Point of No Return (9 page)

“Only then my mother started bringing home her perverted boyfriends. It really made me miss him. Even with all his complaining, he had never scared me, never made me feel like I had to lock my door at night. I left as soon as I could.”

His imagination had caught on “perverted.” Little explosions of fury ignited in his chest.

No wonder she had a little trouble trusting men.

And then there was that minor detail of him cutting her out of his life.
Good move, Chet.
He wanted to howl. “I'm so sorry I made you feel like a burden, Mae.”

“It's not your fault. You get to choose your own life, without me dragging along behind—”

“You'd hardly be dragging, Mae. I just… Okay, fine, the thought of you getting hurt, and having it be my fault, was just too big. Every time I thought about it, it nearly doubled me over. I can't be responsible for someone's death again.”

Even as he said it, as the words tumbled out of his mouth, he felt the past balling up in his chest, aching to boil out.

He took a long breath.

She stared at him. “You're talking about Carissa, aren't you?”

He clamped his jaw tight but nodded. Maybe it was time for the truth. It couldn't really get worse, could it? She already thought him a lost cause. She'd all but said as much just hours ago.
What was I thinking?

He had no answer for that. Why had Mae given him a second look, let him talk her into escaping Gracie's party with him? Beautiful Mae, who laughed at his jokes and twined her long fingers through his and let him pull her close and bury his face in her hair? What was she thinking?

Do you really think I'm that shallow? That I expect you to be without scars or flaws?

He cleared his throat and took a deep breath. “Yes, I'm talking about Carissa.”

“She was more than just an operative, wasn't she? More than a teammate?” Mae had turned in her seat toward him.

He couldn't look at her. “How did you know?”

“Give me some credit for reading between the lines. You loved her,” she said, her voice gentle.

You loved her.
Those words seemed too simple, not enough for the feelings he'd had for Carissa. His love for her had consumed him, swept common sense from his brain. He would have gone to the edge of death and back for her.

He had, in fact. “Yes.”

Mae put her hand on his arm, as if steadying him. “What really happened, Chet?”

He tapped the brakes as he moved his hand off the steering wheel and took hers. They had entered the village, motoring past fences that looked like skewers
in the ground, loose and wobbling in the wind. Dogs scattered, barking at their car.

So much for not calling attention to themselves.

He drew a breath. “She was my contact at the Georgian embassy in Gori. It was only after a couple months of her feeding us information about the Georgian army that I realized she was the daughter of the Ossetian warlord—Akif Bashim. And of course, he was the one who sent us in her direction. He placed her in the embassy as a maid, then used her as a test to see if we could truly be trusted. Which, of course, we could. Except for the fact that I was young and stupid, and had fallen for Carissa, hard.” He glanced at her hand, her fingers now laced through his. “I actually envisioned, after the fighting started, stealing her away to safety where we could be married, and start a life.”

She still hadn't let go of his hand.

“I was a fool. And I lost my grip on my priorities. Worse, I didn't realize that Akif knew about us. She snuck out one night, to the village where I had found a room, and we spent the night together.”

Mae didn't react even to his words.

It wasn't until years later, when he'd met David Curtiss and encountered his partner's faith that Chet realized how much of himself he'd given to Carissa in sleeping with her before marriage. Perhaps, in a way, it was that act that made his wounds so deep, so unable to heal. The fact that he'd betrayed her faith…and her honor, not to mention his own.

“I woke to the sound of his AK-47 being chambered. And Carissa's scream as Akif's men yanked her from our bed.” He tried to breathe past the burn in his throat.

“Her father took us out of the village and his men beat
her—” his voice barely managed a whisper “—while he made me watch.”

She was silent next to him. Painfully silent. He pulled up to the train station in the center of town. As he turned off the car, he took in the street traffic, the array of hometown vendors lined up with tables or standing by the tracks.

They'd beat the train.

He glanced at her, about to announce this news, but she was still back in the story, caught there. She had both hands holding his now, her eyes full, a tear dripping off her chin. She didn't even bother to wipe it as it plopped onto her pants. “Did they kill her?”

He nodded.

“Thankfully, I was too… I was pretty worked over by then. I didn't have to watch her die.”

Mae squeezed his hands, another tear dripping onto her cheek. “I'm sorry.”

He tore his gaze away. “It's in the past.”

She blinked at his words, her amazing green eyes darkening. “It's
not
in the past. It's here.”

She moved her hand to the chain around his neck, touching it. “It's right here between us. It's why you can't bear to have me fly for you. And why you keep wanting to send me packing. It's why, last night, you had a nightmare, and why you look like you're going to combust every second you're in Georgia.”

He glanced at her, then back at the babushkas trolleying metal milk canisters down the rutted dirt road toward the station, and at the children on bicycles, laughing…

No, it wasn't in the past. And clearly, he couldn't break free of it either, despite the years of dodging and hoping and praying and wishing.

He reached up and wiped away the tear that lay on her cheek. She didn't pull away.

He took her hand, kissed it and put it back on her lap. “It's why we need to get on that train and get Josh, and why I need you to walk away from me. Not because I want you to, but because you should.”

She looked at him with a sort of dark horror on her face.

“I don't want to lose you, Mae, I really don't.” Oh, no, his voice was breaking. He closed his mouth, shook his head.
Get a hold of yourself.
Still, he did feel like he
might
combust, right there, he might even cry with the bubble of pain building in his chest. But he owed her the truth, and he'd come this far…

“The truth is, I know that if you see how desperately I need you, it'll scare you back to your senses. You'll realize that I'm just a guy who's made mistake after mistake, and who will probably only get you killed. And because of that, and because I'm so incredibly selfish, I need you to walk away from me.”

“Chet, you're hardly selfish—”

“Let me finish, because you don't quite get it.” He couldn't look at her so he held on to the wheel and hung his head. “I
am
selfish. I'm so scared of losing you that I'm willing to tell you that I don't love you. That I want you to stay far, far away from me, and that you can't be in my life, even though it's completely unfair to
you,
because it's too risky for
me.
”

“Chet—”

“And that's why I rejected you in Prague, and didn't write for a year, and yes, even why I left out some of the darker parts of myself from my letters. Because I—”

“Was afraid that I might love you?”

“No, because I
wanted
you to love me. Back. Wanted you to love me
back.
”

Oh, he'd said it. He loved her.

And, of course, he had to look at her then. She stared at him with those incredible green eyes, so much hope and vulnerability and sweetness on her face—and just like that, the scabs ripped off, everything exposed to the air, burning, open, raw and, oh, what was he
thinking?

But there was more and she had to know it before she started handing out pieces of her own heart. “See, you were right back there in the village, Mae. I don't want you to make your own choices. I want to choose for you, because if I don't, I'm doomed.”

He watched as his words registered in her eyes, confusion passing over her face like a shadow.

He didn't wait for an answer. He opened the door and jumped out of the car, because, as if suddenly God had decided to take sides, the train rolled into the station.

H
e loved her?

Chet Stryker
loved
her?

Except, Mae didn't quite get that last part about being doomed.
I want to choose for you, because if I don't, I'm doomed.

Doomed? As in, condemned, without hope?

Clearly, she didn't speak Chet Stryker.

Not that she had time to interpret his words, not with Chet's hand wrapped around hers, pulling her in a quick walk down the railroad platform past the grimy red and silver train cars and passengers loading on their suitcases. Dogs were slinking around, hoping for a scrap from scarf-wrapped peasants selling boiled potatoes and walnuts to passengers. Oh, no. To add to her problems, her stomach roared to life.

“Can we grab something to eat?”

“We gotta get on the train, Mae,” Chet growled, nearly under his breath. He dodged passengers now disembarking. “Find a conductor who's distracted.”

Right. Because like a fleet of soldiers, the green-coated conductors stood outside the door, waiting for stowaways like her. And Chet.

He pushed her toward a space between an elderly
woman and a little girl who had stopped to talk to the conductor. The conductor, a doughy woman kneaded into her uniform, bent to talk to the pigtailed girl.

Chet's hands circled Mae's waist as he hoisted her up the steps. He pushed in behind her and kept his hand on the small of her back as he turned her toward the inner door and pulled it open. “Let's hope there's an empty compartment in this car.”

“How are we going to find Josh?”

“Let's get inside first, then we'll come up with a plan. We can't just go from car to car, poking our heads into compartments.”

Laura's words in Mae's memory stopped the
Why not?
breaching her lips.
You may find your nephew, but your boyfriend will never leave this country alive.
Right. Wanted.
Price.
And every time Chet stuck his head into an unknown compartment, well, there lurked the not-so-unlikely possibility he might get it chopped off.

She let him maneuver her down the aisle, peeking into compartments for one that might be empty. The train reeked of baked vinyl, dust and way too much unwashed body. Or maybe that was just her own three-day smell rising up to offend her.

Chet directed her into an empty compartment with the upper red vinyl bunks still secured in their stowaway position and the table between the two lower benches flattened against the wall. Turning, he shoved the door shut, braced his hands on it and breathed hard, just for a moment. She wanted to smooth her hand down his back, right below his neck where his muscles were strung tight.

But, well, his word continued to ring in her head. Doomed, he'd said.
Doomed.

And to think, for a second there, she'd
thought
he said he loved her.

The train whistled. Chet scraped a hand down his face. “Okay, we need to come up with a plan.”

“I want to know what you meant by ‘doomed.'”

An expression of panic crossed his face, his eyes opening wide before he blew out a breath and sank down on the bench. He rubbed his fingertips against his forehead, as if working out the stress.

“I don't under—” she started.

“Because if you loved me—even though I hoped for it, practically prayed for it—I also knew that you were the kind of person who would…do…something crazy.”

Some sort of thunderclap should have accompanied the “aha” that resounded in her brain. “You added up my—what did you call it?
Impulsiveness
—with your past, and it equaled Mae doing something stupid to save your life.”

He lifted his eyes to hers, and the pain in them jarred her. She sank down on the seat, palmed her hands against the hot vinyl.

Bingo.

“Wow, you must really think I'm out there, in left field, desperate for a man.”

He flinched. “No, Mae, c'mon—”

She couldn't believe she'd told him all that about her father, and her fear of being left behind, of people forgetting her. “No, maybe not a man, but desperate to be loved, or liked.”

“Mae…”

Shoot, running through the words in her mind, it did sort of sound like that. She was desperate for people to need her.

To love her.

She winced, looked out the window as the train lurched forward with a jerk. Chet put a hand to her shoulder, but she shrugged it off.

“Well, don't worry. I don't.”

“You don't what?”

She looked right at him. Her voice turned tight, crisp, even through her constricting throat. “Love you.”

He stared at her, a muscle twitching in his cheek. Then he drew in a breath, his expression hard. “Good.”

“Good.”

“Let's find Josh.” He got up and turned away—and just in time. She pressed her fingertips to her eyelids to hold back the tears.

Good. She wouldn't want him to be doomed, after all.

The train conductor had already started to bump her way down the aisle, stopping at compartments to check tickets, as Chet pushed Mae out ahead of her and into the next car.

“What's the plan?” Mae asked as they paused in the opening between cars. The wind ran through his hair, stole her voice. Chet turned, grabbing her shoulders, his breath in her ear. And of course, a little tingly jolt of rebelliousness went through her when his lips touched her neck.

No, she didn't love him. And she certainly hoped her heart had gotten that memo. Because it was too dangerous for
him.

She'd have to agree with him—maybe he
was
a little selfish.

“We need to go through each car, get behind a conductor, and peek into the compartments without anyone noticing.”

As he said it, as she watched the conductor waddle away through the rectangular glass window, she knew what to do.

“Don't follow too close,” she said over her shoulder as she slipped inside the next car, noted that the conductor was halfway down the aisle, and ducked into the women's vacated compartment.

Chet, of course, couldn't obey, and moved in right behind her. “What are you do—”

She held up one finger, pressing it to her lips. Then she opened the tiny utility closet in the conductor's room and shifted through the attire until she unearthed a blue coat, almost like a bathrobe. “The cleaning people use them,” she whispered. She grabbed a pillow and pulled the case off, wrapping it around her head, tying it in the back. Then she lifted a tray and a large white teapot filled with
kepitoke,
or tea concentrate, from the hot plate. Out in the main galley, a samovar steamed, filled with hot water.

“You're not thinking of passing yourself off as a tea lady, are you?” Chet said, barring the door with his body. She put a hand to his sternum and handed him her bag.

“Yes, I am, thanks.”

“Please, Mae, we can figure out another way. Don't do this—”

She raised an eyebrow, wanting to push him aside, maybe drop a few choice words about how he had given up the right to tell her what to do. But she could read pain in his eyes and couldn't bear to twist the knife.

She put her hand on his chest, felt his hammering heart, and gently pushed past him into the hall. “All you have to do is hang out about ten feet away and stare
out the window. I'll be fine. You don't know what Josh looks like, anyway.”

“But I know what Darya looks like.”

She flinched. Darya, the younger sister of the girl he'd loved. As opposed to her, the girl who got in the way.

“All the more reason to stay back. What if she knows you? What if your picture is up at camp with a target on it? What if she recognizes you? You don't know what she'll do.”

She had a point, and it registered on his face. He cleared his throat, turned his back to her and affected a casual pose as he leaned against the railing and stared out at the landscape chugging by.

Ah, cooperation, she'd almost forgotten what that looked like.

Please, God, help me find Joshy.
She hadn't exactly been praying her way through the past couple days, but she and God were beyond need-to-know. He knew it all.

Including the fact that she
didn't
have a desperate need to be loved. Did she?

She knocked on the first door. It slid open. She raised the teapot, her gaze scanning past the four men all raising their beer bottles to her.

Okay, so maybe she might be a smidge thankful for Chet's looming presence only five feet away.

“Chai?” she asked, and they laughed. Then she closed the door on their invitations. Good thing she didn't understand all the nuances of Georgian.

“No Josh?” Chet asked, not looking at her.

“Nyet,”
she said under her breath.

She went to the next compartment and repeated the offer. This time, four elderly women sat chewing on walnuts. One held out her cup—a glass in a metal housing
with an elegant handle—and Mae filled it with an inch of
kepitoke.
The woman would add hot water herself to make tea.

“This could work,” Mae said, glancing as Chet as she half closed the compartment door. He didn't comment as she made her way to the next compartment, trying not to jostle the tray. She bypassed the open compartments until Chet alerted her to the return of the conductor. She closed the door, watching as the woman wrestled her large body past Chet, but thankfully, didn't spare her a glance.

Mae waited until the conductor had closed her door, then knocked on the rest of the doors in the car. No Josh.

Chet caught up to her, grabbing her arm as she passed between the cars, nearly knocking the tea onto the tracks. She had no trouble hearing his voice this time, despite the wind. “C'mon, Mae. What if you get caught?”

“Who's going to catch me? The conductors have already checked the compartments and are thrilled to hole up until the next town. This train isn't that long. I can do this.”

His grip was locked around her upper arm, and she looked down at his hand.

“Really. I want to get this over with as quickly as you do.”

He tightened his mouth into a line. Then he unhanded her.

She moved to the next car.

As expected, the conductor never even looked up as Mae slipped past and began knocking on doors. No Josh, compartment after compartment, car after car.
She ran out of tea about halfway through the sixth car, but kept knocking on doors, even after she'd poured her last drop. She simply offered the tea, nodded, and then poured it out, acting surprised when it was empty.

It worked until ten cars down, nearly the end of the train.

She knocked on a door and it opened to four soldiers.

They wore the green camouflage of the Georgian army and looked up at her with interest generated by two bottles of vodka.

“Chai?”

One grabbed his nearly empty glass, still sloshing with the remnants of his beverage. She poured out the empty teapot.

“Zhalka,”
she said, shaking her head.

But as she shrugged and turned to go, she heard,
“Zehinshina!”

Uh-oh. The men obviously didn't want the little tea lady to leave.

She acted as if she hadn't heard and started to step away when one of the soldiers, a man who wore the horrors of battle in a scar down his cheek and a leer in his eye, hooked her around the waist and pulled her into the compartment. She dropped the teapot, tripped and nearly knocked her chin on the table covered with empty vodka bottles.

The man wore boots—she got a good look at them just a second before rough hands pulled her up.

She landed hard on the lap of the soldier with the scar.

The man across from her smiled—no, she'd call it a half smirk, half drunken leer—and began to shut the compartment door.

 

How Chet hated it when his warnings proved right—especially when he knew that the plan wasn't a good idea. And especially when he hadn't tried to stop it before it started. Like the day that David set up the meeting in Kaohsiung harbor, Taiwan, almost two years ago, and Chet had walked into an ambush. His gut prophesied doom—a sour,
this-is-wrong
feeling even as he was placing the weapons in the shipping container. He'd even sensed it the night Carissa slipped into his arms, although then he'd called it something different—shame, or maybe guilt. Now, some twenty years later he knew what to label the feeling.

His own stupidity.

Chet saw the compartment door begin to close, caught a glimpse of Mae's wide, startled eyes, and lunged.

The door slammed on his hand and nearly crossed his eyes with the pain. But he shoved it back—probably harder than he should have because it shook the entire car and the soldiers—no, make that
drunks
—inside. Without a word, he reached for Mae's arm. His other hand, he balled into a fist and connected with the grabber's jaw. And, boy, did it feel good, too. He'd probably added a smidge more oomph into it than he needed. Still, it communicated
sit still and don't move
to the other three as they watched their buddy's head snap back and blood begin to gush from his nose.

By then, Chet had Mae disentangled and was slamming the compartment door behind them.

“Run!” he ordered.

She caught on fast—clearly, her years in the military were kicking in—in fact, if he'd waited, she probably would have delivered a couple of kicks of her own.

Not that it would have made much difference against four healthy, inebriated men.

See, this was what Chet meant by doomed.

He'd intended to push her out the nearest door, but a rod barred it. They'd reached the end of the cars—hence the drunken “security force” barricaded in the last car—so he turned her, using more force than was necessary because she'd clearly figured it out and was already heading back the way they'd come.