The Betrayed Series: Ultimate Omnibus Collection With EXCLUSIVE Post-Shiva Short Story (116 page)

As Bunny applied the extra makeup, an itch sprang up in Rebecca’s foot and traveled up her calf, settling in her knee. She knew the rules about breathing, let alone moving in her elaborate wedding dress, but she couldn’t help it. Rebecca reached her hand down, but before a single finger could touch the fabric, a whip-slender woman rushed across the room.

“No, no, no, dear,” Mrs. Brandt chided with a Southern drawl. How come if people said things with that drawl you couldn’t take offense to it? “You must pick up the dress at the sides so that you don’t crease the chiffon.”

Little did her mother-in-law-to-be know that Rebecca had almost dared to
scratch
the fabric. Rebecca decided to keep that little gem of a plan to herself. Because Mrs. Brandt turned out to terrify Rebecca more than any of the aforementioned threats combined.

“Sorry, ma’am,” Rebecca mumbled.

“Do not
ma’am
me, young lady,” Mrs. Brandt corrected in that silky-smooth tone, scolded as only a Southerner could. “Call me Mama.”

Yeah, that was never going to happen.

“Oh no,” one of the sisters exclaimed. “There’s a piece of lint!”

Apparently, in wedding day mode, that constituted a five-alarm emergency. Brandt’s other sister—Kaydria, Rebecca thought—dove for the lint brush as Mrs. Brandt took a magnifying glass, an actual
magnifying
glass, to the wedding dress.

Okay, this was shaping up to be the longest twenty-one minutes of her life. It seemed the entire family was trying to wipe away the memory of Brandt’s first awkward overseas marriage by putting on the largest, most glamorous wedding Charleston had ever seen.

Which wasn’t easy to do, given it was Charleston and this was the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, the largest church on the southern seaboard. This dressing room alone had enough gilded crosses to give the Vatican a run for its money, and Rebecca would know.

“Don’t worry,” Bunny whispered. “None of it dates before the eighteenth century.” The younger woman gave a wink. “I checked.”

And Bunny would know as well. The redhead was nearly as well versed in proto-Christianity as Rebecca. Which had come in handy several times in the past few months.

Still, Rebecca felt compelled to study the religious icons to assess if there wasn’t some deeper, hidden code buried in them rather than preparing to get married.

Get married
.

Okay, those two words were really starting to freak her out.

Bunny must have sensed Rebecca’s rising anxiety, as she tried to herd the Brandt women to the door. “I think the bride might need a little air.”

It looked like Rebecca might get a reprieve from all of the clucking when Holly, Brandt’s youngest sister, burst into the room. “They’re still not here!”

The other women dropped Rebecca’s dress and rushed over to the teen.

“What do you mean?” Mrs. Brandt demanded. “Vincent said they were stuck in traffic and going to be a tad late”—she looked to her silver watch—”but the groomsmen should be in position by now.”

“Yes,” Bunny encouraged, “why don’t you go see about that?”

In a rustle of satin, the mother of the groom and three of Rebecca’s bridesmaids rushed from the room as Bunny closed the door behind them.

“They’ll be here on time,” Bunny reassured her.

Of that, Rebecca wasn’t so sure. This was Brandt, after all. If any man on the planet could find a way to get in some kind of international trouble on his wedding day, it was her fiancé.

The only thing Rebecca was certain of was that the men weren’t stuck in a traffic jam.

With Lopez driving, that was an absolute impossibility.

* * *

Sergeant Vincent Brandt clutched the machine gun to his chest as his other hand grabbed hold of the train car’s panel to keep himself from being hurled out the window. Yes, he was clutching a machine gun on his wedding day. That didn’t stop the train from nearly derailing as it took a sixty-degree turn at sixty miles an hour. Physics was not their friend today.

“Slow it down!” Brandt yelled to Lopez but knew that it was futile. Especially as the corporal lashed out a hand to catch the video camera before it slid off the console.

“Gotcha!” Lopez announced, not to Brandt, but to the camera as he set it up again.

Another one of Operation’s bright ideas. Filming their missions. Even though the brand-spanking-new Ricoh military spec camera was solid state, eyes-only encrypted, with a self-destruct module, Brandt thought it was possibly the worst idea to come along since, well, since ever. And it didn’t help that Lopez was already a little too Evil Kinievel for Brandt’s tastes, but now? Now that he was being filmed for posterity? Forget about it.

But the upper brass’s new thing was accountability. They wanted proof of a mission’s objectives. Brandt thought if they wanted that kind of deal, they might want to come out in the field with his team for a week. Strangely, no one took him up on his offer.

The crack of a shot came from the right as Davidson cursed under his breath. Clearly, the private hadn’t hit his driver of the train car in front of them. How could he? The kid was good—
damned
good. However, the train they chased was just a speck on the horizon. And strong winds coming in from the east were making any long-distance shot reliant on prayer.

Davidson pulled himself back into the car and stretched out his scarred fingers, shaking off the pain. How the kid could shoot at all after all those burns was amazing. The fact he could outshoot most snipers with ten years his training? That was about as near a miracle as you could get. Brandt’s lips turned down as he studied the melted ruin of Davidson’s left cheek.

Had that fire truly transformed the sniper? There were times Brandt felt the old trust building, then Davidson would take a single step out of place, and it would be shattered. Brandt wished he could wipe that memory of Davidson pointing a gun at Rebecca away, burn it to ashes, but it refused to be uprooted. Was the sniper reformed or just a scorpion biding his time?

“Throw on more wood!” Lopez yelled over the clacking of the train, snapping Brandt back to the present.

Picking a steam-powered antique train as their chase vehicle hadn’t been the most efficient choice, but it was what they had, so they had to make it work. Ahead of them, a stolen train car filled with live munitions was booking it.

“Levont!” Brandt ordered. “You heard the man!”

The team’s new point man bent over, grabbed a large log, and tossed it into the old-fashioned furnace. The burly guy made it look easy. The train picked up speed, hurling down the tracks of an abandoned railway on the north side of the Charleston Naval Weapons Station.

“Nineteen minutes!” Talli shouted.

Damn it. The naval base had over three
thousand
active-duty personal, yet here Brandt and his team were, chasing down the bad guys. The upper brass was worried that this string of ammunitions thefts were inside jobs, hence why they had no military back up. And now, with less than twenty minutes to go before his wedding?
Typical
.

There was absolutely nothing Brandt could do to speed up the chase as the Charleston countryside rolled past. Thick grass blanketed the meadows hemmed in only by the weeping willows. It smelled green. Not that muted, dusty green of the rest of the world, but that bright, shiny green he’d only found in South Carolina. It smelled like home.

“Watch it!” Davidson snapped at Talli. “If you can’t get a shot through the window, don’t take it.”

The team’s “official” sniper bristled at the rebuke. However, Brandt backed their “unofficial” yet infinitely more talented sniper. Ever since Davidson had rejoined the team, Talli had been trying too hard. Which was not helping the man’s accuracy one damned bit.

Honestly, Brandt doubted Talli had been targeting the train car itself. In truth, Brandt was pretty sure Talli had
meant
to hit the window. The man kept trying to take shots outside his range to keep up with Davidson. Which just wasn’t going to happen.

Normally, Brandt would let it slide. He would let Talli find his footing. The problem was, right now, Talli’s quest to prove himself could get them all blown up.

“Look, we’ve got no idea where they’ve stored the stolen ordnance,” Brandt said, trying to use his sensitivity training. The upper brass was now also all for caring about feelings. Brandt was supposed to be careful not to deflate Talli’s ego. He failed miserably. “It’s the engineering window or
nothing
.”

Talli’s jaw clenched as he lowered his eye back to his scope. Brandt noticed, though, that Talli didn’t fire. Good man.

Davidson took several more shots, all equally unsuccessful. Brandt squinted. Were they catching up? Had the other train car slowed? Or had they sped up?

Then Davidson’s rifle snapped up. “Crap.”

“What?”

“They’re stopping,” the private reported.

“Great!” Lopez whooped.

“No,” Davidson said, shaking his head. “They’re stopping because the tracks end up ahead.”

Not even Lopez could find the silver lining in that. Not with their brakes shot. Gone. Done. Nonexistent.

Brandt turned to Levont. “Any luck?”

The tall black man shoved another log into the furnace as he indicated with his head to the antique control panel. “Maybe if we had Henry Ford to help…”

The lack of brakes had seemed like a nonissue when the chase began. How often did Lopez use them, anyway? Now, however? Now brakes kind of seemed important.

Lopez’s smile returned. “You know what I say?” Brandt really didn’t want to know. However, he had a wedding to get to in nineteen minutes, so he let Lopez continue. “I say throw on
all
the wood.”

A retort was on Brandt’s lips, but it stalled as he saw the long-term strategy of Lopez’s plan. It wasn’t just that Lopez wanted to set the world speed record for a steam engine
and
catch it all on film. It wasn’t even to get to the enemy before they unloaded all of the ammunition they’d stolen. It
was
to ram this train into the other at the highest speed possible,
detonating
all of those live munitions.

It was a “if you can’t beat them, join them” kind of plan. Better to have those dangerous explosives go up here where they could do minimal damage than where the terrorists planned to use them.

Brandt turned to Levont. Even though the man had only been with them a few months, he didn’t need the order, as he grabbed a log in each hand, chucking them into the furnace.

As the train surged forward, Brandt had only one little problem to work out.

How the hell to get off the train before it exploded in all its fiery glory?

Minor detail
.

* * *

Rebecca held her tongue as the Brandt women once again fussed all around her. Apparently, wedding preparation involved constantly readjusting every inch of her dress.

“Maybe,” Brandt’s youngest sister blurted, “maybe Vincent’s had second thoughts.”

Mrs. Brandt took a supposedly playful swing at her daughter, although when it connected, Holly grimaced. “Hush, child. Vincent is having no such thing.” The older woman then turned her attention to Rebecca. “Don’t you worry. Vincent
will
be here.”

Rebecca was pretty darned sure that the woman said it more for her own sake than any bride’s. The teenager couldn’t help herself, though.

“But Vincent is never late for—”

“Holly!” Mrs. Brandt snapped, tugging her youngest away from Rebecca.

“Mom!” Holly complained as she was dragged off. “You ruffled my dress!”

As the two smoothed out the peach chiffon, Rebecca looked to Bunny, who pushed a tumble of red curls out of the way, arching an eyebrow.

“Never late?” the younger woman whispered. “How about, don’t bother to make plans because he is probably on another continent?”

Brandt had clearly done a great job of protecting his family from his true occupation. They all thought he was regular army, stationed over in Germany. That worried them enough. If they knew what he really did? If they knew the danger he put himself in on a daily—no,
hourly
—basis?

They would not be nearly as worried about chiffon—that was for certain.

“I’m sure Vin’s got a good reason,” Kaydria said as she squeezed Rebecca’s arm.

That was exactly what had Rebecca concerned. Not that Brandt had ditched her. That thought had never crossed her mind. He would take a bullet for her. Actually, he’d taken several for her, so worrying about his level of devotion was kind of a moot point.

No, she was worried he and his team had gotten themselves into the kind of trouble they couldn’t get themselves out of.

* * *

The hot South Carolina air blasted Brandt in the face as he climbed up onto the roof of the train. Although, the blazing summer heat was nothing compared to the inferno inside of the engine car. Levont had stoked the fire so high that flames shot out of the furnace. That was their cue to leave.

The only “safe” location was on top of the train, which gave you an indication of exactly how insane their plan was. Lopez swore he had a backup contingency, but sometimes the corporal confused contingency with prayer. And there was no time to discuss the difference.

Levont looked over the side of the train to the ground speeding past. “If we throw ourselves off…”

Yeah, a broken back would probably be the best-case scenario. Right now, the only other option was to crash into the munitions car and die in a ball of flame. So there was that.

“Sarge!” Talli yelled, pointing to what appeared to be a fly on the horizon. The faster it zipped toward them, the larger it became. That was no fly. It was a helicopter.

“When the general said
no
base support,” Brandt growled at Lopez, “he meant
none
.” The whole reason Brandt’s team had been pulled in was the concern that this heist was an inside job.

Lopez smiled, though. “I took it he meant
this
base, Sarge, not the other three in the area.”