Hard As You Can

by Laura Kaye

  Nick’s gaze narrowed. “How’d you end up at her place?”

  Shane recounted the entirety of his night, from bugging Confessions and his confrontation there with Crystal, to following her to her apartment, helping her sister, and finally questioning her after bugging her apartment. He conveniently left out the dance. And the feel of her body in his arms. And how hard she’d made him no matter how much he’d tried to rein himself in.

  Marz immediately got to work on the computer, connecting to the transmitters and testing the feeds.

  Shane held up a hand and started counting off on his fingers. “Here’s what I nailed down for sure. Church is involved in human trafficking. Some part of it takes place in or via Confessions. And there is a delivery taking place Wednesday night. I think I need to sit on my hands for twelve to eighteen hours and see if Crystal reaches out. In the meantime, we get some ears on those transmissions and see if she has any conversations that might be useful. If not, I’ll need to go back in and push a little harder.”

  Nick nodded. “Was she as skittish as at the club?”

  “Every bit. Even in her apartment. She was pretty clearly afraid I’d be found there. No doubt by whatever scumbag took a hand to her and marked her face.” Not wanting the others to see how much Crystal’s abuse affected him, Shane scrubbed his hands over his face and tugged his fingers through his hair, still stiff with the gel.

  Marz froze, his gaze cutting up to Shane, while Nick’s expression slid into a scowl. “Shit. Someone beat her?” Nick asked.

  Shane dropped his hands and felt a big bucket of pissed off park itself on his chest. “Yeah. Because of what we did.”

  “She said that?” Nick asked, his tone subdued, like he didn’t want to rile Shane any more than he already was. Which meant Shane was doing a stellar job hiding how angry he was over this. Fantastic.

  “She didn’t have to,” Shane said, needing to put an end to this topic. “Anyway, the degree of her fear and the fact that someone had no qualms marking her in a visible way both seem to point to some kind of association with a higher-up in the Church organization. And, if I’m right that this same someone outfitted her otherwise no-frills apartment with several thousand dollars in high-end media components, he’s either a boyfriend or a sugar daddy or something. Least that’s what my gut is telling me.” Though, when they’d danced, Crystal sure hadn’t responded to him like her heart had been claimed by another man. Because, damn, she’d been every bit as affected by their dance as he had. He’d put money on it.

  “Sounds right,” Nick said. “Seems like the sister could be an in with Crystal, too. If the girl needs medical care she’s not getting, you could no doubt white knight it and earn some favor.”

  Shane frowned. “If Jenna’s not getting treatment or medicine, she’s in some serious trouble. She had a full-blown grand mal seizure. Doubtful Crystal’s pulling in health benefits as a waitress, so unless someone’s picking up the tab, I have no idea how she’d cobble together money for the meds. They’ve gotta be damn expensive.”

  The clacking under Marz’s fingers stopped. “Hold up a minute. If someone is covering the sister’s doctors’ bills and meds, that’d certainly give that person a strong hold on Crystal, and it would incentivize her loyalties toward them and away from us. If any of that’s true, you sure we aren’t barking up the wrong tree? ’Cause we don’t have time to spare.”

  Marz had a point, so Shane bit back the knee-jerk irritation that threatened at the suggestion that Crystal wasn’t reliable. Because his gut told him she was even if she needed a little time. Years of finding, managing, and working with informants gave him a sixth sense about these things that he’d learned to trust. “What you’re saying all follows, except we don’t know if any of it’s true. Until we do, Crystal’s our best option. And it’s worth saying that she was more than a little interested in my medical training. Like maybe she saw an alternative in me. But I could only push so far without scaring her off. I’ll figure out what’s going on. Don’t doubt it.”

  “I don’t,” Nick said. “But we can’t put all our eggs in one basket. Tomorrow night, B-Team should visit Confessions and see what else they can learn and who else they might be able to tap for intel.” B-Team was one of the three-man teams they’d created to run the operation that led to Charlie’s rescue. They’d had two possible locations to investigate—Shane, Nick, and Easy on A-Team focused on Confessions, where Charlie had in fact been held, and B-Team’s Beckett, Marz, and Miguel infiltrated one of Church’s front businesses, a storage facility across town.

  Out of nowhere, Charlie’s recollections about his time in the storage facility slammed into Shane’s brain. He braced his hands on the desk as the pieces turned in his brain . . . and finally clicked together. “Well, goddamn,” Shane said.

  “What?” Marz and Nick said at the same time.

  “Church’s storage facility. When we interrogated that thug on the boat the other day,” Shane said, referring to the man whose attempts to kidnap Becca had landed him on the wrong end of Nick’s favorite knife, “the guy said Charlie had been at the storage facility, and Charlie said he’d heard women locked up inside there with him. Jesus. Could a storage facility be any better of a place through which to traffic women? I bet there are box trucks in and out of there all the time, maybe even container storage. What if there are records at that facility that would give us more intel relevant to Wednesday’s meeting? What the cargo is, who the cargo’s intended for, maybe even where it’s being delivered.”

  “Well done,” Marz said, his fingers flying over the keyboard again. “Maybe I can get us into their server. If not, we’ll need boots on the ground. Shane could be right, though. There’s a reason they were so trigger-happy there.” And Marz would know, seeing as how three of the Churchmen’s bullets had turned the guy’s pants into Swiss cheese.

  “All right. This is good. We’ll brief everyone in the morning and put together a plan. In the meantime, you two should get some shut-eye,” Nick said. “We all look like the walking dead.”

  Marz chuffed out a weak laugh as he scrubbed his hands over his face. “Roger that,” he said, pushing out of his chair. “I’ll start fresh on all this on the flip side.”

  “You guys make any progress here?” Shane asked. Marz’s computer research was at the center of a number of mysteries they were trying to solve.

  Marz blew out a long breath and tugged his longish hair behind his head. “I spent all night burying our IP address so deep you’d have to go to China to find it. Now I’ve got some spiders crawling the web for all possible meanings of ‘WCE,’” he said, referring to the depositor’s initials Charlie had found in his father’s twelve-million-dollar bank account.

  Shane pressed his lips into a tight line. Twelve million dollars. Apparently the going rate for selling out the men and the values you were supposed to defend. Fucking Merritt. Shane counted his failure to see his commander’s true character as the second biggest mistake of his life.

  After Molly.

  Sighing, Marz continued. “Also been trying to unravel the mystery of Becca’s bracelet without much luck yet.” When they’d rescued Charlie the night before, the guy had only needed one good look at a bracelet their father had sent back from Afghanistan to see that the design actually embodied binary codes that translated to six-digit numbers. What those numbers meant, though, nobody knew. Marz pointed to a cardboard box sitting on the far end of his desk. “And I sorted through all the papers Becca had from her father, but nothing seemed to connect to the numbers.” The frustration in Derek’s voice was unusual, but understandable. They were looking for a needle in a Himalaya-sized haystack.

  “You’ll figure it out. Don’t worry about it,” Shane said. If anybody could, it was Derek DiMarzio.

  “Appreciate the vote of confidence, but I feel like I’m spinning my wheels. Charlie might be able to help, though. After all, I’d missed the bracelet, and he’d only needed one look to realize its significance.�
�� Shane suspected Marz might be right since Charlie seemed to have been cut from the same scary-brilliant cloth. Marz shrugged. “Anyway, the transmitters are all up and running, so anyone wanting to listen in or review the recordings can.”

  “Thanks, man,” Shane said, clasping hands and bumping shoulders with the guy.

  “No problemo.” Marz repeated the action with Nick, then headed toward the door, his nearly even gait almost hiding the fact that, a year ago, Shane had held the man’s femoral artery between his fingers when a grenade had blown off everything below his right knee.

  When Shane looked at the guy, he saw many things—a survivor, a friend, a brilliant mind. But he also saw one of the few unequivocal things he’d done right in his life. It wouldn’t make up for failing Molly or his team. Nothing could make up for that. But it sure explained why Shane always felt that just a little of the weight on his shoulders lifted when Marz was around.

  Because it was surprising just how much a lifetime of guilt weighed when saddled around a man’s shoulders.

  What a fucking track record Shane had. No run-of-the-mill screwups for him. No. His mistakes were of the epically catastrophic kind. Every damn time.

  Which was why, with every passing minute, Shane’s instincts lit up all over the place when it came to Crystal. Saving her just might represent a chance to earn a little redemption. He felt the truth of that into his very marrow. Any other outcome was unthinkable. Intolerable. Liable to take him to his knees once and for all.

  Shane forced himself from his thoughts and turned to Nick. “How come you’re over here with us ugly mugs instead of holing up with a certain blond-haired cutie?”

  A hint of humor flashed across Nick’s face. “We were holed up until Charlie started feeling bad. He said he was okay, but Becca wanted to sit up with him for a while.”

  “Gotta respect that.”

  “Yeah. I can only imagine how I’d feel if it were Katherine lying in that room right now, having gone through what Charlie did.”

  Nick didn’t mean anything by mentioning his younger sister. Shane knew he didn’t. But it still totally sucker punched him. Because having failed to be there for Molly when it mattered most, he’d never get the chance again.

  “Aw, goddamn, man, I didn’t mean—”

  “Ain’t a thing,” Shane said, shaking his head. “Just know if I can help with Charlie, you can count on me.” Suddenly, Shane realized the gruffness in his words made them sound a bit like an accusation given their recent history.

  Sure enough, Nick’s expression told him he’d heard the same thing. Damn, would they never recover that old, comfortable easiness that once came so naturally? “Thanks. I hope you know the reverse is true, too. Always has been.”

  “I know you have my back.” Which wasn’t exactly the same thing as being able to count on someone, was it? When the shit was flying, sure. Shane had no doubt that Nick Rixey would have his six. But day to day, when the crisis was past, and it was just the regular slog of life, when they no longer had this catastrofuck of a situation to drown out the physical and mental pain this past year had inflicted? Yeah, he wasn’t so sure about that.

  Time would tell, he supposed.

  A weighty pause filled the space between them. Nick crossed his arms and dropped his gaze to the floor. “But . . . ?”

  Shane shook his head. “I don’t need to say it, Nick. You know as well as I do what went down between us.”

  Rixey gave a tight nod. “I do. Question is, you gonna let me build a bridge or not?”

  If only it were that simple. Shane didn’t want to hold this grudge. Feeling hurt and betrayed took energy and headspace he didn’t have to spare. But some emotions couldn’t be willed away. No matter how hard you tried. He had a lifetime of experience to prove it.

  “Come on,” Nick said, walking away.

  “What?”

  “Just come on.”

  Sighing, Shane forced himself to move, no idea what Nick wanted and very little patience left to find out. Halfway across the room, he yawned so big his eyes watered, and his jaw cracked—

  Something knocked him in the gut. “What the hell?” he said, his arms rising up to block the attack and finding . . . a pair of black boxing gloves resting in his grip. He glared at Nick. “Aw, hell no.” He tossed them to the floor, his patience just about worn clean through.

  “Pick them up,” Nick said, tugging on a thick black glove.

  “No.” Shane stepped toward the door.

  Nick moved in front of him, blocking his way. “Pick. Them. Up.”

  “I’m not fighting you.” Shane nailed the slightly taller man with a glare. Throwing fists wasn’t going to fix what was broken between them, and Shane wasn’t a vindictive asshole. At least, not usually.

  Jabbing both gloved hands against Shane’s shoulders, Nick’s light green eyes narrowed. “Put the goddamn gloves on, McCallan.”

  The shove made Shane’s GSW sting like a mofo and tripped a wire in his brain, unleashing all kinds of things he’d been trying to hold tight. Anger. Regret. Hurt. Guilt. He shoved right back. “Screw you, Rix.”

  “That’s the spirit. Now do as you’re told and glove up.” He knocked his gloves together and arched a brow.

  Do as I’m told? “Fuck that noise. We aren’t working for Uncle Sam. And you sure as hell aren’t my superior anymore. What’s your fucking problem, anyway?”

  Pressing his lips together, Nick shook his head. “I’m not the one with the problem.”

  Shane scoffed. “Oh? Is that right? Then why’d you shut me the hell out the past year?”

  “And now we’re getting somewhere.” Nick walked past him, and Shane flinched back, his adrenal gland doing its job and flooding plenty of fight instinct through his body. He was wound as tight as barbed wire. Nick scooped the gloves from the ground, turned, and chucked them at him again. Hard.

  This time, Shane caught them before they made impact.

  “Look, I know a firearm is your first weapon of choice. But as I don’t need any more holes in my head, and I’d like to stay on this side of the great white beyond, you’re going to have to make do with the gloves. You need this, Shane. We need this. So could you just put the fucking gloves on already and stop being a pain in the ass?”

  “Right. I’m the pain in the ass,” he muttered, his hands making quick work of lacing up without really telling them to do it. Nick was right, though. Shane did need this. For a whole lotta reasons. But the other man was a few rounds shy of a full clip if he thought throwing a coupla punches would clear the debris field between them.

  The minute the second glove was secured, Nick was right in his face. “No holds barred.” He slammed his gloves on top of Shane’s, and Shane hammered right back.

  And then it was on.

  Shane threw the first punches, catching Nick in the jaw and the ribs, and blocked the uppercut aimed at his gut. Facing off again, Shane jabbed with his right, forcing Nick to cover himself in a way that exposed his left side—and the lingering injuries from his gunshot wounds that still gave him back problems. Shane jammed his knee into Nick’s side. The deep groan that erupted from his opponent’s throat tempted Shane’s guilt, but then he wasn’t the one who insisted on this, was he? And now that Nick had invited Shane’s lizard brain out to play, it liked their little game here too much to back down.

  Nick recovered quickly and came at him with a back kick that had broken ribs written all over it. Shane managed to rear back at the last possible second, but the action threw him off-balance, allowing Nick to take his feet out from under him. Shane slammed to the ground, his breath whooshing out and pain radiating up and down his spine. But even before gravity had all its fun, Shane was forcing his ass to move. He rolled and sprang to his feet, ignoring the dizziness that threatened.

  And it was a good goddamned thing he’d found his feet again.

  Because Nick was now full-on pissed off. He came at Shane like a freight train, swinging, kneeing, kicking. Nick’s f
ury fueled his own, and Shane gave every bit as good as he got. Body impacts, grunts, and the scuffs of shoes on concrete echoed around the cavernous space. Man, but Shane was going to be feeling this little dance for days.

  They circled, attacked, and retreated over and over, neither man holding the advantage for long. Nick clipped him in the mouth, and Shane felt the skin split and the metallic tang of blood on his tongue. So evenly matched, their fight turned into a war of attrition that threatened to go on and on. Exhaustion making his arms heavy and his responses slower, Shane used the memory of the train of unanswered calls and emails, each one leaving him feeling more alone and isolated, and found the will to keep going, keep fighting, keep exorcising the demons in his head that never let up for five fucking seconds.

  It was just . . . all . . . too . . . goddamned . . . much. Wham. His fist connected with Nick’s cheekbone like a sledgehammer. Nick’s head whipped to the side, and his whole body spun as if in slow motion.

  Nick caught himself just before he face-planted, though he stumbled until he crashed into the bench press.

  For a long moment, Nick braced his gloves against the leather-covered bench and seemed to gather himself. He rose and faced Shane, and it was clear from the stiffness and slowness of his movement that he was hurting.

  Shane didn’t take a lick of pleasure from that fact.

  Just the opposite.

  The sight of his best friend bloodied and injured at his own hands drained the fight from him. Becca was going to have both their asses in a sling when she saw that the nearly healed cut on Nick’s cheekbone was open again. The initial wound wasn’t Shane’s doing—that had been between Nick and Beckett.

  “Goddamnit,” Shane rasped, wiping the sweat off his brow with the back of his forearm. His mouth took over where his fists left off. “I needed you, Nick. I fucking needed you, and you weren’t there.”