by M. S. Parker
As Cain explained what we would be doing, I made a mental note to text Aline as soon as our meeting was done, letting her know that I’d be gone for a while. With this turn of events, I was glad I hadn’t actually made any plans with Aline since I might not be back by Christmas. Disappointing, but it was the job. At least it wouldn’t be as dangerous as a tour overseas.
Probably.
Nine
Aline
Dr. Rhimes had heard about my kidnapping, so she set up a special virtual appointment for me on Saturday morning, which I appreciated. The problem didn’t begin until after she’d asked a number of questions, and I told her everything that happened and how I’d been feeling. At that point, she’d gotten quiet, and even through the computer screen, I could see the concern on her face. That’s when she suggested I get a pregnancy test.
So now, I was standing in a pharmacy, staring at the wall of options and trying not to freak out.
It was just a precaution, Dr. Rhimes had said, and that was what I tried to keep reminding myself. I had an IUD, and the chances of those failing were slim. But, after all the craziness I’d been through recently, she agreed that she preferred to be overly thorough. She’d do a blood test no matter what, but she thought it’d be better if I had an idea of what to expect.
I’d almost decided on which test to buy when my phone alerted me that I had a text from Eoin. I had the message open before I’d consciously decided to read it.
We just got a job that’s going to take us to Vegas and then probably to San Diego. We’re not sure how long it’ll take, but we’re leaving for Vegas in a bit. I’ll let you know what my schedule will look like as soon as I know so we can plan times to talk. I hate that I won’t be able to see you before I leave. We’ll do something special when I get back.
Dammit.
I couldn’t let him go off and be unreachable when I could be pregnant with his baby. I’d screwed up before, not telling him about being a virgin. I wasn’t going to keep something this big from him for any amount of time, which meant I needed to know before he left so, if the test was positive, I could at least tell him that it was a probability.
I grabbed one of the tests, paid for it, and practically ran the two blocks back to the apartment. Martina was at work, but I was unsure if that was a good or a bad thing. If she was here, she’d be supportive, but that also meant I’d have to tell her, and I felt that telling anyone before I told Eoin would be wrong.
If there was anything to tell him.
I’d paced from one side of the apartment to the other a dozen times before the alarm on my watch went off. My heart was going a hundred miles a minute as I walked into the bathroom. I’d gotten one of the simple ones that actually said ‘pregnant’ or ‘not pregnant.’
It was the first.
Pregnant.
My knees went weak, and I sank down on the toilet lid. I would’ve liked to sit there for hours, trying to process the probability that I was going to have a baby, but the reason I’d rushed to take the test was still valid. I needed to tell Eoin before he became unreachable for who knew how long. This wasn’t the sort of news one could exactly leave on a voicemail.
I dialed in a daze, only snapping to attention when I heard his voice.
“I’m sorry about the last-minute warning,” he said in way of a greeting.
“That’s not why I’m calling.” My voice sounded strange even to my ears. “And it’s all right. It’s part of your job. I just had to tell you before you were unreachable for a while…”
Shit. Maybe this was a bad idea. Did you tell a man this type of news over the phone?
“Tell me what?” He instantly sounded concerned. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Even as the debate over telling him or not continued to war inside of me, I decided not to delay. “I might be pregnant.”
Less than a second after the word left my mouth, I heard a curse. Two. More. Yelling. Not just Eoin.
And then everything went silent.
“Eoin? Eoin?”
Nothing.
He was gone.
Ten
Eoin
The screech of tires.
Shouting.
Light reflecting off metal and glass.
Curses.
A jarring impact sending vibrations through every bone.
Crunching.
Breaking.
Dizzy.
Falling.
Pain.
The flashes going off in my head were like individual snapshots I didn’t only see, but heard and felt. Each one was barely a second in actual time, but they all seemed like an eternity.
Logically, I knew every minute contained sixty seconds, and every properly run clock counted a second out the exact same way, but experiencing time wasn’t always like that. It changed depending on the circumstances. I knew that from too much experience.
And then I was hurtling back in time.
A loud bang and flying through the air, tumbling, crashing.
Gunfire sending little sparks into the air, the sound echoing, filling my head. It was so loud.
And hot.
Smokey.
My lungs burned, and every breath just made it worse. Burned through my mouth, down my throat, filling my lungs with fire.
The world was hazy, edges blurred. Bodies were shadows and outlines running across my vision. Legs moving, running. The sound of boots on sand and rock.
Loud popping. Gunshots. Semi-automatic. Handguns. Rifles. Automatic. Everything.
An explosion rocked the world, shook the ground.
No, the roof. Not the ground. I was upside down. Blood rushing to my head. I couldn’t move. I could see everything. But I couldn’t move.
My ears were ringing. The world was muffled and loud.
I could see everything.
Bart, lying there with his eyes fixed on the sky. Mouth wide open, as if he’d been screaming. In pain. For his mother. That he didn’t want to die. But he was dead. Neck clearly broken.
While he screamed.
I could see everything.
I could hear him screaming, blaming me.
Doto, pinned to the driver’s seat. Blood pouring from his mouth. He screamed too. Cursed me for letting him die.
More explosions, more screaming, more gunfire, more of everything. And I still couldn’t move.
Someone was screaming my name.
Leo.
“Eoin! C’mon, man.”
Not Leo.
Cain.
“Wake up, you fucking bastard! I can’t yank your huge ass out on my own!”
Cain.
I opened my eyes to find Cain leaning over me. He looked like hell. Scratches on his face. Blood.
I blinked, wondering if I was seeing things. I had to be. There was no reason for Cain to be here, and no reason for him to be bloody.
Here.
Wait. Where was here?
I blinked again, and nothing changed.
Except I now realized that he was upside down.
“What…” I cleared my throat and tried again. “What happened?”
Cain ignored my question and asked one of his own. “Can you move?”
“Yes.” Even as I said it, I frowned as I realized something important. I didn’t actually know if that was the truth. Something was wrong, although I couldn’t figure out what it might be. I couldn’t understand what was going on or where I was.
“Eoin!” Cain snapped his fingers in front of my face.
I blinked again and started doing what I should have been doing already. Thinking. I wiggled my toes, then moved my legs. Some pain, but I didn’t think anything was broken. Arms were the same.
As if providing evidence, I wiggled my fingers. “I can move.”
“Great.” Cain moved out of my field of vision before a pair of hands latched onto mine. “Use your legs.”
I did it without really thinking, and between Cain pulling on my arms and me pushing with my legs, I moved.
It wasn’t until I saw the sky above me that I realized I was outside and that there was something wrong with why I was out here. Why I was on my back, staring up at the clouds.
As I sat up, I realized that the ringing in my ears was partly sirens. Dazed, I looked around, trying to separate what had actually happened from the flashback Cain’s voice had pulled me out of.
One thing was very obvious. No one was shooting.
That helped me separate my flashback from real life, but it didn’t tell me what was going on right now.
The agency’s SUV was almost completely upside-down, and a moving truck was on its side.
We were in the street. An intersection, I realized as I focused in on the stoplights. No. That wasn’t entirely accurate. I wasn’t in the street. I was on the sidewalk. And so was the SUV. The moving van was on the actual street, and someone was directing traffic around it.
Fever. That’s who was standing out in the middle of the street. Pollard Fevrier was a large and scary man, which was probably why none of the passing drivers were honking or shouting as he showed them where to go.
Or it could’ve been the second man walking up next to the first. Desmond “Dez” Ambler was a terrifying son of a bitch too. Even from where I was sitting, I could see that both of them sported some blood, but it didn’t look like they were actually hurt. Then again, they were both marines, so they could’ve had a couple broken bones and were just ignoring them. They were almost as tough as an army.
“You look like shit.”
I didn’t have to see Bode Monroe – “Bruce” – to know he was grinning. He was always grinning.
Sure enough, when I looked up, the first thing I saw were those nearly blinding teeth. “Can’t see what you look like with the sun reflecting off that smile.”
The comment was automatic, out of my mouth before I thought about it.
“How bad does your head hurt?” He crouched in front of me, and now I could see that, despite the smile, he was worried.
I frowned. “My head?”
“Dude, your head broke your window.”
“Broke a window?” I looked over at the SUV, and my brain started working again.
Or, rather, it started realizing that it wasn’t working correctly.
Because I just realized that I didn’t know what happened. I could put together from the visual clues that there’d been a car accident, and I’d been with the agency when the collision took place. And it was daytime.
“Shit.”
“What’s wrong?” Bruce asked.
I scowled. “My memory is fucked up.”
I hated admitting it, but if we were on our way to a job, I couldn’t compromise what we were hired to do because I didn’t want to look weak. A head injury could get a lot of people hurt or killed, and I wasn’t going to let that happen.
Not after Leo. I’d swallow my pride and do the right thing.
Eleven
Aline
He was gone.
I stared at the phone. He’d been there one minute and then gone. He hadn’t hung up. I was almost one hundred percent certain of that. I’d heard a curse, which could have been a valid reaction to what I’d just told him, but not the other curses that followed. Or the yelling. I’d heard it in other men’s voices, not just Eoin’s.
I might be pregnant.
My own words were ringing in my ears, and the news was still freaking me out, but all of that took a back seat to whatever had happened on the other end of the phone.
I called him back, and it went straight to voicemail. “Eoin, I need you to call me back because what I heard before the call ended scared me. Please.”
I barely got the last word out of my mouth before I went down on my knees and threw up. Fortunately, since I had already been in the bathroom to take the pregnancy test, I made it to the toilet and didn’t have a mess on the floor to clean up on top of everything else.
By the time I cleaned myself up and brushed my teeth, I felt like enough time had passed that I could call Eoin again without seeming like I was freaking out, even if that was what I was doing a bit.
Straight to voicemail again.
I left another message. “Eoin, I’m getting worried here. If everything’s okay, but you just don’t want to – or can’t – talk right now, please at least text me to let me know that you’re all right. Please.”
I paced, counting off two full minutes before sending a text that said pretty much the same thing. Eoin had it set up on his phone to show when he’d read a text, but the alert didn’t turn from ‘delivered’ to ‘read.’ Not after two minutes and not after four.
Something was wrong.
Eoin had made some poor decisions in the past when it came to handling things between us, but he wouldn’t just completely blow off all communication like that, especially not right in the middle of a conversation this serious. No, my gut said something had happened to keep him from responding, and I didn’t think it was as simple as the battery in his phone dying or lack of cell coverage in the area.
Based on what I’d heard and Eoin’s text about the agency having a job, I was fairly certain that he was with at least one, probably more, of Cain’s men. Which meant the agency would know at least a little more than I did.
After a quick search online to find the agency’s phone number, I placed the call. With each ring, my heart fell a little further. After five rings, the call went to an answering service, but I didn’t bother leaving a message. Either everyone from the agency had been with Eoin, or whatever had happened had called them away from the office. I was a little surprised that the landline hadn’t been forwarded to someone’s cell phone, but that wasn’t really forefront in my mind.
I needed to get ahold of someone from the agency, and while I remembered being introduced to the other guys, I didn’t have any information that could help me contact one of them. Except for Cain, I realized suddenly. Freedom had to have called him to hire his team to get me, and I doubted she hadn’t gotten every possible number she could use to reach him.
Dammit.
I really didn’t want to talk to her, but my need to find Eoin outweighed my family issues.
“Aline!”
The worry in Freedom’s voice was almost enough to make me feel guilty for how long I’d shut her out. Almost.
“I’m so glad–”
“I need Cain’s phone number,” I cut in.
Silence for two beats before she asked, “What?”
“Cain. Military guy. Your ex. Came to Iran to save me.” My tone was harsh, clipped, sounding nothing like me. It didn’t bother me the way I knew it should have, but personal analysis had to take a back seat right now.
“I know who he is.” Freedom’s voice was tight. “Why do you want his number? I think we have more important things to discuss.”
“Actually, we don’t,” I snapped. “I’m not calling to talk to you about what’s going on between us. Something happened to Eoin, and I can’t get ahold of him. No one’s answering at the agency either.”
“Eoin.”
It was amazing how much Freedom could say with just his name.
“Are you going to help me or not?” A sharp pain made me look down, and I saw four half-moon marks in the palm of my hand. “I can figure it out on my own, but you’d save me a lot of time if you just give me what I need.”
A few seconds of silence passed, and then, just before I was ready to hang up and try something else, she rattled off nine numbers. I repeated them back.
“Yes, that’s it,” Freedom said. “Am I going to hear from you again?”
“Yes,” I admitted, “but I can’t say when.”
“All right.” Another brief pause. “I hope Eoin’s okay.”
She ended the call before I could respond, and I was relieved that she’d done it. I couldn’t handle one more confusing thing for me to deal with right now. Not when I was already struggling with a probable pregnancy and whatever had happened to child’s father.
&
nbsp; My hands were shaking as I dialed the number Freedom had given me, and I sank down onto the closest chair without remembering when I’d come into the kitchen. If I was going to hear bad news, I didn’t trust my legs to hold me.
“Aline?”
“Cain?” My heart gave an unsteady thud, and I closed my eyes.
“First off, he’s more or less okay.”
A rush of air went out of me. That wasn’t exactly what I’d wanted to hear, but it was better than so many other alternatives.
“We were on our way to meet a client, and our SUV was hit,” Cain continued. “Eoin hit his head pretty hard, but he’s conscious. The medics are taking him to the hospital for tests though, to make sure.”
“Okay.” My mind raced, all sorts of awful possibilities piling up one after the other.
“I know you were on the phone with him when we crashed.” Cain’s voice was gentle but held a firmness that I found reassuring. “I’m assuming you called him a couple times before calling me. His phone was smashed.”
At least I knew now that the reason he hadn’t answered his phone had been because of something wrong with the phone, not physical injuries that had prevented him from taking a call.
“What hospital?” As Cain told me, the wail of ambulance sirens echoed in the background. After confirming the hospital name, I added, “I’m on my way.”
After hanging up, I wrote a quick note to Martina, telling her where I was and why, and then I called for a car. It was hell waiting for them to come, but it was still faster than taking the bus would have been. For the first time since I’d left my parents’ house, a part of me wished that I’d stayed, if only because that would have meant I’d have had a car available for me to use.
If wishes were horses…