“How are we going to play this once we walk out of here?” I asked. “There are only so many ways they could have found out who I am, and while I’m very happy to bank on their goodwill, I’m not going to trust the French unless they give me a very good reason to.” It was kind of funny to realize that while I was convinced that Elle had no ulterior motives besides thanking us for helping her people, I just knew there was trouble brewing on the horizon. If it wasn’t going to come from the French, I was sure Hamilton would jump into that breach.
Nate looked positively nonplussed. “They seem to have taken a liking to you—“
“Unexpectedly, you mean?”
“Unexplainable with what we know right now,” he corrected. “Until we know why, we have to play it by ear. I say we do what’s worked so far.”
“You mean, I do all the talking and you do all the sulky glowering?”
I was surprised that my barb hit home, but probably shouldn’t have. Bucky’s revelations about what had been going on behind the scenes in his camp had had a sobering effect on me. I could only guess at how much that had upended Nate’s plans.
“It only makes sense you take the lead for now. Weasel all the information you can out of them. Then we’ll decide together what we do with it.” He hesitated, then added, “As much as it pains me to say, don’t deliberately antagonize Hamilton unless you absolutely have to. Until we know what his mission is really about, all we can do is flail blindly in the dark, hoping to get a lucky hit in. I know you are tempted to use any leverage you could gain here for payback. Don’t. Be diplomatic and kill his people with kindness. They’ve had years seeing you as my plaything. You did a lot over the past few days to show them that you’re a force to be reckoned with. Force them to reckon.”
That left a bitter taste on my tongue, but I nodded my agreement without protest or hesitation. “Anything else?”
Nate was already shaking his head when someone started banging against the door to our little hidey-hole, or kicking the living shit out of it from how it sounded. “Time for you cockroaches to scuttle back into the light!” none other than my beloved Capt. Hamilton shouted, loud enough to make me hunch my shoulders. As soon as I realized that I was doing it, I suppressed the impulse. Nate and I shared another look, the anger in his gaze nicely mirroring my own. Had he always been that bad about keeping a lid on it and I just hadn’t realized it? Or was that powder keg about to blow?
“Coming!” I shouted, then couldn’t help but giggle when my gaze fell on the stained thermal in Nate’s hand. “Or I have been, repeatedly,” I added more levelly, garnering myself another flat stare. “Oh, come on! That was funny. Actually…” I trailed off there, considering. “Do I look freshly fucked? Because for maximum impact, I think I should.”
While generally not one to rebuke my advances, Nate preferred to play it more low key than that. I expected one of his usual barbs, something that would leave me just exasperated enough that it was easy for me to cut down on my apprehension on coming face to face with Hamilton and let me appear cocky and without a care. What I didn’t expect was for Nate to come for me, slamming me against the still-shut door, to start downright devouring my mouth while shoving his hands down my slightly loose pants. After getting off only minutes ago, I was sensitive enough that it really didn’t take much until I was screaming against his lips, no more than a muffled moan making it out. That Hamilton continued to throw a tantrum outside barely registered.
So worth it.
Leaning back against the door—quite contentedly—I donned a grin in between my slowing pants. “Or, you know. You could go out there and stop holding back. Take control. Be the guy again who told me not to be stupid and let my quest for tampons be derailed by political-correctness-motivated stupidity.”
Nate answered with a wry smile that turned sarcastic within seconds. “So that’s the part you’re never going to let me live down?” When all he got was a blank stare, he shrugged. “Yes, I could do that, but it would be so much smarter if I didn’t. Because the first thing I would do would be to kill Hamilton. Then I would have to kill the four or five of his people who’d take grave offense, ultimately leaving us with too few people to complete whatever his mission is, I’m sure.”
“Who says we should complete it?”
Now Nate’s expression turned condescending. “Oh, come on. We both know that we both have too much bloodhound in us to just quit now, even more so after losing five or six good people to the cause already.”
“That you had to kill,” I stressed. “And not sure that ‘good’ moniker befits anyone lurking out there in the corridor right now.”
Nate ignored my barb. “I gave my word, and even if you seem to value you doing the same less than I feel comfortable with, I saw how excited you got when Cole dropped that little snippet about why we’re here. You wouldn’t miss the chance to find out if my brother actually found a cure for the side effects of our untimely expiration or not.”
The accusation in his voice irked me more than I liked to admit—and also more than the hint of gloating he couldn’t hide as he revealed that last observation.
“I would keep an oath that I felt wasn’t forced at gunpoint by people I only trust as far as knowing I can’t trust them,” I insisted.
“You don’t even try to deny that I’m right.”
“Why should I? Yes, if there’s a chance your brother found a cure—and, likely, by extension a cure for the zombie plague—I want to know. I doubt they would have carted us halfway around the world on a wild guess.” I paused there, thinking—and also wondering if that was a byproduct of the serum screwing with my mind as well, but doubted it. If it furthered my knee-jerk reactions, I doubted the reinforcing reflection would help. I was likely just mellow because I felt really good right now—and a little high.
Nate snorted, but that typically male, I-just-thoroughly-satisfied-my-woman look he gave me mollified me somewhat. “And there she is again.”
Which was to say, thoroughly confused me. “‘She?’” I echoed.
“The woman who knows that the entire world lies at her feet and there’s nothing she can’t conquer,” he explained. “Last time you were looking at me like this was when we hit Dispatch and the Silo for the first time. Before the factory—”
“And everything went to shit,” I finished for him, exhaling forcefully as the usual pang of pain twinged through my heart. “I can’t believe that’s only been, what? Seven months ago? Eight? Feels like a lifetime.” Nate didn’t protest my assessment. “Guess I had a lot to work through.” Again, no contest to that. I couldn’t help but mull that over some more—which got increasingly harder when Hamilton assaulted the door once more, his shouts muffled into unintelligibility. The door behind my back shuddered dramatically, my weight not quite enough to keep it entirely shut. It stopped moving when Nate sagged sideways against it, both of us leaning into the sturdy material with our shoulders now. “I’m so not going to miss this,” I noted.
He gave a mirthless bark of laughter for an answer, but his expression remained surprisingly calm. “This will pass also,” he reminded me. “It’s only for a few more weeks, until we’re done here. Once we’re on the destroyer, we can easily avoid each other, and after that…” He trailed off there, reminding me that neither of us had a clue what to do once we were back across the ocean. The only thing that was sure was that we weren’t going to stick around, and not just because of Hamilton. That latent unease that had started clinging to my soul since Bucky’s reveals about Decker—the ghost he and Nate both had assumed was a thing of their past—returned, making my skin itch all over.
“I want to go back to how things were back then,” I found myself voicing my thoughts without much intent, but the words rang truer than I’d expected. “I want to be that woman again. I don’t want to give a shit about anything or anyone outside of our group. Fuck helping people who don’t even want our help or only if they can abuse our gullibility. Who fucking needs a job anymore
? We just do our thing, and that’s it. We can easily fortify our hideout and get whatever we need to keep it going forever. That’s what we should have done in the first place.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d come to that conclusion, and Nate didn’t protest. The next bang against the door just seemed to underline the necessity of acting on that plan.
Taking another second to ground myself—for all the good that would do me as soon as I got face to face with that asshole outside the door once more—I pulled away, mentally giving myself a shake. Nate was right—nothing we could do about our situation now… except that wasn’t true. I couldn’t control Hamilton, but I sure as hell could control how much I let him goad me on. Maybe it was simply because I felt more self-assured now—and with the edge of my anger quite dulled due to residual feel-good shit pumping through my veins—or maybe it was Nate’s reminder about how things had been last spring, but I sure as hell wouldn’t let Bucky continue to rain on my parade. If I really missed feeling like I was the queen of the world and could do whatever the fuck I pleased, why not try getting back into that mindset? Super strength and endurance certainly didn’t hurt.
“So, play it by ear?” I asked once more, getting ready to face the music.
“The same as usual,” Nate agreed, picking up the soiled thermal and getting ready to shut off the flashlight while I got the door handle.
“Then let’s do this.”
My pull on the door was a little too hard, making it open in a dramatic motion that almost jerked it out of my hand before I could let go. I used the momentum to propel myself into the corridor, ending up smack in Hamilton’s face, who’d been getting ready for the next round. He didn’t seem particularly pleased seeing me waltz right up to him, but I did my best to keep my shoulders down and body relaxed as I slipped past him—the fingers of my right hand wrapping around my Glock where it was once more stashed in the holster at the small of my back. I didn’t draw, didn’t even tense that arm, but it was damn reassuring to have my gun ready should I need it.
“Are you finally done?” Bucky sneered in my face. It was unclear what reaction he expected to get from me, but the easy—and still a little winded—smile he got seemed to enrage him further.
“What’s the urgency?” I quipped, more lighthearted than I would have managed earlier. “Just because you can’t find anyone to bump uglies with doesn’t mean that I can’t get laid.”
A day ago—heck, a few hours ago—I would have cringed at what seemed like just the next instance of my constant foot-in-mouth issue, but unlike before whenever we’d skirted any issue even remotely alluding to anything sexual, I felt my confidence surge rather than falter. Over the past weeks, I’d given Hamilton way too much power over me because of that, and this was going to stop now. I might have felt a little ridiculous at the notion of wrapping myself into a security blanket made out of my own sexuality, but really, why shouldn’t I? It was about time I owned my shit once more, and stopped letting anyone, least of all some limp-dicked asshole like Hamilton or Taggard, take that away from me. And seeing the anger in his eyes let me know that, somehow, he realized what was going on.
It was also impossible to miss the confrontational expression on Nate’s face where he ended up just inside the door, not bothering to step around Hamilton to physically shield me with his body because, lo and behold, I didn’t need that anymore.
Keeping my smirk in place, I slowly withdrew my hand from my gun, relaxing into an easy stance. Let Hamilton see that I wasn’t afraid of him. And yes, having a few of the French at my back now that I was facing Hamilton helped, a little. It also reminded me of my recent trust issues, which took some of the glow from my mental triumph, small as it was.
Bucky seemed more than ready to sneer his misgivings at us forcing him to wait for us to join him right into my face, but Elle, stepping up next to me so the three of us could see her without having to stop our childish glaring game, spoke up first. The look on her face had a bemused quality to it but was lacking some of the previous leniency. Peachy—we were already wearing out our welcome.
“I’m sorry that I have to interrupt your conversation,” she offered, pausing long enough to let her neutral tone be as chiding as it was intended. “We have finally established satellite connection, and, at best, that gives us a fifteen-minute window.”
I had a certain feeling where this was going, and quickly nodded for her to go on, hoping that neither Nate nor Bucky would take this chance to have at it and make us all look bad. Another missed golden opportunity to take Hamilton down a notch, but Nate’s assessment had been right: if we killed him, we might as well consider asking for asylum in France, because getting back to the States would likely be short of impossible.
A slight woman with light brown hair behind Elle gestured further down the corridor. “Gabriel Greene wants to talk to you.”
Chapter 3
My first reaction was to want to crow in victory because my guess as to who was to blame for our surprisingly warm welcome had been correct. I cut down on the impulse quickly, also because riding shotgun with that sentiment came the almost-missed sense of paranoia that always shut me up. So the black, fat spider in his New Angeles web had flung his reach right across the ocean—answering one question and posing a hundred new ones. Rather than dwell on it, I gave the woman a nod, starting forward.
Elle fell into step beside me, ignoring our two hulking, glowering followers. “We have time for introductions later. The weather is clear tonight so we should have good reception, but you’re well-advised to get your important things stated first,” she iterated.
I acknowledged that with another nod, a little absentminded as I tried to sort my suddenly buzzing thoughts. There I’d had weeks with a lot of mental downtime to make up theory after theory, and suddenly found myself with seconds to decide which one to go with.
The turn the woman had indicated before led into a large, dome-shaped room, full of the remainder of our people mostly scattered around the perimeter, and a handful of not-yet-introduced French. The half closer to the door was dominated by a table that was large enough that ten people could have easily lain down on top of it. Red was leaning against it, facing the opposite wall but just now looking back over his shoulder at us, his expression carefully neutral. On the wall, there was a bank of monitors connected to three workstations, all but one dark. I couldn’t help but compress my lips in not-quite irrational misgivings at seeing Greene’s face on screen, leached of color and with static because of the less-than-stellar connection pixelating the image every few seconds. No surprise that Gita was busy talking to him, Tanner lurking at her side as if to ensure nobody would keep her from giving her status update.
As I passed by the table—on the free side, to avoid bumping into Richards—I caught a few odd smirks but did my best to ignore them. I could tell that my face was still flushed and I was obviously not cold although I was only wearing a tank top on my upper body. While it had sounded like a neat idea to in every possible way rub it in Bucky’s face that any sway he held over me was slipping fast, I hadn’t exactly considered who else would see me like that. Well, no avoiding that now, and I refused to feel weird about it.
Leave it to Greene to make that impossible.
As I stepped up to Gita—and not so incidentally to where Burns was lounging against the wall next to one of the computers—Greene’s attention shifted to me, and Gita shut up after finishing her current sentence, a recount of what we’d found at the conservatory, from what I caught. I rocked to a halt trying to still look relaxed, but as I crossed my arms over my chest I was suddenly reminded that, unless I stuck my hands into my armpits, my fingers would be in plain view. So I quickly continued the motion and dropped my arms to my sides, putting my fingers onto the tops of my thighs where they would hopefully be out of the focus of the webcam, wherever it was mounted. If that meant I was idly fingering the holsters of my Beretta and knife, that was pure coincidence.
Rather than greet
me like any normal person would, Greene squinted at me, and I could tell that he didn’t miss any of the scars now in plain view due to my state of undress. His eyes returned to my face, yet not quickly enough to keep me from gnashing my teeth. “Is that your freshly fucked face? I really didn’t need to ever see that.”
Irritation burned away any thread of self-consciousness left from feeling like a mutilated freak-show, forcing me to fight for composure for a moment. Rather than snap at him, I donned as pleasant a fake smile as I could. “Gee, it’s so sweet of you all to always be up in my business and worried about the state of my marriage,” I drawled. Greene’s mouth snapped open as if to refute that, but I talked right over him. “I hear we’re pressed for time? I’ll make it short then. I assume it’s because of you that the French not only were expecting us, but have done so with the notion that I’m somehow some kind of savior-level VIP?”
From the corner of my vision I could see Bucky make a face where he’d stopped next to Red, while Nate—having settled just out of his reach, next to Burns—didn’t hide a snort. Oh, the overflow of support was melting my cold, dead heart. I had to admit, the situation was kind of funny, and not just because it irked Hamilton to no end. Elle, to my other side, didn’t react, clearly content to observe rather than judge prematurely.
Greene’s obvious mirth about the truth of my observation surpassed his gloating at my obviously flushed state from moments before. “That is correct. I will leave the explanation of the details to the lovely Madame Moreau, and Gita should be able to fill in the blanks on our side.” At the mention of her name, Gita hunched her shoulders, looking slightly uncomfortable—a reaction I couldn’t quite place. It couldn’t be because she’d figured I hadn’t worked out yet that she was along because she was Greene’s spy—that had been obvious from the day we’d set out on the journey north to the Silo, and then so, so far beyond that.
“Instead you’re going to tell me why we’re here?” I ventured a guess, then turned to give Richards a blank stare. “Told you the time was running out where you giving me a bone to chew on would make a difference. Clock’s officially stopped ticking.” Richards didn’t react, and Hamilton doing the same confirmed my guess that Red playing “good cop” to his “bad cop” had been going on since we’d come to that damn Canadian base of theirs.
Green Fields (Book 9): Exodus Page 4