I sighed. This was familiar. His need for control; his impatience with poor standards. Niall did everything with intensity, especially his work. Mr. Control. But we’d relied heavily on that in the past, hadn’t we? The Team, that is. He’d kept us safe and secure more than a few times. I’d somehow forgotten that. But dammit, I’d also forgotten what it was like to be around him personally when he was in mission mode. Tiring. Consuming. Selfish….
Lonely.
Niall was staring back at me. There was an odd expression on his face, and it’d been there ever since I rushed past him out of the kitchen. I could sympathize with him, to be honest. The last time we’d been together, we’d thrown a lot of flak at each other, and he’d said a few things to me that still left an acid burn in my memory. And now I was his landlord! But to him, of course, there were much worse things. He’d been injured in the line of duty with no fucking idea of whom to blame. That was eating him up, I’d imagine.
His eyes kept flickering over my body. He looked like he’d swallowed a couple of lemons and then bitten into the peel. Like I disgusted him. It’s not that I hadn’t seen that look before, you know? Just not for a while.
And it still hurt.
“What do you do here all day, Tanner?” His voice was calm, but I knew that deception well. Why did you run away to a pit like this? he was really saying, I was sure. Why are you such a loser? Why am I trapped here with you when I’d rather be anywhere else?
Hell, it wasn’t like I didn’t agree with him. “That’s none of your business, man. Hasn’t been for a long time. That’s how we both wanted it, that’s how it is. You can spread the papers out on the couch, right? I’ll move off, and we can have a look at it.”
“We?”
I grunted with frustration. “Look, it’s not like all the Secret Spy stuff is your specialized subject, is it? I have more experience than you in the Nancy-Drew-invisible-ink business. It’ll take you a couple of hours to decode Brad’s handwriting, let alone the message underneath.” And you’ve been hurt. I nearly bit my tongue off to stop saying it aloud. It’d only irritate him. Someone tried to blow you up. Your brains are going to be like scrambled eggs for a while. The mix of emotions that thought raised in me was disturbing.
We both scrambled clumsily to clear a space. Niall flipped open a couple of boxes, sending dust and the waft of damp cardboard across the room, and I swept the cushions back and cleared the coffee mugs back out to the kitchen. He scowled; I scowled. But we got on with it.
When I came back into the room, he had the files he wanted, though he was clutching them to him like precious family heirlooms. I swore and tried to snatch at them—did he expect me to have X-ray vision? —and he growled and started to protest. A file got caught in the middle and its edges tore open with a loud complaint. With a fluttering sigh, a batch of papers tumbled out on to the floor.
Neither of us moved to pick anything up. We stood paralyzed, facing each other, breath stilled, eyes wide with shock. We had both reached for the slipping file together, and both missed it. But our hands had caught at the nearest alternative.
Each other’s palm.
I COULDN’T move for a few seconds. Every sense was elsewhere.
His skin was cool; rough on the pads under his fingers, smooth along the life lines. Skin against skin—it was something I’d not had for a while. And certainly not his. Memories slid cruelly under my defenses. My eyesight blurred and my heart raced.
Then I thought I saw Niall suppress a shudder. I snatched my hand out of his grip, if only to save him his coronary and me my pride. We both stood there, at a loss for what to do next.
“Been a while, eh?” I was baiting him, I knew. I hadn’t had any communication with him for months now, let alone seen or touched him like this. The others had tried to keep in contact, to support me, despite my own desire for exile. But Niall and I hadn’t spoken since the day I left.
Baiting him and tormenting myself. Ridiculous. How long did I think I could joke about it?
He took a tight breath, and his hand fell back to his side. I liked to think his step back was because of uncertainty. “Don’t be facetious, Tanner. You made your choice. We both got the same suspension period. You just chose….” He paused. Bit at his lip. Christ, I knew he hated it when I provoked him to speak without planning it all out first.
“Yeah?”
“You chose to take your suspension away from the Team. You hid yourself here. You abandoned it all.” His eyes caught mine and he glared at me. Of course, he was totally loyal to the Department and the Team. He had no sympathy for my defection. I didn’t know why I thought I saw hurt in his eyes as well as fury.
He continued to move back until he was a decent distance away from me, trying to relax the tension in his body. I bent and picked up some of the fallen papers, then laid them on the couch. They may have been in the wrong order or completely upside down; I wasn’t focusing too well. “If that’s how you see it, that’s fine with me.” I sounded hoarse. “I don’t have to explain anything to you. You stayed, of course. Hanging around the Team, working out your after-class detention. Committed to the cause until the bitter end.” Guess you had other things to stay for, though. “So you’ve been back at work for a while?”
He didn’t answer directly. He leaned back against the wall, though there weren’t a hell of a lot of other places to rest while still keeping a safe distance from my contagion. “You’re the one acting like a kid, Tanner. I haven’t had any special treatment, if that’s what you mean. I’m still in the last stage of my suspension, same as you. But I’ve been in touch with Judith all along. In your words, I’ve been hanging around the Team, but in case I was needed. When the attacks started, she called me in.” He sighed, obviously annoyed that he had to justify his behavior. “Everyone in the Team has a role to play, Tanner. We’re all needed, especially at this time. That’s more important than any internal disciplinary matters.”
“Yeah.” Maybe his dressing down hadn’t been as humiliating as mine; maybe his session with Judith hadn’t been so heated. Maybe, at that particular time, his mind hadn’t been white with fury the way mine was. “Guess when you told Judith just what a shit I’d been, the sympathy vote was with you, anyway—”
“I never told her anything,” he said sharply.
I raised an eyebrow, and the bitter words dried in my throat.
He was flushed. “She just saw our fight and disciplined us accordingly. I never told her anything about the reasons it started, nothing of what was said between us. It was private, not relevant to the mission. It wasn’t for her to know.”
It was private. His words echoed my own thoughts. Perhaps I’d misjudged him. Mind you, the mood I was in then, I’d have misjudged the Archangel himself. But that didn’t stop me feeling a little ashamed now. “Okay,” I said. Sorry kind of stuck in my throat.
“We were… dammit! We behaved appallingly, you must have realized that.” Niall’s expression was very grim. “We were unprofessional. We jeopardized the surveillance. They couldn’t let it go unpunished. But it’s all over now.”
I saw him grimace, even as that superbly pragmatic remark slipped out from his mouth, even as he realized how his words—all over now—could be taken on several levels. His eyes flashed with a depth of fury that I could have drowned in. He was angry with me, but angry with himself too.
“Sure is,” I said, smoothly. “All over. Wipe the slate clean of it all, right?”
“Don’t be such a brat, Tanner. Running off like a scolded child. Did you expect someone to come begging you back?”
“Fuck you.” I knew I deserved his anger but I wasn’t backing down. “I had to get away. You’d know that, if you had any idea about me at all!”
“Which I thought I did!” He was very flushed now. “I could say the same about you too. Imagining how I felt. You think I’m not ashamed of the whole thing?”
“Ashamed?” Of us?
“Of the fight!” He glared at me, his eyes
back to that cold flint color. “We’ve hammered anything else to death, I’d say, and I don’t need any extra helpings of death wish right now.”
“That’s why I left,” I snapped. “Like I don’t need the trouble myself. The abuse, the misery.”
“That’s what it all was, then? Trouble? Misery? You gave up that easily?”
“Yeah. Maybe so.” I was warming up now. My heart was thudding and my flesh felt too hot. My fingers itched to grab hold of something. “Far as I can see, I’m out on my ass and a disappointment all round, and now I can’t even hide in my seedy little sanctuary without being hounded down—”
“For God’s sake, Tanner, I knew where you were all the time!” he growled. “I tracked you down pretty quickly.” He must have seen my wide-eyed outrage. “Tanner, I didn’t mean it like that—”
“Like what?” Like he was a stalker? Like he wanted to prove something? Like he cared?
“I mean that it was a security issue. In case… anyone needed to find you.”
“Security issue. Right. So why did Simon and Brad bother tracing me as well? Could’ve just come to you—”
“I didn’t tell anyone,” he said, far too quickly. “I assumed you’d run here to be alone. It was up to you what you did then.”
I was trying to read any underlying feelings in his tone, in his eyes, in his body language. Fuck all to work with at the best of times. Of course, it could just have been indifference. The absence of care.
Niall was shaking his head again, forehead creasing with irritation. “Oh, the hell with it!” He looked disgusted that I’d wrung the emotion out of him. Bemused. Pained. “Tanner, what’s the point of digging over the past?”
I stared at him, my anger leeching away like water through a sieve. He’d been near death. His ordered life had been thrown up in the air like a handful of confetti and he was standing amongst the drifting pieces. He didn’t need my arguments. He was right.
What was my point?
Tuesday 08:45
HE’D MENTIONED the fight, and I guess you need to know what that was all about. Or maybe just that it happened. Niall and I had a falling out, but a rather major one. In the middle of a mission. We fought, physically—and I’ll have you know I put up a creditable defense—but Judith took a dim view of it, at work and all. We were both hauled over the coals and suspended for three months.
There you are. My fall from grace in a nutshell. Not only that, but the end of my affair—the end of Niall and me. With not a whimper, but a rather impressive right hook. His.
So what did it matter now whether I’d been humiliated or hurt? It was past history. Neither of us was going back there. What did it matter whether Niall knew where I was all along? Whatever he thought about me and what he knew… well, that was all his problem now, wasn’t it? Shit, there I was again, going around in that spiraling way that leads to plenty of sleepless nights. That’s what it’s like at the end of a relationship, after all, no new revelations there. It’s the loss of everything, including the right to know anything about your ex; to share anything with them; to have anything but a supporting role in their future life.
Niall obviously had it sorted out well. I was the one struggling.
There was silence between us for a while. Maybe he had as many questions bubbling in the back of his mind as I did, but neither of us spoke them aloud. His eyes were clouded with what looked like shock. Yet again, I’d drawn him out, and so quickly. But he could blame the trauma he’d been through.
I didn’t have that excuse.
“Why did you get called back in?” I was curious, despite myself. “Couldn’t they manage the investigation without your inimitable help?” Maybe if he’d kept withdrawn like me—kept out of the line of fire while he did his time—well, maybe he’d never have been targeted in the first place. What sort of masochist was he?
He bit at his lip again. I watched the plump flesh ease out from under his even, white teeth. “I don’t know why you want to know. You’ve made it clear you’d rather be kept out of it all.” He took a deep breath. “But I guess it’s important now that you do know. For a while, we thought I might have a clue as to the motive behind it all. There’s so little to go on.”
“And…?”
He shook his head, not answering directly. “It should have been given higher priority from the start. The Team should have contained the situation after the first attack. It was a small letter bomb, though it made a hell of a mess of one of the Departmental carports. But there were plenty of personnel available at that time, plenty of opportunity to identify the culprit. Personally, I think they underestimated the threat, thinking it was an isolated event. The work of an amateur.”
“And then it escalated?”
He nodded, very slightly, as if reluctant to engage me. “When the next attack came in, and the next after that, all in such quick succession, there was too little time to regroup. Especially when it shifted and threats started on Team personnel.”
“And then it did become priority.”
“Judith suggested she revisit some of the closed mission files to see if there were any connections, any reason for a specific vendetta against us. To see if there was anyone who’d also threatened the Team or its people in the past. I was only called back into active duty because I could identify someone who fit that profile.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not bothered that you were Mr. Popular while I languished out here. Don’t bother about trying to massage my ego, because to be honest, I don’t have a hell of a lot of time for one nowadays—”
“Dammit, I wasn’t! Are you listening to anything I’m saying?”
I swallowed back a retort, and then engaged my brain instead of my tongue. “Wait a sec. The person you could identify—the previous threat against a Team member—you don’t mean it was that kid who stabbed you?”
His eyes narrowed. “Yes.”
I cursed myself. That time had been one of the most distressing… for us both, despite whatever arguments we may have had subsequently. Hi, Tanner. Meet Mr. Foot-in-Mouth. But if Niall could talk about it so coolly, well, so could I. “So, did that confirm the theory that it’s not political at all, but a personal attack? On the Team—all of us? Or just you?”
He shrugged. He was looking weary again, despite that exhaustive sleep. “I don’t know, I really don’t know. I checked out the kid, and he’s still in the specialist detention center. It couldn’t have been him.”
“Other family members? Associates? The guy who ran the club where we found him?”
“I don’t fucking know!” Whoa, when Niall let loose, he let loose. He saw the look on my face and growled with frustration, trying to rein the anger back in. “No, there was nothing else on that particular exercise to give us a lead. But Judith has other cases to examine, other people we’ve brought down or exposed or just generally pissed off—and anyway, that may not be a motive at all. Shit, I don’t know where to go from here.”
I looked at the papers on the floor and the couch. “Well, we could make some sense of this pulped rain forest and see if it gets us any further. Okay?”
And then the cell phone rang. The one that Judith had left behind for us. For Niall.
His gaze flashed to me, and I stared back. Then he grabbed it from a back pocket and flipped it open. We stood there, paralyzed like some kind of living tableau, as he listened to whatever greeting it was. When I caught sight of his expression, there was a strange kind of wildness in it.
“It’s Joe.” He might have been presenting the weather forecast for all the outward emotion he showed in his voice. But I read him far better than that. “From the hospital. They’re going to operate tomorrow.”
I wanted to snap back at him again. What kind of cold fish was he? What hospital? What operation? How serious was it for God’s sake? And then it occurred to me that he might have been holding back on the concern for some other reason… maybe for my benefit. Hospitals were a difficult thing with me. Not that I’d spent
much time myself in them; I’d rarely had a broken bone or serious illness in my life. But Niall had, and the circumstances had caused me plenty of grief.
You see, six months ago, and because of me, he’d nearly been killed.
OKAY, SO I guess I knew it wouldn’t be enough just to skate over the story of our prize fight as some kind of lovers’ quarrel. It was actually at the end of a time of great stress—a culmination of a strange, tightening spiral of misunderstanding and hurt and bitter, bitter disappointment. It had been threatening for months.
Things were still tangled up between us personally. Guess we never cleared the air. The Team missions got more complex, our lives got more committed, our relationship… got more crappy.
And that’s when the Team was marked out for Mission Dove.
Judith was thrilled; we all were, really. It was our first really big break, and we’d be working alongside the Department itself. No formal recognition, of course, but she was excited that they’d see what we could do. We’d make a real contribution. The preliminary work started almost at once: preparing and monitoring the locations as the delegates began gathering for the meetings, checking out their security and the people around them.
That’s where we came up against the first hurdle. We discovered that one of the more prominent politicians was spending his nights in a downtown gentlemen’s club. Nothing new, you might say, if you’re as cynical as I am. I mean, that in itself wouldn’t have merited the attention of the Project Team, except that it turned out the pimp offered access to a special selection of kids—children who were way too young and way too vulnerable for anyone to let it pass. We alerted the Department, but because of the sensitivity of the politician concerned, they nudged the situation Judith’s way.
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