The Omega Team: Hot Rod (Kindle Worlds Novella) (10 page)

He felt the impact to his teeth. It blasted through her and into him, slamming them both back and into the hard wall. She cried out and collapsed in his arms even as a searing burn registered in his belly.

Well fuck
, he thought before darkness took him.

Cooper had killed them both, with the same bullet.

That sucked balls.

Chapter Ten

Matt woke up in a hospital room, surrounded by beeping machines. Grey and Athena stood over him with bleak expressions. They were staring at each other, though, so they didn’t notice he was awake.

He cleared his throat—a nasty rumble—and Grey’s eyes snapped to him. “Matt.”

“Such an enthusiastic greeting.” He forced a smile.

Athena frowned at him. “We thought we’d lost you,” she complained.

“I’m fine. It was just a scratch.”

“You lost your spleen,” Grey muttered.

Matt thought this over for a minute. “Do I need a spleen?” But it was a rhetorical question. He asked the one he really needed an answer to. “And Vixen? Is she all right?”

He hated the way those little lines tightened around Athena’s mouth. She and Grey exchanged a glance.

“Well?” A hint of panic in the wail.

“She’s…all right.”

Why didn’t he believe him? Grey never lied. “Where is she?”

“She’s here. In the hospital. She’s fine.” He set a palm on Matt’s shoulder. “Settle down.”

“I am settled down.”

“You both did a great job.”

“What happened to Cooper?”

Grey’s expression darkened. “He survived—”

“Too bad.”

“And he’s in custody. We’ll deal with him. You just focus on getting back on your feet.”

Back on his feet? Hell, he needed to get back to
her
. Needed to make sure she was safe. He tried to sit up in the bed but his muscles wouldn’t cooperate.

“Matthew Devereaux.”

He froze and locked gazes with Athena. She didn’t use that tone often, but when she did, a man paid attention. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Lie down. You’ll pull out your leads.”

“With all due respect, ma’am, I don’t give a f— fig for these leads. I need to see her.”

“She’s fine.”

“She took a bullet for me.”

“So I hear.” Athena’s lips quirked, as though she’d met a woman who might one day be a good friend.

“I couldn’t stop her. She just jumped in front of me.”

A dark chuckle rumbled from the door and another man stepped into the room. He was tall and muscular and had a military mien about him. “That sounds like her.” The newcomer approached Grey and the two men shook hands. He then shared a nod with Athena before he turned to Matt and thrust out a hand. “Jon Rudnick.”

His pulse gave a lurch. Jon Rudnick was legendary, and the man who’d founded GAPS. And he was Vixen’s boss.

“Sir.” His grip was firm and warm but all Matt could think about was how annoying it was that Jon Rudnick was so fucking good-looking. Did
she
think he was good-looking? When she’d mentioned him, her voice had been filled with admiration and awe.

Pity he was in no condition to punch him in the—

“I really appreciate you taking care of our Sam. It was a pretty close call from what I hear.”

Matt nodded, and then froze. Gaped at Rudnick. His gaze flicked to Grey and back. “Wait. Did you call her Sam?” Something sizzled through his solar plexus. It felt like…presentiment.

“That’s her real name. Samantha Sawyer, actually.”

His heart lurched. His pulse pattered. His breath caught. Could it be? But how could it be? Somehow, on a cellular level, though, he knew. Somewhere, deep inside, he’d recognized her. “Samantha Sawyer, daughter of Sergeant Thomas Sawyer?”

Jon’s eyes glimmered and he gave a small nod. “The same.”

“How on earth did she come to work for you?” And why wasn’t she dead?

And God! She wasn’t dead.

It was nearly too much to process. Especially with his brain all foggy with drugs.

“I served with her father in Iraq.”

God. God, oh God, oh God. It was her. His Samantha. “But…didn’t she die? It was on the news that she died.”

Grey had been watching the exchange like it was a Ping-Pong match, but now interjected, “Wait. Do you know her?”

Matt ignored his boss, never a good strategy with Grey, but he had to know. He stared at Rudnick until his eyes watered. “Tell me.”

He crossed his arms and studied Matt for a moment. “All right. Yeah. After her father died, her mother hooked up with a man named James Bartlett. A mean SOB. But then, when her mother was killed, Sam approached the Attorney General with evidence that, not only had her stepfather beaten Margery to death, he was running a heroin ring in DC. That brought her onto my radar again and, as a friend of the family, I called in some favors to protect her. Since both her parents were dead, and the ring swore retaliation, we put her in Witness Protection. The official story was that she died.”

“But she didn’t.”

“Um. No. She didn’t. She’s alive and well and recuperating down the hall from taking a bullet for your ass.”

“I didn’t ask her to leap in front of me!” God, his heart had nearly stopped when she had. It had hurt more than the bullet that had plowed through her and lodged itself in him.

Jon glanced at Grey. “She had her mission. Just like you had yours. She’d rather die than fail.”

Fuck. He couldn’t bear that. Just couldn’t.

“I need to see her.”

“You’ll have to wait.”

“Why?” His soul wailed.

It prickled that neither Jon nor Grey would make eye contact.

“Why?”

“Because she’s in ICU.”

Shit.

“I need to see her.”

“Well, you can’t. Not until the doctors are sure she’ll pull through.”

Athena set her hand on his. Her voice was soft as she skewered him with the most painful words he’d ever heard. “She’s critical, Matt. We don’t even know if she’ll wake up.”

And there it was. His worst fears, realized.

He’d found Sam again.

After years of aching and wanting and howling for her, an eternity of darkness, he’d found her again.

But had the miracle come too late?

Sam awoke in a fog with everything hurting, especially her chest. She glanced down, beneath the hospital gown, to see her left shoulder was tightly wrapped. She closed her eyes—it was a lot of effort to keep them open—and recalled the showdown with Cooper. Questions swirled in her mind—was Matt okay? Had they killed Cooper? Was that discomfort
down there
really a catheter?—but there were no answers. None that were satisfying at least.

She shifted a little to ease the soreness in her back and her leg nudged something hard and heavy lying on top of the covers. She peered at it and her pulse jerked as she recognized Matt’s journal.

She glanced around. She was alone in her room. Everything was silent in the night except for the beeps of the machines by her bed.

Without debating if it was right or wrong to read his personal journal—because she didn’t care—she reached down and picked it up. She clung to it for a moment, this piece of him, and then slowly, she opened it and read the first lines.

January 1, 2016.

Dear Sam—

Her heart lurched.

He’d been writing a letter in this journal.

A letter to a girl named Sam.

Not to a wife or a girlfriend.

Her.

Fascinated, she resettled and began to read.

It’s New Year’s Day. Another one. Without you. Hard to believe this is the tenth.

Ten long years since I saw you.

I still think of you every day and wonder what life would have been like if we hadn’t been separated. If you weren’t gone.

I don’t have those dark thoughts I used to have. You should be happy to hear that. I like my job and the guys around me are tolerable and sometimes even amusing. My boss is a great man, and it’s an honor serving him. I feel like I have a purpose again.

They always say time heals all wounds. But that’s not true. Some wounds can’t be healed. We just have to learn to live with the pain.

I’m happy to say, I think I figured out how to do that. I guess I realized I had a choice. I could go on living in misery over something I could never fix, or adjust.

Consider me adjusted.

But I still dream of you at night. And ache for you.

I hope you are somewhere beautiful and sweet.

Love forever, Matt

With shaking hands, she flipped the page, and the next and the next. One for each day. Describing his day, his thoughts, his hopes, to her. Day, after day, after day.

“There are more.”

Her head snapped up to find him leaning against the doorjamb and watching her, so handsome and huge. He filled the frame, he was so huge. Something in her chest fluttered. “M-more?”

“More journals. More letters.” He looked down for a second and when he raised his head again and his gaze locked with hers, there were tears in his eyes. “I wrote you every day, Sam. I never forgot you.”

Lights danced as her mind spun. A cacophony rose in her soul. An eternal skirmish, the strident clash between hope and fury. “Is this a hallucination?” Surely it was. The pain, the drugs… Maybe she’d died and this was heaven. If it was, she was going to complain, because everything hurt.

“No, Sam. No hallucination.” She had no idea why he smiled. This wasn’t funny. Not funny at all.

“So you never forgot me?” Not a frail whisper, but a vitriolic snarl. It made him flinch. She didn’t care that it did. She was far too furious. “Then why did you send back all my letters?”

He paled. Seemed to diminish somehow. “Letters? You sent letters?” He took a tentative step into the room, but her glare forestalled him and he stopped.

“Of course I sent letters. I needed you. I begged for your help. But you never even opened them.”

“I never got them.” His voice was harsh.

“Right.” She crossed her arms over her chest and then winced because it sent a shaft of pain through her. But she refused to let him see her agony. “So you’re saying that someone else received them and sent them back to me?”

“Yes!” He lurched forward

“Who the hell would do that? Who the hell would be that cruel?”

“I don’t—” He froze. The muscle in his cheek bunched. He spun away. “Goddamn it.”

His anguish seemed so real, so poignant, she had to think he wasn’t pretending.

Trouble was, she didn’t know what to think about
that
either. She’d spent ten years hating him for his apathy, and now she was faced with the tormenting truth that he’d never forgotten her. He still thought of her.

He wrote to her every day.

Every day of the last ten years, she had been in his heart and mind.

He turned back to her, raking his hair. “It had to be my mother,” he said in a ragged voice. “She wanted me to forget you. Move on. We fought about it a lot.”

She stared at him, unable to speak.

The muscle in his cheek throbbed. “I swear to God, Sam. I was crushed when you never wrote. When the letters I sent you came back undeliverable. And then…” His voice broke.

“And then…what?”

His jaw worked as though he were grinding his teeth. “Then I saw it. The story on the news.”

Oh God.
She knew. She knew what he was going to say.

“They said you died.”

She had.

She’d walked away from everything she’d been, everything she’d cared for. Even him.

It had been a hard choice, but she needed the anonymity to survive. And of course, she’d thought he’d deserted her.

But he hadn’t.

“Sam?”

How did she face him? What could she say? “Well, I didn’t die.”

“I know that…now. Where the hell have you been all this time?”

She turned away. “It’s complicated.”

“I want to know. I
need
to know.”

Not all of it, surely. It was a tawdry tale. “After my parents died, I went to live with a nice family in Wisconsin.”

“Wisconsin?”

“Great cheese.”

“I wish I’d known.”

“Everyone knows about the cheese.”

He growled. “You know what I mean.”

“I wasn’t allowed to contact anyone. I was dead. Besides…”

“What?”

“I thought you didn’t care anymore.”

“Fuck. I always cared. Always loved you. I never stopped.”

A familiar bitterness swelled. “That’s cute, but I’m not the same girl I once was.” She wasn’t.

“You are the same at your core, Sam. The same person.”

“I’m not. I’m a killer. I’m a highly trained operative who doesn’t think twice about taking a man down.”

Silence blanketed them as he stared at her for far too long. Then his lips quirked. “What’s your point?”