by Carla Cassidy, Evelyn Vaughn, Harper Allen, Ruth Wind, Cindy Dees
But Jonas White cursed, only confirming what she thought she’d heard. Ashurbeyli’s voice. And Razidae, sounding defeated for the first time, murmured, “Inshallah,” abandoning himself to God’s hands.
“Where is she?” Ashurbeyli demanded, much closer now. Selena wished she dared to look; as it was she could only imagine it—White in the corner, threatening Razidae. Ashurbeyli coming up on them from the adjacent hall. Former allies, eyeing each other with blame and dislike. “And did you think you could get away with your betrayal?”
“Make up your mind,” White responded with irritation. “Do you want to get your hands on our meddling FBI agent, or do you want to posture and threaten me?”
“She was right.” Ashurbeyli didn’t sound quite like himself, and he’d stopped just around the corner. Still out of her sight. “You had your own agenda all along. These guns—” and he said it with an emphasis that made Selena think he had gestured with one of the guns in question “—they came from you. You lied to us from the start…made us think the United States was backing us. Gave us inferior weapons—and then came to manipulate us into saving your own faithless hide by risking our own!”
“That sounds just about right. Now get over it. Do you want me, or do you want the American woman? Because if you leave me alone, you can have her.”
“What—?” No, he definitely didn’t sound like himself. His voice had a ragged quality; his mind wasn’t so quick as it had been.
“She’s in that room just around the corner. If you can take her, she’s yours. If you let me go on my merry way. Otherwise I’m afraid we’ll be forced into a distasteful standoff right here, and I note that my gun is properly aimed.”
Then he’s not aiming at me—
“Go, then,” Ashurbeyli said, his words thick with disgust. “I think in fact that you are the worst thing I can do to the Western capitalist—”
“—dogs,” White completed for him. “Yes, yes, I know. We’re all infidel scum. But you and I can still come to this agreement. I leave her to you, and you leave me to my own fate. It is, I might add, a limited time offer.”
A moment passed in which they must have come to some unspoken agreement, for just as Selena eased around to peek into the hall, White said, “Good, then,” and gestured her way with the gun. Behind him, Razidae struggled for breath, pale beneath his normally robust complexion.
Ashurbeyli came around the corner, not as wary as he might have been. Staggered around the corner was more like it, with blood covering the side of his shirt and flowing fast enough to make the material gleam. He saw her; saw her gun, and raised his own at her in what seemed like a token gesture. His face had paled; his intensity had faded into mere determination.
And White watched. Like a greedy voyeur, he watched. As Razidae attempted protest, White shifted his weight just enough to make the man choke, closing his fingers so they dug into Razidae’s windpipe.
Ashurbeyli, his finger tightening on the trigger but then holding fast, said the last thing she expected. “I met your husband.”
Cole! She didn’t have enough nerve to ask what had happened. Not at first. Too busy fighting all the stupid things fear did to her—the greased, wobbly knees, the watery spine, the sudden inability to breathe. And when she finally managed to open her mouth, he cut her off.
“I just buried him under that bomb. And before I left him there to die, I let him know I was coming after you.”
Horrified, she met the triumph in his gaze, holding the connection…a request for truth between enemies at the end of the battle. She saw there his triumph, and saw also his sorrow…and then a brief flicker of something that she suddenly recognized as regret. “No,” she breathed, but it was still more question than belief—more hope than knowledge. “You didn’t.”
He closed his eyes—briefly, but still long enough to make him vulnerable, and she didn’t think he’d intended to do it. And though her finger tightened on the heavy trigger of her gun, she didn’t pull it. She told herself she wasn’t quite ready to upset the balance of the moment, not with White standing poised to crush Razidae’s throat. She told herself it was too risky. But when Ashurbeyli opened his eyes, the regret shone the strongest. “It’s a shame,” he said, and shifted his gun, weary enough to allow the telltale; weary enough to let that warning slip through.
Selena dived aside, followed by the thunderous report of not one but two guns. A fiery trail plucked her sleeve, running up her forearm; she fell heavily against the wall behind the door, her stupid fake Luger raised and ready. Still on her feet; still ready for whatever came next. Her other hand finally escaped her pocket, still curled around the marbles. Still ready—
Ashurbeyli fell through the door and thumped to the carpet. His mouth moved in a few soundless words, and then he died.
White. As Ashurbeyli came for Selena, White had betrayed him. Shot him in the back.
Selena’s fury took her by surprise. She opened her mouth to voice it…and then she thought again. White thinks Ashurbeyli shot me. She’d certainly hit the wall hard enough, convincingly uncontrolled.
And now she let herself fall hard to her knees, hitting the door so it slowly swung closed—at least until it ran into Ashurbeyli’s body. She slid down the door, a dramatic scrape of cloth against wood.
White laughed, damn him. Selena let herself settle so her head rested just against Ashurbeyli, her vision barely clearing the edge of the door. White, if he looked, would see only the top of her head. But White had already turned to Razidae, gloating, jamming the gun back into the prime minister’s chest and pulling him out of the corner.
Selena felt for the gap beneath the door, the way it rode high over the plush Sekha carpet. Plenty of room, oh, yes. And she had plans even if this didn’t work, but if it did she’d find it ever so sweet. One by one, she rolled the marbles out under the door, swiftly adjusting for distance until she had placed scattershot hard round objects in Jonas White’s path. Acme marbles. Perfect for foiling the overconfident bad guy.
Out he stepped, harshly pushing Razidae before him. And it was Razidae, already off balance, who hit the marbles first, whose foot shot unexpectedly forward. He fell hard just as White’s own foot skittered aside, and White took the brunt of it as they hit the floor.
Selena poked her gun around the edge of the door and said in her drollest tone, “Doesn’t it just suck when you get nailed by a trick a cartoon character would use? I’m the Roadrunner, by the way. You must be the Coyote. So we already know how this ends, don’t we?”
White’s face, already florid from his fall, went to dusky purple rage. He jerked his gun to bear, ready to empty the magazine at her right through the door.
She didn’t give him the chance. She braced the ill-made semiautomatic against the edge of the door and she jerked the trigger back. By the time she hauled it back down into position in the wake of the jarring recoil and trigger pull, White stared at her with two small, dull unseeing eyes, his shirt torn by her bullet, the bleeding already stopped.
For a moment, Selena rested her head against—good God, against Ashurbeyli. That made her straighten fast enough, all the painful way to her feet. A step forward, and she nudged the gun away from White’s curled fingers, and she looked down on him and said softly, “Beep, beep.”
Cole sat outside among the hostages and the injured soldiers and knew only one thing for certain: Selena wasn’t one of them.
Two things: no one would give him any crutches.
Three things: no one would go back into the building to look for Selena until the exterior had been secured. The Predator’s missiles had scarred the hell out of the back parking lot and the old coach building running along the perimeter of the grounds, scattering the approaching Kemenis—some of whom had holed up to take potshots at soldiers. One of the hostages had been wounded on the way out, and now no one could approach the building, not until the military dogs just now hitting the scene had declared the area clean.
Cole glared at the Air
cast on his leg and considered hopping. He’d spotted a pair of crutches near the triage area…he knew he could reach them. The only question was whether he could reach them unseen.
They knew she was in there. They knew. Ambassador Allori, only recently loaded into an ambulance, had told them as much. Prime Minister Razidae, stumbling around the end of the building to be met by a squad of soldiers and a roar of delight and approval, had also told them as much. She’d stayed behind for Razidae, to rescue him—and she had. But as far as he knew, she’d gone down in an old-fashioned gunfight. He wasn’t entirely sure—he’d fallen, the shooting had started, and he’d left the scene at top speed, anticipating no survivors.
Or so he said. But Cole wasn’t willing to take him at face value. He wouldn’t have taken any man in Razidae’s position at face value, not when the man had so much of that face to lose. Bad enough that Selena had been fighting his battles; he wasn’t likely to admit he’d left her behind to do so.
Crawling. Crawling was an option, too.
All the while the capitol building groaned and grumbled and coughed smoke, threatening fiery collapse—close enough to this streetside staging area to loom, just far enough away to eliminate danger if it disintegrated. And Cole watched with a stunned disbelief alternating with complete panic, going from numbness to a fierce pain that overwhelmed the pounding of his head and the sharp ache in his leg—and then back again to numbness.
Razidae was wrong. Razidae was lying. Lying.
Cole rested his head on fisted hands. You’re not doing her any good like this. He had to pull himself together. And if he couldn’t go into that building after her, he’d find someone who could. Who would. One of the SEALs. The whole damn SEAL team, if it came to that.
If he could find them.
The triage area boasted a complete mix of personnel—Berzhaani medics, International Red Cross volunteers, American military support personnel with a distinct and careful paucity of actual soldiers and the inevitable border of reporters and cameras along the perimeter, crowding each other for the best shot.
The SEALs would be staying out of sight. Bad enough that they’d been here, lurking, against Berzhaan’s wishes. Bad enough that Cole himself had been found inside the building; he’d already been promised the debriefing from hell.
It didn’t faze him. He was already there, tortured by the moments ticking by and the flames licking from the top windows and the precise, clear memory of Selena signing that she loved him as she went back to guide the hostages to safety—and eventually to face not only White, but Ashurbeyli. Of the look on her face, her well-protected heart and soul right out there for everyone to see.
For Cole to see.
Oh God.
Noise rumbled around him, the nonstop diesel hrum-hrum-hrum of rescue vehicle engines. The hostages cried in pain and relief, the various in-charge people shouted out orders he didn’t bother to understand. But for a sudden instant, it all seemed to stop—as if everything and everyone held their breath at once—and then let it out again to be twice as noisy. But—and Cole lifted his head to see—with the addition of vigorous pointing.
Pointing at the lone figure standing in the black, cavernous opening of the capitol’s double doors.
Crutches! Crutches, dammit!
One of the former hostages, a self-possessed young blond man with a wide-eyed young woman usually clinging to his side, appeared beside Cole. He held out the crutches Cole had been recently eyeing, and nodded at the stone steps, his expression unusually knowing. “Here,” he said. “Go to her.”
Cole had had no idea he could get to his feet so quickly, and he snatched the crutches away with such possessive ferocity that the kid grinned. Across the abbreviated lawn between the street and those Death Steps, across the sidewalk at the foot of the steps—
She was still there. Holy moly, she was still there. She stood there—swayed there—poised between movement and utter collapse, and therefore going nowhere. That strong, lean face was bruised along every striking line; her eye still half-closed. Blood soaked one tattered sleeve and she held the other as stiffly as he remembered.
She was beautiful.
She was alive.
She looked down at him with the same incomprehensible relief he felt taking over his own features.
He opened his mouth to say Wait, I’ll come help you, or on second thought after a wise glance at those steps, Wait, let me get help.
Selena shook her head. Not the short, sharp gesture he expected from her, but a more careful movement—the movement of someone trying desperately to keep herself in one piece. Quite clearly—a voice stronger than any he expected to come from that exhausted shell of his wife—she said, “No. Stay there. This is one set of steps that I fully intend to walk down.”
It might just have been the hardest thing Cole had ever done…but he waited. He watched her careful descent, he ached and bled for her, and he waited. And when she reached the bottom, he didn’t care about all the cameras aimed their way, all the commentary suddenly building to applause and cheers. He put his arms around her and he said, “Welcome home, Lena.”
Welcome home—and everything that it meant between them.
And barely standing on her own, she lifted her head from his shoulder and whispered, just for the two of them, “Home for good.”
“Beep, beep?” Cole asked again, his mouth close to Selena’s ear and his breath a delicious tickle. Carefully, achingly, she eased closer to him. The bed wasn’t theirs and it wasn’t entirely comfortable; nor was this tiny room on base at Ramstein in Germany—where they’d both been flown, treated and released, and now faced the first rounds of debriefing. The bed wasn’t theirs…but they were together in it. Spooned in the luxury of simply being together. Cole kissed Selena’s neck and added, “You really said that?”
“Mmm-hmm.” She curled her hands over his arm where it pillowed her head, stroking down to meet his hand and clasp it lightly. “Lightly” was their watchword. Selena was stitched and bruised and even cracked in a place or two, from the initial damage to her face and arm through the battering she’d taken in the bathroom and the final insult of the bullet that had deeply furrowed her forearm. Cole’s concussion had been declared mild; his leg rested heavily in a cast on which she’d already written a lewd suggestion.
His free hand traced a path over the curve of her hip, one of the few freely touchable places available. He settled his hand and tugged her back slightly, sighing down her neck as her bottom made contact with an obvious but gentle arousal. “And that Post-it note I found? You really wrote ‘You lose’?”
“Mmm-hmm.” She kissed his arm. Lightly, oh yes. Her face still looked like a battlefield.
He rested his head on hers, taking a deep, slow breath that came out in a sigh and meant he’d been reveling in the scent of her hair. After a moment he said, “I’m done with fieldwork for a while, you know. Possibly forever.”
“Because of the cameras.” She’d wondered. Even in her weary, painful daze, she’d been aware of the cameras recording her every step on the way down to Cole. Her statement about walking down the Death Steps had already been splashed across international headlines. And though the stills showed mostly the back of Cole’s head, the broadcast cameras had captured his distinctive profile and the bright gold glint of his hair.
He shrugged, his chest moving against her shoulders. “I’d do it again. No-brainer. Besides, they’re asking me to consider training recruits at the Farm. After my leg heals, maybe some of the survival camps. Maybe Tory can get her interview after all. And it strikes me as a good thing for a father to do.”
“But—”
But he wasn’t. They weren’t. The little pee-on-a-stick kit had been smugly certain of it. Selena’s fatigue, her illness…just the results of stress set off by bad food and followed up by way too much in-her-face death. She’d cried at that, as she hadn’t cried in the past horrible days.
“No buts.” He gently rubbed her stomach, avoiding the
three stitches that closed the wound there. “We’ll get there. And it’s better this way.”
She didn’t immediately absorb the statement, still lost in the thought of his job changing…and of her own. “The CIA called me today, you know.”
He stilled, his soothing gestures coming to a standstill. She missed them immediately.
“Not to worry,” she said. “They want me for Langley. They need a new chief in counterterrorism interrogation and analysis. I guess I impressed them.”
Cole’s laugh was short and quiet. “Honey, you impressed the world.”
She’d impressed someone, anyway. The CIA hadn’t been the only one to come calling. Delphi herself had called, on a secure cell phone that had been hand delivered only moments before. The women of Athena Academy, she had said, were fulfilling their promise—Selena among them. And it was time to pull together in a more organized fashion, pooling their talents across agency lines to prevent incidents just such as the one Selena had survived. As soon as Selena returned to the States, she and certain other Athena graduates would gather to meet Delphi for the first time—and to formally initiate the organization that Delphi called Oracle.
“Langley,” Cole repeated after moments of mutually quiet thought. “There’d be travel, of course.”
“Some,” she agreed, distracted enough to purr as he stroked her side, hand gently following her curves, fingers tracing the interesting features along the way—skimming the side of her breasts, her ribs, the hip bone that wouldn’t be quite so obvious once she got another good meal or two on board.
“Still,” he said. “A good job for a family woman.”
“What did you mean?” she asked suddenly. “That it’s better this way? That I’m not pregnant?”
His silence came through as uncomfortable guilt. They hadn’t talked about this, not yet. Selena hadn’t felt the burning need, not after she’d delved so deeply into her true feelings. Facing terrorists tended to peel away the superficial layers of feelings to get straight to the core, and she’d found her answers there. Her trust.