Lie with Me (14 page)

And he’d infiltrated. Had been prepared to blow DMH off the map, if it took the rest of his natural born life.

He’d never thought DMH would find Sky, hadn’t realized that the kidney transplant donor list would be public information. Or even semi-public. Hospitals obviously had no clue about proper security for their files.

Of course, DMH would never have discovered that he even had a daughter if he hadn’t been betrayed by someone as a CIA agent.

Well, he’d work with what he had.

He’d gone back into the fire much too soon. The timing had been perfect, but thanks to the surgery, his mind and skill set had not.

And now … and now he remained, waiting to see if DMH would make good on their promise to kidnap Skylar.

She was the only thing keeping him glued to the spot.

The only thing he knew for sure, thanks to his daughter’s phone call, was that the safeguards he’d put in place in case of capture or kill hadn’t worked on Cameron. And so, with Sky in Cam’s hands, Gabriel had to figure out a way for himself, if there was one.

His enemies knew who Sky was.

His daughter was with a man who hated Gabriel’s guts.

But Cameron Moore was nothing like him. Cam was honorable.

If anything, Gabriel was sure Sky could
keep
Cam honorable.

T
he old saying
You can’t go home again
was true. Elijah glanced around the old house that had once been the center of his entire world and felt the pervasive smell of old failures and dead dreams as surely as if he was sixteen again and everything he’d held true was falling apart.

He’d often tried to imagine what his CIA or FBI or Interpol file said about him. What profile the psychologists and other analysts painted of him. What they’d hypothesized about his childhood, his formative years.

They had probably spent months on his profile—years even. No doubt they added to it after every job Dead Man’s Hand took credit for.

It was simple, really. The world was his playground, and everyone in it, his potential pawns. It was all a giant game and he was careful the way he played it, much more so than the men he’d grown up with. His vision had always been big, some would say impossibly so.

He knew better.

DMH was a homegrown terrorist extremist group born from a shared enjoyment of poker and Wyatt Earp among Elijah’s father and his father’s three best friends. Modern-day anarchists, the men were restless and disillusioned with the current government. Small-town men with what Elijah would now term even smaller minds. But at the time, they’d been his heroes, fighting for their freedom.

He stared around the kitchen—the old wallpaper had yellowed, his mother’s ceramic utensil holder remained in its place by the stove, even though no one had used it for the past ten years.

He should’ve sold this house years ago, but had not been able to make the break. He hated that he had sentimentality for something that had not shown him the love he’d craved.

His mother had been strict. Religious. Overbearing. Definitely head of the household, even before his father’s death, and Elijah had stayed behind, while his brother left as quickly as he could, when he turned eighteen.

Two more years, kiddo. You can do it
, his brother said.

Elijah had no choice. But it was a living, breathing hell, made worse by the fact that there was no golden child to buffer him. The abuse was more mental than physical—the fact that he was told daily that he would never amount to anything because he was stupid.

It took him many years to figure out that
stupid
meant dyslexic. That he didn’t have to keep his mouth shut about his ideas to bring the group more into the mainstream, to get them more power and prestige.

His older brother had been so dedicated to the cause, he’d enlisted in the Army in order to learn proper military fighting techniques. He’d planned on recruiting men from the military to help DMH realize their missions, planned on opening a training ground for their own militia, to make it more professional.

But his older brother never came back. The U.S. military killed him as surely as if one of its own soldiers put a gun to his head, and from there Elijah’s entire world crumbled, like fine sand through his fingers.

The simple fact was that everyone Elijah truly loved died. And whether it was him who cursed them or he was the cursed one, the end result of him ending up truly alone was still the same.

He poured everything into DMH—all his pain—until the group was able to move locations to the Horn of Africa, which he’d correctly predicted as the new area of terrorism.

So, no, Elijah had not invented Dead Man’s Hand—he’d simply taken it from a small-town, homegrown extremist group whose members talked a hell of a lot but didn’t do much more than that, to what it was now—a well-known terrorist group, capable of a hell of a lot of damage. They did everything from aiding in guerilla warfare in American cities and her interests abroad, to funding terrorist training camps, to human trafficking.

He’d taken some of DMH’s younger and more adventurous members with him to Africa. Used the same name and expanded the group’s vision. The ones that survived were heads of various branches, managing everything from skin trades to black market organs.

It had gone from being an idealistic version of how he wanted his world to look, to a game. Every game had winners and losers—and the winner owed loyalty to no one but himself.

The CIA had been after him in one form or another for years, sending operatives to take out Elijah’s, but it was only a mere drop in the bucket in terms of hurting DMH.

But Gabriel had the patience of a saint without the sensibilities of one—he might have been with DMH for years before he’d made his moves, taking down Elijah’s dream without a second thought. And still, Elijah liked Gabriel Creighton, because the man understood his vision, and perhaps even empathized with his position, knew that the best way to hurt a man or woman was through their children.

Elijah would’ve died for his son. Whether Gabriel was willing to crack under the pressure of watching his daughter tortured would be interesting. But before that happened, Elijah had flown here, to his old house, where they were keeping the former CIA spy locked away tight, to try to reason with him. He walked to the basement, past the guard, and sat across from Gabriel. The man barely looked at him.

He’d like to think of himself as strong as Gabriel—and he would’ve spilled everything if it meant his son’s life. Even though he was savvy enough to know that, in most cases, both parent and child would end up dead anyway.

He leaned forward in his chair casually, his voice echoing in the small concrete chamber that had been built as a weapons cache for the old DMH. “Be reasonable. If you choose to work with me, we could do great things.”

Gabriel remained on his back, the thin mattress the only thing between his body and the cold floor. “You would never trust me. Besides, what’s in it for me?”

“Life.”

Gabriel’s eyes flickered over him coolly. “Not really enough incentive.”

“I figured as much.” Elijah remained far enough out of reach, even though Gabriel was chained down, because he was brave, but not stupid. “Your wife was more than willing.”

Again, no movement. This time, the man didn’t even turn his head, but Elijah caught the clenching of the jaw.

Still in mourning for the woman, all these years later. She’d been Gabriel’s ultimate downfall—couldn’t he see that?

In Elijah’s mind, in his world, women were disposable. Vessels.

But children were a different matter. A son had been his future, the future of DMH. A legacy.

Mari was his equal—maybe too much so. She’d been planning on killing her newest lover that night and framing Elijah for it, hadn’t expected their son to be home to thwart those plans. And she’d been smart enough to take from him what she knew would slay him, even as it cost her own life.

She hated their son because she believed that Elijah’s affections had transferred. Which was, of course, not true, since Elijah knew he was not capable of loving a woman, and as such had never truly felt affection for her in the first place. Not truly, not well, not ever.

To say he’d feared her would have been closer to the truth, and what he feared had always fascinated him. Made him fly too close to the sun with no protection—he had no one to blame but himself when he got severely burned.

Gabriel would have no one to blame for the torture he would endure either.

R
iley lay on her side, facing Dylan on the double lounge chair. She was covered in a towel, the bikini long abandoned. Dylan had managed to pull his pants back on, but his chest remained bare.

Neither had said anything for a long while—no, they’d communicated by moaning and coming and then silence, while Dylan held her hand, the way he had in that bed in Bogotá years earlier.

So much had changed, and yet everything was the same.

“I know what it’s like to be all alone, Riley.” His voice drifted over her, pulling her back to a reality she didn’t want to face.

“Stop, Dylan. Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t be nice to me.”

“Fine. I know about your mom … I know where she died,” Dylan told her.

She froze, and suddenly the towel was much too flimsy. She flashed back to when her mother lay dying in a state-run hospital because Riley hadn’t been able to afford to put her someplace with better conditions.

And then she pulled herself together. “So we were poor. Things are rough all over.” She shrugged. “The childhood thing is really boring as hell. I’d rather skip it.”

“I was twenty when my parents died,” he told her. “I raised my brothers. I was already in the Army, so I got custody.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What happened to your father?”

She knew that question was coming, had dreaded it … and wondered if saying it out loud could make everything stop, could make all the madness and fear go away. “They say he committed suicide, but I know better.”

“Who’s they?” he whispered.

“The CIA. He was a CIA special agent. They told my mom that my dad was a traitor, that he sold out his country. They said he knew he’d been caught, admitted everything he’d done. And then they stripped him of everything—his job, his money, his life. And so he killed himself, and we were left with nothing.”

“But you think the CIA actually killed him.”

“I know Gabriel killed him,” she spat. “I don’t believe my dad was a traitor—can’t believe it. And I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to prove them wrong.” She’d learned well in the Navy—and more than she’d ever wanted to after she’d gotten out.

“I kept approaching the CIA, and the FBI, trying to get a job with either agency. But they wouldn’t let me in, and I knew it was because of my dad. Of course, they never came out and said it. And the only one I can blame is Gabriel Creighton.”

“So now that we’ve established we have a common enemy in Gabriel, we can work together,” Dylan said.

“I like to work alone.”

“You weren’t saying that when I was inside of you.”

She sighed. Mainly because it was true. “Who do you work for again?”

“Never told you.” He paused. “I work for myself. I pick the jobs I want. I’m in control of right and wrong, won’t be forced into a situation I don’t want to be a part of. I do that so I don’t end up without a soul, like Gabriel. Are you willing to do the same?”

She stood then, tied the towel tightly under her arms. “Don’t plan on taking me with you down redemption road.”

But when she tried to leave, Dylan was on her, slamming her body back down to the lounge chair without any of the patented gentleness he’d shown her before. “We both have souls. That makes us just as dangerous as Gabriel, if not more so.”

He eased off her, but didn’t offer a hand to help her up from where she lay. And she remained prone—even as he stood next to her, and long after the wind returned to her lungs—staring at the sunlit sky, thinking of her old, shitty apartment in Queens, where she’d put stick-on stars on the ceiling, because she didn’t like to sleep in the dark and couldn’t afford the electricity it would take to keep a light burning all night.

Heat was something else she couldn’t afford, and she remembered always feeling damp and cold, and was never without a heavy sweater and extra blankets.

She realized that she did little differently today, just in case the rug was pulled out from under her.

And she’d purposely chosen a warm climate, because she never wanted to feel the cold again.

She and Dylan always seemed to connect in the warm climates …

They’d met up again, this time in Mumbai. Headed through the hotel lobby to her room. But when she’d opened the door, the shock of what she saw made her stumble back against Dylan
.

Nothing was in the orderly fashion she’d left it. No, her room had been trashed. Invaded. What wasn’t taken, like her computer and camera and iPod, was destroyed
.

She fought a sob, born of equal parts anger and sadness. Because she’d vowed she would never let anyone take anything from her again. And even though she was smart enough to realize she’d only lost material possessions—all replaceable ones
,
at that—there was still the jolt to remind her that she wasn’t invincible after all
.