by Lora Leigh
“The two of you are too quiet,” he said, turning to them as they waited for the lesser-known cousin who had called earlier. “Just say it and get it the hell over with.”
The two men turned to him, but it was each other they looked to first. Dawg shook his shaggy black head, that tiny hint of silver at the sides giving him a more distinguished look than Natches had expected before it showed up.
“I believe her.” It was Rowdy who spoke up, his somber, sea-green gaze piercing as he stared back thoughtfully. “The minute she said she was Bliss’s sister, I knew what was bothering me about her since I met her, and when she left the marina, she looked broken, Natches. Whether she’s Beth Dane or not, she believes she is.”
Dawg blew out a hard, deep breath, drawing Natches’s attention to the regret that creased his face.
“Christa’s said all along that Angel was too much like Chaya, and that was why Chaya was having problems with her.” He propped his hands on his hips for a moment, hanging his head before lifting it again and giving Natches a regret-filled look. “I’d never believe she was your kid, but yeah.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “I believe she’s Chaya’s. It was in those eyes, contacts and all, she was beggin’ Chaya to see her. To accept her.”
Natches wanted it to be a lie. He fully admitted that. To know her daughter had lived the horrendously dangerous life they knew Angel had lived would kill Chaya. It would kill him if he was facing Bliss twenty years later, knowing he’d lived a life that included love and laughter while she’d suffered. Chaya would feel the same, and it would break both of them.
“Bliss is brokenhearted.” Rowdy’s words had Natches’s heart tightening. “She told Annie she didn’t think she would ever forgive her mother if anything happened to Angel now. Told her she felt like Angel was as close to her as a sister.”
Pain struck at his heart and tore to his soul. God help him. God help Chaya.
And if he called Bliss from her bedroom to question her about it, Chaya would follow. She wouldn’t let Bliss out of her sight. She was presently curled in the large, oversize chair in Bliss’s bedroom. The two hadn’t spoken since they’d left the marina. Which was odd for Bliss. She usually went into a Mackay meltdown when she was angry. But she was eerily silent now, refusing to discuss Angel or the attempted kidnapping. And Chaya refused to leave her alone.
“Timothy’s going crazy,” Dawg said then, worried for the former DHS special agent who had been with Chaya in Iraq when Beth had supposedly died. “One of my contacts from DHS said he arrived about two hours ago and demanded all of Army Intelligence’s records as well as DHS’s from that operation. He’s in meltdown.”
Timothy’s lab had run the DNA and verified the child’s body as Beth’s.
“We’re all in meltdown,” Natches said heavily as the silent alarm on the watch he wore vibrated, indicating a vehicle had passed over the motion detector set in the driveway leading to the house. “And I have a feeling it’s about to get worse.”
Because he knew the man arriving.
Duke Mackay had been investigating Angel Calloway for about five years. When Natches noticed the young woman showing up at the lake or at events that Bliss attended, he’d become curious about her. Tracker and Chance hadn’t even blipped on his radar until eighteen months ago.
Just out of Army Intelligence, Duke and his brother, Ethan, had taken the job of tracking Angel down and learning why she’d taken such an interest in the preteen. At first, Duke had reported that Angel’s presence in Somerset must be a coincidence, that a young mercenary, a sister to the commander she followed, couldn’t have any true interest in Bliss.
But Duke had decided to stay with the team for a while, and Natches had let the information and the young woman slip to the back of his mind. Until Tracker, Angel, and Chance had shown up a year and a half ago, out of the blue, to protect Dawg’s sister, Lyrica, while Duke had been involved in another job Natches had sent him to.
He didn’t believe in coincidence, he thought as he opened the door leading into the kitchen for his younger cousin and stared into the mossy green eyes of the man who had spent all of his adult life away from his home. A man he knew had his own demons and haunted past.
“Office?” Duke nodded his head toward the opened doorway across the kitchen. “I’d like to talk to you and the cousins alone first.”
First.
Duke’s features, reminiscent of Dawg’s at the same age, were sharply hewn, brooding, and touched with the same sun-bronzed stroke of Native American ancestry. Raised by distant relatives in Montana from the time he was fifteen until he joined the Army at eighteen, he wasn’t a man many were comfortable around.
He was a man Natches could understand and respect, though. And the fact that Duke wanted privacy first had the tension already radiating through him building instantly.
“Come on,” he breathed out roughly, turning and heading for the office. “Let’s get it over with.”
• • •
Natches had known grief in his life. More than anyone could imagine, but as he stood silently next to his desk with Rowdy, Dawg, and their younger Mackay cousin, Duke, he knew this was the nightmare he never could have imagined before today.
He’d thought the past and its monsters had been vanquished when his father, Dayle Mackay, died in prison. Now, he realized, the nightmares he’d known as a boy were never going to be forgotten.
And as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t vanquish the monsters that were going to rise up to torment the wife he loved more than he loved anything else in his life. And now Chaya’s nightmares were only going to be added to as well. Nightmares of the life her daughter Beth had lived for the past twenty years.
Duke showed him a photograph of Beth and another little girl almost identical to her but younger, with Chaya’s first husband, Craig Dane. He explained that the other girl was Jenny Dane, the child Chaya’s sister had had with Chaya’s husband. The Canadian birth certificate verified the parents. Jo-Ellen was murdered when the girls were taken from her, and she had never told anyone about her baby.
Jo-Ellen hadn’t possessed many friends, worked from home in Canada, and hadn’t told those she did know that Jenny belonged to her. She’d hidden the pregnancy and the birth, presumably to keep Chaya from knowing how she and Craig had betrayed her. Then, somehow, Craig got both girls to Iraq and they were all in the hotel when it was bombed.
A mercenary named J. T. Calloway found a little blond-haired girl wandering the streets of Baghdad and had assumed she’d been beaten. There was no report of a missing American child, so he’d kept her, given her his family name to hide her, just in case she was in danger, and raised her as his own.
He’d raised her amid the blood and death he, his wife, and two sons lived within. A child taught from the age of three that survival meant kill or be killed. Homeschooling lessons included hand-to-hand combat training and how to use a knife, a gun, or fingernails to disable an enemy.
She’d nearly been raped at age six by an enemy combatant, forced to kill at age fifteen, and taken her first bullet at age sixteen. And her eyes weren’t a shattered blue, intense violet, or brilliant green as listed in differing reports on her, but a soft gray ringed by a darker blue.
And when she smiled, she looked like her mother.
She looked like Chaya.
That resemblance had been what Natches hadn’t been able to put his finger on since he met her. That “something” that just bothered the hell out of him.
Halfway through the pages of notes, reports, photos, and proof of a hell a child had lived, he couldn’t take any more.
He stomped away from the pages spread out on the table, his arms crossing over his chest to hold back the pain ravaging his soul.
This would kill Chaya, especially after the confrontation with Angel. His wife, who had nightmares every year on her first daughter’s birthday, who
still bought a present and wrapped it for that daughter every Christmas, who couldn’t let go of her belongings for fear the grief would tear her apart.
He wiped one hand over the side of his face. God, he had no idea how to begin figuring out how to handle this one.
Fuck, as though there was a way to deal with this? He couldn’t even make himself believe it and the proof was right there, spread out on the damned table.
Natches rubbed his neck, trying to ease the tension threatening to snap his spine. He’d known not to let her walk out of that marina, but Chaya’s grief had been strangling him at the time.
“I knew something wasn’t right,” he admitted, hated it, cursed himself for ignoring it. “Especially with Chaya. She knew Angel was hiding something, since the first day they met, she knew. That was what pissed her off so much about the girl.”
And Chaya had fully admitted her anger at Angel was out of proportion. As a mercenary, Angel had no choice but to hide her real name, her family, her private life.
Mercenaries made enemies.
That knowledge would only make Chaya more furious.
A child, she’d ranted after first meeting the girl. Angel was still just a baby at twenty-three, and her parents let her live such a life? Selling herself, her loyalty, to the highest bidder when she should be in college, dating, figuring out what she wanted in life. Not figuring out how to avoid the bullets whizzing around her or the best way to kill a man.
Subconsciously, Chaya had known as well. She’d sensed it, felt it, and had known Angel was hiding that truth from her. Delivering that truth in the same hour Chaya had nearly lost her second child had just been poor fucking timing for all of them.
“What are you going to do?” Rowdy asked, his voice low as all eyes watched him.
Natches turned back to them, grief building, burning in his soul.
“I have to tell her.” He breathed out heavily. “What choice do I have?”
“She’ll want to go straight to Angel, to question her, to claim her,” Duke inserted, his face, his voice, as hard as Natches remembered his own being at one time. “I know this woman, Natches. In the time I’ve been working with her, investigating her, Ethan and I have fought with her and her brothers, gotten to know them to some small extent. She won’t come to Chaya easily. Not after this afternoon.”
“She won’t have a choice,” he snapped. “I won’t accept anything else.”
“And she’ll shoot you the finger as she’s flying into the sunset,” Duke snorted, his vivid green eyes filled with knowing mockery. “She’s not like anyone you’ve known, Natches, and trying to order her to do anything will only piss her off.”
Natches could feel the fury beginning to build, to burn through his senses. Chaya wouldn’t be able to live with that. It would kill her.
“You say you know her,” Rowdy stated, the calm tone of his voice pulling Natches’s attention. “What do you suggest, Duke?”
Rowdy was watching the younger Mackay closely, almost knowingly. That look on his face had Natches paying more attention to him as well.
“She told you she was there today because of Bliss. She tried to tell Chaya who she was, because she wanted to protect Bliss. Angel lost a sister in that hotel bombing and I know she’s still haunted with nightmares from it. The only way you’ll be able to get to her is with Bliss.”
Natches’s eyes narrowed on the other man. There was something almost angry, definitely territorial whenever he spoke of Angel.
“Pull her in,” Natches decided quickly. “You know her. . . .”
The derisive snort Duke made had him pausing.
“Natches, you don’t understand, that woman is a powder keg waiting to explode over any man working with her, besides Tracker and Chance. She doesn’t take orders worth shit, goes her own way, and nine times out of ten ends up with a bullet buried in her somewhere that’s all but guaranteed to kill her. It’s been all Ethan could do to keep her ass alive since joining that team. . . . And they threw us the hell out eight months ago when Tracker somehow figured out we are Mackays.”
It wouldn’t have been that damned hard to figure out, Natches knew; not once Tracker had worked with him, Rowdy, and Dawg a year and a half ago.
“She obviously trusts you enough to allow you to fight with her,” Natches snapped. “Don’t give me fucking excuses, Duke. Make it happen.”
“Make it happen?” Duke repeated, his large body, reminiscent of Dawg’s at the same age, tensing until his shoulders appeared broader and more imposing. “I’m no Marine and you’re not my fucking commander, Captain Mackay.”
Natches smiled. A slow, easy smile that lacked any humor whatsoever. “Think Memmie Mary will see it the same way?”
Memmie Mary was the iron will of the Mackay family on the other side of the mountain, just as Natches’s uncle, Rowdy’s father, Ray, was on their side of the mountain.
Duke’s eyes narrowed on him. “That’s low, even for you.”
“Not nearly as low as I’d go, Duke,” Natches promised him. “I won’t see Chaya destroyed any further than this is going to do already if Angel disappears. And I have a feeling, as much as Chaya and I both will hate it, you’re likely the only one with enough influence, where that stubborn-assed daughter of hers is concerned, to keep her here.”
As the final sentence left his mouth he saw the looks on Duke’s, Dawg’s, and Rowdy’s faces as their gazes jerked to the door behind him, and he knew with a sense of fatalistic regret that he no longer had to worry how to tell his wife.
He turned to her slowly, watched what little color she had in her face leech away as she stared back at him in horror.
“Duke. Find her. Now,” Natches ordered his cousin.
“We’ll go sit with Bliss.” Rowdy and Dawg moved to the door on the other side of the room that entered into the kitchen, with Duke following them.
Natches didn’t bother to watch them leave. He didn’t take his eyes off Chaya, nor did he try to hold her back as she glanced at his desk, saw the papers and files spread out over it, and began moving toward it slowly.
“You sent Duke to investigate her,” she said, her voice hollow as she neared the desk. “You didn’t tell me.”
“I actually sent him out five years ago,” he told her, staying close to her, knowing the blow this would deliver to the twenty-year-old wound in her soul. “He didn’t tell me what he’d found until tonight, though. . . .”
• • •
Natches’s words faded away when Chaya lifted a picture from the various papers and photographs on the desk.
She could feel herself screaming. Silent, agonized screams that she didn’t have the breath to actually push from her chest.
The little girl, her dark blond hair tangled and dirty, a little white bow barely hanging at the ends of the soft waves that ended at her shoulders. A matching white dress, torn, filthy, and stained with blood.
A single white sandal on her bloody, dirt-caked foot.
Red arrows pointed to her broken leg, her fractured arm.
She looked like a tiny, broken doll lying on the rough cot, unconscious, so pale she could have been dead.
Chaya heard the small, keening cry that left her lips. She knew that child. Knew her with every fiber of her heart and soul and knew the mistake she’d made when she faced the young woman that child had grown into.
Angel.
“What did I do?” The sound of her own voice was a shock to her, whispering from lips that trembled with the violent emotions surging through her. “What did I do to my baby . . . ?”
She was only barely aware of Natches’s arms going around her, holding her on her feet when she would have sunk to the floor.
There were other pictures. Pictures taken each year at about the same time, others taken with each new injury, each broken bone, and each gunshot or knife wound. And there
were many of them.
There was a notation made of a near rape, an abduction by one of the men holding another child who the family had been sent to rescue, and a detailed report of the collapse of a small hospital in Uzbekistan five years ago that resulted in hysteria and further injuries when Angel had been trapped in the basement.
Twenty years of training, near fatal wounds, and a life devoid of her mother’s love.
Included with the pictures was a birth certificate for another child. Jennifer Ellen Dane. Chaya read the parents’ names: her ex-husband and her sister. Her sister had had a child? With Craig? Beth’s half sister.
Chaya knew she was fighting to breathe, to throttle the screams echoing in her head, to find reality in the midst of the nightmare converging on her.
“My baby . . .” Strangled, filled with horror, the knowledge of what she had done to her daughter that afternoon sliced jagged, ever-deepening wounds into her soul. “Oh God . . . Oh God . . .”
What had she done?
“I know women like you. . . .” Her accusation had shattered the cool, remote look on Angel’s face.
“A mercenary . . . a killer . . .” Her words had caused the younger woman to pale.
“Bliss is my sister. . . .” The desperation in Angel’s voice had caused Chaya to freeze.
She had fought to deny Angel’s claim. She’d stared at the girl, fighting to see past the vulnerable hunger that reached out to her to the deception she’d seen in the girl every other time Angel had stared back at her.
“Is Bliss your only child, Mrs. Mackay?” Angel had whispered, and Chaya had been unable to answer her.
Sobs broke from her chest, agony ruptured inside her and caused her to tighten violently in her husband’s arms, to fight to be free of him. She had to get away from this; she couldn’t accept this. . . .
Oh God, she had found happiness all these years while her daughter had suffered. . . .
She tried to scream for her baby, to scream out to God for mercy, but all she could do was collapse against the bands of steel wrapped around her as Natches turned her to him, held her to his heart.