“A hit?” he asked.
“He isn’t the first lead to wind up dead . . . or the only one with a contract on his head.”
“Who else?” he asked, though he had to at least suspect what she’d say.
“You. Me,” she said, and wondered when it had all become so normal to her. “Felix Harrigan and the others discovered one of the trials. Compiled proof—”
“The bank.”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “Then I was used to clean up the mess. To prevent exposure—I wasn’t meant to survive it.”
Will looked away from her, his jaw set, and his fists clenched.
“I don’t know what’s in that bank, but Felix thought it was worth hiding and the CIA thinks it’s worth killing for. I need that information. Names, dates, studies, results, tissue samples. I need patient records and the doctors involved. What I have right now . . . it’s not enough.”
“You want an insurance policy.”
Cooper barked a laugh. “Please. I’m not that naive. The more information I find, the higher the price on my head grows. This wasn’t some huge government program. This was the work of a few people. It was quietly managed, quietly orchestrated, and when shit started to go wrong, it was meant to be quietly shut down.” Problem was, she didn’t know who was behind it all, which meant as far as she was concerned, she had to move forward as if everyone was. “This is kill or be killed, and at the end of the day, I intend to make sure both Cole and I are still standing.”
“Cole?”
“He’s out there. Snared in the steel trap they created inside his own head. A prisoner. A plaything. A pawn on a board he isn’t even aware of. I have to find the people who did this to him before . . .” She swallowed hard, afraid to voice just what lay at the end of that sentence. “He’s a prisoner in all this.”
Like you. Like me.
“I need to get into that bank, Will.”
“Right.” He let the silence stretch between them and push its way through the room, filling every corner like the wet, oppressive blanket of Southern summer humidity.
“Far as I can see, there’s only two possible scenarios here, Cooper.” Like a predator, he advanced on her.
She held her ground, refused to take a step back, and refused to forget that though the last year of his life had eaten at him, the skills, the muscle memory, the dogged efficiency and determination of a Special Forces soldier remained.
“Either you’re desperate enough to tell me the truth, no matter how damning and outlandish it is,” he said, pinning her with a look. “Or you’re here on behalf of your employer, and once again, you’re just doing your job. So which is it, Cooper? Are you in over your head? Or are you just like every other spy I’ve ever met—a mindless drone devoted to the job, and damn the consequences? I mean, what’s six lives in the grand scheme of things anyway?”
“Mindless drone?” She bristled, his jab landing a little too close to home. “You were Delta how long again? Five years? And a solider before that.” She snorted. “And I suppose you made a career out of arguing with COs and questioning orders. I’m sure you never went on an op you didn’t agree with or deployed for reasons you didn’t know.” The very thought, the simple accusation that he hadn’t made the same decisions, been put in the same positions, grated against her skin like wind-tossed sand. “But then, if that was true I’d never have had to pull you out of the Colombian jungle in the first place.”
Shock, as effective as an open palm, slapped across his face.
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“That little raid that landed you as a guest of the Vega cartel? Turns out it was bought and paid for by a private party. You were used, Will. For something so petty as war profiteering, apparently. And then left to rot.” She clenched her fists. “So don’t talk to me about mindless devotion to the job.”
She forced her fingers open and worked on breathing through the anger. It wouldn’t do her any good.
He set his jaw and stared at her with that condescending brown gaze.
“Christ,” she swore on an exhale. “I never would have pegged you for a hypocritical asshole.”
“And I never would have pegged you as manipulative bitch,” he hissed, then reeled his anger back, tucked it away until it was simmering just beneath the surface. “It’s a good story, Cooper, I’ll give you that. Sympathetic. Neat.”
“Nothing about that day or anything that came after it was neat.”
He ignored her. “Hits all the right notes—looping in the program was a nice touch.”
“The program?” she asked, but he ran right over the question.
“And you almost had me.”
Almost. God. She was losing him and didn’t know what to say or do to change that.
“You don’t believe me.”
“Oh, I believe you killed that team. I even believe you were following orders—”
“Then—”
“I might even have bought everything you told me about Cole, even the medical trials, impossible as they sound.” He advanced on her, his body vibrating with a quiet kind of rage she didn’t know how to subdue. “But you know where you lost me, Coop?” He stepped around the coffee table and she backpedaled toward the door. “When you tried to play me. ‘He’s a prisoner, too,’” he mimicked. “It was a gamble, and it tipped your hand.”
“No, I—”
“It makes sense, I guess, why they’d send you. We have a history, and I bet your handlers thought I’d do anything for the woman who saved my life. Who freed me.”
She retreated until her ass hit the drop-leaf table by the door, her hands going to the surface to keep it from tipping over. Something rolled into her hand, and her fingers curled around a syringe Pierce had left behind.
“But if you thought, for even a moment, that I could ever trust the woman who killed six of my friends, then you’re as stupid as you are cold.” He went to step around her and toward the door.
She slid to the side, blocking his exit.
“Move.”
“No.” She couldn’t. Wouldn’t. And may God forgive her for it.
“I’m leaving, Cooper, and you can’t stop me.”
She thumbed the cap off the syringe, desperation drowning out every protest screaming at the back of her mind. “You’ve got a price on your head, too, you know.”
“Right.” He snorted. “Except that as you said, I’m the only one who can access that bank, so what good am I dead?”
“You die, and that box gets buried with you, the contents lost and harmless—I can’t let that happen.”
“How do you propose to stop me? Nine out of ten, right?” he reminded her.
She sucked a breath and slid her thumb over the plunger, unsurprised but still hurt he’d use her own words against her.
“Move.”
She shook her head, and he slid that cold brown gaze down her body. The second he saw the syringe, she moved, surprise her only real advantage.
She went for his thigh, but he was ready, and fast, so shockingly, violently fast.
Desperate, she managed to empty half the syringe to the floor at her feet before he turned it on her, forcing it into her arm, and pumped her system full of scopolamine.
And as the drug hit her system, pulled at her mind, all she could think of was how sorry she was.
Sorry that she’d taken those shots.
Sorry that Will would forever believe the worst of her.
And sorry that after everything, she’d failed the only person who really needed her.
So damn sorry.
Chapter Ten
“What was in the syringe, Cooper?” Gripping her by the arms, Will shoved her back against the door and held her there.
She did a long, slow blink. Like a spill of black ink, her pupils grew like a stain, eating away at rich blue irises until only tiny band of color remained.
He shook her, and her head snapped back against the wood. “What was it?” he demanded.
The confession fell from her mouth like the smooth, unwavering swing of an executioner’s ax. “Scopolamine.”
Rage snapped through him, a living, breathing thing with teeth and claws and an animalistic determination to maul anything that threatened him.
She’d tried to stop him. Tried to hurt him. Tried to control him.
It was the last one that had him tightening his grip and digging his fingers into her biceps until she winced.
A voice, dark and ugly and vicious, told him to slide those fingers up. To wrap them around her throat.
To stop her. Hurt her. Control her.
Permanently.
Because he thought about it, because for a single, terrible moment he wanted to do it, he shoved her away and let go. Forced himself to step back. Then again. And again.
Until he was certain there was enough space between them that reason would override rage.
Every instinct he had said to deal with the threat in front of him. To strike first and strike last because there would be no second chances.
The jungle had taught him that.
Taught him to be relentless. Ruthless. Fearless in the face of his enemy . . . and in the face of death.
But Cooper wasn’t there to kill him.
He pulled in a breath. Tasted the drier, temperature-controlled air of the apartment. Rubbed his fingers together, skin sliding against skin and clean of sweat and dirt and blood.
Will reminded himself where he was—and where he wasn’t.
Focused on who he was—and who he never wanted to be again.
“Will . . .” she whispered his name, the sound distant and hollow, as if she’d said it from far away rather than the other side of the room. But she was far away, Will realized. Oh, she was fighting it, swimming hard against a riptide she couldn’t see but was dragging her away all the same. It was there in her eyes, the way she constantly tried to focus on something, anything. Even him, a lighthouse on a jagged coast.
Too bad he felt more like the treacherous rocks, waiting to batter her. Destroy her.
He needed her gone.
“I won’t ever be at someone else’s mercy again. Not even yours, Cooper.”
Her words came slowly, as if she had to push them up through layers and layers of cotton. “I’m sorry.”
“I. Don’t. Care.” Each word carried him forward, closer and closer to something he couldn’t take back. Something he’d never be able to live with. “Get. Out.”
“Please . . .” she begged, fear, acrid and unmistakable, seizing her.
“Get out!” he raged, terrified of what he’d do if she stayed.
A tear slid down her cheek and the drugs took hold. She turned, pulled open the door, and disappeared from his life.
She just walked away. Didn’t even bother to close the door.
He slammed it shut behind her.
Fuck. Just fuck.
Scopolamine. For a moment, he’d let himself believe the lives she’d taken were the worst of it. The worst of her.
He hadn’t even been close.
He knew what that drug was. What it did. What she could have done to him.
What he could have done at her command.
Mindlessly. Remorselessly. Mercilessly.
He couldn’t forgive her for it.
Didn’t even know how to try.
He was so damn tired of being used.
To fight other people’s wars.
To kill for the entertainment of men with too much time and too little power.
To open some goddamned box.
He plowed a fist into the wall. Plaster rained down and the skin around his knuckles split.
He did it again.
And again.
And when it didn’t help, he pulled himself back and paced to the other side of the room.
The anger clung to him like a cloak, but worry followed like a starving, pathetic dog he didn’t have the heart to send away.
He’d thrown Cooper out into the late-afternoon rush of Panama City. Drugged. Vulnerable. Alone.
Because he didn’t want to give a damn and didn’t know what the hell to do with the fact that he obviously did, he snatched his dish up off the coffee table. Stomped to the kitchen and washed it under water that was too hot and with movements that were too rough.
He shouldn’t give two shits about what happened to her. She wasn’t his problem or responsibility.
Too bad he couldn’t get her face out of his mind.
Couldn’t forget what she’d looked like as she’d told her story—devastated, wounded, desperate.
Or what she’d looked like when he’d accused her of being a manipulative bitch—hurt, but not shocked. Resigned, but determined to try all the same.
He might have been able to chalk up those reactions as the well-rehearsed emotions of a master manipulator.
Might have, except for the way her face had fallen, devoid of expression or emotion, as she’d lost the fight against the scopolamine, done exactly as he’d told her to, and walked out that door.
She would have just as agreeably walked into traffic.
Or over a cliff.
Or climbed into a car.
The possibilities of what could happen to her were endless, and all of them horrors he could all too easily imagine.
But he hadn’t condemned her to them. She’d done that on her own the second she’d raised that needle against him.
He should hate her for it. A part of him did hate her for it.
He’d spent the last year of his life at the mercy of people who didn’t understand the word. People who’d used him to kill. For sport. For pleasure. For the sheer satisfaction of knowing he would.
And every time he’d won those fights, taken another life, he’d wondered if he’d killed off another piece of his decency.
By the time Cooper had come for him, it had started to feel as if the only thing filling him, the only thing keeping him going, was a bleak and brutal fury. A determination to win—and make others suffer for trying to hurt him in the first place.
He’d hated himself a little more with every life he took.
Hated how it got just a little bit easier.
Hated how it bothered him just a little bit less.
Hated that he couldn’t just let them kill him. Let them win.
But more than anything else, he hated that he’d looked at Cooper and seen Matías. That his first instinct had been a violent one.
Because regardless of her reasons, Cooper had come for him. And though her words were easy to discount as lies, her actions were much harder to ignore.
The way she’d fed him—as if she understood what it was to be that deprived, to be that hungry.
The way she’d cleaned his hands. Gently. Patiently. Wiping away the filth as if it didn’t even register.
The way she’d shaved him. With a deft touch and a steady hand, she’d brought Will back to himself—and shorn away the shame that had tried to snare him.
Had all of that been a manipulation? A lie?
He didn’t think so.
He closed his eyes and remembered what she’d looked like in the moment after he’d kissed her. Raw, passionate, open . . . and miserable as she’d pulled away.
She’d known, Will realized. That he wouldn’t believe her. That he’d be furious when she told him the truth.
So why had she?
Why tell him about Afghanistan? Why take responsibility for an order she’d been trained to follow?
To gain his cooperation?
There were better ways, and she’d had all of them at her fingertips.
He’d certainly given her the opening. She could have taken advantage of his moment of weakness and insecurity. Sat him down, talked him through it, cleaned him up.
And shoved that syringe full of scopolamine into his thigh.
He’d never have se
en it coming. Never have been able to stop her.
So why hadn’t she?
Doubt, slick and insidious, slid through him.
He wandered to the window and gazed out on a city he’d never seen before and longed for a city he’d thought he’d never see again.
He could go home. One phone call, and Ethan would move heaven and earth. Will would be safe at the embassy in under an hour. Home in twenty-four.
He could deal with the bank another time. When he was rested. When he was ready.
When he had the full force of Ethan’s team at his back.
He glanced down at the street below and scanned the sidewalks full of people. Even several blocks up, Cooper was easy to spot.
She wasn’t moving quickly, but she wasn’t stumbling as if she was drunk, either. But then, that wasn’t how scopolamine worked. She wasn’t likely to trip or slur or pass out on the street. She would, to most, seem normal, if not a little distracted. Tomorrow, though, tomorrow she’d have one hell of a hangover and no memory of what she’d done . . . or what had been done to her. And that would be its own sort of agonizing punishment.
He watched her as she made her way up the street and wondered what she’d do. Where she’d go.
Maybe she’d wander the city for the next several hours. Maybe she’d find a corner or an alley or a café and sleep it off.
Maybe the city would consume her.
Not my problem.
He should find a phone and make that call. Put the memory of this place, the memory of her, behind him.
But when he closed his eyes, he had to acknowledge a truth his head fought but his heart had already embraced.
Far too much had happened that he could never forget.
He had blood on his hands. The best he could hope for was that he’d learn to live with it. For the most part, he thought he could.
But could he live with condemning the woman who’d saved him?
Will opened his eyes and let himself find Cooper one more time.
Moving against the crowd at half the energetic pace of the city, she stood out.
And for the first time, so did the man following her.
Fearless (Somerton Security Book 3) Page 11