by Ronie Kendig
Giraude met the onslaught with his brother-knights. Vibrations rattled through his sword, but he gave it no thought. He instead focused on pushing back the Saracens. Pushing them down.
A scream from behind spun him toward his tent. Toward Shatira. He threw himself at the flap, not caring what he might face. Darkness engulfed him, but he adjusted quickly, sighting the Saracen who’d slipped inside.
Their swords clashed in a song of rage. He arced. Parried a blow. Lunged in.
Light came from behind him. Giraude knew he was trapped—a Saracen behind and in front. He must focus.
Shatira gasped.
Giraude stiffened as the sound of metal grating bone brought him around. There, Matin drove his blade through a newcomer. With no time to process, Giraude pivoted in time to see the first Saracen scrambling out of the tent. The meaty thud of a body hitting the dirt told him another brother-knight had likely felled him.
Warm softness flew against Giraude’s chest. He curled an arm around Shatira, shifting to lock gazes with Matin, who breathed heavily, then gave a nod of uneasy alliance.
21
— MOSCOW, RUSSIA —
Weakness. Aches. He’d been plagued with both all his life. Hidden them from everyone imaginable.
Yet here he sat on the bathroom floor. With practiced precision, Ram slid the needle into the fatty tissue of his thigh and pressed the plunger, forcing the milky white substance into his system. He sat on the tiled floor and waited. Tilted his head back against the cabinet, expecting the violent reaction of his body to the drugs. As he waited, he thought, as he always did, about the legacy his father had left him.
His father. He rammed his head against the bathroom wall with a growl. He’d suspected his father was still alive, but finding out it was true intensified the fires burning through his chest.
Tzivia might have assigned noble aspirations to their father’s actions, but Ram held no pretenses. What father abandoned his children when he still lived and breathed? Now, knowing his father was alive, held captive by the most notorious man in the world . . . rage tore through Ram. He rammed his elbows back. Heard the crack of weak plaster.
Weak. Everything was weak. He was weak. His father was weak.
Bile surged up his esophagus. Burned his throat. Ram threw himself to the side and hugged the toilet as his body warred with the drug he’d just injected. He’d lose some but not all. And what remained would be enough.
Spitting caused him to vomit again. He coughed. Choked. Wiped the tears from his eyes as his system slowly quieted.
The tone for a text message hit his sat phone. Limbs trembling, he hauled himself off the floor. At the sink, he washed his face and brushed his teeth. As he rinsed the acidic taste from his tongue, he grabbed his phone. Glanced at the message.
T2K threading needle for the queen.
Ram hesitated for a moment. The words were hints. T2K—Tox and Tzivia. Needle—London had the Eye. You could thread the eye of needle. And London had a queen.
Why was Tox going to London? Ram texted back.
Sightseeing?
Babysitting. She was attacked.
By whom?
Israeli friends.
Not possible.
Tell that to the dead rats.
Ram hesitated, staring in disbelief at the words.
I’ll look into it. KMP.
Pot is boiling. Dangerous to touch.
KMP—keep me posted—wasn’t a request, no matter the danger. Ram was typing a reply when an incoming call took over the device. He swiped to answer. “Hello.”
A long pause. Then, “You should be retired.”
Ram tensed at Omar’s voice, thinking of the dead operatives. Of them attacking his sister. Mossad had provided the funding for the mission to send Tox in undercover, but the mission should be more covert, less . . . discussed. Especially by Omar, whom Ram had yet to forgive for taking advantage of his sister. “Is there a problem?”
“She has given them the first piece.”
“I just found out.” A while ago, but he wasn’t ready to send the wolves after her, and he wouldn’t tell them she was in London now.
“You spoke to her? What did she say?”
Ram gritted his teeth at the hope in Omar’s voice. “What I have is from the asset.” He hated that this man felt invested in her life.
“Does she know where the other pieces are?”
Ram snorted. “Nobody who knows would tell anyone else, so I do not expect her to tell.” But if Tzi knew where the pieces were, she wouldn’t be hanging around her flat to get clobbered by Mossad agents. Which was probably why they were headed to London.
“We are concerned.”
We. The IDF—Mossad. Revelation pulled Ram up straight. “Why?”
“She killed three operatives. Threatened me.”
It took Ram a minute to process those two pieces of information, to merge them with what Tox had just said. What he knew of Tzivia and Omar. They’d dated and lived together for months before she vanished with a piece of intel Omar inadvertently divulged one night. Yet for all her bravado, for all her sharp words, Tzivia had been unable to hide that she had real, deep feelings for the Mossad director. And while she was trained to protect herself, she wasn’t bloodthirsty. “What’d you do to tick her off?”
“We didn’t do anything to—”
“Tzivia would only fight to the death if she felt threatened,” Ram countered. “What did you do?”
Omar sighed. “She’s getting too close to putting the Adama Herev back together. I tried to stop what Mossad had planned, but it—” There was a long pause. “They went over my head. She has been deemed a threat. They sent messengers.”
Ram’s eyes slid shut as he pinched the bridge of his nose, still feeling the tumultuous effects of the drugs. “Is the order STK?”
“I’m losing traction with my superiors, Ram.”
“Is the order STK?” he repeated.
“Not yet, but soon. If she persists, they will shoot to kill on sight.”
If she really found the remaining pieces, would it be over? The curse lifted?
He snorted. Curse. It was a curse—riddling males of the mercenary line with a debilitating disorder that afflicted them with a hybridization of hemophilia and muscular dystrophy. Combined and untreated, the Matin Strain plagued them with rapid degeneration of muscle tissue and progressed to the point of paralysis. A simple fall during that stage could result in massive internal bleeding, eventually leading to death. It had killed many boys for centuries, nearly wiping out their line. Today it could be managed with injections, which he’d hidden from all his records—military and otherwise.
His mind swam back to the caller. To the reason. The real reason. Omar wanted Ram to warn her. “Understood,” he muttered into the phone.
“Do you?” Omar’s voice pitched. “Because I cannot shield her anymore.”
Ram mashed the END button and trudged into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. His leg caught the edge of the counter hard. Pain thudded to the bone. “Augh!” He held it, feeling the double header of the injury and the injection site.
His phone rang again.
With a growl of frustration, he answered. “Khalon.”
“I need you in Virginia. Now.”
Iliescu. Argument leapt to the tip of Ram’s tongue, but he had to make it sound good. Legit.
“Don’t even think about arguing,” Iliescu barked. “You need to be here.”
As the tone buzzed in his ear, he noted an ache worming through his thigh. He lifted the hem of his shorts and saw a swirl of red and blue swimming to the upper layer of his dermis. It would be big and ugly soon. Had he waited too long for the injection this time?
— SAARC HEADQUARTERS, VIRGINIA —
“What is this, a rite of passage? Y’all tricking me into making an idiot of myself and betraying a fundamental trust?” Leif stared back at Thor and Maangi with a mixture of disbelief and amusement.
“Hey,” Thor
said with a mock grin, “you brought it up.”
“You say that like this is my fault. Like I made up what I heard.”
“What you heard,” Maangi said, “and what you think you heard could be two different things.”
“You’re trapping me.” Leif nodded, then shook his head. “Beautiful.” He hadn’t expected integration to be easy, but he also hadn’t expected to run afoul of their team loyalties. “You really think I’ll go to the general and rat him out?”
“What else are you going to do with this nugget of information?” Thor slapped Leif’s chest with the back of his hand. “Why did you bring it to us?”
“Because we’re a team”—he tossed up his hands—“I thought. I have a concern, so I bring it to you. I don’t run it up the flagpole. We deal with it. Between us.”
“And how do we deal with this?” Maangi asked, his dark skin seemingly darker as he stared back. “You come to us, suggesting Ram is doing something underhanded, bringing Cell into it as well. So far you’ve implicated half the team.”
Thor’s blue eyes sparked. “Makes me wonder what you’re accusing me of behind my back.”
“If I were out there and got into trouble, if someone suspected that, I’d want them to do something. Talk to someone.” Because that had happened before, and nobody did a thing. And he had the scars to remember it by. But these guys were more about making him an outsider than watching his six.
“You know what?” Leif huffed. “Forget it. But if things go south, if Ram gets ensnared in something he can’t handle—”
“He’s team leader for a reason. So’s Tox. You might have led the Congo mission, but that’s a whole separate thing,” Thor said. “Let’s let them do their jobs.”
“Fine.” He’d tried to take the high road, but he’d known they wouldn’t be receptive. Somehow, he had to find a way—
“Hey!” Cell burst out of the elevator, rushing at them, face a mixture of worry and urgency.
They all turned to him, tension thickening more than it already had.
Thor came to his feet. “What’s up, Cell?”
His brown eyes surfed the command hub. “Iliescu here?”
“Negative.”
Maangi started over. “Why?”
And that drew Leif, too.
“I . . .” Cell tapped his thumb against his thigh. Then checked Almstedt’s office. “I have a friend I’m worried about.”
Thor lifted his hands. “We all have people we’re worried about.”
“Nah, I mean—”
The secure elevator intoned another arrival.
When Iliescu emerged, Cell all but threw himself at the doors. “Sir!”
The deputy director paused, ignoring Cell, who was a flurry of movement, and looked to the team. “Ram here yet?”
Thor slid a glowering look at Leif. “Negative, sir. We expecting him?”
“An hour ago.”
“Listen,” Cell broke in. “I have to talk to you.”
Iliescu’s expression pinched. “Slow down, Mr. Purcell.”
“I have this friend,” Cell said, then cleared his throat. “I’m worried—I think something happened to her. She’s not answering my calls or—”
“That sounds like a law enforcement problem.” Iliescu kept moving toward his office.
“Or a girlfriend problem. Get a clue,” Thor grunted. “She grew a brain and dumped you. Moved on.”
“No, no. She and I weren’t like that. I mean”—he gave a one-shouldered shrug—“she’s gorgeous, but you see . . .” His gaze bounced around the room, meeting everyone’s expectant stares. “I might have—no, I did . . .”
“Did what, Purcell?” Iliescu growled as he reached his desk at the hub and tossed his briefcase onto it. Tucking aside his expensive suit jacket, he planted his hands on his belt.
Cell had a whole lot of guilty going on. “That line you established? The one we weren’t to cross . . . ya know, when you said to keep things here between us.” He nodded around the hub. “Well, I crossed it.” Guilt hung on him like sodden blanket. “I have a friend. She’s really good at finding stuff on the internet that people don’t want found. I mean, crazy-good.”
“This going somewhere?” Iliescu demanded.
Holding up a finger, Cell nodded. “You know how Wallace was all tough and macho, blowing off my suggestion about this thing being related to TAFFIP. Well, after our last meeting, Ram and I were talking . . .”
Again, Leif felt Thor’s probing gaze, but he ignored it. Focused on the jabbering comms specialist and the deputy director.
Iliescu’s dark brows dove toward his nose. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. Really.” Cell swiped a finger across his upper lip. “I mean—okay, I asked her to look into this, check to see if she could find anything in there—”
“In where?” Iliescu demanded.
“The FBI servers.”
Iliescu cursed. Then huffed. Swallowed what looked like a grenade ready to detonate.
Cell had violated a dozen codes and laws. But they couldn’t change what he’d done now.
“Did she find anything?” Leif asked.
Eyes wide, Cell pointed at him. “That’s just it—I don’t know, because she’s missing now. I tried to call her. I went to her place, and she never came home. She hasn’t responded to my texts.” He seemed ready to toss his cookies. “I’m telling you, something happened to her. Honestly, I’m worried.”
“Did you get dumped again?” Ram Khalon’s voice carried through the command center as he emerged from the elevator.
Leif stiffened, feeling as if his words and conversation with the team could be replayed verbatim. And it probably would be. Then he’d have Ram breathing down his neck.
Thor grabbed Ram’s hand, then shoulder-bumped him.
Cell stabbed a finger at him. “Don’t get me started, man. You told me to do this, and now I have an asset who’s gone missing.”
“An asset?” Ram snorted.
Cell’s brows furrowed. “I ain’t messing with you, man. This is—”
“Calm down, Purcell.” Scratching the side of his face, Iliescu sighed.
“Do not tell me to chill out. When Palchinski died, you went ballistic. Then when Haven was in trouble, you were all over it.” Angry Cell looked like a squirrel on crack. “But now I have a friend who’s like the closest thing I’ve got to family in trouble, and you’re blowing me off?”
Iliescu straightened. “Like family?”
Cell shuffled his feet, a frown flickering through his expression. “Yeah.”
The noticeable difference in Cell’s vehemence made Thor chuckle. He’d clearly been caught in a lie.
“You don’t know her or me like that, so don’t go making assumptions.” Cell touched his fingers to his temples, then snapped his hands away, palms flat. “And can we just get past this to the fact that she’s been taken? If she’s not already dead, your jacked response might get her killed. And that—that I won’t let lie.”
“Wow, Barc, sounds like you really care for me.”
22
— SAARC HEADQUARTERS, VIRGINIA —
Life seemed to have a vendetta against him. Or maybe it was the curse come to roost in the insanity of an existence that filled his days with cruel pain and opposition. Ram stared at the athletic woman with more punch in the tips of her fingers than her fist and realized he had two options right now: pretend he didn’t know her, or call her out. Since she had that look in her gold-flecked eyes that warned she wouldn’t go unnamed, the choice had been made for him. But first, he needed to address something that bugged him.
He homed in on Cell. “How do you know her?”
Cell’s mouth opened, hesitation guarding his lips. He bounced a nervous gaze around. “You know Mercy?” Disbelief colored his words. “How? When?”
“Mercy.” Ram flicked his gaze to her. “Interesting choice.”
She gave him a lazy shrug with a sly smile, her eyes lit with the same att
raction he’d seen before. “I became what you never gave.”
Oof. She’d nailed that one—and the coffin lid on their relationship. Or maybe he’d done that when he walked away.
He had to admit, she still looked good. Really good. But then, she’d always had what it took to bring him to his knees. In his occupation, that could be deadly. And it had nearly killed them both. Thus, the leaving.
“Dude.” Cell huffed. “What is this? And what do you mean ‘interesting choice’?” He pivoted to Mercy. “Wait—what the fluff are you even doing here? Deputy Director?”
“Okay,” Iliescu said, stepping forward. He leveled a gaze at Ram, delivering a stiff warning to drop this and leave Lara Milton—or whoever she was these days—alone.
Mercy. That name would take some getting used to. She’d always been easy to read, at least for him, especially her intent. She’d want to talk. Pick up where they’d left off. But Iliescu wanted this buried. Probably to protect her. Or whatever mission had landed her in the SAARC command hub.
Interesting. Ram had always wondered who she reported to. Ironic that they were connected to the same man. But it was the worst possible scenario. Especially now. He couldn’t afford divided attention or loyalties, and that was the only thing she came with. Her amber gaze drew him into a line of questions, forced him to erect defensive barriers. She was too good at undoing him. Why are you here? What are you after? Are you going to be a problem?
Iliescu shouldered in, breaking Ram’s visual interrogation with a stiff warning in his expression. A warning that said, as an operator, Ram should know better than to get in the middle of another operator’s mission. He needed to yield before Iliescu made him.
Ram lowered his gaze. Took a step back.
“Okay,” the deputy director began. “Mr.—”
“Wait. I want to know what’s going on,” Thor said with a chuckle. “I’ve never seen Ram stand down like that.”
“I’m with Thor,” Runt said. “Some serious stuff just happened without a single word being spoken.”
Ram tightened his jaw. His hands were tied—but that was an excuse he allowed. He wouldn’t tell the guys they had a mission, a reason for gathering, and to focus on that. Nor would he verbally disrespect them, though his actions would do that very thing.