a safe house while we figure this out.”
“I don’t trust them.”
He drew a breath. She didn’t trust them—some of the best men and women he knew—because of him. Because he’d drawn Danny into this world and had gotten him killed. “Trust or not, they’re our best shot at staying alive.”
She said nothing, but she looked unconvinced. Given everything, who could blame her?
As the arriving planes emptied, the corridor filled with people. He checked for the man in black, didn’t see him. If they were going to make a move, now was the time.
Still holding her hand, he pulled her out into the crowd. They bumped along through the corridor to baggage claim, then he spotted a group of surfers collecting their boards. Since he was still in board shorts, the group made for the perfect cover. He slipped in behind them, sticking close enough to look like he and Leah were part of the group. When the surfers boarded a hotel shuttle, he guided Leah on, too. At least the shuttle would get them away from the airport.
If he didn’t hear back from Harvard before they reached the hotel, he’d reevaluate.
Ten minutes later on the dot, the phone vibrated in his pocket. “Yeah?”
“Got a place,” Harvard said. “Tuc owns a private villa in Canggu. About twelve miles northwest of the airport.”
Of course he did. Tucker Quentin, the billionaire founder of HORNET, owned half of the goddamn world. “Text me the address. We jumped on a shuttle to the Hilton Garden Inn. Can you have transpo waiting for us?”
“On it. Tuc has his staff getting the villa ready for you. There are two live-ins on site, locals, a husband and wife. Both are one hundred percent loyal to Tuc. I’ll send you their pictures and relevant info.”
Suddenly exhausted, Marcu
s rubbed at the tension clamped around the back of his neck. “Any luck on that symbol?”
“Still looking,” Sami Blackwood, tech girl genius extraordinaire and the love of Harvard’s life, said in the background. “I have it narrowed down to three options. I’ll email them to you, see which you think looks most like the one you saw.”
“All right. I’ll check once we get to the villa.”
“So,” Harvard said, drawing the word out. “I had to tell Gabe and Quinn you called.”
“Uh-huh.” He’d expected as much. “They pissed?”
“If Gabe is, he’s not showing it. As usual. But Quinn…not so much.”
“Quinn’s not Quinn unless he’s pissed about something.”
“I mean, he has a right to be. You walked out and ignored his calls—all of our calls—for months.”
“Yeah, dude. I know. I’d say I’m sorry, but—”
“And when you finally do call,” Harvard continued, heating up to his argument, “it’s because the shit has hit the fan, bad guys are chasing you, and you need our help.”
“Eric,” Sami said softly in the background, trying to soothe, but Harvard wasn’t having it.
“Yeah, of course Quinn’s pissed. So am I. So is everyone else. We were worried about you.”
Every word hit like the lash of a whip. “Can we have this out later?”
Harvard made a grumbling sound. Marcus decided to take it as a yes. If he could just put off that convo for the next, oh, eternity that would be great.
“The bad guys aren’t after me,” he added, grateful to change the subject. “They’re after Leah.”
After a stunned beat of silence, both Harvard and Sami exclaimed, “Why?”
He shot a sideways glance at her. She was staring out the window, watching the city rumble by as the shuttle sputtered toward its destination. Didn’t seem to be paying attention to his conversation. “I don’t know the whole story yet, but I intend to find out ASAP.”
“Hey,” Sami called out before he could hang up. “How is she?”
Another glance in her direction. She was stoic and her hands were steady where she had them clasped in her lap, but she was still too pale. He honestly didn’t know how to answer that question. “About how you’d expect. I’ll call when we’re safe.”
Honor Avenged (HORNET) Page 8