But losing his home how he did had rattled Sean in a way Alexei hated to see. Right now probably wasn’t the best time to broach the subject of officially moving in together. Maybe later, after this mess was cleaned up and Cillian was dead and buried six feet under.
It took all of five minutes for Sean to pack up what clothes he’d left in Alexei’s closet and a few toiletries from the bathroom. Alexei didn’t argue when Sean also stuffed a few changes of his own civilian clothes into the duffel bag.
“Smart. Not come back for a while,” Alexei said. “Ready?”
Sean shouldered the duffel bag with a nod. “Yeah.”
They left as quickly as they arrived, with Sean holding Alexei’s hand all the way to the car. They dumped the duffel bag in the trunk and got on the road, with Alexei picking a random direction to drive in.
“Where do you want to eat?” Sean asked.
“Not care. You choose.”
Alexei wasn’t picky, even if Sean could be. Some minutes and countless food reviews later, Sean finally held up his tablet for Alexei to see. “How about this?”
“Steak?”
“Yeah. Figured we should get something that we won’t be served on the base.”
“Base serve steak.”
“That block of charcoal isn’t steak, Lyosha.”
Alexei chuckled. “You want steak, we eat steak. Is good.”
Sean rattled off the address and Alexei mentally mapped out a route that would get them there in an hour as opposed to the thirty they could make it in under normal parameters. He kept his eyes on the road in front and behind them, searching for any possible tail, but didn’t see a single hint of one.
Sometime later, he finally pulled into a public parking garage tower, finding a spot on one of the middle levels. As he turned off the engine, Sean answered a call.
“Hi, Phaedra. How was school today?” Sean asked, in no hurry to leave the vehicle.
Alexei sat back and waited as Sean chatted for a couple of minutes with the little girl his parents were fostering. Alexei adored Phaedra the same way he adored his younger sisters. She was a shy little girl his entire family doted on, as she slowly came out of her shell and got the help she needed to overcome her trauma. Phaedra had become particularly close to Sean ever since he rescued her. He talked to her at least once a day if he wasn’t on a mission or busy with work.
For all her sweetness, Phaedra still had deep, lingering trauma from her time in Montana. Phaedra’s clairvoyant power still overwhelmed and scared her, despite the instinctive control her changed DNA came with. Which made Alexei glad Mercedes was guarding his family with Charlie Team. Mercedes would be able to help Phaedra handle any mental overload during this stressful time better than anyone else except for Katie. Phaedra didn’t like using her power, a fact Alexei knew the higher-ups were hoping she would grow out of.
Sean ended the call a few minutes later with a promise to call Phaedra in the morning. Alexei opened the car door and got out, automatically scanning the area. The only people he saw were two blonde young women getting out of a sporty-looking car that had come up a minute or so after they had parked. Both women looked to be in their early twenties and wore matching sorority inspired T-shirts beneath their unbuttoned coats. They seemed more interested in giggling through their conversation than anything else. Alexei mentally discarded the sorority sisters as a threat.
“How is Phaedra?” Alexei asked as he code-locked the car.
“She’s a little worried about everything going on.”
“Not tell her things be okay?”
“I didn’t want to lie to her.”
Alexei hummed a wordless agreement at that. Growing up in the refugee camps and cities of the Ukraine meant his parents had no choice but to treat him as a young adult despite being a small child at the time. It was the only way to stay safe. Sugar-coating the situation for Phaedra wouldn’t do her any good
They headed toward the pedestrian exit located down the garage incline rather than up since they were closest to that set of elevator banks. Sounds of honking horns from the street below filtered up through the air. The parking garage tower was open to the elements on all sides and a chill wind blowing through had Sean stepping closer.
But then he kept falling.
Alexei braced himself beneath the sudden dead weight of Sean collapsing against him. Alexei automatically caught him, holding Sean’s limp body close. The glint of a deeply embedded tranquilizing dart protruding from his back caught Alexei’s eye as adrenaline narrowed his focus. Whatever drug carried by the dart had been strong enough to immediately knock Sean unconscious.
Which meant it had been primed to take down a metahuman.
Alexei wrapped one arm around Sean, trying to hold the unconscious man up as he half-turned and raised an arm toward the threat behind them. Fire snapped into existence around his hand in angry curls that roared toward the threat. From somewhere below, he heard tires squealing, getting closer by the second.
Training was instinctive at this point, but instinct couldn’t outrun a hit from a neuro-jammer gun. The whine of the weapon echoed loudly in the parking garage and in Alexei’s ears. He only got a glimpse of the two sorority women through his fire, each braced in a two-handed shooting position, before a snarling wave of excruciating agony ripped through his body, cascading down every last nerve. What felt like an explosion went off in his brain, brightly colored spots filling his eyes until the world whited out like a supernova.
A punch to the face woke Sean up.
His head snapped to the side, teeth cutting into his cheek. The coppery tang of blood filled his dry mouth, coating his tongue. Beneath it was a bitter, almost medicinal flavor that spoke of drugs. Sean swallowed the taste of both and forced his eyes open, reeling from the hit and the vise-like pressure surrounding his head. Black dots danced in front of his eyes and he flinched away from the dim lights in the low ceiling above.
“So glad ye can finally join th’ party, Sean.”
The Irish-accented voice burrowed through the fog in Sean’s brain, kick-starting a sense of terror he hadn’t felt since Belfast. He tried to phase and ended up crying out as what felt like a jackhammer tried to punch through his skull. Dry-heaving against the stomach-churning agony in his brain, Sean struggled to take stock of the situation at hand beyond the obvious leashing of his power.
He sat in a chair, hands cuffed behind him, suit jacket missing and dress shirt torn over his right upper arm. A bruising soreness near his left shoulder blade stood out for its odd placement, but the deep ache in his left wrist spoke of his bioware and RealIdent being burned out. Which meant no working comms. A sharp sting from a wound in his right upper arm was in the exact location his subdermal tracker was once located. It felt like it had been cut out none too gently, which wasn’t surprising.
A thick tiredness tugged at Sean’s thoughts that was difficult to shake off. Every time he moved his head, embedded electrodes pulled at his scalp, the wires from the Faraday cage an itch he couldn’t scratch. No wonder why he couldn’t use his phase power.
Blinking rapidly, Sean struggled to push back his fear and clear his vision, the lazy smile on Cillian’s pockmarked face swimming into view. Sean’s aching brain processed where he was being held in slow flashes that eventually formed a windowless room with a cracked cement floor, a messy work table topped with tools, and a set of stairs leading to somewhere above. There was no way to figure out where he was, if he was even still in Washington, D.C.
With his bioware burned out and his tracker removed, a rescue wasn’t looking too likely.
Sean slowly scanned what he could see of the room and the handful of guards in civilian clothing scattered around it. Then he finally focused his blurry vision on the one man he never thought he’d ever see again.
“Cillian,” Sean got out around a bottom lip that was rapidly swelling up. His jaw felt hot and sore from the punch, one molar wiggling more than it should when he pressed his tongue aga
inst his teeth.
“I’d offer ye a pint o’ Guinness, but ye lost th’ right ta reciprocity when ye betrayed th’ cause,” Cillian said.
“Wasn’t my cause.”
A second punch caused his head to jerk backward, the tear in his bottom lip splitting wider when it cut across his teeth. Sean sucked in a ragged breath, blood and spit trickling down his chin to drip onto his shirt. The pain in his mouth was almost negligible to the burning agony that set his nerves on fire when he tried again to phase. He had to stop almost as soon as he started, gasping against the pain.
“Did ye think we would nae come prepared ta be dealin’ wi’ ye an’ yer partner?”
Sean’s memory was a fuzzy blank that wouldn’t fill. The last clear moment he remembered was riding in the car with Alexei on the way to—
Alexei.
Fear coursed through his body like ice, the pain he felt receding in the wake of the stomach-churning terror Sean felt at not knowing what had happened to Alexei. Coughing to clear his throat of a backwash of blood, he spat on the floor between Cillian’s boots.
“Where’s Alexei?” Sean rasped.
“Yer partner was harder ta wake up. He an’ I already had a little chat while ye had a bit o’ a kip.”
Cillian stepped aside and Sean stared numbly across the short distance to where Alexei sat, handcuffed to a chair like Sean was, his ankles bound to the legs of the chair with rough-hewn rope. He too had a Faraday cage covering his skull, short-circuiting his central nervous system in order to block his power. Dried blood painted the skin beneath his nose, and the left side of his face was beginning to swell from one too many punches. His gray eyes were open, a faint, glazed look to them that Sean remembered from Las Vegas during the summer.
Sean hadn’t been hit with a neuro-jammer gun, but Alexei clearly had.
“Alexei,” Sean said, leaning forward as far as his bound arms would allow.
Sean tried to keep his voice from shaking, but he hadn’t ever been in this situation before with someone he cared about. Sean remembered all too well the brutality Cillian had leveled against whoever the Reborn IRA designated an enemy, and that was before Splice chemical bombs came into the mix.
Cillian gripped Sean’s shoulder and slammed him back against the chair, fingers digging hard into his muscle. Sean had no choice but to look away from Alexei when Cillian blocked his view again.
“Did you follow us?” Sean asked, wondering where they’d gone wrong.
Cillian snorted, lifting a hand to slap Sean against the face. The blow sent pain lancing through Sean’s jaw. “We dinnae have ta follow ye when we knew where ye’d end up.”
Despite the soreness in his body and the spots of deeper pain, Cillian’s words were enough to chill Sean straight down to his bones. The utter certainty in Cillian’s voice could only mean one thing. “You’ve been in contact with Stanislav.”
“He’s a good business partner. Had ta rebuild after Emmet betrayed me an’ mine. Though from what I know about ye now, I have ta ask. How many lies did th’ CIA sow in th’ Reborn IRA? What did ye promise Emmet if he broke reciprocity wi’ his own brothers?”
Sean didn’t immediately answer.
Nothing he could say would satisfy the banked rage in Cillian’s blue eyes. The CIA had assigned Sean to the Belfast mission, posing as a member of the Irish mob out of America, to try to pin down the Reborn IRA’s Splice supplier at the time. What Sean didn’t know then, but knew now, was that Vitae Neurotherapeutics had been selling Splice on the black market, and the CIA Deputy Director Carter Bennett had a vested interest in keeping the agency’s nose out of his personal bottom line.
Bennett owned multiple shell companies that all had a stake in North Star International, Declan’s private military company that had provided security for Vitae Neurotherapeutics. He’d owned enough stock to retire as a multimillionaire at the time Sean was sent to Belfast. The MDF believed money was the driving force behind Bennett’s initial betrayal to the CIA. His betrayal for financial gain had morphed into a partnership with criminal organizations to blunt American intelligence investigations running down black market Splice suppliers and Splice labs.
The MDF had independently identified Bennett as the double agent in the CIA who quashed the internal investigation and report on the infiltration by a shape-shifting metahuman who had nearly killed Kyle and Alexei in Geneva some years ago. Bennett knew of Kyle and Alexei’s changed status because he’d overseen their Strike Force contracts with the CIA, and he knew about Sean. As the CIA deputy director, Bennett was in a unique position to play both sides against each other for his own personal gain.
“Thought you were already doing the CIA’s dirty work? You tried to kill me on Bennett’s order, remember?” Sean finally said.
Cillian backhanded him so hard that Sean’s ears rang with a tinny sound that made it difficult to focus on what Cillian was saying.
“Aye, but ‘twas after ye were already embedded. I was nae goin’ ta be a fuckin’ asset fer yer masters an’ Emmet was already turnin’ away from th’ cause ta line his own pockets. Ye expect me ta believe ye had nothin’ ta do wi’ that?”
Rather than swallow a mouthful of blood, Sean let it spill out of his mouth and trickle down his jaw. Something solid and sharp rolled over his tongue—a piece of broken tooth. He spit it out.
Getting solid confirmation Bennett was definitely a double agent sat heavily in Sean’s stomach, not just because of the betrayal. If Cillian had no compunctions to talk so openly about conspiring with a traitor, then it didn’t bode well for his and Alexei’s current situation.
“My orders involved you, not Emmet. If he turned on you, I had nothing to do with it,” Sean rasped out.
“Well, since that bastard is nae here, ye can pay fer both yer sins ta th’ cause.” Cillian leaned down, getting so close his features blurred out. His breath blew across Sean’s throbbing face when he spoke. “I had ye watched fer months back then ta learn yer habits. Ye were supposed ta die in Belfast. Thought ye had, an’ then Tomas comes back from a meetin’ wi’ th’ damn Dutchman sayin’ ye was alive an’ well an’ workin’ fer one o’ th’ richest men on th’ planet. Almost had me fooled before Declan told me th’ truth.”
Something cold and sharp pressed against Sean’s neck. He froze, trying to keep calm as Cillian casually ran the edge of a knife across his throat.
“I’d offer ye a job workin’ fer us, if ye really were Riley. Could’ve used someone wi’ a power like yers. But I know yer kind. Fuckin’ two-faced bastards, that’s all ye are. Family dinnae mean shit ta th’ likes o’ ye.”
“What do you want?”
Cillian pulled back, flipping the ceramic knife between his fingers. Sean knew that blade. It was one of the pair Alexei always had on his person. Sean swallowed against the nausea from an increasingly strong headache that wouldn’t go away until he could phase free of the Faraday cage. He just needed to break through the static in his brain, which was easier said than done.
Of all the known powers that Splice produced, phasing was the only one a Faraday cage couldn’t completely contain. Sean’s power was inherently damaging to all things electronic, and a Faraday cage, at its core, was a piece of technology designed to apply constant neurological containment by disrupting the nervous system. Unlike a neuro-jammer gun, it didn’t leave a person unconscious and incapable of using their powers afterward for hours before the brain and body reset itself. Once a Faraday cage was removed, most metahumans could use their powers again within minutes.
Sean just needed some uninterrupted time to concentrate to get them both free.
He didn’t think Cillian would be that generous.
“Because o’ ye an’ Emmet, I cannae ever go back ta Ireland. Home is too fuckin’ hot ta show me face. Ye were all about family when ye were wi’ us back then, but ‘twas all fuckin’ lies. So I’m—”
“Talk too much,” Alexei interrupted, his words slurring a little. “No one want to hear shit
words come out of shit mouth.”
Cillian straightened up and turned so he could glare at Alexei. Sean wanted to yell at Alexei for drawing Cillian’s attention away, but judging by the lazy smirk on Alexei’s face, that was his intention all along.
“Alexei—”
Cillian moved without warning, slamming his fist into Sean’s stomach so hard Sean vomited up all the blood he’d already swallowed. It splattered onto the floor between his feet as he hunched over Cillian’s fist, trying to remember how to breathe around his diaphragm contracting tightly from the punch. His lungs unlocked slowly, and Sean coughed, a dull, deep pain spreading through his middle.
Cillian unclenched his fist and shoved Sean upright again. Sean tried to get his breathing under control as every muscle in his torso protested moving.
“We knew where ye lived because o’ Stanislav. We knew who ye lived wi’. Today is yer lucky day, Sean. Ye dinnae get ta go first.” Cillian grabbed his chin and jerked his head up so he was staring right at Alexei. “Ye get ta watch.”
“No,” Sean whispered, tasting bile on his tongue, sour, like fear.
Cillian’s smile was a sick, cold thing Sean knew he’d always remember. Cillian pressed the blade of the ceramic knife against his cheek, the tip digging into the soft skin beneath his right eye.
“Ye look away, I take one o’ his eyes. Ye make a sound, an’ ye will nae like what I’ll do. Clear?”
Sean nodded his head a fraction of an inch, the knife point drawing blood from the motion. He knew what Cillian was capable of; had seen the results of his methods in the people he’d brutalized during the time Sean had been in Belfast.
Cillian always took his time.
This was no different.
Cillian waved several of the men who’d so far been standing silently in the background closer. “Strap his arms down.”
In the Blood (Metahuman Files Book 4) Page 16