Chapter Six
Twelve hours. That was how long it had taken for everything to go to shit. A new record. Even for her.
Twelve hours since Cooper had pulled Will off that mountain.
Twelve hours since he’d taken his first breath of free air.
Twelve hours since she’d first let herself believe this nightmare might finally, finally end.
Damn fool; she should have known better. She’d set herself up for this. Courted disappointment from the moment she’d put any trust in hope or let herself forget, even for a second, that she couldn’t afford to have any feelings. Will was dying.
And there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to stop it.
Not here, not with limited water, over-the-counter drugs, and fast-disappearing rations.
She was out of time—they both were—and a betting man would wager every last dime he had on Will never seeing the light of another day.
It was all so goddamned unfair.
Unfair that Will had endured a year of captivity, only to die on this mountain the second he was free to walk away.
Unfair that, yet again, Cooper could feel hope slipping through her fingers like sand.
Unfair that, just for a moment, she’d felt as if she wasn’t so fucking alone anymore. That maybe she’d found an ally, someone who’d understand how incredibly tired she was, even if he couldn’t or wouldn’t help.
Unfair that Will had reappeared in her life as abruptly as she’d once appeared in his, only for the universe to snatch him away.
Again.
Will had been a variety of things to her: a pleasant daydream, a fun “what if” scenario, a knowing, sometimes even intimate, voice on the other end of the phone. Someone who not only understood the job but thrived on it. Lived for it. In so many ways, and for so many reasons, she’d treasured those irregular phone calls.
Enjoyed the flirting and the trash talking.
The teasing and the understanding.
The friendship, uncomplicated by demands, expectations, or careers that drove them in different directions.
It was why she’d never pushed to meet him, though she’d certainly thought about it.
She’d always assumed there’d be time.
How wrong she’d been.
She’d lost her freedom, her career, her life. And she’d lost those late-night calls, random texts, and terrible, terrible jokes.
Silly, that she’d missed that contact, that sense of intimacy with another human being. Especially when she’d spent so much of her life alone. It was the nature of the job, and one she was usually okay with.
Until, like so much else, the choice had been stripped away and the isolation forced on her.
She sat on a sigh, checked the pulse at Will’s wrist. Fast, too fast, a brutal rhythm his body couldn’t keep running to.
Coop smothered a curse that felt like a goddamned sob caught in her chest.
So. Fucking. Unfair.
Will moaned. His eyelids fluttering, his pupils twitching. Nightmares had haunted him, prowling through his sleep like specters in the night. But as his back arched and the muscles along his neck bulged, Cooper longed for the kindness of a nightmare—and her ability to soothe it away.
She could do little more than watch as seizures wrung him dry and wore him out.
She turned him to his side, held him as his exhausted body twitched and spasmed and contorted.
Will turned, a moan passing through dry, cracked lips, and fisted a hand in the fabric of her shirt, his grip tight and desperate. A silent plea that needed neither voice nor interpreter.
Don’t leave me here.
She pulled his hand free. Stood and brushed off the pieces of jungle that clung to her pants and retrieved the satellite phone she kept buried at the bottom of her pack.
As last resorts went, this one sucked. But she dialed anyway. Waited through the endless ringing. Hung up, braced herself for a fight, and dialed again.
“What?” Pierce drawled across the line, his voice thick and heavy with sleep or satisfaction or both.
“I need to change my itinerary,” she offered, cautious over a line she didn’t control and couldn’t secure.
“What number are you calling me from?” Pierce swore, a bed creaking in the background. “You know what, don’t answer that. I’ll call you back.”
It took less than a minute before the phone in her palm vibrated against her hand. She answered on the first ring.
“Hey—”
“You know better than to call from an unsecured line.”
“I didn’t have much choice,” she muttered.
“I need some help.”
“I thought you had an exit strategy in place.”
“I did. I do,” she explained. “But it won’t work.”
Silence, thin and taut as the line between friend and enemy, stretched between them.
“Then make an adjustment,” Pierce grunted.
“I can’t.” Cooper swallowed and braced herself against the explosion she knew was coming. “Not for both of us.”
The swish click swish of Pierce thumbing his lighter open, then closed, then open again, filtered down the line.
“What are you doing, love?” Pierce asked, his voice like honey-laced bourbon—a smooth sweetness meant to temper the sting but deliver the punch.
“I can’t get him out. Not on my own.”
“Then leave him.”
Simple. Direct. Obvious. She wondered if it really was that easy for Pierce to make the practical decision. No emotion. No feelings. No loyalty. Had he always been that way? Or had time and practice cut the fabric of cold-hearted mercilessness closer and closer, until he wore it like a flawless second skin?
“I can’t.”
“Can’t, or won’t?”
“I need him, you know that—”
“You need his fingerprints, nothing more. You got a knife in your pack?”
“Yes, but I—”
“Then do what needs to be done and get the fuck out of there.”
He hung up on her.
Do what needs to be done. No. Just no. Cooper couldn’t even bring herself to consider it. Even if Will never woke, never knew, she couldn’t stand the idea of carving away a piece of him. Of treating him like an object, a means to an end. He was more than that, damn it, and so the fuck was she.
She called Pierce back. Did it again and again and again until finally, her phone rang.
“I thought you’d learned this lesson already?” Pierce asked. “The hard way, no less.”
Cooper closed her eyes, sagged with frustration, and let the sun bathe her face as it came up over the trees. “It’s not the same.”
“Isn’t it, though? You let things get personal. You got attached. Even now you’re acting out of emotion rather than logic. That nearly got you killed once. My mistake, I suppose, thinking you were smart enough to figure it out the first time.”
She swallowed hard against the cold clutch of betrayal that surged up her throat like acid. He was right, and they both knew it. Faith had gotten her into this mess and loyalty, loyalty had given her a blind spot that had nearly gotten her killed.
“I don’t want to hear it.”
Experience told her she was making a mistake. She only hoped it was one she could live with.
“Oh, but you need to,” Pierce assured her. “An extraction takes time you do not have. His location has been disclosed—I know of at least three mercs in the area who’d be all too happy to pull one job and get paid for two. Leave. Now.”
“No,” she snapped, her skin flushing hot then cold, her fingers trembling with nerves she refused to give in to.
Pierce sighed. “Get out of there, Cooper. Before it’s too late.”
“No,” she repeated, stronger, more determined.
“Even if I were willing, what you’re asking for takes time you do not have.”
“I won’t leave him here.” Her mind set, Cooper said the only thing she knew woul
d shut Pierce up and bring him to her side. “I’m calling in my favor. I need an extraction, a secure destination, and a medical team waiting for us when we get there.”
Silence dropped, whistling through the air like a ten-ton bomb about to blow everything to shit.
“You’re cashing in your favor for this? For a man you barely know?”
She’d shocked him, a feat she’d once thought impossible. If she’d ever wondered what it would sound like, she now had her answer. Ugly. Harsh. Judgmental.
“I can’t get him out on my own, and I won’t leave him behind.” Cooper pushed a hand through her hair and gripped the phone. “A life for a life, that’s what you said. Pay up, Pierce. Or break your word. Your choice.”
But it was no choice at all, and they both knew it. All Pierce had was his word and his reputation. Whatever code he lived by, it would drive him straight to her.
“You’re sure?” he asked quietly, carefully, as if giving her the chance to back out. “That favor was meant to save your life. This is a waste, and I’m not a generous man. I won’t take your call again.”
“My favor, my call.” She sighed and prayed she’d never need Pierce again, that she’d never have cause to regret calling in the favor he owed her. The one she’d carried for months like a lethal ace up her sleeve.
He sighed. “Send me your coordinates. And Cooper?”
“Yeah?”
“I sincerely hope you live to regret this.” He hung up, but his words, quiet and soft and genuine, lingered with her.
How often had he cautioned her to be smart, to be hard, to be merciless? To shoot first and die last.
And he was right. That mentality would keep her alive.
But she wondered if she could live with the choices Pierce so easily dismissed as beneath his time and consideration.
In so many ways, Pierce was just one of the destinations on the path beneath her feet. This life had pushed him, tormented him, imprisoned him, and in the end, taken damn near everything from him.
And Pierce had emerged, hardened and jaded, clinging to a life void of all the things Cooper missed the most.
Friends. Family. Trust. Intimacy.
Somewhere along the way, he’d made one tough call too many, crossed a line he could never come back from. Had he known it at the time? Understood that if he pulled that trigger, took that life, or turned his back, that he’d never be the same again? That no amount of answers or justice or vengeance would ever be enough to save him?
And when that line lay before her, stretched and thin and so very easy to step over, would Cooper know it for what it was?
Or would she cross it without a second thought . . . and never look back at all?
Chapter Seven
Panama City, Panama
The metronomic beat of a heart rate monitor drowned out the noise of early morning traffic . . . and was a greater comfort than Cooper wanted to admit.
The last forty-eight hours had been a hellish torture meted out in high-pitched bleeps and one single, heart-stopping note stretched and pulled and plied to the breaking point.
In reality, death had come and gone again in little more than ninety seconds.
A minute and a half of a world without hope. Without answers. Without salvation or redemption.
Without Will.
His heart had stopped, and in that moment, so had hers.
And fear had set in.
Cooper had tried to tell herself there’d be another opportunity. That all her hopes for answers, for freedom, for justice, weren’t pinned squarely on Will’s shoulders.
But they were. Because in the breathless moments where life had failed but death had not yet won, Cooper had understood that one way or another, Will was the end of the road.
She couldn’t keep running. Wouldn’t keep hiding. Her past was coming for her, and it was time to face it.
Rage, rather than hopelessness, had consumed her.
“Well, he’s not much to look at, but he’ll live,” Pierce said as he went through the now-familiar routine of checking Will’s vitals. Through it all, and despite his constant bitching and obvious disapproval, Pierce had been nothing short of a revelation.
A doctor in a former life.
Of all the professions Cooper might have imagined for him, medicine had never once entered her mind.
Do no harm.
Words she couldn’t imagine Pierce had ever willingly uttered, let alone lived by.
And yet the experience, the confidence, the painstaking attention to detail was all there. From the moment he’d extracted them from Colombia, Pierce had been a man possessed. By power. By passion. And by the sheer egotistical certainty that when he stood toe-to-toe with death over a patient’s bedside, that the outcome was a forgone conclusion. The fight to save a life little more than the pomp and circumstance death demanded before walking away empty-handed.
But then that was Pierce. A riot of conflicts and a mess of impressions. Frightening and miraculous. Devastation and salvation.
Mercenary and hero.
“How is he?” Cooper asked, turning her attention back to Will, her breath falling in sync with the easy rhythm of the steady rise and fall of his chest. She hadn’t left his side. Hadn’t let herself close her eyes for longer than a fifteen-minute stretch of sleep here and there. She’d been so certain that if she left the room or looked away, she’d come back to find him still and cold beneath that sunny yellow sheet.
Like so much else in her life, there one minute and gone the next.
Another failure. Another death.
So she’d kept her vigil.
“Alive, as promised,” Pierce answered, checking the fluids suspended above Will’s bed, then looking over the IV he’d placed at the crook of Will’s elbow. Pierce’s incessant bitching about dehydration, lack of nutrition, and the shitty state of Will’s veins still echoed through her mind.
A lot of things did.
None of them pleasant.
But it was the seizures, the nightmares, and the screams that would linger with her.
Even now, Will’s time in captivity, the starvation and neglect, the dehydration and abuse, the desperation and the fight, still rode him. She’d helped Pierce undress him. Revealed the harsh lines carved into long-starved limbs. Exposed skin mottled with a bouquet of bruises in greens and blues, yellows and purples, as if the colors had been painstakingly blended and layered. And she’d laid bare the scars—so many scars—that had been left by cruel instruments and crueler hands.
She’d touched some of them. Wondered how old they were. What had put them there.
And prayed to anyone listening that she’d shot each and every one of those bastards dead. That not one had lived. Not one had escaped.
That Will would never have to glance over his shoulder to find his past lurking in wait.
Ridiculous of course. Even if he found a way to put everything the cartel had done behind him, the past was still there, a familiar stranger in a darkened corner.
Watching.
Waiting.
A wraith that never left. Never forgot. And if it had its way, would never let him move on.
Not on my watch.
“All in all, he’s come through the last year better than he should have,” Pierce added.
Cooper followed Pierce’s gaze, tracked the planes of Will’s chest, the slope of his shoulders, the dip of his collarbone. He was thin, too thin, and though she’d taken the time to clean his skin with hot water and wrung-out washcloths, he needed a shower. A shave. To do something about that tangled mass of hair. But Pierce wasn’t wrong. Will wore the evidence of his captivity, of the casual cruelty and harsh conditions, like the warrior he was.
“It’s remarkable, really. He’s underweight but hasn’t lost all his muscle mass. Regular meals, clean water, plenty of rest—he should rebound quickly.” Pierce stepped back, studied Will with the same expression he so often turned on Cooper. Critical and calculating, that look spoke volumes and e
ven managed to sound annoyed without the benefit of so much as an accompanying tsk to break the silence.
Pierce, Cooper had learned, liked things neatly ordered and predictable. Obedient to the way he saw the world.
As he was so fond of saying, he didn’t do sloppy seconds, suppressors, or surprises.
But Will had surprised him.
He’d surprised, Cooper, too.
For a guy who’d been on death’s door, he looked good. Alive, if not whole. Rebounding, if not healthy.
Color, rather than fever, had returned to his face.
He dreamed—his eyes flickering back and forth beneath their lids—but didn’t scream, or plead, or beg.
He slept.
And he snored. Just a little. Just enough to torture him over later.
It brought a smile to her lips that she’d have the opportunity.
“Everything looks good,” Pierce said, snapping off his latex gloves as he headed out the door.
Cooper stood and followed Pierce out of the bedroom and into the tiny living area of the three room flat he’d brought them to. She’d been here two days, but it still felt like she was seeing it for the first time.
She hadn’t missed much. A worn, but comfortable-looking sofa along the far wall, a tiny kitchenette. A little trifold, dropleaf table next to the door. The air conditioner rattled, the laminate floors were chipped, and a spider had made its home in the corner, his web spreading from wall to ceiling.
It was still the nicest place Cooper had stayed in over a year.
“He’ll sleep for a while.” Pierce strode into the kitchen, pulled a bottle of juice from a refrigerator that aspired toward greatness and a temperature below sixty. “I gave him several rounds of general antibiotics along with the fluids, and you’ll need to follow up with a shot of penicillin, then the pills I’ve left for you.” He chugged down half the bottle, the halogen lights amplifying the dark smudges beneath his eyes. “Given his condition, and the long-term exposure to the elements, I wouldn’t skip any doses.”
“Any idea when he’ll be back up on his feet?” As much as Cooper wanted to give Will time to rest and recover, to eat three square meals and take a long, hot shower, the reality was that the longer he was down, the more dangerous it became to stay. She never lingered long in one place for a reason, and already her skin was itching with the urge to move on.
Fearless (Somerton Security Book 3) Page 6