Forever Mine: Callaghan Brothers, Book 9

by Abbie Zanders

  The beefy guy on the other side turned, clearly expecting someone else. Before his eyes fully widened, Jack disabled him with a stabbing jab to the throat and sharp rap to the back of the head.

  “Pathetic,” he murmured.

  “Can’t get good help these days. Quit playing around and get your ass out here. I’m going for the girls. Going dark in thirty seconds.”

  Girls that had been no doubt brought out as candidates for the possible buyer, a.k.a, Charlie’s distraction team.

  Jack slipped on his night vision goggles, anticipating the impending blackout, mentally counting down the seconds. He found Brian in a small room off to the left, unconscious with wrists and ankles bound. Judging by the facial swelling, ugly bruises, and dried blood, he’d taken quite a beating. Like the warrior he was, Jack forced his emotions into the background to deal with later.

  “Come on, buddy. Time to get you home.”

  Charlie cursed in his earpiece. “Jack, there’s another girl down there. New arrival, not with the others.”

  “On it.”

  “Five minutes.”

  “Yep. Got it.”

  Shite. Jack heaved Brian over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, then continued down the hall, following the route he’d memorized from the blueprints. The plan had been for Charlie to get the girls, him to get Brian. But there was reality again, keeping things interesting.

  The first two doors he came to were unlocked and unoccupied, the third wasn’t. Unlike the others, this one had an old-fashioned key lock, so waving the magic digital wand wasn’t going to help.

  “Haul ass. You’re about to get some company.”

  More reality. Terrific.

  Heavy footsteps and shouts sounded behind him. Jack paused, turned, and fired two silent shots into the darkness, grunting in satisfaction when each was following by a dull thud. Then he aimed at the lock and fired once more.

  In the dim light, he spotted a young woman cringing in the corner, arms raised defensively over her head. She looked like a college kid. A young, terrified college kid.

  “Tick-tock.”

  As if he needed another reminder.

  “Hey, what do you say we get you the hell out of here?” he tried.

  She peered up over her arms, understandably suspicious. They grew huge when she spotted Brian’s limp figure still bent over his shoulder. “Is he dead?”

  “No, just resting. Let’s go.”

  “He tried to save me.”

  “And I’m trying to save both of you. Let’s go.”

  She bit her lip indecisively, but pulled herself to standing, using the wall for support. Jack remained near the doorway, listening for the new arrivals that were sure to show any time now.

  “Now would be good.”

  “Move. Now,” Jack barked, making her jump. He didn’t like playing the hard-ass, but he didn’t have time to mollycoddle her, either. The command must have penetrated some of her fear, because she took one step forward... and all but collapsed.

  Shouts echoed from the far end of the corridor. Shite. They were out of time.

  He lunged forward and lowered his shoulder, half-dragging, half-carrying her as they hoofed it toward the exit. It wasn’t easy; Brian was heavy and the girl was stumbling, but the shouts of more armed guards pounding down the stairs and no way to reach his own weapons were powerful motivators.

  Charlie was waiting at the exit, relieving him of the girl, then taking off into the darkness. Jack followed, noting a downed guard and another dog along the way. In a series of moves reminiscent of BUD/s training, Charlie handed the girl back to Jack and scaled the wall. The dead weight lifted from Jack’s left shoulder, then his right as Charlie hefted Brian up. Then Jack scaled the wall, came down on the other side. He took a brief moment to catch his breath before Charlie eased Brian and the girl down, then joined him. They jogged about a quarter mile to the waiting Humvee.

  “Well?” Charlie asked as they drove away, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. “Did you have fun?”

  “Too easy,” Jack said with a grin. Tomorrow, he’d probably hurt like hell, but tonight, his body was primed and racing with adrenaline.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  October 2015

  Pine Ridge

  Memories assaulted him as he went into the back entrance of the pub. The kitchen had been renovated, but he still half-expected to see Kathleen at the scarred table, or feel the push of warmth on his lower body as his boys rushed to greet him.

  Now it was Taryn who greeted him with a smile and his grandchildren who attached themselves to his legs.

  “Hey Dad,” Taryn grinned.

  “Hello, lass. Is Jake around?”

  A shadow passed over her features before she could fully mask it. “No.”

  Jack knew that look all too well. It was the same one Kathleen had when she didn’t want to tell him something.

  “Where is he?”

  “He and Ian are out of town for a couple of days,” she said carefully.

  Translation: they were on a mission. A mission he knew nothing about. Anger began to simmer inside him. Kane might be running the ops now, but they’d always kept him in the loop.

  “Why didn’t anyone tell me?” he asked, but he already knew the answer. Saw it in her sympathetic, violet eyes. They didn’t want him to worry. Jack was sick and tired of being treated like a fragile old man. As if he hadn’t trained every single one to be the absolute best, to make sure they always came home.

  He would have told her so, too, if the little ones hadn’t been about.

  “I’m going upstairs for a while,” he told her firmly instead. “No, I don’t want anything. No, I don’t want company. And yes, I can make it just fine on my own.”

  He took the steps one by one, clutching the railings on either side like a gymnast on the parallel bars. It was slow going, but an improvement over the last time he’d been here. He wasn’t quite as out of breath, and the pressure on his chest was negligible in comparison.

  Up in his private quarters, Jack sank down in the ratty old recliner. It was nothing like the heated, vibrating chair he had at the farm, but it felt comfortable. Familiar.

  He’d moved to a smaller room when Jake officially took over ownership of the Pub. At that point, they’d begun remodeling the living quarters in earnest, all of them grown. He hadn’t any interest in buying new furnishings for his space, though. If they had been good enough for Kathleen, then they were good enough for him.

  The room wasn’t a shrine, by any means. Life had gone on, and he’d gone on with it. That didn’t mean he’d left everything behind. There was comfort to be had in sinking into the same chair he’d fallen asleep in countless times with one or more boys on his chest. In sliding between the sheets of the same bed in which he and Kathleen had created their family.

  Memories stared back at him in the forms of framed pictures. A couple of his parents, of Kathleen’s. Wedding pictures – his and every one of his sons. Shots of the boys growing up. A photo of him, Brian, and Charlie after that first mission.

  That had been a turning point, the beginning of what eventually became the Ghost Team. Oh, it hadn’t happened all at once. He was certain that despite the rush and sense of purpose that mission had given him, it would be the last. Just went to show how naïve he’d been then.

  The truth was, he liked it. He liked putting his skills to use, knowing he was making a difference. And while he hadn’t been in it for the money, it was a hell of a nice perk. Still, he would never have gone again if Kathleen had asked him not to. She must have sensed that on some level, he needed it. And damn if she hadn’t actually been fucking proud of him for it, too.

  He still remembered how when he’d come back, they’d make love for hours. Afterward, she’d drape her languid body, softened by as much pleasure as he could give, over his and tell him how much she loved him. What a good, selfless man he was...

  It was bullshite, of course. He’d been nothing but selfish then, ri
ding high, foolishly thinking he’d paid enough dues to earn an easy ride. And why wouldn’t he? He had the perfect wife, the perfect family. The pub was doing well, and he was off playing hero every couple of months.

  For a couple of years, he’d had it all.

  He’d been a fool to think it would last.

  January, 1991

  Pine Ridge

  “One more for the road.” Kathleen handed him a Thermos of hot, homemade chicken soup and a flask filled with whiskey. He’d been partaking of both in an attempt to kick the head and chest cold he’d been battling for the last week or so.

  Jack accepted both, stuffing the flask, which had been his father’s, into an inside pocket for later, when he wasn’t driving the treacherous snow and ice covered roads up to the private air strip. The winter had been a brutal one thus far, with record lows and above average snowfalls, making travel difficult, even for those accustomed to mountain winters.

  Concern filled her eyes. “Are you sure you’re feeling up to this, Jack?”

  “I’m feeling much better, thanks to your expert care,” he assured her. A nasty virus was working its way through the region, and had all but closed down the local schools. Kieran had been the first to get it, but one by one, it had been claiming the rest of them. Kathleen had been the only one spared thus far. She’d been playing nursemaid around the clock, pushing fluids, dispensing over the counter pain meds, fluffing pillows and providing the comfort only a mother could.

  He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead, frowning when it felt warmer than usual. “Are you running a fever? How are you feeling?”

  “I’m fine. Just tired.”

  Stepping back slightly, he focused on the dark purple crescents under her tired eyes and the paleness of her complexion. “You look pale.”

  “It’s the middle of January in Pennsylvania,” she said with a weary smile. “Of course I look pale.”

  She wasn’t being totally honest with him; the way her eyes remained fixed on his chin instead of meeting his gaze was a dead giveaway. That and the way she petted his chest and arm, a soothing form of distraction she had perfected over the years.

  Not for the first time, he regretted agreeing to this mission, and not only because the flu had knocked him on his ass. He’d been taking on more assignments lately, mostly to keep an eye on Brian. Brian had lost Adonia the year before and he wasn’t coping well.

  From what Brian had told him, he and Adonia had been fighting over whether or not Alexis should be enrolled in public Kindergarten. Alexis was a common point of contention between them -—Brian felt she should have as normal as childhood as possible, whereas Adonia wanted to home-school their daughter, or at the very least enroll her in a private, controlled learning environment that would cater to her special needs. Things grew heated and tempers flared. Brian left to cool down, and when he returned later that night, he found her unconscious and unresponsive.

  The official cause of death was listed as a subarachnoid hemorrhagic stroke, most likely a result of Adonia’s rare bleeding disorder. Brian blamed himself, convinced that it was their argument that had elevated her blood pressure to a high enough level to cause a weakened blood vessel to give way. Heaped upon that was the belief that if he hadn’t walked out, he would have been able to get her the medical attention she needed before it was too late.

  The doctors didn’t agree. After the autopsy, they’d concluded that Adonia’s weakened vessels were ticking time bombs, and that nothing could have saved her. Unfortunately, Brian’s crushing guilt wasn’t allowing him to accept that, not yet.

  Jack hoped he would eventually, though, because Brian still had Alexis to think of. Knowing that she suffered from the same disease as her mother made it doubly hard for Brian, because he was terrified of losing her as well. Brian was signing up for everything he could, leaving a confused and hurt Alexis at his mother’s while he tried to exorcise his demons in the only way he knew how -—with extreme prejudice. Jack had had to intervene more than once to keep the little girl from having to grieve the loss of another parent.

  That’s why he was doing this. And Kathleen, God bless her, she understood.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he told her.

  “I know. Go. Brian needs you. We’ll be fine.”

  He wished there was a way to put this off, but he’d already delayed as long as he could. Accepting her assurance, he made a silent vow to get in, get out, and get back as quickly as possible.

  “When I get back, I’m going to spoil you rotten,” he promised, drawing her close against him. “Draw warm baths and wait on you hand and foot. Take care of you the way you take care of all of us.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” she murmured. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

  “In the meantime, take your sister up on her offer to help, okay?”

  “She’s got her hands full with Seamus and the kids. They all came down with it at the same time.”

  “Mom! Bring the bucket!” Sean bellowed from the bedroom down the hall. “Shane’s going to ... uh, never mind. Better change that to a mop.”

  Kathleen exhaled and kissed his chest. “Duty calls. Come back to me, Jack Callaghan.”

  “Always,” he promised.

  Jack knew something was up when Charlie was waiting for them at the extraction point with the sleek black chopper instead of their regular transport.

  “Go on,” he urged Brian. They were both thinking the same thing -—that something had happened to Alexis. Brian ran ahead and spoke to Charlie; Charlie put a hand on Brian’s shoulder and shook his head.

  Dread began to pull in Jack’s stomach, but his gut didn’t take a complete nosedive until Brian turned and looked at him.

  “What’s going on?” he asked as he drew up level with them. “Why the express?”

  Charlie’s face was too even, too controlled to be anything good. “There’s a situation, Jack. You’re needed at home ASAP.”

  “What situation?”

  For just a second, Charlie’s mask broke and sympathy poured out of his eyes in waves. “It’s Kathleen. She’s been taken to the hospital. Tony here is going to get you there.” Charlie indicated the pilot, who nodded. Jack couldn’t see the guy’s eyes behind the mirrored aviator shades, but he’d seen enough to recognize the stiff body language of the bearer of bad news.

  Ice filled his body, the kind that only came with the knowledge that something really, really bad had happened. Somehow, his body had gone into autopilot. He jumped into the copter, strapped himself in, and donned his commset while the pilot did his thing.

  “What’s going on, Charlie?”

  Charlie didn’t answer as the chopper left the ground in a vertical shot and then started hauling ass toward home.

  The heavy weight of dread doubled when the chopper touched down not at the private airfield, but on the emergency landing pad on the roof of the Pine Ridge hospital building. Jack was close to losing his shite by that point, because no one would tell him a Goddamn thing. All he knew was that Erin was at the Pub with the boys and Kathleen was in the hospital.

  “What’s going on, Dad?” Jack asked when Conlan met him at the rooftop entrance. The older man looked as if he’d aged at least ten years since they’d seen him at Christmas less than a month earlier.

  “It’s Katie, Jack. The doctors say it’s pneumonia.”

  “Pneumonia?” Some of Jack’s worry eased a little. Pneumonia was bad, but nothing compared to the horrors he’d been imagining.

  “Aye. Kane found her passed out in the kitchen this morning and called the ambulance.”

  Passed out. Which meant that she had picked up the flu, too, and had pushed herself too hard -—again. The woman put everyone else’s needs above her own, too stubborn to ask for help. He and she were going to sit down and have a serious talk as soon as she was feeling better.

  Conlan paused outside her room. “Jack, you should know...”

  “I should know what?” Jack asked, impatien
t to see his wife after spending the last four hours imagining the worst.

  “It’s ... it’s not good, son.”

  Jack heard the words, but they didn’t make sense. He’d had a bout of pneumonia when he was a kid, right after Fitz had dared him to strip down to his skivvies and take a quick dip in the half-frozen pond behind his grandmother’s house. Pneumonia was just like a bad chest cold. Antibiotics, rest, fluid, that’s what she needed. It was 1991, for God’s sake, not the old days when they didn’t have medicine for that kind of thing.

  Besides, Kathleen was strong. He’d never met a stronger, more vibrant woman.

  Buoyed by those thoughts, he wasn’t prepared for the sight awaiting him. Kathleen was in bed, her skin so white it blended in with the bleached sheets. Her hair and the dark bruises under the eyes were the only splashes of color. The bed was raised slightly beneath her shoulders; silver poles holding transparent bags loomed beside her; a series of tubes snaking into her delicate arms filling her with God knew what.

  Jack had to stop and catch his breath. She’d never looked so small or so fragile, not even after the birth of the twins. He reminded himself that she was tough. This was Kathleen. She was going to be just fine.

  He moved beside the bed, eyes fixing first on her lips and the bluish tint that stained them. Then on the shallow, rapid rise and falls of her chest. He reached out and took her hand in his, shocked by how cold it was. What the hell was wrong with these people? Didn’t they know she was freezing?

  As he looked around for an extra blanket for her, her eyes fluttered open. She stared at him for several long moments before recognition dawned. “Jack. You’re okay.”

  The whispered words were muffled beneath the clear plastic mask strapped over her nose and mouth. Her hand lifted as if to remove it, but stopped about half way and dropped over her abdomen as if she didn’t have the strength.

  “Of course I’m okay. I promised didn’t I?”

  She smiled weakly. “Yes.”

  “How about you?” he managed through the pain in his chest.