Comeback

by Doranna Durgin

  God—Cole! The arriving security backup had found him and were screaming Berzhaani at him, orders he wouldn't be able to understand—not well enough to respond before he was shot.

  Selena leaped to her feet, scanning the assembled men and women in their semiformal attire, ignoring the horse who'd found himself a corner to tuck his head in, trailing breeching straps and tracing and presenting his butt to anyone who might think about getting close to him. There—Razidae! In conversation with one of the arriving security guards, but she couldn't wait for that—he was the only one who could stop the confrontation on the steps. She ran to him, grabbing his arm even as his eyes widened with both affront and recognition; she caught a glimpse of Dante Allori not far away, reaching for his ringing cell phone—Aymal at work—one eyebrow arched high in exquisitely expressed what have you gotten into now. Only a few words later he headed for Davud Garibli, a man strangely apart from the others.

  Later for that, too, and even as the security guard grabbed her, she said, "Sir, that's my husband your people are yelling at—he doesn't know Berzhaani and—"

  Renewed gunfire cracked through the building from outside. A short spurt, and then silence. Selena dropped Razidae's arm and wrenched herself free from the guard.

  And she ran.

  SPOTLIGHTS PAINTED THE STONE steps in harsh light and brittle shadow, distorting the half-dozen dead and wounded Kemeni. It had indeed been a suicide charge. In such small numbers, they could not have hoped to survive. They'd simply been intent on causing their damage before they died—and they would have, had Selena not interfered.

  Had Cole not interfered.

  Heart thumping painfully in a manner oh-so-different than her reactive nerves, she hunted Cole. He'd gone off the horse about a third of the way up the steps, but then he'd fought his own battle. There was no telling where he'd ended up—

  There. That abaya, crumpled off to the side and half-hidden in the shrubs. Capitol security slowly closed in, weapons aimed and ready and every single man looking as though it would take nothing more than boo to cause a full-bore volley of gunfire. All Cole had to do was twitch…

  "Stand down," she shouted, even knowing that a stranger's voice—a woman's voice—would have no authority. "He came to help! He is American, and has no Berzhaani!"

  They didn't so much as glance at her, and she ran down several steps, aimed her pistol off to the side, and fired a shot into the sculpted dirt of the memorial garden. "You want a target?" She thumped herself in the chest for emphasis as they turned to this new threat, reflexively ducking, bringing their weapons to bear. "Here's your target, you fools!" Another two shots into the dirt and she had what she'd wanted—every gun on the stairs was pointed directly at her.

  And it had seemed like such a good idea at the time…

  Selena held her breath, remembered that she wore black over tan and hoped none of them would mistake tan for khaki in this light. She froze, and the only move she made was to open the trigger finger and thumb of the hand on her pistol, holding it precariously with her remaining fingers—the clearest, most concise gesture of harmlessness she could muster.

  They didn't look convinced. Oh, God, they don't look at all convinced—

  Except suddenly they'd altered aim, pointing their weapons slightly down and to the side, their expressions changing from wary, aggressive anger to something somewhat closer to abashed. Huh.

  From behind her, Razidae's deep voice rang out. "Stand down. The Kemenis are contained. Hunt for stragglers and leave that man and this woman to me."

  Selena's strength left her in a whoosh of relief; she almost sat down right then and there, at Razidae's feet. But her eyes sought out the stained and ragged abaya and the familiar shape of the body beneath it, and she couldn't bring herself to look away as she said to the prime minister, "Good evening, sir. I came to warn you that the Kemenis had something planned for the evening. I see my timing wasn't quite right."

  "In fact, I consider your timing to be perfect," Razidae said, his commanding voice taking a distinctly dry note. "Considering I wasn't even aware of your presence in my country. But we will discuss that later. Go to him."

  Selena spurted into motion. "Cole!" And then, as she slipped in her haste and literally skidded the few remaining steps to reach him, "Cole, dammit!" By then she was beside him, one hand heading for his shoulder, ready to shake him—

  He stirred. He lifted his head and grinned up at her as he rolled over to almost-sit, a feeble half-assed sort of grin with the wry twist that said he knew it. No blood…she saw no blood anywhere. She patted him, careful of his back, unable to believe he hadn't been riddled with holes. "Are you all—"

  "Hell, yes," he said. "I'm fine."

  She snorted with utter disbelief—that he still had his humor, that he wasn't full of leaky holes. "I can't believe you weren't shot."

  "Are you kidding?" Shaking with chills, burning with fever, his eyes not even beginning to focus, he still had the wherewithal to give a short laugh. "As soon as I realized they'd decided I was one of the bad guys, I decided to take a dive. A big, convincing dive."

  "You were damned well too convincing," she snapped, and jerked her hand away from his shoulder to let him know he'd pay for scaring her, too.

  For all of two or three seconds.

  In the background, someone shouted about finding a wagon, and finding an injured man. Selena closed her eyes, hoping they were in time. "Dobry is still alive," she whispered to Cole, shorthand translation.

  Cole sighed with weary relief.

  She opened her eyes to find him watching her—watching closely. The chills, the fever, the subtle jerk in his body that told of his strain. "But you're okay. You'll be okay."

  He spared an arm from supporting himself and used it to pull her in close, to the kind of embrace where they stopped being individuals and became one being. One intense, grateful being, for the moment forgetting the circumstances also embracing them—the capitol steps in the aftermath of a terrorist attack with an injured comrade a block away.

  Almost.

  She was the one to pull away, taking all her willpower—and helped along by the commentary flying in the background, by those who'd forgotten she'd shouted out in their language. Helped, too, by the knowledge that one of them had already died, and that Cole was much sicker, much closer to that downward spiral, than he would ever admit.

  Cole didn't let her pull back very far. Just far enough to meet her eyes and give her that wicked, wise-ass grin of his. "Okay?" he said. "Just fine."

  She could have smacked him.

  But she didn't. She leaned in to kiss him, and then to drag him away to safety.

  Chapter 24

  Days of worrying later, days of debriefing…days of explanations and international appeasement later, Selena found herself back at the ritzy Suwan restaurant—this time without Dante Allori. Without Dobry, who still slept in recovery from his wounds. But not alone, either. And not without a mission.

  "You heard about the station house, right?" Selena spoke into the discreet earbud mike of her cell phone—the Agency phone, newly secure again—and nodded at the server who refilled her glass with tea. She spooned jam into it and almost wished Dobry was there to make a dour face at the habit.

  But Cole's voice in her ear was a welcome relief after several days of IV antibiotics, a hyperbaric treatment or two, and one very bad second night when Berzhaan's best doctors thought the infection was winning the battle. He still tired far too easily, and his arms were stained with a fading rash of red dots that had been hidden by darkness and the abaya. But he'd wanted to "be here" for this, so Selena charged the phone battery to the fullest, pulled out the wireless earbud, and clipped the phone to the pocket of the gorgeous silk tunic she wore over loose black slacks. She sat at the same table where Ambassador Allori had once hosted her, and carried on a conversation with her husband, waiting for the final scene of the latest Kemeni tragedy.

  "I heard about the station house," Cole
confirmed. "TRAMMEL came by to act embarrassed about it. Seems the station security upgrade was the last job Betzer did for Hafford before taking his crew independent. Obviously a man who thought ahead, our Betzer. He left some strategically placed taps in place when he left."

  "Your Betzer," Selena murmured.

  "No one's Betzer anymore," Cole responded more soberly. "It's a good thing capitol security tracked down the surviving merc. He's been damned enlightening, from what I hear."

  Not that tracking him down had been difficult. The man had managed to leave the wagon, but wasn't moving any faster than a crawl when Razidae's men caught up with him. And in acknowledgment of Selena's role in preventing a massacre at the private preview of the rebuilt capitol, they'd handed the wounded merc over to the embassy, where he proved very talkative when offered a deal that took the charge of treason off the table. "It's a good thing," Selena said, and nibbled a left-over breakfast pastry. "What a tangle. Betzer's group working to prevent Aymal's defection—"

  "He made it to the States?"

  "Touchdown yesterday afternoon, while you were sleeping. He's apparently been set to full babble ever since. There was a bombing planned for March Elementary School in Webster, New York, but those school kids are completely safe."

  His sigh of relief echoed through her own chest. "Okay, so Betzer was supposed to grab Aymal, and he knew about the thing with the capitol because he helped round up the Kemeni stragglers for his mystery boss, who was running a separate op—with Scott Hafford's inside information and driven by Davud Garibli—to get rid of Razidae once and for all."

  "Or at the least, emasculate his leadership abilities by destroying the supposedly secure capitol." Not that they'd found out who that boss was—it was the one thing on which the wounded merc stood fast.

  "Hey," Cole protested. "Watch how you use that word. It's a scary one. It could delay my recovery."

  "You mean emasculate?"Selena asked, all innocence.

  "The longer I'm in this hospital, the longer until we get back home…the longer it takes to get on with our lives." Cole's voice went suggestive, and Selena found herself glancing around, suddenly certain everyone in this conservative restaurant could hear. But she turned serious quickly enough, pushing the half-eaten pastry aside.

  "I hear that," Cole told her. "That sudden silence into deep thought."

  She made a face at him, quickly covering it with a fake sneeze as a dignified set of businessmen walked by, observing her unescorted presence with disapproval. "Brat," she whispered at him. But she recovered quickly, because he'd been right. And she didn't want to wait any longer for this conversation. "Here's the thing," she said, and took a deep breath. "I figured out something on this op. The whole I-am-what-I-am thing. And you're the one who said it…accept it. Use it."

  "That I did," he agreed. "Something like that, anyway. But I don't get the feeling you're talking about the job anymore."

  "No." She kept her voice low and watched her fingers tear off bits of innocent pastry. "I'm talking about us. About our family. I think we need to face facts…if practice could get it done, we'd be pregnant by now."

  "If practice could get it done, we'd have quints by now," Cole said, his voice taking on an edge of fervency. "Oh, hold on—" He moved the phone from his mouth; his voice became muffled as he exchanged words with someone on his end. The receiver rustled against cloth, and finally he came back to her. "They were admiring my maggots."

  Selena desperately muffled a snort, not willing to attract any more disapproving looks. Dobry had taught her that much. As a legate, it worked to her advantage to have a strong public personality, to be recognizable. Now that wouldn't always be the case.

  Cole cheerfully continued. "We did a good job with that, they said. The things ought to come out tomorrow."

  She cleared her throat, quite deliberately. "That's nice, dear."

  "I know, I know…bad timing. Practice. Pregnant. Quints. And…?"

  She couldn't help but lower her voice again, feeling very much as if she was walking out onto thin ice, the clear kind that showed every crack as well as the deep rushing water beneath. "So I think it's time we accepted that I am what I am. As much as we want a family—our family—I don't think it's gonna happen the usual way."

  "No," he said, entirely sober. "It doesn't look that way."

  "And we could go the whole high-tech route, or we could try to find a surrogate, or…"

  Or the part she didn't have any idea how he'd respond to. The part they'd never talked about, because until recently they'd never had the need.

  But apparently they'd both been thinking about it somewhere along the way, for Cole's voice had gone soft, too. "Lena…you've seen what I've seen over the past handful of years. The toll terrorism takes…the number of kids it leaves behind…"

  He knew.

  He felt it, too.

  Relief whooshed out of her lungs. "Yes," she said. "That's it. There's someone waiting for us, Cole. Someone already waiting for us. I don't care where she comes from, I don't care—"

  "She?"

  "She," Selena repeated, almost shyly. "To start."

  "She," Cole repeated. "Yeah, I like the sound of that."

  Don't cry in the restaurant, Selena, not even from happiness. Taz wouldn't.

  Except she wasn't the Road Runner, and she wasn't Taz…she was Selena. Through and through.

  "Lena?"

  And just like that, she was back at work. For here came Scott Hafford, moving through the tables on the trail of the maitre d'—glancing around as though he expected the world to come toppling down on him at any moment, but a man still going through the motions.

  "Target's here," Selena murmured to Cole. She waited until the maitre d' had gone past her table but Hafford hadn't, and she stood.

  That's all she did. She stood and she waited, silent, one eyebrow slightly raised.

  Hafford stopped in his tracks, his options crossing his face as he considered them—to fight, to run, to accept the inevitable. And eventually his shoulders sagged, and he nodded. In turn, Selena caught the eye of the CIA case officer who'd been stationed not far from her. The man stood, waiting to take custody.

  "You knew," Hafford said, and waved off the maitre d' who'd turned to check on him.

  "We knew you were susceptible," Selena agreed. "And now we've got some people who will want to talk to you about Arachne."

  Hafford went so pale she thought he might pass out; he steadied himself by gripping the back of an occupied chair, oblivious to the startled man seated on it. "You know," he murmured. "It's almost a relief."

  Ignoring Cole's, "Arachne? Arachne who?" in her ear, Selena nodded. "I can imagine that's so. I can only hope it's also a relief that so few innocent people died because of you. That the capitol is opening today as planned even though you fed codes and bypass information to the Kemeni. That Razidae's government is strong and moving forward."

  "I didn't want any of it to happen," Hafford said, a quiet but desperate plea for understanding. "I had no choice."

  "Really?" she said coolly. "There's always choice, Mr. Hafford. And then you live with who you discover yourself to be."

  "You'll see," he said, and if anything, that haunted look intensified. "You think your people are a target? You'll feel differently when you've faced what I have."

  My people? The FBI, the CIA?

  No. She knew who she thought of as her people. Who she'd have to warn. Athena Academy. She'd have to connect with Delphi…

  But she'd finish here first. She gestured for him to precede her, and the local case officer stood to accompany them out of the restaurant, a casual move of which Dobry would have approved.

  Outside the restaurant, Selena blinked at the bright sunshine and lifted her face to the unusually warm air of the fall day. Cole had been quiet for some moments. Now he said quietly, "Hey, you okay?"

  And he meant okay with all of it. With what they'd been through together, with what they'd learned about each other
together. What she'd learned about herself…and what they planned for their future. Even with the questions still unanswered about their future.

  Okay? Selena took a deep, happy breath. "Hell, yes," she said. "I'm fine."