Promises in the Dark

by Stephanie Tyler

  Bastard. Hitting nerves left and right with his zings. She turned back to the metal, not wanting to look at him, yanked so hard her back lurched and her teeth ached because she was grinding them together from the effort. Her fingers were bloodied and raw, as were her palms, but still she shook and pulled at the rusted metal, and finally—finally—after what had to be ten minutes the ladder began to pull away from the old bolts. She attempted to pull at the bolts themselves. One turned easily enough for her to get it out, but the other one was too tough, and the top two too far away for her to get to without climbing on the now unstable ladder. And the water was rising rapidly around her.

  No choice. If she got close she could manually unscrew it. Tenaciously, she steadied herself and got one of them loose. The ladder shifted, throwing her backward into the water.

  Thankfully, she’d held on, and she used the now-moving ladder to haul herself back to her feet, sputtering. She coughed the water up and out, gagged, breathed. For a second she stood there, waiting to hear Zane say something else to her. Anything.

  “I know you can do this, Liv.” His words were spoken with a quiet, calm strength, and she knew he had all the faith in the world in her.

  It made tears come to her eyes and it pulled her focus back to where it needed to be—on the ladder, not the rushing water.

  They would make it.

  One wrenching yank and she fell into the water again, the ladder free and smacking her in the face before she went under.

  Learning to swim really might’ve been a good thing.

  Thankfully, she felt her foot touch the ground and she pushed herself up with a clumsy series of splashes.

  In another time and place, Zane would no doubt laugh at her. For now, all he said was, “We need to teach you to swim. Put that on the normal list.”

  The freezing cold was already affecting her. She moved sluggishly toward him, wading through the water—which had a surprisingly strong current to it—dragging the metal ladder behind her.

  She pushed the ladder to him and he positioned it behind the bolt holding him to the wall. “We’ll try this first. Otherwise, I’ll have to deal with a broken wrist. Hold here, and when I say go, bear down on the ladder as hard as you can. Full weight.”

  She did, heard a creak, but all it seemed to be doing was bending the ladder, not the piece of metal holding Zane’s chain fast to the wall.

  “Shit. Okay, once more.” Repositioned, and again, failure.

  “Okay, here.” He moved the ladder’s lower rods inside one of the chain links. “We’re both going to bear down.”

  It was the link closest to the wall, but still. “Zane, your wrist—”

  “Will heal. Push down—now!”

  His words didn’t leave room for argument. He groaned viciously as the link broke, no doubt breaking his wrist along with it, and they both went into the water.

  He hauled her up swiftly and she coughed and pointed to his wrist. “Broken?”

  He shrugged. “Doubt it. I’ve had worse. Come on.”

  The water was up to his chest now, and he kept her head from going under as they made their way to the remaining ladder.

  “I’m going to get up there. When I get a grip, you grab my leg and hold on.”

  He bobbed, jumped and missed. He did it again, and again, and finally he reached over and ripped the T-shirt off her body, leaving her in a tank top. He tore the sleeve off the shirt and wound it around his palm, twisted up the rest of the fabric in a long rope and held on to it as he tried the jump twice more.

  On his third attempt, he caught the rung, and she watched him pull himself up with one fully working hand, the other arm wrapped around the rung with sheer will.

  “Grab my leg, Liv. Grab and hold.”

  She tried but a sweep of water knocked her hands off the wall where she’d been furiously palming it to keep from going under.

  Don’t panic, don’t panic.

  She reached her hand up and saw a blurred image of his leg and she grabbed for it, made contact with his foot and held on for dear life.

  “Get a better grip,” he called out. “Both arms, wrapped around my calf until you can grab a rung.”

  Her hands slipped and she went down hard, under the water. She found the bottom and pushed away. She broke the surface with a huge gasp, her lungs filling gratefully. She reached for the wall, put her palms out in an attempt to hold on to something, watched Zane.

  He’d hauled himself up a bit, used his weaker arm to wrap around the bar while he tied the shirt tight to his leg with one hand—a slow process as she bobbed along in the water—and then he moved up a rung to get a better grip.

  “Grab the shirt, Liv. That’s it, both hands. Now hang on, okay?”

  “You’ll have to pry my hands off the damned shirt when we’re done,” she assured him.

  A rough hoist hauled her partially out of the water and then there was another jerking one a few seconds later, and the rungs were in her grasp.

  “One hand on the shirt, the other on the rung, okay? And push up—help me bring you up a couple more rungs.”

  One by one they climbed in a precariously swinging motion, with the water rising to meet them, and she was hanging on with both hands.

  Stubborn refusal to let DMH win forced her to use all her upper-body strength to pull her weight to a place where she could just get her foot onto a rung of the ladder. And then Zane was hauling her by her tank top up and up, until she was even with him, between him and the ladder, and they were moving upward slowly. Together. Painfully.

  Step by step, they got there until the air rushed at them. Her head cleared the opening first.

  “Go on, Liv—get out.”

  She did, scrambled on hands and knees, turned to watch him do the same, his wrist swollen and red, held against his body. “I’ll wrap it.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  The voice came from the darkness in front of them, the voice of the man who’d dragged her here and locked inside.

  When she looked into Zane’s eyes, she saw the calm focus there. The promise. And she knew she wouldn’t have to worry for much longer.

  CHAPTER

  20

  It was the same guy who’d taken Zane from the safe house and brought him here. And now he’d pay, just like Zane had promised.

  Zane pushed Liv behind him and waited. This guy got off on torture—simply shooting them wouldn’t be enough. No, he’d want to draw it out—and Zane was banking on that. “Like I said, you’re not going to win this one, Ace.”

  The pale light came from a lone bulb on the side of the tank, positioned upward. It currently highlighted the surprise in Ace’s eyes.

  “I figured that Elijah would underestimate you. I don’t make those kinds of mistakes.” Ace shook his head. “It would’ve been more fun to watch you drown, though. To know that she got to watch you die first, realizing that it was all her fault.”

  God, the guy really got off on this shit. His eyes glazed talking about torture.

  Zane heard Liv’s sharp intake of breath. And then shots rang out overhead—not from Dylan, because Dylan would not have missed. No, they were coming from farther away, but they split Ace’s attention for a second, allowing Zane to charge at him, tackle him with a full-body slam.

  Ace’s gun clattered away, and yeah, that was good. Zane could do this, wring the guy’s neck with one good hand and the rest of his damned body.

  “Get down, Liv,” Zane told her, and she would have … except the gun was kicked to the side, ended up on the edge of the platform of the silo, and she could reach it if Zane could keep Ace away from her.

  It wasn’t an easy fight. Ace obviously had military-like training in hand-to-hand combat, and Zane was no doubt starting to feel the effects of the early stages of hypothermia. She knew she was.

  Olivia crawled, still unsteady, toward the gun.

  My God, she was half-frozen and so weak.

  Zane, thankfully, didn’t appear to be having t
hat problem at all because he was fighting as if he wasn’t half-frozen.

  It had been sheer will that had helped her get the ladder freed. She would harness that again.

  But the men were rolling, precariously close to her, and to the edge of the tank, from which there would be at least a sixteen-foot drop, if not more. She caught the handle of the gun and she pushed away from the hand-to-hand combat, barely avoiding a boot to the head.

  Ace appeared to have the upper hand, had Zane down on the ground, holding his throat. She tried to get the gun to work, but her hands were shaking so badly that even if she got it pointed in the right direction, she wouldn’t be capable of aiming toward Ace only.

  Then he made the fatal mistake of looking at her and smiling. Before she could react, get the gun up, Zane’s hand went up, the flat of his palm slamming Ace’s nose upward, and the man knocked back hard. One kick and then another and another and Ace flapped his arms wildly to regain his balance, and lost the fight.

  Olivia heard his scream on the way down and winced at the crushing sound his body made when it hit the earth. And Zane was taking the gun from her, telling her, “We’ve got to keep going. Come on, stay with me.”

  Her body felt made of lead, her head all floaty and dizzy, and she recited the stages of hypothermia in her head to try to remain as clear as possible.

  She followed him, one foot in front of the other, down the endless steps to the bottom of the tank.

  She was about to ask, Now what? but the sounds of police sirens interrupted her.

  “Must’ve heard the shots. Most likely there are hunters in the surrounding woods, but they were damned lucky,” Zane said. “Come on, let’s get closer to the road and get ourselves rescued.”

  ———

  Liv had refused her own ambulance, rode with him all the way into the next town as they shivered under blankets and the warm IVs that infused rapidly into both their hypothermic bodies.

  Zane pictured Tristan saying, Whipped, and realized, releasing a resigned sigh, that he didn’t give a shit.

  She’d refused to leave him when they set his wrist as well—it was a small fracture but a bad sprain and it was turning colors fast. Wouldn’t leave him during both their exams and—probably because she was a doctor—the hospital personnel allowed it.

  Zane didn’t blame them—he wouldn’t refuse her anything either—not now, not ever.

  He was toast.

  “You know, you’re more hypothermic than I am,” he commented. “Maybe I should be fussing over you.”

  “Not in your nature.” She smiled from where she was curled up in the next bed.

  “Wanna bet?” He peeked around the curtain the ER staff had pulled and hopped out of bed and moved toward her. He’d snagged a pair of scrub bottoms to go under his hospital gown, because the walking around bare-assed wasn’t something he enjoyed.

  Hell, he hated the whole hospital thing … except for Liv. And so he slid next to her on her bed. “Can you get us out of here?”

  “We have to be cleared.”

  “You’re a doctor. We’re fine.”

  “Are we really?” she asked, and he knew she was talking about much more than hypothermia.

  “Yeah, really. It’s over. Elijah’s gone. He won’t bother you. Ace too. And the rest of DMH is fragmenting. My brother Caleb actually got called away on a mission because there’s major intel on the line about where the last main player of DMH is hiding out.”

  “God, I hope he finishes them off.”

  Even so, she knew that there were so many more groups like them.

  “So what happens now? Normal?” she asked from where she’d snuggled against his chest.

  He was nearly done with leave from the team, although his wrist would keep him out of action for a little while. The brutality of the training kept him sharp. Battle-ready. He liked that, the feeling of always being on the razor’s edge with the knowledge that, if necessary, he could take on anyone and anything.

  The other side of the coin was that it kept Zane very aware of his own mortality. Strangely, the balance worked well, reminded him that life was too short and had once kept him partying pretty damned hard.

  Dylan kept him working on black ops missions in order to keep him out of trouble, and in its own odd way, it had worked well.

  “Before this I lived alone, worked a lot and partied a whole lot more. And I took both very seriously,” he said.

  “And now?”

  “Now I think I can handle both if you’ll join me.” He paused. “As long as I know you’ll be okay when I have to go away with the team.”

  “I don’t know if I can practice again. I’ll have to go before a board, I’m sure.”

  “The CIA will help clear that up, Liv. You need to get back to doing what you love.”

  “You’re that confident, huh?”

  He pulled her up so she was looking into his eyes. “All I’ve ever known is this. Warrior. Survival mode. Everything I do is based on me surviving whatever it might be that crosses my path, no matter the obstacle. I’ve been in that same mode for so long, I don’t know if I can be anything different.”

  “I thought the same thing about me,” she said softly. “But you showed me that it doesn’t have to be like that—not all the time. I think we’ll always be survivors, but we won’t be as …” She searched for the right word.

  “Desperate?”

  She punched him lightly on the chest and he turned serious again. “I feel like I fell in love with you before I even knew you. And then I met you and …”

  “I wasn’t what you expected,” she finished for him.

  “You were better.”

  “You were pretty damn good yourself,” she told him.

  “Is that why you hit me in the head with a frying pan—to stop me from leaving?”

  “Zane—”

  He cut her off with a kiss and she gladly accepted it, melted into his arms. When he pulled away, he murmured, “You saved my ass today.”

  “And the rest of you.”

  “Yeah, that too.”

  “No man left behind, right?” she joked weakly, holding on to him for dear life.

  “Not for either of us, ever again.”

  It was a promise—she knew that. Zane had come through on every single one he’d made to her, even the ones she hadn’t been so crazy about at first.

  And it was a promise she would make sure they both kept.

  EPILOGUE

  It had been a month with no word when Noah called Vivi in to see him. She’d taken a cab onto the post and, wearing a badge declaring her an authorized visitor, walked past security toward the building the guard had pointed out to her.

  She wasn’t an authorized anything else when it came down to her own life, although she had been contacted by the FBI and Homeland Security. She was still in danger until they decided that enough of DMH had been eradicated, and it was better for her if she remained off the radar, which meant staying away from her house and her bank accounts and credit cards. It wasn’t forever, they assured her, but couldn’t tell her when it would be safe enough for her to resurface. They hadn’t offered her protection beyond that advice though, and she knew she’d be in big trouble without Caleb’s generosity.

  Noah had simply been a stern voice on the other end of the phone line, checking in with her weekly, never mentioning Caleb. Now she would get to meet him. She knocked lightly, jumped at the sharp “Enter,” that followed.

  Noah was taller than Caleb, leaner, but not much older. His face was tanned, his blue eyes so light she wondered if they turned translucent in the sun.

  His countenance was unsmiling, and she wondered if that ever changed. She noted no wedding band, no personal pictures in the office, and realized that most of these men could never wear their personal lives on their sleeves, if they could even have one.

  “How have you been?” he asked gruffly, as though being nice was something he had to actively work at. It definitely didn’t appear to
come naturally to him.

  “I’m doing okay.”

  “Good.” He passed a large envelope across the desk. “Sit down. This is for you. Open it.”

  She did what he asked, opened the envelope and saw that it contained cash—a wad of it. Internally, she sighed with relief, because money had been tight. Cael had left her some, but she was running out quickly because of the little things, like food.

  She’d taken to wearing Cael’s sweats quite easily, though.

  There were also keys. A passport and a social security card with the name Vivienne Simmons on them. “I don’t understand.”

  “Your last name is proving problematic. Getting you off DMH’s radar is challenging, and ultimately, the FBI thinks the name change will help. Along with this, they’ve got a deal for you.”

  “I’m listening.” She picked up the keys and held them, wondered what they were for, because moving out of Caleb’s apartment wasn’t something she’d planned on doing.

  “You’ll be given a new identity. Since the agency’s convinced you had nothing to do with DMH’s theft, they can do that easily. But they want something from you.”

  “What?”

  “Your computer skills.”

  She nodded, her throat tightening. It would all come down to this, she had known that. And she’d spent the last month going over the pros and cons.

  In the end, she’d come to the conclusion that, when asked again, she would say yes. Not so much for her, but for her and Caleb. Otherwise, staying together would prove problematic for both of them. And she wasn’t prepared to let the best thing in her life disappear because she was too proud, or too scared of her past. “What are these keys for?”

  “To an apartment in Washington, DC. You’d have to relocate there for a while if you decide to go through with this.”

  So she had some money. A small apartment, a new last name and a social security number. Small consolation to be able to keep her own first name, but it was something. And an opportunity to utilize her skills under protected circumstances. “It’s a good offer.”

  “It is,” Noah agreed.

  “I accept.”

  “I figured you would. There’s a phone number in there—call it. Agent Parr will tell you what you need to know.”