by SE Jakes
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Riptide Publishing
PO Box 6652
Hillsborough, NJ 08844
http://www.riptidepublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Daylight Again (Hell or High Water, #3)
Copyright © 2014 by SE Jakes
Cover Art by L.C. Chase, http://lcchase.com/design.htm
Editor: Sarah Frantz
Layout: L.C. Chase, http://lcchase.com/design.htm
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at Riptidepublishing.com, or at [email protected].
ISBN: 978-1-62649-140-3
First edition
May, 2014
Also available in paperback:
ISBN: 978-1-62649-141-0
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Before Prophet Drews can have a future, he must first put his past to rest.
Prophet Drews is a man on the edge, and he’s pulling Tom Boudreaux, his partner on the job and in real life, right over with him. When his old CO calls in a favor, Prophet asks Tom to join the off-the-grid rescue. But the mission raises all of Prophet’s old ghosts: CIA assassins, the terrorist Sadiq, and most importantly, John—traitor, former teammate, and Prophet’s first love.
To help bury those ghosts for good, Prophet and Tom gather the members of Prophet’s former SEAL team . . . and a spook named Cillian who’s been tailing Prophet for years. In the process, Prophet is forced to face his team’s shifting loyalties, ghosts who refuse to stay dead, and scariest of all, his own limitations.
With everyone’s lives in danger, Prophet and Tom must unravel a tangled knot of secrets, including their own. Prophet must decide how much to reveal to Tom, while Tom must decide how far he’s willing to go to help Prophet lay his ghosts to rest.
For the survivors.
There are two kinds of light—the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
—James Thurber
We burn daylight.
—William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
About Daylight Again
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Dear Reader
Acknowledgments
Also by SE Jakes
About the Author
Enjoy this Book?
The second his eyes opened in the dark, Prophet knew exactly what was happening.
As he watched, the darkness of his apartment coalesced into pure slabs of concrete. The windows and the bed and everything in the room disappeared until it was simply a cell. And he was locked inside.
The sheets were twisted. He was on his belly on the mattress, pinned. He knew his arms and legs were free, repeated that in his mind, but it didn’t matter. The flashback rolled through, capturing everything in its undertow.
He surrendered for the moment. There was no escaping it anyway, no matter how hard he fought.
“Fuck me,” he whispered, the words echoing off the walls.
He’d said exactly that when he’d woken in this cell almost eleven years ago and realized he’d been saved from a terrorist only to be immediately re-imprisoned by the CIA. He’d psyched himself up for struggling through another ring of hell. After all, the CIA hadn’t been his idea of the cavalry.
This particular flashback was one of the rarer ones, but it’d been threatening all goddamned day, the way it always did after seeing the eye doc. Prophet had hoped that working out harder than normal would bring on a more peaceful sleep, but apparently his demons decided to come out to play.
The same sick feeling rolled in his stomach now like it had then when he’d looked over his shoulder and blinked at the men in black BDUs standing over him. He’d been chained, facedown, to the cold concrete. He heard the hiss of the hose as they sprayed him with cold water, and even though he knew this reliving of what happened wasn’t real, his skin sparked with freezing spikes like fine needles.
But he’d been numb at that point too, refusing to believe that John was gone, that Hal was dead, that the entire mission was a total goatfuck. He also didn’t know anything about the other guys on his team, and he refused to ask, because asking equaled putting them in the crosshairs. Then again, no one was asking him anything yet anyway. They were just trying to break him down.
The smell of fear, anger, and despair mixed with sweat and blood was overwhelming. He ached in places he was always surprised could ache. The water rolled off his skin, soaked his BDU pants, and his dog tags dug into his chest, dragged on the concrete when he shifted his body.
When Prophet was first captured by Azar, the terrorist had taken the tags off. Someone from the CIA had gone to the painstaking trouble to find them and put them back on him.
It would be the last time he wore them.
Come on . . . wake up. This isn’t fucking real.
And yet, when he looked over his shoulder, he saw Lansing coming into the cell. Locking the door behind him. Reaching up to flick off the camera feed and the hallway lights. It was really quiet. Much quieter than it had been over the course of the last four days, and yes, Prophet had forced himself to keep count of minutes and hours so he could keep track of how long the CIA had kept him in this hellhole, how long it’d been since the Humvee John had been driving was hit. How long it’d been since Prophet had been forced to kill Hal so he—and all his specialized knowledge of triggers for nuclear bombs—didn’t fall into the terrorists’ hands.
“Where’
s John?” Lansing asked him.
Prophet turned away, put his forehead on the floor, refusing to have another go-round at this. “I want a JAG.”
“You don’t get to make the demands.” Lansing was leaning over him, then kneeling, grinding Prophet’s own knees into the concrete floor. His ankles were already chained to the floor, spread so he couldn’t kill anyone with his legs.
As he worked Prophet’s tattered BDU pants down, Lansing sneered, “Did you and your lover plan this?”
It wasn’t anything Prophet hadn’t already heard over the last several days while in the CIA’s care—obviously Lansing thought he and John had something to do with Azar. Couple that with the fact that there were no bodies on the scene, not John’s or Azar’s or Hal’s, and Prophet—and John—looked guilty as fuck.
Azar was dead—that, Prophet could confirm without the shadow of a doubt. But John . . .
Prophet glanced over his shoulder. “I didn’t plan on getting captured. Personally, I think it was a setup,” he said casually. “How much did you know about the mission again?”
“You goddamned piece of shit,” Lansing snarled. Because this had been Lansing’s mission from start to finish.
Prophet hadn’t moved, wasn’t giving Lansing the satisfaction of fighting. When he heard Lansing pulling his own pants down, Prophet finally looked over his shoulder impassively. “You gonna be able to get it up?”
Lansing slammed his face to the concrete and took him. Prophet didn’t know how long it lasted. Lansing kept up a steady stream of threats as he violated him, telling Prophet all the ways he planned on screwing him.
“Anyone new in your life? Gone. I’ll hunt down your team members like dogs and kill them when I lay eyes on them if I find you’ve met with them. I’ll fuck with your family, with every new partner—on the job or off. You fucked with the most important job of my career, and you’ll pay until you bring me John.”
Prophet hadn’t given the bastard the opportunity to follow through on those threats, although Lansing managed to keep his hold over him anyway. Prophet shifted partners like the wind, kept contact with his teammates to a minimum . . . and there’d been no one new in his life beyond one-night stands. Until Tom. Now, on his bed, in his apartment, Prophet screwed his eyes shut and told himself that this wasn’t happening, that any minute now he’d be free.
That he’d never let Lansing near Tom.
At that thought, Prophet nearly hyperventilated. Cursed. Prayed.
And finally, Lansing pulled out without coming—and fuck, at least he’d worn a condom—and since Prophet refused to speak or fight back, and since Lansing hadn’t been able to come, Prophet felt like he was in the lead, but he hadn’t exactly gotten in the last word. Because Lansing had still fucking violated him.
Until Prophet almost killed him several hours later during the interrogation, and that had been caught on video, then circulated through the CIA offices making Prophet infamous . . . and making it impossible for Lansing to kill him off once and for all.
That video made Prophet a wanted man—and in CIA-speak, wanted equaled highly desired operative.
And Prophet had never said anything to anyone about what Lansing had done to him in that cell. But it was always there, between them. Because to Lansing, what Prophet had done to him in that interrogation room was far worse, and fuck, Prophet could live with that.
Or at least he convinced himself he could, until nights like this.
Once Lansing’s weight was off him, it was only a matter of time before Prophet could talk himself out of the flashback. Come on, Prophet . . . not real . . . open your fucking eyes and look around . . .
Open your eyes and look around while you still can. Because when you can’t . . .
“Asshole,” he cursed himself. He forced his head up, blinked, waited until the cell turned back into his room. He moved his arms. Sat up. He was in sweats, not tattered BDU pants. No tags around his neck, and he was shivering violently. He went to grab a blanket from the end of the bed and saw the figure sitting on the windowsill, staring out into the darkness.
It was the flashback that kept on giving. “Get the fuck out of here,” Prophet growled.
“I’m not the one who keeps bringing me here, Proph,” John said.
John Morse, his best friend, first love, SEAL teammate. The man he’d been captured with. The man supposedly shot by a terrorist because Prophet wouldn’t answer questions. The man who now may or may not be the leader of a terrorist cell himself.
The man whose disappearance was responsible for changing the course of Prophet’s life, for better or worse.
A man who Prophet couldn’t help but believe was alive, until he was shown hard proof otherwise. So far, he’d seen nothing but John’s ghost visiting him, which only proved that he had PTSD, not that John was dead.
But fuck, the guy seemed as real as Prophet. Dressed in desert BDUs, like he’d been the last time Prophet had seen him. Tanned. Pensive. Staring at Prophet.
“You keep bringing me here.”
“Fuck that. Maybe I need to perform an exorcism.”
“That’s not going to help you.”
Prophet sighed tiredly. “What is, genius?”
“Walking away. Letting it go,” John told him. “This is going to kill you.”
Prophet turned his back on John. “So let it.”
“Fucking stubborn. It’s too late for me. It’s not for you. Don’t, Proph. Just . . . for what we had. Don’t.”
Prophet turned around, prepared to throw the first thing he picked up at the apparition, then realized he was alone.
You were always alone. As he heard the open and close of a window, he rubbed his eyes like they were fully responsible for the hallucination.
When he stared where John had been sitting, he also heard the jangle of a doorknob, a sound so low and yet magnified to an unholy echo in his mind, that it took him several seconds to realize the room wasn’t turning into a cell again.
He sat there, trying to pick apart the sounds . . . one coming from outside the bedroom window, the other coming from inside the apartment, the creak of a door, the slam of something outside the window . . .
He swore and got out of bed. Ran his hands along his bookcase and his dresser, reassuring himself that this was his room. He turned and looked out the window.
No sign of John. And still, he was shaking.
Something was going to happen. Ever since Tommy came into his life, bearing that video of him and Lansing—a harbinger—he’d known.
Again, he heard a jangle. Maybe he was on high alert from the flashback, but he didn’t think so—if someone was actually there, they’d purposely bypassed the motion sensors. He was up and moving toward the door, but he was still shaky, like he was swimming through molasses.
When he got to the entranceway, he was thrown off-balance, tackled, but caught before being slammed to the floor and rolled so he landed on . . .
Tommy.
Tommy, who rolled him again fast, pinning Prophet underneath him, grabbing Prophet’s wrists and holding them the ground above his head. Tommy, who kissed him before he could curse or think, an all-consuming, punishing grind of a kiss that promised Prophet exactly the fuck he was in for.
God, he liked those kinds of promises. Needed Tommy to hold him down and make things okay, because he would. But he didn’t stop struggling though, because hell, he wasn’t going to lose his touch, wouldn’t make it easy on the fucker who’d decided to go Houdini and bypass all the security cams, just because.
But even as he surged up, Tom dug in, using his body’s position to hold Prophet to the ground, his knees pressing Prophet’s thighs together.
“You’re going to want me to open my legs,” Prophet murmured against his cheek once Tom broke the kiss and was concentrating on biting Prophet’s earlobe.
“And you’ll do it for me,” Tom drawled, his breath warm against Prophet’s cheek, his hips a slow, steady rock, forcing their clothed cocks to rub to
gether. “Jesus, that’s good.”
“Fucker,” Prophet grunted, Tom’s heavy weight grounding him. “You’ve been practicing.”
“Practicing fighting you or fucking you?” Tom held Prophet’s wrists immobile with one hand and reached to pull his sweats down with the other.
“You tell me.” But Tom had always been good at both the fucking and the fighting. The things Prophet wanted to teach him were beyond that.
Tom’s sweeping gaze was predatory at best, and Prophet shuddered under its intensity. “Well, since you’re already the one pinned, we’ve got that covered. And since your pants are down . . .” Tom’s hand slid along Prophet’s inner thigh, hot and demanding, pressing a knuckle against his hole, and he fought a groan. “Yeah. It’s going to be my cock soon enough.”
Prophet’s legs opened wider, pushing against the barrier of Tom’s legs.
“Yeah, that’s right . . . let me in,” Tom urged, and Prophet wanted to tell him to fuck off, but he couldn’t. Not when Tom entered him with a finger. A few twists to open him, coupled with several swipes of his prostate, and Prophet was pushing his hips up to meet Tom’s motions. “Good. That’s what I want to see.”
“Fuck your good,” Prophet growled, but his voice was too raw and gave away exactly what he was feeling.
Tom added another finger, turned them until Prophet groaned his surrender. The sensation of Tom’s fingertips brushing his gland made him shudder. He kept his hands above his head, didn’t try to break Tom’s grip. He’d have rug burn on his ass by the end of this, and he didn’t care. Tom was here. Home. Safe.
Now, so was he.
“Go ahead—ride them,” Tom encouraged, and Prophet rocked his hips in time with the rhythm, letting Tommy fill him, tease him, and generally drive him fucking nuts.
Tom practically crooned, “So good when you obey and take what I give you. Going to bite you, fuck you. Make you scream my name, for starters. Gonna make you forget everything but me . . . so much I want to do to you.”
“Yeah, do it,” Prophet panted before he could stop himself. “Please, Tommy . . . need this. You don’t understand . . .”