by Loki Renard
Chase nodded and stood up, turning to the others. “See?”
She didn’t understand the significance of the word, but obviously he’d just proved something to his men.
“I’m really surprised you all came,” she said. “I didn’t expect, I mean, I know… I’m so sorry about what happened. I had no idea you’d be… I had no idea… I thought you’d be heroes. You were heroes to me.”
She hoped that her little speech would soften them, but it didn’t seem to help. Five sets of distinctly unimpressed eyes settled on her with hard expressions. A couple of sweet words weren’t going to make things better. Lacey understood that. What she didn’t understand was why they were all there.
“Uhm, I really don’t expect you all to help me,” she said. “I don’t expect any of you to. I just called Chase because I needed to know how to survive this…”
“Well, you won’t survive it alone,” Chase said decisively. “You’re dealing with shadow government agents. They have abilities and powers no other organization does. How did you check in here?”
“Cash,” she said. “I’m not dumb enough to use my credit card for anything.”
“Is that your car out front?”
Her little yellow Kia Forte was parked next to their big black behemoth.
“Yeah.”
“They won’t be far off,” the tall dark-haired one with the innocent face said. “We passed a bunch of plate readers on the way here.”
Suddenly nervous, Lacey popped up from the bed. Chase reached out with one hand and pushed her back down into a sitting position.
“Easy, Ms. Christie,” he said. “The pattern of deaths is concerning. It sounds like you and your friends really were on to something.”
“We were,” she said. “I’m going to take it to mass media. That’s the only way to spread it. The story can’t be buried…”
“Easy,” Chase soothed. “You’re already in over your head. Let’s not make that worse.”
She bristled, wanting to deny that, but she couldn’t. She’d been in over her head when they first met, and she was drowning now.
“So. Uhm… I appreciate this, but I mean… how…” She just had to ask the question outright. “How can you help me?”
“Since we got booted from the service, we started our own little mercenary unit. We’re pretty well equipped, Lacey.”
“Wow,” she said. “I called the right guys then. You landed on your feet. That’s awesome. I’m so happy for you.”
She smiled around at them all. There was not a single smile back. What on earth was going on? They were there, but they didn’t seem happy—and she got that, but if they didn’t want to help her, then why had they come?”
An uncomfortable feeling started to build in her belly. The relief and nervousness that had overwhelmed her when she first saw them was starting to turn. Something wasn’t right. These men didn’t look helpful. She suddenly felt like a lamb surrounded by a pack of wolves.
“Okay, what’s going on?”
Chase glanced over at the man who had been conspicuously quiet so far. Chase hadn’t been the leader of the unit when she met him in Venezuela. That role had been played by Rex Waltham. And Rex was standing more or less behind him, just off to the left, his large arms crossed over his broad chest. She’d not had much to do with him back then. He’d been the one barking orders, the one who coordinated everything. She wasn’t easily intimidated, but she was nervous around him. There was just something in his steel gray gaze that sent shivers down her spine. Now that it was fixed on her, she could barely breathe.
“You want to explain, Rex?” Chase threw it over to him.
“Alright.” Rex had a Texan drawl, a rough, gravelly voice that gave him natural gravitas. He was older than the other men by about a decade. Lacey was twenty-five. She’d been twenty-two when she was captured, just an idiot naive journalism grad who fancied herself an international freelancer. In the years since, she’d learned a lot about herself, and the world, but she felt small compared to him. Rex had to be in his late thirties now. The rest of them were mostly around thirty or so, except for the one on the end. He was a bit younger. The pup of the group.
Rex stepped forward, and she instinctively leaned back a little. It wasn’t that he was menacing her on purpose, it was just the sheer force of his personality. Back then he’d been clean-shaven. Now there was stubble around his chin and jaw, a very closely trimmed beard of sorts. He was graying a little at the temples, but it wasn’t the kind of gray that made a man look old. It was the kind that made him mature. Matched with the steel hue of his eyes, it only made him more intimidating.
“You’ve caused us quite a bit of trouble over the years, Miss Christie.”
There was no denying that. When they’d rescued her, they’d been an elite military unit on a classified mission. They’d told her not to mention anything about their role in her rescue, but she hadn’t been able to help herself. As a junior freelance journalist, the story of being rescued by elite Special Forces had been too good not to tell.
The story had been picked up and syndicated internationally. It had been her first big break, the beginning of everything—and then someone had worked out who the men in the story were, and a new scandal had developed around geopolitical relations and… basically a whole bunch of shit most people really didn’t care about. The brass did though, and every single one of Rex’s unit, all the men now looking at her, had been court-martialed and dishonorably discharged. That part of the story hadn’t hit national news, but she’d known about it. Tried to apologize for it too, but only Chase had taken her call.
“I really didn’t mean to…”
“You were told not to say anything.” Rex’s tone was clipped and harsh.
“I know, but…”
“There are no buts. You cost us our careers, and we were lucky that’s all that you cost us. If we’d been active when that story broke, you could have cost us our lives.”
“I’m sorry…”
“We’re not interested in sorry,” Rex said bluntly.
Her hackles were starting to rise now. Had they come just to waste her time?
“What are you interested in, then?” She was just barely keeping her temper now. From the fear she’d been filled with at seeing assassins in her apartment, to the relief when she first saw these guys again, she was now just confused, guilty, and more than a little upset.
“We understand your life is in danger,” Rex said. “But you don’t have the kind of money we cost, Miss Christie, and frankly, you owe us more than mere money could really cover anyway.”
“So you came all this way just to tell me that you’re not going to help me? Thanks,” she said, bitter and sarcastic. “Hope you all have a nice drive home.”
“We came to offer you a deal.”
A deal? She let her eyes run over the line of hard military men. “What kind of deal?”
“We get paid to protect what belongs to other people. But we’ll happily protect what’s ours for free.”
Her head jerked back as her gaze was drawn back to Rex again. “Uhm… what?”
“If we help you, you will belong to us. All five of us.”
“Belong to… as in…”
“As in your body.” Rex made things bluntly clear.
Her eyes widened in shock. He couldn’t be serious. There was no way. There were five of them, and they expected her to… it was utterly unthinkable what they expected. This was taking advantage, pure and simple.
“You’re honorable men. You can’t mean this. Chase…”
“We used to be honorable. We’re not so much into that these days.” The one at the end bit the words out bitterly. She’d forgotten his name, but not his face. He was viciously handsome, very dark eyes that were held perpetually narrowed, dark brows, a hard jaw and lips that at the moment were a thin slash. Her heart skipped a beat. Danger. She recognized it instantly. They were all dangerous, of course, but he stood out among them, a fierce,
barely restrained male force.
“There has to be something in this for us, Lacey,” Chase said more reasonably. With his sandy blond hair and blue eyes, Chase looked like the boy next door—if the boy next door had been pounding protein shakes and pumping iron for the past decade. He was a good man, the only one to accept her apology for what had happened after her story broke. Her heart ached whenever she so much as looked at a picture of him, but right now she was just stunned.
“Has to be something in it for you? I thought you were better than this, Chase.”
“Why? We don’t really know each other, Lacey. Not like that.”
Good point, she guessed. She’d known them for a couple of days in Venezuela. Same length of time they’d known her. Which was probably why they’d had the balls to make this kind of proposal. If they knew her better, they wouldn’t have wasted her time and theirs.
She looked down the line of men, hoping to find some salvation. Max—she’d never forgotten that name—was grinning as if he expected her to just immediately fall in love with the idea. He’d gathered a few more scars since she’d last seen him. Had the one over the bridge of his nose always been there? First to throw himself into action, last to care about the consequences had been her assessment when she’d dashed out the article about them.
Then there was the last one. The younger one. Brains. No. Brian. That’s right. Definition of tall, dark, and handsome. Could have been a runway model with his elongated frame. He ran the tech, from memory. She had been impressed with the alacrity with which Brian had handled a fire fight while simultaneously scrambling satellite signals and giving them a clear window for escape. He seemed to have the least reaction of any of them. Not angry. Not happy. Just a hard to read neutral. She was sure there was more dancing behind those green eyes than he was letting on.
They seemed to be presenting a united front. So they were all in on and into this little plan. What a pack of sickos.
Rex was talking again.
“You’ll do as you’re told, when you’re told to do it. You’ll make yourself available to any one of us. You’ll be ours. And in return, we’ll make sure nobody captures you, tortures you, and kills you. Sound like a deal?”
Lacey straightened her shoulders, looked him dead in the eye, and answered, “No deal.”
For a second, she thought she saw disappointment in his eyes. Did he really expect her to take that deal? Did any of them? As she glared at them, they did all seem a little deflated, except for Mr. Angry.
“Well, Miss Christie, it was nice to see you again, we wish you all the very best,” Rex said. He was either calling what he hoped was a bluff, or they were actually going to leave her to her fate.
Whizzzzzzzip!
A bullet sang through the window, skimmed past her cheek, and slammed into the cinder block wall just inches from her head. Lacey screamed and threw herself down, finding herself immediately covered by two very large bodies. In spite of the fact they were ready to leave her to die a second earlier, every single one of them threw himself to her defense without question. Col and Max ran out the door, guns at the ready and Chase and Brian were hunkered over her while Rex barked orders.
There was shouting, running, squealing tires. Whoever had taken the shot didn’t want to be run down and caught. The entire incident lasted maybe thirty seconds, but it left her trembling on the bed, tears in her eyes. They were really trying to kill her, and they’d found her. She wasn’t going to last ten seconds without these men to help. If they hadn’t been there… Lacey couldn’t bring herself to think about it.
Chase pulled her up and pressed his thumb to her cheek. “Small graze,” he breathed. “You just got the kind of lucky most people don’t get twice.”
There were six people in the room. The guys had been lined up like sitting ducks next to the window. If it had been random, one of them would have been easy to take out. But nobody wanted them. That bullet had been meant for her.
“Rex,” Chase said, his voice desperate. “We can’t leave her.”
“She doesn’t want our help,” Mr. Angry said as he returned to the room, still brimming with rage. Then the rest of them began to chime in, talking over one another.
“Of course she didn’t agree to that!”
“Maybe she doesn’t have a choice.”
Rex looked at Lacey coldly as he had the final say. “Take her.”
It happened far faster than Lacey could react. All four of them aside from Rex grabbed her, pushed her face down on the bed, and pulled her arms behind her back. They were fastened a second later with what felt like a thick band of plastic. A similar device was wrapped around her ankles. Cable ties. She was being taken prisoner.
Lacey was so scared and confused she didn’t even scream as her rescuers turned into her captors. A second later, a pillowcase went over her head and the whole world went beige.
Chapter Three
Brian
“We can’t just take her…” Brian glanced over his shoulder with a worried look. They had, in fact, just taken her and were burning down the road at the maximum allowable speed, heading for state lines. This was about as much of an abduction as an abduction could be.
“Of course we can, when the alternative is her being shot dead in a motel,” Max said, gnawing on a stick of candy cigarette. He had given up smoking five years earlier, but the candy cigarette addiction was harder to beat.
“Well, I mean, what Rex said, about her being ours. Saying that she had to do whatever we wanted…”
“We’re not rapists,” Max said bluntly.
“I know! But what he said…”
“Rex offered her a deal she didn’t take,” Max shrugged.
“But she’s still ours though. We’ve got her.”
“Jesus, Brains. What are you getting at?”
“I mean, obviously, we’re not going to do anything she doesn’t want.”
“Right. Obviously.”
“But right now she’s in a cage, and she probably doesn’t want that.”
“That’s for her own protection,” Max smirked. “And it’s not a cage. It’s a transit protection enclosure.”
He mimicked Brian’s voice, hearkening back to when they’d had the thing installed in the vehicle, and Brian had gone around insisting that the cage wasn’t a cage, and pointing out all the features that made it a TPE.
Brian rolled his eyes and ignored Max. He was worried. For a lot of reasons. Two main ones though.
One, like Col and the others, he had his reservations about helping Lacey too. She’d gotten them all in a lot of trouble last time, even if she hadn’t meant to. She was impulsive, she liked to stick her nose in where it didn’t belong, and she had a big mouth. A natural journalist, in other words, but not an ideal companion for a mercenary group.
Two, she was attractive. Very, very attractive. And none of them really had a chance to form relationships with women, not meaningful ones because they were never in the same place for long. It was hard to maintain a relationship with anyone when you would disappear for weeks at a time without explanation, or sometimes, even any notice. To say that she was trapped with five very oversexed men was an understatement. Brian just couldn’t see how this ended well for any of them.
Chapter Four
Lacey
“Let me out!” Lacey yelled through her pillowcase. She was being bumped about in what felt like the hard trunk of a car, though it was too spacious to be a trunk. Must be the back of the behemoth vehicle they’d brought to her motel room.
“Shh!” Chase said from somewhere close by. “Settle down, you’re fine.”
His voice was soothing, but she was demonstrably not fine. She was tied up in the back of a speeding vehicle, having just barely escaped an assassination attempt with her life, in the company of five men who had just announced an intention to take her as their slave.
“Let me out!”
“Gag her.”
She recognized Angry’s voice.
; “Leave her be, Col.”
That’s right. His name was Col. Not short for Colin. Just Col. He’d been distant years ago, and he was outright hostile now. Col had the slightest hint of a British clip to his tone. Her journalistic mind made a note to investigate that more. The rest of her panicky, stressed mind took control of her vocal cords again.
“Please! Let me go!”
“Brian, stop the van.” It was Rex’s drawl that made the vehicle come to a halt. Lacey squirmed around, not knowing where the doors were until she heard them squeak open behind her. Strong hands grasped her by the hips and turned her around. A second later, the pillowcase was pulled off her head. She found herself looking into Rex’s stern gaze. He had something dark in his hand, something he unrolled as he looked at her.
“What are you doing to me? You have to let me go. Please.”
“Nope,” Rex said simply. “Open your mouth.”
She shut it firmly.
“I can force it in, and it will hurt, or you can open your mouth and it won’t,” he said.
“Please,” she begged. “Don’t do this. I don’t want this.”
“We’re doing our job regardless. You called us, remember?”
“Well, I didn’t think…”
“No, of course you didn’t.” Rex spoke shortly, his Texan drawl bringing an incongruous charm to his lecture. “You didn’t think when you got yourself caught in Venezuela. You didn’t think when you told our business to the world, and you didn’t think when you called Chase. You don’t think, little girl. You talk. And I’ve had about enough of that, so you’re going to wear this gag until I decide otherwise. Now open up.”