Shatter (7 page)

“No wonder you don’t have a woman.”

“Care to toss any of your extras my way?”

He glanced at Halina, her pale, battered face stark against the dark patchwork of Dex’s fur.
All of them except this one
was the first thing that came to mind. He forced his gaze out the windshield and the stupid thought from his mind. Stupid,
stupid
thought.

“Have anything?” he asked. “Or did you just call to hear my voice?”

“Just the lowdown on your assailant. I’ve had enough of your voice to last me a lifetime.”

“Listening.”

“Major Bruce Abernathy. Career U.S. Army with six years in the Rangers and six in Intelligence.”

“Fucking A, why can’t they send some regular Joe Shmoe after us for once?”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

“You’ve been around Nelson too long.” Nelson was one of Teague and Alyssa’s full-time guards and wanted to know where the fun was in anything ordinary. And since everyone who didn’t have a house in Truckee, California, was camped at Teague and Alyssa’s, Kai had obviously been hanging with Nelson.

“Wait, wait, wait.” Kai sounded like a kid in a candy shop. “You’re gonna love this.”

“Which means I’m going to hate it. I thought you were cutting back on the caffeine, dude.”

“I did. Had to up my sugar intake to balance, right?”

Mitch groaned and dropped his forehead into his hand, rubbing at his growing fatigue.

“So, I looked back in the records my boss sent, and Abernathy’s assignments only go back three years, but—and here’s the good part—every one of them coincides with one of Quaid’s missions.”

Kai went quiet—a rare and blessed event—and Mitch took the opportunity to consider Abernathy’s role.

The team was combing through Quaid’s memories and Schaeffer’s financials in hopes of linking the details between the missions Schaeffer had sent Quaid on over the last five years and the senator’s developments for various armies across the globe through his manufacturing company, Millennium.

He glanced at Halina. His gut still told him she was the key. That she had the last piece of the puzzle he needed to wrap all the evidence into a package for the attorney general to get an indictment against Schaeffer on multiple serious federal crimes. Mitch’s intuition told him she had what he needed to put this whole damn mess to rest and give everyone on the team, including Alyssa and her family, their freedom back.

What his intuition
didn’t
tell him was what that golden nugget was or how to get her to choke it up.

“Did you talk to Quaid about it?” Mitch asked.

“You need to up
your
caffeine intake,” Kai said. “It’s three a.m. and he
does
have a woman. One that will chew a piece of my scrawny ass if I call asking questions at this hour. If you want to know that badly,
you
call him.”

No, Mitch didn’t want to face Jessica’s wrath either. But he smiled thinking about how protective she’d become of Quaid since they’d reconciled. Then his smile dropped and his mind veered as his gaze darted to Halina again. If Jessica and Quaid could overcome their years apart, and the horrors each had endured, and still find happiness . . .

Mitch stopped himself, yet again.

“We’ll be there in the morning. We can talk about it then. For now, we’ve got a badass on our trail who’s likely involved in this at the field level.”

“Looks like. By the way, I talked to Luke earlier—”

“I don’t need any more of his nasty messages.”

“This one’s from Keira by way of Luke.”

“She’s often worse than he is. He’s a bad influence. She used to be such a dream—”

“Do you want to know what she picked up from your wild child since you hooked up with her or not?”

Mitch winced. Kai could only mean Halina, and given their interactions since they’d “hooked up”—hardly the term Mitch would use—he wasn’t so eager to get into her head anymore. But he didn’t really have a choice, did he?

“I suppose.”

“She’s lying to you.”

Mitch’s hand fell from his forehead and thumped against the steering wheel. “You’ve got to be freaking kidding me—”

“If you don’t shut your trap, shark-boy, and let me finish for a change, I’m going to give this messenger duty to Ransom. That would teach you, wouldn’t it?”

Mitch hissed through clenched teeth. The thought of talking to Ransom several times a day brought on a full cringe. “Go on . . .”

“Thank you.” Kai said ceremoniously, making a point to pause afterward before saying, “It’s not a simple case of lying, as Keira describes it. All Halina’s thoughts revolve around how to best deceive you. How to keep you at a distance. How to get you out of the way. How to keep you from uncovering the truth. She’s not just lying, bro, these lies are water and air to her.”

Mitch’s gut ached. He heaved a breath and rubbed his eyes. “Gee, thanks so much, bud. Get some sleep now, would you? A crash from that altitude could kill you.”

Kai started to say something, but Mitch disconnected, exhausted. He couldn’t take in any more information. Especially not of the depth of the deception Halina was willing to reach to get away from him.

“Who’s Quaid?”

Halina’s sleepy voice didn’t make him jump. In fact, just the opposite. The smooth sound, floating on the car’s dark interior, created a dangerously intimate sensation within Mitch’s body.

He shifted in his seat and resumed searching for a hotel on the GPS. “Quaid Legend was the firefighter who allegedly died in the warehouse fire.”

“How can someone allegedly die?”

They used to talk like this in the middle of the night. One of them had woken for some reason and the other had sensed their restlessness or their absence from bed. They’d almost always made love in those midnight hours. Usually slow and passionate, with endless kisses and deep strokes. Sensual, pleasure-seeking missions when they discovered new secrets about each other. When they’d bonded deeply, loved completely.

Or so he’d thought. He narrowed his eyes and shook his head. How could he have been so wrong? Not just hit-it-out-of-the-ballpark wrong, but hit-it-into-the-stadium-in-the-next-town wrong.

He cleared his throat, but that didn’t erase the pain in his chest. “It’s when the injured are taken to a military hospital and quarantined, then told one of their teammates, in this case also someone’s husband, didn’t make it. That he’d died from his injuries. But in fact that man is taken to a secluded lab on the border of Area 51 in Nevada—”

“The Castle?”

Mitch’s gaze jerked toward her. “You know it?”

“I . . .” She lifted her head and glanced at him, her eyes glittering with dread. “Don’t look at me like that. I just know that Gorin used to split his time between our lab in Washington and the Castle. But there was never talk of prisoners or even human experimentation. There were so many insane steps we had to get through to be approved for—”

“Halina.” His voice gave away his lack of sleep and growing frustration. “No one needs to approve
illegal activity
.”

She straightened. “
I
was not doing anything
illegal
.”

“Then everyone around you was.” He didn’t try to hold back his disgusted tone. “The team and I went into the Castle a few weeks ago to break Quaid out, but they’d already taken him to a safe house—”

She gasped and slumped back against the seat. That hint of terror he’d been looking for earlier finally showed in her eyes. “A few weeks ago?” Her voice came out broken and weak. She pressed a hand high on her chest. “The explosion there . . . Jesus Christ, Mitch, tell me you didn’t do that.”

“I didn’t blow them up.” He hadn’t meant for that to come out quite so flippant, but . . . he was tired. “They flew their own damn helicopters into their own damn chemical lab.”

“Oh my
God
. Mitch . . .” Her mouth hung open, her gaze horrified. “The devastation there . . .”

He shrugged, but didn’t feel the nonchalance inside. The episode would forever be etched on both his memory and his conscience. “War is messy. Schaeffer started this war. And he continues to perpetuate it.”

When she remained staring off into space, mouth open in shock, Mitch said, “I see you’re starting to get the bigger picture here, Hali.

“Anyway, back to Quaid. When we finally got him back, we discovered that while Gorin had been shaping him into that perfect soldier of the future, they’d wiped out his memory bank. He’s since been reunited with his wife, Jessica, who’s spent the last five years believing she watched him die at the warehouse—they were newlyweds at the time of the explosion.”

“Oh Christ.” She barely breathed the words and held up her hands. “Stop.”

She covered her eyes as Mitch approached a freeway exit with a hotel half a mile down.

“Oh, but that’s just the start. There’s juicy stuff to tell. Quaid’s chemical exposure at the fire made him a gifted remote viewer and teleporter, which Gorin manipulated until he had the perfect asset for clandestine missions around the globe. Quaid has been stealing military secrets—from other countries and our own—and supplying them to Schaeffer so Millennium Manufacturing can fulfill the military’s every need, whether it be manufacturing advanced weaponry or developing intelligent support devices. And he’s making billions upon billions doing it.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head, eyes wide with a dull glaze. “He . . . he can’t. I mean . . . isn’t that espionage or treason or . . .
something
?”

Mitch grinned, hard and bitter, pulling into the hotel’s parking lot. “Only if it can be proven. And to commit treason, two parties need to be involved. Espionage . . .” He shrugged. “It’s a tough sell—to a grand jury, to a judge, to a jury . . .”

“But he’s a
senator
. Everything has to be held in trust. He’s not supposed to be doing business while he’s in office. It’s a conflict of interest. That’s . . . I don’t know, fraud?”

Mitch’s smile softened to something a little more real. “Either your trainer was teaching law with his Krav Maga or some of our conversations from all those years ago stuck.

“It might be considered fraud. Then again, it could be viewed as within legal parameters, like Vice President Cheney’s involvement in the deals his company, Halliburton, picked up with the military while he was in office. That was ultimately ruled legal—at least in the U.S. He still had problems overseas. But as you can see, there is a lot of gray area to be colored one way or the other, which is where you come in—evidence gathering.”

He pulled to a stop directly in front of the hotel office.

As if she realized for the first time that they weren’t on the freeway anymore, she frowned through the windshield. “What . . . ? Where are we?” But she didn’t wait for an answer before she asked, “And where are we going to be tomorrow morning?”

Ah, shit. He really wasn’t up for this. “Halina.” He forced himself to put a soothing tone behind his words. “You’re exhausted, you’re hurt, you’re stressed. You need to get some sleep. And if I keep driving—”

“You’re going to run into a post. I know. Who is Kai?”

“Your questions are making me dizzy, sweetheart. Let’s get a room for now and—”

“Shit, this is . . . this is
crazy
.” She covered the injury on her head with one hand and closed her eyes. “What am I
doing
?”

“Welcome to my world. Get comfortable. You’re gonna be here a while.” He pushed from the car and took a deep breath of the cold night air before rounding the hood to open her door. “But stop stressing for the moment. Doing anything that stands out is the fastest way to lead them to us. Now, pretend you like me. It’s a normal thing for couples to do when they come to a hotel.”

He reached for her arm to help her out, but she pulled back. Dex pushed out of her lap and tried to stretch in the small space. “Why can’t I stay here?”

“Because I don’t feel like coming out to an empty parking spot.” He tugged Halina to her feet. “Sorry, dude,” he said to Dex. “I’m going to steal her for a few minutes.”

At the lobby door, he pulled her aside and tilted her chin up with a finger. The dim outside lights bathed her face in a warm glow, easing the stark paleness clinging to her since she’d headbutted Abernathy. Every surface was smooth, creamy . . . so utterly beautiful.

“We need to cover up this shiner.”

His fingers smoothed the strands of hair that had fallen across her forehead, but didn’t begin to cover the damage. He reached around the back of her head to unfasten the messy bun she kept throwing her hair into. Her scent and warmth slid along the front of his body, then slipped around him as if she’d circled him in her arms. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on his fumbling fingers, but his head had gone woozy. How did she do this to him? It was like she . . .
had powers
.

A moment of dread preceded an almost-laugh. That was a ridiculous thought. Even if she had the ability to put men in a sexual fog, she’d only use it to get away from him, not turn him on.

“Need some help?”

The suggestive tone in her voice had to be his sick imagination. But the feel of her hands resting against his belly sure wasn’t. And the simple touch spread heat across his entire upper body.

She lifted her hands behind her head and covered his struggling fingers. For a moment, she just held them. For a moment, he just let her. Then he pulled his hands from beneath hers but found no good place to settle them once they were free—or rather far too many good places to settle them. They ended up low on her waist, where he forced himself to hold them light and still.