by Malcom, Anne
No, they were for a purpose.
To hurt and end human beings.
But it was something beyond that.
Especially after he’d lost his best friend. Heath hadn’t been there when it happened, but he had been there when Keltan had to be forcibly removed from Ian’s body.
Keltan broke that day. When you see your brother in everything but blood, mangled flesh, and bone for a war that meant fucking nothing but money and power, your view of the world gets warped. Or maybe you see everything for how fucking ugly it is.
And it fucks you up. In a way that most men come back to their families and a life that’s not about surviving by killing and they can’t handle that. Because no one gets it. That’s why so many eat a bullet. Yell at their kids and their wives until they scare them enough to leave. Then they find a bottle, if only to forget how fucked up everything is.
The great fucking system.
Keltan was lucky.
He had a woman that showed him the world wasn’t all pain and ugliness. Or maybe it still was, but he didn’t give a fuck because he had her. Lucy had saved him, and Keltan was man enough to admit it.
Polly had saved Heath.
And he had not been man enough to admit it.
Because he had been angry.
Still too angry at the fucking world, and that meant he didn’t understand her. Because she wasn’t angry. She found joy in the world.
And because he couldn’t fucking understand that, he’d fucked it up. He’d hurt her. Because she’d hurt him. And he was trained to hurt people that hurt him. He was trained to destroy him.
He hadn’t even had a chance to truly show her that he was going to put her back together if it took the rest of his life.
The rest of both their lives.
His hands fisted atop the table.
“They get shit?” Duke asked, glancing to Heath, knowing he was holding it together by a thread.
Duke hadn’t been with them, he was deep Special Ops. He didn’t say shit about what he’d done. Uncle Sam probably made sure he’d rot in a cell for the rest of eternity if he did so. But he didn’t need to say shit.
He was an intelligent motherfucker, as well as deadly. His smile was a front for something much darker.
“Their hacker has something,” Keltan said, glancing to Heath too. They didn’t know the full story with Polly.
They didn’t even know half of the fucking story.
But they knew enough.
Keltan had known enough to let him go when Polly had got married. Respected him enough to give him nothing but a clap on the back and not a single question when he returned.
They knew that Polly was his.
And now she was gone.
Keltan knew what that was like better than anyone else.
So did Luke, who was silent across the table.
He was fighting shit too. Because his woman was like a sister to Polly. And his woman took shit hard. Because she’d seen and done shit that made her worthy of a place at the table with these men.
She was battle worn in a lot of the ways they were. And a lot of the ways they weren’t. Heath didn’t scare easily, but that woman could be downright terrifying. And just as dangerous as every single man at that table.
She could handle herself.
But Luke did everything he could to handle shit so she didn’t have to. Which was, of course, a constant battle with someone like Rosie.
Though now she was pregnant it was one Luke won.
Only after he’d physically dragged her out of a drug dealer’s house.
Heath only did missions with her because he knew she’d do them alone and he figured it was better for her to have backup. And he knew that she loved her child more than anything, she wouldn’t put it in danger. He’d planned on putting a stop to it when she started to show.
But she had done that herself.
“It better be the location of that fuck, and more importantly, Polly,” Heath said through gritted teeth.
It had been three hours.
Three hours.
A lot could happen in three hours.
And it wasn’t death.
Death could happen in three seconds. That wasn’t the thing drawing poison through Heath’s system.
It was all the other shit that would kill all the beauty in Polly’s soul. It might not take three hours to kill it all, because she was strong. But even killing a fucking inch of that was enough to haunt Heath for the rest of his days.
“Not yet. But he’s got intel on someone who might now.”
Duke stood. “On it.”
Heath wanted to go too. But he couldn’t trust himself not to kill the man before they got the right information. And making someone wish they were dead, think they were dead without killing them was Duke’s specialty.
He trusted that man with his life. And with Polly’s. Which were one in the same.
* * *
Six Hours Missing
He was about to crawl out of his skin. He was ready to tear it apart so he could feel something that wasn’t the utter fucking helplessness that was sitting in this fucking room not being able to do shit to help Polly.
Not being able to kill the fuck who made her bleed.
Duke was still working on the man.
But he was deep in the business, and they were trained to withstand torture. If he didn’t break soon, Heath was going to break him, if only to fuel his need for violence, for death.
Keltan had been in and out, checking on Lucy, who was in the bedrooms in the other wing of the offices. He’d only let her discharge herself because they had an on-call doctor with her.
Fucker wasn’t taking any chances.
Neither would Heath.
Ever a-fucking-gain.
It was just him and Luke now. Luke had been exhausting all his contacts in and out of the law enforcement. They’d put APBS out on Craig. On women matching Polly’s descriptions. Were running any cars that were stolen from the same area Polly was taken. Running all of Craig’s cards.
And they were coming up with shit.
The door burst open.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” a female voice demanded.
Luke moved the second the owner of the voice stormed into that room.
She held up her hand to her husband. “Don’t you come near me,” she hissed. “You don’t get to come near me when I have to find out from one of my sources that there’s a missing person’s alert out for Polly. My sister. And then my other sister, who is pregnant, got punched in the face by Polly’s total fucking asshole of an ex-husband.” She pointed at Luke as he opened his mouth and tried to move forward. “I. Am. Not. Done,” she seethed. “I am also armed. And I wouldn’t normally shoot the father of my baby, not even to get on Jerry Springer, but this qualifies as extenuating circumstances.” Her voice shook, from what most people would’ve thought was fury, considering she just threatened to shoot her husband.
But Heath knew her, saw more than most people. And she was holding on by a thread. And her voice was shaking with terror. It took a lot to scare Rosie.
“You decide to keep that shit from me when I could’ve fucking helped,” she hissed.
“You had an ultrasound,” Luke said, voice soft. “They were checking to make sure you didn’t have placenta previa. If you did, anything upsetting, anything raising your blood pressure will risk you and the fucking baby.”
“And you think my blood pressure is nice and steady right now?” she screeched.
Keltan entered the room, upon seeing Rosie, he muttered, “fuck.”
She raised her brow. “Fuck is right.”
“Sit,” he said, nodding to the table.
“Are you telling me that because I’m pregnant and I couldn’t possibly stand just like I couldn’t possibly handle the news of Polly being kidnapped as soon as it motherfucking happened?” she demanded.
“Rosie,” Luke murmured.
“Nope,” she hissed at him.
&n
bsp; Keltan rounded his desk and sat. “I’m telling you to sit because we need to talk.” He gave Heath a look. “All of us.”
“Whatever,” Rosie muttered, sitting beside Heath.
She reached across and squeezed his hand.
That was Rosie. She was hard as nails but was soft where it counted.
“Wire just gave me some info,” Keltan said once Rosie had quietened enough for him to speak, she was glaring at her husband and he was glaring at her.
“You remember the shooting that you were involved in with Polly last year?” he asked Rosie.
Luke stiffened.
As did Heath at the memory. But not for the same reason as Luke. Or maybe for precisely the same reason, because someone tried to tear through their whole world with bullets.
“I vaguely recall it,” Rosie said dryly.
“We assumed it was to do with your shit because, well, you’re you,” Keltan said.
“Aww you’re so sweet,” Rosie said, forcing a grin.
“Let me guess, it was aimed at Polly?” Heath said, the words acid coming out. He needed to remind himself that none of those bullets hit her then. But that was hard as fuck to do when he had no idea what was hitting her now.
Keltan nodded.
The room turned wired.
“Okay, it’s fine to shoot at me, but at Polly?” Rosie said.
“It’s never okay to shoot at you,” Luke hissed.
“Not the time,” she muttered back.
“It was some kind of threat to Craig, as much as we know,” Keltan explained. “Apparently he was getting in deeper when he’d only been low level at the start. He was causing enough shit that they sent him a message. Obviously they didn’t know they were separated by that point. Which I’m still confused about.” He looked to Rosie. “Is the reason she divorced him because of that?”
Heath knew that wasn’t true. Because Polly wouldn’t have protected him if she knew he was at all connected in human trafficking. No matter her views on peace or feelings toward him.
He knew what it wasn’t, but still, he had no fucking clue what it was. He had been planning on gently probing it out of her in the periods he wasn’t fucking her today.
He’d thought they had time.
He was a fucking hopeful idiot.
Rosie’s expression changed. She pursed her lips.
“Now is not the time to protect Polly’s secrets,” Heath clipped. “Not if it could be the reason we fucking find her.”
“It won’t,” Rosie said.
“You can’t know that,” Heath replied.
She didn’t back down. “I can.”
“Rosie, they need to know this shit,” Luke said, his voice soft as if he were trying to protect her. Heath didn’t give a fuck about protecting Rosie’s feelings right now.
“No, this will only distract them from what they need to figure out. Which is where Polly is,” she said.
“Just fucking tell us!” Heath roared.
Rosie jumped. And not because she was jumpy at all by nature. She was harder to shock than Duke. But Heath didn’t yell. Not at anyone. Especially not at women.
“He hit her,” she said, voice small, a contrast to Heath’s roar. The three words silenced the room.
Keltan’s face drained of all color.
Heath’s body drained of oxygen.
He hit her.
He hit her.
He couldn’t stop the words from screaming in his mind.
“That’s why she left him,” Rosie continued. “She swore us to secrecy because she knew how much it would hurt Lucy.” Her eyes found Heath. “How much it would hurt you.”
“Of course, she’s the one whose husband hits her, and she worries about how that’ll hurt everyone around her,” Heath spat.
Rosie flinched.
Luke glared at him.
He didn’t give a fuck.
Because Polly had carried that around for two years.
This fucker didn’t hesitate to hit her when she was with him when he had her as his wife. Now he didn’t...
“Rosie’s right,” Keltan clipped cutting off Heath’s toxic thought. “As much as that makes me wish we’d castrated him when Lucy first suggested it, it doesn’t change anything now. And there’s more. These fuckers have had their eyes on her since the divorce. Probably since the marriage. They trailed her around Europe.”
Heath stopped breathing.
“Only reason they didn’t snatch her because she moved so often, so erratically, they couldn’t pin her down.”
“You’re telling me that Polly unwittingly evaded some of the most ruthless fuckers on in the world just because...she’s Polly?” Rosie asked in disbelief.
Keltan nodded proudly, trying to grin. It didn’t work. “Yeah, that’s about the size of it.” He moved to eye Heath. “Seems I owe you an apology since if we hadn’t started her security detail, they likely would’ve snatched her if we weren’t a constant and visible presence.”
An apology didn’t mean shit, especially since they snatched her anyway.
An apology wouldn’t save her.
Sure as shit wouldn’t save him.
Chapter Fifteen
Polly
Eight Hours Missing
It was shocking to be kidnapped.
I was a lot more shocked than I should’ve been, considering my family’s history with such things. Rosie had been kidnapped. International drug dealers had tried to kidnap Lucy but failed. Then they stabbed her in the middle of the day on the street and almost killed her.
My stomach roiled with that thought, that memory.
She’s safe, I chanted to myself.
She’s safe and she got out of that which means you will get out of this too.
Even though it hadn’t actually hit me that I was in this.
That I was in a dated, obviously cheap and thankfully clean hotel room, and chained to the bed. With a black eye. Well, I didn’t know for sure that it was actually black. It felt hot, it was throbbing, and the skin below and above my eye felt tight and swollen.
The back of my head was throbbing too, and it felt sticky and hot. From me cutting it as I hit the floor.
That was from Craig punching me in the face.
I’d told myself, I’d promised myself that he wouldn’t lay a hand on me again. But such things weren’t exactly within my control when he turned up at the door and said hello—and goodbye—with his fist.
I’d come home from Heath’s after deciding I couldn’t wait in that apartment for a second longer. Not like I did last time.
Last time I spent the whole day there, entertaining the fantasy that Heath didn’t get on a plane, he came back, picked me up and we spent a life together, on the run. From war. From peace.
Of course, my sister had called frantic that I’d been in some kind of “Vegan Coma”—her words— and I’d had to leave.
I couldn’t stay like last time, nurturing a hope that might get shattered. I forced myself to get an Uber home. I was still wearing Heath’s tee. I hadn’t showered. I smelled like him. Like us.
I’d answered the door smiling because I thought it was him.
But it wasn’t.
It was Craig. Smiling wickedly, coldly and then...nothing.
And I woke up here. Chained to a bed.
I wasn’t quite sure it was just the punch and the head wound that had knocked me out, because there was a heavy and blurry quality to my thoughts that hinted that I’d been injected with something.
Since drugs could knock me out for an hour or a day, I didn’t know how long I’d been here.
Though in addition to my throbbing eye, my arms screamed from their position above my head, my wrists felt raw from the rubbing of the cuffs, my bladder was uncomfortably full—to the point of bursting—and my stomach was painfully empty.
I would hazard a guess to say I’d been here for a while.
And I couldn’t even fathom that I was actually here. Sure, that break from reality probabl
y had something to do with whatever chemicals were coursing through my system, but a lot of it was pure naive disbelief.
Because although violence and kidnapping were somewhat of a regular occurrence with my extended family, it was something that never happened in my life. My life was designed around peace. Chaos, too, but a peaceful kind of chaos. The chaos that had me deciding to camp in the desert with four friends for five days, not the kind of chaos that would get me chained to a bed with a bruised face.
And there was surprise that Craig would actually do this. I shouldn’t have been surprised, considering he had no qualms hitting me in the face when I was his wife, so it stood to reason that kidnapping me and hitting me in the face was not a problem now that I was his ex-wife.
But I was still surprised.
Because there was something off inside him, something broken.
But I had been under the impression that there was still something inside of him. Something that he’d shown me to make me fall in love with him, something human and vulnerable and something that somewhere along the way had been ruined and broken by someone else.
It wasn’t a thought process I was proud of. But I liked to believe the best in people. The world did enough for us as a society to expect the worst in everyone. Our very media was saturated with human brutality, with fathers killing children, women killing husbands, with senseless violence, genocide, war. It was so much so that it was our default to brace against the brutality of our race.
Because we were never shown the kindness. Never shown the woman who spent her time and money volunteering in children’s shelters after she’d lost her only child to cancer. The couple that had been together for fifty years and died within minutes of each other because they couldn’t stand to breathe in a world where the other didn’t exist.
Kindness didn’t sell newspapers.
Because people didn’t believe it. They were conditioned to expect, consume and crave violence on some level.
And I rebelled against that.
My entire life.
I was lucky I had a family that nurtured this belief, even if they didn’t completely agree with it.
I missed my family with an ache that was bone deep right now. I wondered how long I’d been gone. If they were worrying. If Lucy was worrying so much that it hurt the baby. I prayed no one had noticed I was gone, if only to save them from that.