Forged in Ash (A Red-Hot SEALs Novel)

by Trish McCallan

  She awoke slowly, skimming along consciousness to the drone of masculine voices.

  “How do we know she’s not faking it?”

  “Because I can tell, and she’s not.”

  She recognized the one voice, the Southern one. Although it was missing the gentleness and croon. The other voice—the cold, hard, and brutal one—was not familiar. She wanted to keep it that way. Best to keep her eyes closed and head down. Simcosky’s girlfriend had said they wanted to question her. Since she wasn’t dead, the blond bimbo must have been right, which meant the longer they had to wait for their answers, the longer her lifespan.

  So she lay there, still as possible, as the urge to move, to stretch, to ease her battered muscles became a constant itch.

  “Did Kait make out okay with the five-oh?”

  “Yeah.” It was Marcus Simcosky’s voice. But less loud and angry. “She covered for us.”

  “Told you. She’s quick on her feet.”

  “When the fuck’s she going to wake up?” the hard, gritty voice demanded, and Jillian knew he was talking about her.

  Fingers touched her neck, lingered. Jillian fought to regulate her breathing. Could he tell from her pulse she was awake? The thought sent her blood crashing through her veins. Certainly he could feel that. Panicked, she tensed, ready to launch herself up and at him, when the hand fell away.

  “She’s awake. You might as well open your eye, sweet cheeks. We’re not going to hurt you.”

  Liar.

  His voice might be gentle and his hands soothing, but he was one of them. A murdering, lying bastard like Zane Winters and Marcus Simcosky.

  Still, it was useless to keep pretending. Best to face her fear and enemy. With a deep, ragged breath she opened her eyes. Or eye. Her vision cut off to the left of her nose.

  She was lying down, something soft beneath her head. Her right eye, which was still working, although blurrier than normal, had a hazy view of brown leather—maybe the back of a couch. She couldn’t see anything to her left. When she tried to force her left eye open, a molten poker pierced it. She froze, and the piercing pain settled into a deep, raw ache. After a moment, she released her pent-up breath, reached up, and gingerly touched her eye. The cold of an ice pack chilled her fingers. Holding the ice pack in place, she rolled her head until she could see to the left. A tall blond man with concerned blue eyes came into view. She recognized him from the television and papers. He was one of the men responsible for Russ’s death.

  That concern was just another lie. Like the lies they told about her brother to the FBI and the reporters.

  An IV stand caught her attention. Frowning, she forced her blurry gaze to focus on it, to follow the plastic line that ran from the clear bag down to her arm and into the needle that penetrated the vein beneath her elbow.

  She jolted up and swayed. Once her head stopped swimming she tried to tear off the tape that held the needle in place.

  “Easy.” The blond SEAL stepped around the IV and behind her head. A hand came down on her shoulder and pushed her flat, then he caught the hand scrabbling at the IV needle and pinned it against the couch behind her head. “It’s just fluids.”

  And she was supposed to take his word for that?

  “Take it out!” Her voice rose shrilly.

  “No.” His voice was calm. “You’re dehydrated.”

  She tried to reach the needle with her other hand. He caught that one as well.

  “Don’t make me bind your hands again.” While his voice might have been calm and gentle, there was no give there.

  Her breath locked in her throat, Jillian subsided. What was really in the bag? Some kind of poison? Would it make her death look like an accident?

  “I promise you. The only thing in that bag is fluids. To hydrate you. We aren’t going to hurt you.”

  Tilting her head back, she bared her teeth at him. “And I’m supposed to believe you? A murderer?”

  “Yeah.” He frowned down at her, the fake warmth of concern still firing the blue of his eyes. “About that. Kait says you told her we killed your kids and your brother. What makes you think that?”

  She glared back. “Because you did.”

  “When?” A second voice asked in such a calm tone it sent a rift of unreality through her. How could he be so calm while talking about the murder of her babies?

  Rolling her head to the left, she tried to get a look at the monster who spoke so casually about the murder of children and found herself face-to-face with Zane Winters.

  The bastard who’d killed her brother.

  “You!” She tried to tear her hands from the blond SEAL’s grip and bolt up, but he easily held her down. “You bastard. You bastard. You killed them. You killed my babies.”

  Zane Winters stepped closer, his green eyes shadowed. He exchanged a grim look with Marcus Simcosky. “We had nothing to do with whatever happened to your children.”

  “Liar.” The word vibrated with her rage.

  “Why are you so certain we killed your kids?” the man who’d murdered her brother asked.

  “Because you admitted it. On the television. In the newspapers. You admitted you killed them,” she hissed at him, struggling to free herself from the hands binding her wrists.

  “There’s no way in hell I admitted to killing your kids. Not on television. Not to the papers.”

  “You admitted to killing Russ,” she threw at him. “You told all those horrible lies about him. Made him out to be some kind of a monster. Your buddies kidnapped me and the kids on the same day! The same day you killed Russ. That wasn’t a coincidence.”

  A long pulsing silence fell. She could literally feel the tension squeezing the room. Yeah, they couldn’t deny that now, could they?

  “You’re talking about Russ Branson.”

  “No.” Her voice broke. She hardened it. “His name wasn’t Branson. That’s just another of your lies.”

  Zane spun to look at Simcosky, and then turned back to Jillian and took a step closer. “What was his name?”

  She tried to jerk her hands loose, every cell, every muscle, every atom in her body wanting to hurt him. Rip out his eyes. Make him pay for what he’d done—what he’d taken from her. “You don’t even know the name of the man you murdered?”

  Did he hear the hate in her voice? The rage. She’d never wanted to hurt anyone as badly as she wanted to hurt him. All of them. Right here. Right now.

  “We knew him as Russ Branson.”

  “So you admit you killed him?”

  “Yes, I killed him—”

  His admission shocked her so much she missed the rest of his sentence.

  “—my fiancée. If I hadn’t taken him out first, he would have killed me, Beth, Amy Chastain, and Christ only knows how many others.”

  “Liar!” The word emerged on a shriek.

  Zane Winters winced, squared his shoulders, and took another step forward; but before he could say anything, another man pushed him aside and pointed a lean, tanned index finger at her.

  This new threat was leaner than the other three, and older. His short black hair was graying at the temples. Eyes as black as a cloud-shrouded midnight locked on her.

  “Lady, I’m getting pretty fucking tired of you calling us liars. You obviously don’t know a damn thing about your brother.” The thunderstorm masquerading as a man snarled as he repeatedly chopped the air with his extended index finger. “In Seattle alone he was responsible for the attempted hijacking of flight 2077, for the kidnapping and rape of Ginny Clancy and Amy Chastain, for the murders of Todd Clancy and Agent Chastain. Your brother was a Goddamn sociopathic—”

  “Mac, you’re not helping,” the blond SEAL holding her hands behind her head growled.

  The thundercloud wheeled on him. “She’s the one throwing the fucking lies around. Let her get a dose of the truth.”

  “Look.” The blond leaned over the couch’s armrest behind her head and stared down. “We own taking out your brother. We had no choice. But w
e had nothing to do with what happened to your kids.”

  “Right,” she sneered the word up at him. “And I suppose it was just a coincidence that the bastard who shot me and killed my”—her voice hiccupped and went watery before she infused it with venom—“was hanging around your lame buddy yesterday?”

  Pure shock brought Cosky to his feet. “The hell you say?”

  The woman who’d tried to kill him—twice—twisted beneath Rawls’s grip. Her good eye locked on Cosky. The wild, brown depths were brimming with rage. But there was something darker beneath the fierceness—the raw desolation of someone who’d lost everything and had nothing left to live for.

  Christ, if she’d witnessed the murder of her kids, no wonder she was halfway to insane.

  He gritted his teeth beneath his own surge of anger. If what she claimed was true, if that bastard had killed her kids…Christ, he deserved the slowest and most excruciating death imaginable. Cosky would be happy to hand it to him.

  He thought back to her first attack on him. She’d been determined to kill him. Driven by hatred. Yet, she’d turned away from the perfect opportunity to take him out. He’d been down on the ground, defenseless. All she would have had to do was step around the pickup’s door and empty her pistol into him. Instead, she’d spun and fired across the parking lot.

  It hadn’t made sense then, why would she target that chatty kid? Well, it made sense now. She hadn’t been aiming for Mr. Chatty. She’d been aiming for someone else entirely.

  “This man who shot you.” Cosky left out the fate of her children. The reminder of her loss had to be unbearable, and he needed her coherent. He needed answers. “He was at the back of the parking lot yesterday, wasn’t he? He’s the one you were targeting.”

  Her lips curled into a combination snarl and sneer. “You think I’m so stupid I wouldn’t recognize the bald bastard who shot me…and—”

  Raw agony crumpled her face and darkened her eye. But almost instantly the agony bled into savage wrath. She shook her head and the ice pack took flight. She looked almost malformed at that moment. Her left eye was swollen shut and shadowed with blue. Her face twisted into a mask of primitive ferocity.

  It took a few seconds for her description of her shooter to sink in. Bald bastard.

  Son of a fucking bitch.

  “Goddamn motherfucker,” Mac said, his face livid. “Cos, give me that business card.”

  Cosky dug into his pocket and pulled out the business card that antagonistic bastard of a detective had given him in the emergency room.

  That bald, antagonistic bastard of a detective.

  “The world’s full of bald men,” Rawls said. When his captive suddenly slumped against the pillow, her muscles slack, he let go of her hands and bent to pick up the ice pack.

  “Yeah, but this particular chrome dome was far too interested in what she”—Cosky jerked his chin toward the woman stretched across his couch—“said to me.”

  “And he didn’t show up at either crime scene,” Mac said with his cell phone plugged to his ear. “What are the odds of that?” He lifted the business card and glared down at it. “Radar, I need another favor. Check with the Coronado PD. See if they have a Detective Alejandro Pachico in house. Get a description if they do, and buddy, keep this on the down low. Yeah, ASAP.”

  Zane ran a tense hand through his hair. “If this guy’s a ringer, and he’s involved in what happened to her”—Zane said with a nod toward their captive—“then it’s a good bet he can lead us to whoever was behind that mess in Seattle.”

  Mac’s lips stretched into a predatory smile. “Which will lead us to who financed McKay’s hit.”

  Rawls perched on the armrest above the woman’s head and laid the ice pack across the left half of her face. “We can’t keep calling you her or she,” he said with a non-threatening smile. “What’s your name?”

  She arched her neck to stare up at him, a frown wrinkling her bruised forehead. Suddenly she winced and her face smoothed out.

  “Jillian,” she finally said, the delay so long Cosky didn’t think she was going to answer at all.

  “And what’s your last name, Jillian?” Rawls persisted.

  She pressed her lips together and glared. Caution registered on her face. Her gaze twitched from Cosky to Zane and over to Mac.

  “Michaels,” she said grudgingly, apparently deciding that providing her last name wouldn’t give them an advantage.

  Zane frowned, and took a step closer to their guest. “Was your brother’s last name Michaels too?”

  “You know it wasn’t,” but her voice lacked heat.

  She looked exhausted, lying there. Fragile. The half of her face not covered by the blue ice pack was a sullen gray against the rich mahogany of their leather couch.

  “We knew him as Russ Branson,” Zane said, his voice quiet.

  Cosky and Rawls exchanged glances and waited. Knowing Branson’s real name was the first step to tracking his bosses down. Although now, thanks to Jillian, they had another, even more promising lead. Before she had a chance to answer, Mac’s phone rang.

  Mac lifted the cell to his ear. “Yeah. There is? What does he look like?” He listened for a moment, and scowled. Disappointment touched his face. “Fuck. Can you get me a picture? Thanks.” He lowered his hand and shrugged. “The description fits; he could be legit.”

  Of course, the smart ringer would impersonate the person in the department who resembled him the closest in case someone called the department to verify his identify.

  “Did Radar get a photo?” Cosky asked.

  “He’s sending it to my phone,” Mac said. “We’ll know for sure in a minute.” He turned to Jillian. “Did she give up Branson’s name?”

  “Not yet.” Zane turned toward the couch and scowled. “Damn.”

  Jillian’s face had gone slack and her good eye was closed.

  “She’s faking it.” Mac stalked forward and glared down at her as though he could get her to open her eye with sheer force of will.

  “No, she’s not,” Rawls said. “She’s malnourished, dehydrated, and exhausted. The only thing keeping her awake is adrenaline and rage, but she can’t maintain that kind of intensity for long in her condition.”

  Mac didn’t look like he believed the diagnosis. But before he could grill their sleeping hostage, his cell buzzed.

  He lifted it to look. “Radar sent the pic.” A couple of finger punches later and he grinned, that predatory anticipation back in full force. “We have a ringer. And our first lead.”

  “I need to let Kait in on this,” Cosky said, picking up his cell from the coffee table.

  “Bullshit.” Mac made a chopping motion. “This intel is need to know. And she doesn’t need to know.”

  Ignoring the order, Cosky highlighted Kait’s number and hit dial. She was in the thick of this fucking mess, thanks to him. No way was he leaving her vulnerable to that bastard.

  “Goddamn it, Cos—” Mac’s voice rose.

  Cosky flatly stared back, listening to his phone ring and ring and ring. “If he has a contact in the Coronado PD, which you can bet your ass he does considering how well informed he is, then he knows Jillian attacked Kait. I’m not leaving her vulnerable. That asshole could swing by her place at any moment to question her about Jillian.”

  It bothered the shit out of him that they’d left her alone to deal with the cops. Damn it, someone should have stayed for support. Although, considering the way his body tightened in anticipation of hearing her voice, not to mention his sudden intense craving for his fingers on her smooth, hot skin, it was probably a good thing he hadn’t bailed from the van to help her out.

  There was a good chance he’d still be in her bed.

  The call quit ringing and her husky voice came on line. “Hello?”

  Bingo, his dick jolted straight up.

  “Hey—”

  “You must have gotten my message,” she broke in.

  He frowned in confusion. “What message?” />
  She snorted. “The one where I thanked you for dragging your mess to my door.”

  Cosky drew back, the confusion deepening. She’d said something similar when she’d called him originally, back before they’d picked up Jillian. Before he had a chance to question her, she started talking.

  “I’m fine. But your stalker got away again.”

  “You have someone there with you?” Cosky asked, his confusion vanishing.

  “Yeah,” she confirmed his suspicion in such a casual voice, it made him wonder how much experience she had in lying. Because she was pretty damn good at it. There was no tension in her tone, no hesitation, nothing to give the lie away.

  “There’s a detective here now, as a matter of fact. But he says they still haven’t found her.”

  Cosky froze, an ugly suspicion stirring. Ice broke out over his back, and prickled down the nape of his neck. “Would this detective’s name be Pachico?” he asked, the words coming out low and hard and dangerous.

  For the first time she paused, and he could sense her surprise. “It would—”

  He swore viciously, his heart slamming against his ribs like he’d just finished CQB training.

  Damn it, he shouldn’t have caught her off guard. If Pachico was half the professional they suspected, he’d pick up on her surprised reaction.

  Cosky’s own ineptitude had just put Kait in danger. Serious danger. A cold, black pressure rose inside him. He recognized it instantly. Fear.

  He’d never had trouble caging it before, forcing it into the background. This time it insisted on taking the driver’s seat.

  He forced himself to concentrate, and realized she was talking.

  “But dinner alone isn’t getting you out of this,” she said in a half-laughing, half-flirting tone. She paused as though listening. “No, I’m not turning you down. I never turn down a free dinner.”

  Cosky tried to calm his surging blood pressure. “You didn’t tell him anything?”

  If Pachico knew they had Jillian, he’d know Jillian had told them about him. He could decide to grab Kait and use her as a bargaining chip. Previous experience proved the bastard’s pawns didn’t have the life span of a fruit fly after he was done with them.