by Snow, Nicole
I’m still holding on to my smile, which claws at my face, purely because I know damned well it unnerves him as much as the click of hard candy against my teeth. “Is this what you meant when you said you wanted what’s best for me?”
I start moving—but he stops me with a warning shot, finger snapping quickly enough on the trigger to make the golden Colt jerk.
Inside the cabin, the shot goes off loud enough to nearly shred my eardrums, especially when it goes whizzing past my jaw.
He’s testing me to see if I’ll flinch.
I don’t.
I don’t even move.
In situations like this, I’m at my best.
An absolute wall of ice.
And this angry old dumbass just made sure his plane can’t even take off.
There’s a smoking hole in its hull, meaning it won’t even pressurize anymore. Not unless he’s had some very crafty military-level upgrades, which I sorely doubt.
“Smooth,” I say flatly. “Next time, aim a little more to the left. My eyes are up here, asshole.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says. “I’m merely making sure you keep your distance.”
“Probably smart—considering I’m very interested in hurting you, Durham.”
His expression saddens. It’s so artificial, so controlled, and I want to rip this sociopath’s face to shreds with my bare hands.
“Fuchsia...after everything I’ve given you—”
“After everything you took from me!” I snarl back, and I’m not smiling anymore.
Not by a long shot.
“You took my daughter!” I hiss. “I know she didn’t die in that fucking hospital. I know you lied to me about her being stillborn. And I’ve got her file, courtesy of little fuckboy Timmy Rook. You’re going to unlock it now and show me where you’ve been hiding her.”
A long, sympathetic sigh courses out of him.
Yeah, right.
If he was so sympathetic, he wouldn’t still be pointing that Colt at me.
“Your daughter was stillborn,” he says with absolute assurance. “I’m sorry. It’s clear we didn’t do enough to get you the appropriate postpartum grief counseling, and I regret we failed you so thoroughly in that regard. Had I known the trauma had taken such deep root and been spiraling for all these years...surely I could’ve done something to intervene. But I’m not God. I can’t bring back a child who’s dead, Miss Delaney.”
“Stop saying my name that way!” I roar.
Like he owns it.
It’s my name.
One no one gave me but myself.
Not the dead parents who left me wandering and lost until these vultures picked me up.
Not even Galentron specialists with all their code words and aliases and an endless fuckity-fuck of secret phrases.
I can’t stand hearing it on his patronizing tongue, talking to me like I’m a mental patient. “And stop lying to me. Even if lying is all you’re good fo—”
The door to the cabin bursts open.
We both whirl, tensing.
I’m expecting more Nighthawks.
He’s clearly expecting backup, too, judging by the hopeful glint in his eye.
Only one of us is right, but even if the odds just swung in my favor...
I think I just lost the upper hand.
Truly, I can’t move.
Can’t think.
Can’t do anything but stare at the man in the eyepatch.
His identity doesn’t click. It slams into me headfirst like a screaming train.
Oliver Major.
Holy, holy hell.
I didn’t see him closely enough before, but now, unless I’m already dead...
There’s no mistaking him.
He’s older, more weathered, his skin like fine leather and his jet-black hair now half silver mixed with threads of white.
He’s a bit broader, most of it muscle, a little of it that heavyset barrel build military men get as they grow into themselves with age. It just made him even more of a tank—though there’s a looseness in his left leg, from the calf down.
It doesn’t quite fill out the leg of his jeans, and a slight shift in his height and the odd shape of his shoe tells me he’s got a prosthetic.
He’s lost an eye behind that eyepatch, probably in the attack meant to kill him, but that only makes his lone, wild whiskey-dark eye stand out so much more fiercely, crackling bright with golden brown fire and sharp intelligence.
Yep, he’s very much alive.
A fact I’m probably going to kill him for, if we get out of here.
I make a choked sound in the back of my throat.
“Oliver?” I gasp.
Just as Durham strangles out, “Major?!”
It’s Durham’s voice that spurs me back to action.
Even if something in my heart leaps wildly to see Oliver again, alive, it’ll have to wait.
That’s a story for later.
For now, I remember why I’m here.
And while Durham’s distracted, I see my chance.
Snapping around, I fling myself low and go right for his legs, diving under the reach of his Colt.
He belts out a strangled sound and starts to swing it toward me anyway—and when a gunshot goes off, I’m half expecting to feel a piercing jolt of pain ripping me open.
Self-preservation kicks in. I fling myself to one side, but there’s no gunshot wound, no bright burst of agony thrusting a hole in my body.
Because Durham wasn’t the one who fired.
There’s a smoking Glock in Oliver’s hand, and the Colt goes spinning across the floor in a haze of gold while Durham yanks his hand back, shaking it, hissing from the impact.
My roll takes me to the floor, shoulder taking the brunt of it, before I coil back around quickly and catch Durham’s ankles with mine, tangling to rip him off his feet.
With a loud cry he goes down hard, thudding against the floor with a whump!
He’s reaching for something inside his coat—but I’m on him too fast, surging into a crouch with my full weight over him.
One knee drives down on his throat.
He freezes—but with his hand pulled out of his jacket, he’s holding some kind of remote-controlled device.
And even as I crush down on his neck, he does it.
He presses a button.
A shrill, ear-splitting beeping starts echoing from the cockpit, rising higher and higher into the deafening cries of an alarm.
“What is that?” I snap. “What did you do?”
“Security,” Oliver answers for Durham. “We’ve got sixty seconds before the real cops come swarming in, and we’ve got a lot of questions to answer.”
“No,” I hiss. “No! I’m not leaving without knowing. You tell me—you tell me right now, you bastard piece of shit!” I stare down at Durham, rage a thing hotter than a thousand stars inside me. “You’d rather risk the police catching you than tell me what you did with my daughter?”
Even with my knee on his throat, Durham smiles.
“What will the police do to me?” he asks blandly. “I’m just an innocent citizen by the name of Jared Lintner, being assaulted by a crazy woman and her brute accomplice on my own private jet.”
I stare at him.
Of course. Of fucking course he’s got it all worked out.
With his new identity and his way of just disappearing...
That’s all the police will see.
Not an escaped criminal squirming his way out of justice yet again.
They’ll let him fix this plane or jump to a new one and sail off into the sunset with no one the wiser.
I know what I have to do. I’ll kill him.
“You bastard.” I bare my teeth, crushing down on him, raking my hands at his face. “You bastard!”
“Fuchsia!” Oliver roars, and that damnable beeping, shrilling, murder-inducing alarm takes me back.
* * *
Fourteen Years Ago
I h
ate the damned beeping.
And I double hate the way they keep saying my name.
I’m so tired.
I’m so, so tired, and I can’t think, the drugs they gave me mean I can’t think and everything hurts but I know the baby’s coming too soon.
It’s my fault.
Everything is always my fault.
Oliver’s gone and it’s my fault.
And now my baby might die because I worked myself too hard trying to forget Oliver, trying to forget the pain and fear and loss and grief and loneliness I told myself I couldn’t feel. Now it’s all building up inside me in a scream of anguish because I’ve gone into labor too soon and this doctor is standing over me saying “Push, Fuchsia, push, Fuchsia.”
Just repeating my name again and again in that monotone I hate while the heart monitor blips sharply behind me, and I try not to sob.
It’s driving me into a hot, lunatic mess.
That incessant beeping.
That awful beeping, going faster every time I push, speeding up as my body collapses in on itself trying to get this kid out of me.
Please, little girl.
Please be okay.
Please be alive.
The rest is a haze of sweat and tears and dull hurt.
Then this feeling like a huge pumping fist squeezes my whole body over and over again as contractions convulse through me. I’m swimming, lost in time. Everything smells like bitter chemicals and blood and my own salty skin.
I don’t know what they gave me, but it’s potent.
Everything goes fuzzy through tears, through delirium, through agony.
But I know.
I know when I hear a baby’s cry. I know she’s okay.
I know when that beeping speeds up faster because my heart races with joy that my little girl made it through. She’s alive. I have her and she has me, and one way or another we’re going to be okay.
Except that beeping takes over everything, eating up every other sound in the room.
Hypnotic.
The whole world swims with that steady, harsh sound.
And I remember the eyes behind the mask look suspiciously like Dr. Maximilian Ross as he leans over me and tells me to sleep. Then he says some word I can only half make out, and some switch flicks in my brain so that I just...
Go dark.
And wake up to that beeping still, slow and steady and sluggish while a man I don’t recognize, a doctor I don’t think was even there even if I can’t trust my memory, says the one word that will drive my life for the next decade, my insane obsession with my work, and my even more insane secret mission to destroy Galentron.
“Stillborn.”
My daughter was stillborn.
And now I have nothing.
Nothing left but myself.
And a mission I won’t stop even if it kills me to finish.
I’m going to avenge her, one way or another.
I’ll live to avenge them both.
* * *
Present
I still remember that day.
The very blinding moment when I swore I’d take revenge for both my daughter’s and Oliver’s deaths.
Except now I’m realizing my daughter must be alive somewhere, and Oliver stands over me, and maybe what was really stolen away all those years ago wasn’t just the people I loved, but...
Me.
What Durham took away from me most was myself.
And any chance of ever being happy.
It doesn’t make me want to kill the scum any less.
My throat burns, tight and closing off my air, but I grasp him by the shoulder, digging my fingers into a deadly pressure point. One easy flick of my wrists and he’s a dead man.
For now, he lets out a strange, howling cry like a wounded hyena, arching against the knee pinning him by his throat.
“Tell me where she is,” I grind out again around the rough, wet feeling in the back of my mouth that tries to make me cry.
It tries to force it all out when I didn’t even cry at her stillbirth.
All because I was too numb from the drugs and the twisted way Dr. Ross mind-fucked me like he’d been doing for half my life.
I shove my hand into my coat, pulling out that drive with the encrypted biometric data. “I know you’ve got a reader on this flight,” I snarl. “So you take this, you unlock it, and you tell me everything I need to know.”
“I-it’s—it’s—”
I let up enough to let him talk.
Barely.
Durham’s eyes go bleary and red-rimmed, his face nearly purple, and he gasps, “It’s in the...the cargo hold. I didn’t bring it into the cabin.”
“Liar!” I dig into his pressure points again, pinching right below the trapezius, and relish his anguished scream—less like a hyena now and more like a woman who’s just seen her entire life ripped away from her, every possibility of who she could have been destroyed.
I hope he’s enjoying it.
I draw my fist back, the data card clutched between my knuckles. I swear to God, one more word that isn’t what I want, and I’ll jam it straight down his throat.
But before I can, a strong, unexpected hand seizes my wrist, stopping me in my tracks.
I whip my head up, staring up at Oliver.
Part of me can’t believe he’s real.
I’ve snapped.
I’m hallucinating.
He’s not really here.
He’s like some made up audio-visual dream of my own conscience, looking down at me with that one urgent eye, shaking his head.
“You don’t need him.”
“What?” Everything inside me crumples. “But I—”
“No. I know a better way. Trust me,” he says tightly, pulling on my arm. “But it only works if we’re both free. We can’t do shit from prison. Come on, wildcat.”
Wildcat.
God, it is him.
My eyes are about to spill over, but I won’t let them.
I have to be cold.
I have to be me.
And I make myself stand, letting go of Durham, falling into Oliver’s grip—so warm, so real, so solid—supporting my shaky legs so I don’t lose my dignity.
“You’d better tell the man you murdered thank you,” I spit. “Because he just saved your sorry life.”
Durham only lies there gasping like a fish, while Oliver turns and strides quickly out into the entryway, the hall, then the boarding ramp, pulling me in his wake in brisk, hurried steps.
While he does, he fishes a phone from his pocket and taps a few quick icons, then hits something decisively with his thumb and pockets it again.
“What was that?” I breathe, and he glances over his shoulder at me, dark eye gleaming wickedly.
“Contact at the FBI. Who coincidentally happens to be in the neighborhood, looking for clues regarding a lead that says the Durham in jail isn’t the real Durham.” He smirks, devilish and wild. “Don’t fret. He’s not going anywhere good when the police show up.”
As we spill out into the rain, the sound of sirens and the flash of blue and cherry-red lights explode over the grey darkness, lighting up the storm like the strangest lightning.
With the squeal of tires chasing us, we make a break for it, dashing inside the terminal through the service doors and making ourselves invisible.
We take back corridors until we find a secluded spot out of sight of windows, doors—tucked away in some forgotten hall that smells dusty. It’s piled up with old cleaning supplies.
Then comes the moment he stops, turning to me, his mouth opening with his eye dark with concern.
There’s no more waiting.
I fling myself dead at him.
“Where have you been? Where have you been?” I demand, smashing my fists against his chest, gasping out the words like I’m spitting up years of built-up pain in bullets. “All this time...all this time I thought, I believed, you were dead...”
He just takes it, letting me crash my f
ists against him like a mountain, his broad chest resonating with the soft thumps of impact.
“I know,” he rumbles softly. “I know, Fuchsia. I’m sorry. I couldn’t—they had to think I was gone. They stopped watching for me.” He looks down at me helplessly. “And I thought...” He shakes his head. “I saw you. From afar. Up until the last couple years, I thought you were still...” A hard sound rumbles in the back of his throat before he finishes, “With them.”
“I was never with them until I had no one else to be with!” I strangle out.
He’s silent, watching, so expressionless it’s strained.
“How could you?” I snap, shaking my head with disbelief and rage. “And I walked out on the company a long time ago. I couldn’t take it. After what they did to you, to us. Why—why the unholy fuck—couldn’t you send me a message?”
I stare up at him, anguish clouding every thought.
That whiskey-dark eye cuts through me, his whole gaze energized like a beautiful thunderhead getting ready to unload.
This better be good.
“Do you remember that time in Anchorage when they tried to import those lethal bird flu samples?”
I blink, cocking my head. “Like yesterday. SP-73 was never enough for Durham. That was...what? Six or seven years ago? I personally blew the ship to kingdom come before it ever came into port.”
“Correction. You got yourself thrown in the brig after they confiscated your explosive charges. A lucky glitch in the computer system set you free,” he says, reaching for my hair to run his fingers through it.
For a second, I’m lost in the sweetness of his fingers.
Then it hits me, and I jerk back.
“You—what? That was you?”
Oliver says nothing. But that single bright brown eye of his smiles with a wicked gleam.
“Your guardian angel. Watching over you, whenever I could. At least, the few times I could actually find you with any confidence.” He scratches at his short, dark beard, princely flecks of silver multiplied in it. “Or that other time, when they were harvesting human organs from that other clusterfuck of a company, Mederva Therapeutics?”
She wrinkles her nose. “Those savages were harvesting babies. I was all set to bring the place down myself if that guy hiding out in Minnesota hadn’t done it first. The military man who married the daughter of that author...Miller something-or-other?”