by Skye Warren
He stared at me blankly. Okay, that had been pretty vague.
“And she said that he would lash out if we got close.” And we were about to get very close, right up into his business. “So be careful,” I finished softly. “I wish I could be there to have your back, but I understand why I can’t.”
I felt the tension inside him, some internal battle I wasn’t privy to. But he didn’t look pissed anymore, so I wasn’t going to question it.
“There’s a lot of firepower on our side,” he said. “And I’ll probably work better without worrying what trouble you’re getting into.”
I gave him a sad smile, aware it didn’t really reach my eyes. “Come back to me in one piece, okay?”
It felt chilly, exposing myself that way. Admitting my feelings for him went beyond the professional, even though I’d done so without words. Even if he’d already admitted as much to me with his kiss in this very room. But my feelings went beyond the physical as well, and his eyes darkened with the knowledge.
“Samantha, I…” He stopped himself, looking frustrated and a little bit lost.
It made me want to soothe him. It made me want to keep him safe, as if I could. Except I wouldn’t have his back in the raid tonight. Other agents would. More experienced agents would, and that should give me ease—but it didn’t. I’d come to care for him more than I’d have thought possible in a few weeks’ time. I didn’t want him rushing into dangerous situations. Hell, I didn’t want him leaving my side at all.
But none of my wishes would come true. He’d go to the warehouse tonight without me. And when this case was over, he’d move on to the next one. Without me.
He cupped my face, his eyes searching mine. I felt infinitely delicate when he held me like this, as if I were made of porcelain and spun gold instead of flesh and blood. As if I might break. His thumb ran along my cheek, softly, gently, the callused pad of his thumb catching my skin, tugging it, abrading it, sandpaper against silk.
He leaned toward me, and this time our kiss was slow, like the long incline of a warm beach with lazy waves, with languid caresses of his mouth on mine. His tongue nudged my lips, and I opened for him. Relaxed against him, submitting myself to the sweet torture of an unhurried kiss.
It was quicksand, swallowing me whole, one small inch at a time. His hand caught my neck from behind, supporting me, holding me steady for his exploration. He tasted of spiced masculinity with a hint of coffee. My tongue darted into his mouth, seeking more—more of his flavor, his heat. More of the heady pleasure coursing through me.
His hands roamed to my side, my back. They burned through the silk. They scorched my skin. They blazed a path right to my heart—with their odd courtly respect and irrepressible desire. I would never be the same, I realized. Such a small moment to capture such a huge shift.
His hand on my waist.
His lips over mine.
The dust of a thousand files floating all around us like snowflakes.
I loved him then—and looking back, I would always remember the time before that kiss and the time after. Two separate versions of myself, one needy and one fulfilled. He pulled back enough to place warm kisses along my lips with a reverence that undid me.
Over. It was over, but I could still feel him every place that his body touched mine. I still felt breathless and yearning inside. He stepped back with a strange expression. Regretful, almost. And the way his thumb brushed my parted lips before he turned to leave the room…
I stood there, disconcerted and overwhelmed. And suddenly afraid, because that final touch had felt somehow like an apology.
Like saying goodbye.
* * *
Static crackled over the radio waves. It felt like the noise inside me, absorbed into my bloodstream, pulse harsh and erratic. He’d said benching me wasn’t about punishment, and he wasn’t the sort of man to spare my feelings, but it still felt like a punishment.
The A/C on the van rumbled at full blast, but it couldn’t penetrate the stale lukewarm air. With Lance and the comm specialist beside me, there was barely room to breathe. I took off my suit jacket, and that helped. But between the thick suit skirt and my pantyhose, my body was boiling itself.
“North team, check.”
“Southwest, clear.”
Each of the teams reported in from their vantage points, while I waited, holding my breath. The sound came through the speakers. On the panels we could see their locations with red lights overlaid by a map of the docks.
“Are we a go?” Lance asked beneath his breath.
I shook my head. “Not yet. The teams in the water need to report in, and then he goes in.”
He was Special Agent Hennessey, the leader of this operation. He’d be leading in the first strike as well, the most dangerous position. Fuck. He’d barely been recognizable on the way over, decked out in his black cargo pants and T-shirt, his shoulder and ankle holsters, his earpiece in and rifle loaded. A bulky bulletproof vest and body armor. With his visor flipped down, he was simply another agent, another man on the ground. A pawn.
If he were hurt tonight, I would blame myself. Even though I likely couldn’t protect him, even though the people with him were better trained in combat, stronger fighters, I felt a connection with him. It was damned inconvenient.
“In place,” came Hennessey’s low assurance over the radio. Without identification, I recognized his voice. We all did.
“Comm here,” I said into the mic. “We’re all set.”
Hennessey’s reply came quickly. “Go.”
There was a shuffle, and then the comm line dropped. I stared at the blinking equipment, tasting bile in my throat. Just like that, they were walking into a minefield. Radio silence until they were already in and had secured the location. Seconds ticked by. It felt like forever. My muscles were tensed, as if I were in combat, sitting still. My only consolation was the tripwire didn’t sound, so they must have cut through the alarm as planned.
A drop of sweat worked its way down the center of my back, a combination of stress and the oppressive atmosphere inside the van. Lance was breathing shallowly, his eyes alert. The comm specialist was busy fiddling with dials I couldn’t decipher. The seconds ticked by with excruciating slowness. Five minutes, then six. Life or death in each second.
I’d never really understood when people talked about the condition of human frailty. As if life were spun like glass, but I knew that wasn’t right. I knew how much a person could withstand. People had always terrified me, with their ability to hurt other people, with their propensity for not giving a shit. But now I understood how fragile a body was, when I loved the heart beating inside it. The bulletproof vest was little armor against a maniac, one who had no compunction about killing a law enforcement officer.
“Clear.”
At that one word, I breathed a deep lungful of humid air. Clear. He was safe. Jesus. Relief flooded my veins, making me lightheaded. Or maybe that was the unfortunate conditions. Either way, I had to close my eyes before speaking again.
Are you okay? I wanted to ask. “Sitrep?” I asked instead. Situation report. Keep it professional. At least, while there were twenty other agents on the line.
“About fifteen suspects. Heavily armed. We got here in time.”
He meant they’d caught them before the deal went through. Carlos’s men in custody, the drugs seized. It was a win. A major win, even if Carlos wasn’t among the men there.
“Carlos?” I asked.
“Not sure. We’ll have to interview them when we book them.”
“Understood. I’ll contact base.” I was under strict orders to report back to Brody. Then again, I’d proven I wasn’t always keen on following orders to the letter. In this case, it seemed fair enough.
“Wait,” Hennessey said.
There were low voices over the mic, too soft to make out. It sounded like he was talking to someone else. I paused, waiting. Then a shout came, as if from someplace away from him. Another shout.
Som
ething was wrong.
“Hennessey,” I said, too softly for him to hear me, afraid I’d distract him at some crucial moment.
A loud sound crashed through the speakers just before everything went dark.
“Ian!”
Too late. He was gone. The whole system had gone quiet. The comm guy practically shit his pants, cycling through the frequencies, trying to pick it back up. Lance was muttering fuck fuck fuck under his breath. I was completely still, processing. Whatever had happened over there, it was bad. Really bad. My imagination filled in the radio silence, envisioning Carlos lined up against the wall with other rough criminals. He would have realized he was caught, that even if he played dumb, we’d be able to figure out his true identity. Cornered, he’d done the only thing he knew how to do—he’d fought his way out. And Hennessey had been talking to me. He’d been distracted.
Lance had it right. Fuck.
I was out of the van before I realized what I was doing, pushing through the double-wide doors and breathing in cool, misty air. It had rained. In the forty-five minutes we’d been cooped up inside the bulletproof van, it had rained and I hadn’t even realized it. I looked out over the plains and long dirt road, over the tin roofs of the dockside warehouses, and felt a million miles away from Hennessey.
I started for the cluster of buildings when something caught my elbow. No, someone.
Lance frowned down at me. Only then did I realize he was taller than me. The way he held himself was usually lower, designed to draw less attention to himself. But that was changing. When he’d stood up to Tyler Martinez on our unauthorized field trip, I’d seen another side of him. That side was gradually coming out more, and I’d be glad for it, once this was all over. Right now, he needed to stand aside.
“Let go of me,” I demanded.
“We’re supposed to stay in the van.”
“Bullshit. They could be in trouble.”
“And you’re going to help them with what? Your service weapon?”
Good point. They had high-powered assault rifles and body armor. I had a Glock. Still, no way was I sitting still while our men were possibly getting killed.
“I’m going in. Bottom line. These are our people, and they might need us. You’re not going to change my mind, so the question is, are you going to help me?”
To his credit, Lance deliberated for only a second. He nodded, and with a quick glance at the van, we slipped along the path and stole behind the nearest building. It was still easily a mile’s distance between our location and the main warehouse. This late in the day, the sun was almost horizontal with the ground. It cast a blinding orange glow everywhere it could reach. The other sides of the buildings lay in shadows.
When I reached the main cluster of buildings, I paused at the corner.
Clear.
Lance signaled me ahead while he provided cover, and I returned the favor at the next building. It would go faster if we could run straight through the main streets, but we had no idea what enemies might be waiting in the wings. Even our own people might shoot first and ask questions later if they were in the middle of a firefight.
Sprinting, I rounded a Dumpster and pulled up short beside the building. I breathed hard and waited for Lance to catch up with me.
He didn’t.
Peeking around the Dumpster, I called out in a low voice. “Lance? You there?”
Silence. First the team went silent, now Lance. It was starting to become a problem. No, scratch that. It was already a huge fucking problem.
I crept near the dark side of the wall, moving quietly and quickly. I had to hope Lance had made an unfortunate wrong turn. I prayed I’d get a chance to tease him about it. Because if he’d run into someone…if I really lost him…
I rounded the corner where I’d last seen him. Empty. I was alone. I should have been alone, but I wasn’t. I felt someone watching.
“Lance,” I whispered.
The hair on the back of my neck rose. Fear. Real fear. There wasn’t time to savor it. I heard the faintest rasp of a rough indrawn breath. Not mine. Gasping, I turned to run. Something heavy slammed into me from behind. I fell, face-first, into the brick wall. My arms wrenched behind my back. I called out, but no one was there. Just my assailant, and he worked quickly and efficiently to subdue me. A prick of pain entered my neck.
A sedative, I realized as the numbness spread over me.
My assailant set me gently on the ground, guiding my fall as my legs stopped working. He turned me over so I was looking up at the orange and purple sunset. His head and shoulders were a silhouette, blocking the light. Even now, I couldn’t get a good look at him. Even now, he used the elements against me, keeping me in the dark.
Chapter Nine
At first I assumed it was a dream. My mind felt hazy, my body sluggish. My eyes were closed, with vague lights behind my eyelids, like a tilting, spinning ride at a carnival late at night. I felt like throwing up, and I tried to lurch up, to get out of bed. Except I wasn’t on my bed. And my arms didn’t move.
And when I opened my eyes, the world was still black.
A blindfold covered my eyes. It trapped my eyelashes back and forth as I blinked helplessly. Thick fabric stretched tight enough to block most of the light. I searched desperately for some glimmer of light peeking from below, where the cloth ran over the bridge of my nose, but the pinkish glow didn’t tell me anything. For all I knew it was the inside of my eye or some misfiring of my cornea. I couldn’t even trust my senses right now. Even my body had turned against me.
My arms were bound behind my back. The rope scratched at my skin, but didn’t chafe too badly as long as I didn’t struggle. There wasn’t much give though. I pulled carefully at my bonds, which only succeeded to make grooves in my wrist and yank my shoulder.
Captured. Fuck.
Resigned for the moment, I laid down my head. That was the most ridiculous part, the bed. The soft, sweet-smelling bed that I could lounge in for days, for weeks—forever. Sleep seemed like the best possible thing that could happen to me now. Just drift away and never wake up, drowned in a luxury too good for me.
I lay there, unable to move my hands or my legs. Unable to see. Alone with my thoughts.
God, my thoughts. The very thing I’d been running from my entire life. But I would never escape. Especially now at a standstill. Full stop.
To anyone outside, my father must have looked like a good man. He worked all day at a nearby garage as a mechanic, then came home to make dinner for his motherless little girl. He racked up those single father sympathy points. He wasn’t bad looking either, judging by the women that would sometimes come around with lasagna and pointed questions about when he’d be home. Little did they know he was out stalking his latest victim. They never suspected just how perverted and deadly his preferences ran. He would be out until late while I huddled in my princess bed.
I loved that princess bed. My dad had taken me to pick it out. In the furniture store there were rows upon rows of king-sized mattresses of varying thickness and softness and material. A hundred different options for adults to pick from, the most expensive of which cost the same as a small car.
For children, there was only one. One brand and one type. Twin-sized. Even rich people were content to let their kids sleep on whatever-the-fuck.
But I’d seen this bed with large looping wheels made of metal and a sheer pink cloth draped over the top, and I’d begged my father. To this day, I don’t know why he gave it to me. Or why he’d even care what I wanted. Was he crazy only some of the time? Was his violence reserved for people not related to him by blood? If so, I’d fucked that up by tattling on him. He’d attacked me in the jail just fine.
I slept on the princess bed until the day Child Protective Services took me away. The foster homes weren’t as nice, of course. I had old, lumpy mattresses, some of them lousy with fleas. I had foster “brothers” who smirked at me when I got out of the shower and threatened to join me in bed that night. But they never did.
It was a shitty environment and a shitty life, but no one ever hurt me.
Until now. Until someone had drugged and kidnapped me. Until he’d tossed me on the softest, most luxurious bed I’d ever imagined. The irony was almost enough to kill me, and I prayed it would, really. I’d looked at enough case photos to know what lay in store for me. I remembered the blood on my father’s hands. This wouldn’t end prettily or without pain, and I was helpless to change my fate. Maybe I always had been.
A sound caught my attention, the gentle squeak of hinges followed by booted feet on hardwood. My mind sketched in the picture, starting with me and radiating outward. Blindfolded and bound. Fully dressed, as far as I could feel. No, wait. My jacket was gone. No bulk around my shoulders. The tautness around my chest felt like my bra and dress shirt. The skirt was there too, thick and unwieldy as ever. Between my ankles, I felt the thin netting of my pantyhose.
I heard him coming. A man approaching, a quiet one. He stalked me. Maybe my mind was adding that element, because I felt so much like prey. But his step was fast enough to be purposeful and slow enough to be predatory.
My heart beat so wildly, and irrationally, I felt sure he must hear it. I swallowed thickly against the dryness in my throat, and I was certain he heard that too. Every brush of my sleeve against the bedspread, every throb of discomfort in my shoulder. Every sound and sensation magnified under the weight of sensory deprivation and pure, absolute fear.
A gentle hand brushed back the hair from my face. It tickled, and on instinct, my nose scrunched. He laughed softly. Oh God. I was amusing him. He thought I was cute. This was some sort of twisted flirtation, a touch and a response. An advance and a surrender.
“Special Agent Samantha Holmes,” I said between clenched teeth, rattling off my badge number. Name, rank, and serial number. In case this guy was sane enough to care about the punishment for cop killing.
Fuck you, I added silently.