Blamed (5 page)

Beth Faraday did not plead. Not with him, not with anyone. She was the strongest person, man or woman, he’d met in all his thirty-seven years, and he would be damned before he listened to her beg when he knew she could—should—simply
take.

He let his careful American accent drop. “I’m not CIA, Beth.”

For the second time that night, he watched all color drain from her lovely face, and instead of keeping her gun on him, she clutched it to her chest, as a small child might cling to a teddy bear.

The sight gut-punched him.

“Oh, God,” she whispered brokenly. “Kabul.”

“Kabul,” he agreed somberly.
He
remembered, because he’d been there in Afghanistan, same as her. If only she would remember
him.

“You’re MI6.” The shock in her voice was a quiet slap.

“Nothing quite like a vengeful queen, love.” Leaning back in his chair, Raleigh Vick linked his fingers over his flat stomach and arched a knowing eyebrow. “The spooks are out to get you.”

Chapter Four

Kabul, Afghanistan
One year earlier

Oh
,
these games we play.
Beth smiled wryly as the crosshairs of her scope framed him beautifully from six hundred yards away, unable to prevent the melty little sigh that escaped her.

Not that she’d ever admit to sighing over him, whoever he was this time around. Her brows knit in a scowl as she studied him, loathing the desert sun for the way it burnished him bronze—and loathing
him
for looking like a god in its glow.

How long had it been since Cyprus?
Nine months
,
twelve days
,
and...
Well, the hours and minutes didn’t matter anymore, because here he was. Granted, six hundred yards away and completely unaware of Beth lying belly-down on a hill in the outskirts of deadly Kabul, but still—here.

Her pulse picked up its pace as she remembered the last time she’d seen him, nine months, twelve days and twenty-two hours ago. Yes, twenty-two. A girl didn’t easily forget the last time a pair of broad-palmed, callused hands had stroked her to orgasm. At least, not when those hands belonged to
him.

He stood on a dusty street corner under an awning, talking animatedly with a
keffiyeh
-wearing man who appeared decidedly upset. Her attention focused on the hands she could still feel like a brand on the tender skin of her belly, her inner thighs. He gestured easily, attempting to calm his companion, clearly speaking the other man’s language with enviable fluency. She stared at his moving lips through her scope, unconsciously wetting her own as she caught a glimpse of the gap between his front teeth.

And there was her confirmation, dental and undeniable. Different as always, and yet the same, despite the change to his coloring and clothing.

His hair was shaved down to a close buzz, appearing to be some shade of brown; in Cyprus, he’d been a sun-streaked, shaggy blonde, all surfer chic as his cover had demanded. She couldn’t see his brows behind the large aviator sunglasses he wore, but as he turned his head, she caught a glimpse of his other identifiable marker—the scar cutting across his jaw to the left of his mouth, earned years ago during an incident in Serbia.

Coincidentally, Beth had been underneath him during said incident.

Again, she focused on him, unwilling to lose this opportunity to drink him in, even from a distance. Below his aviators, his nose took a jagged turn to the right, a bump from being broken long years before she had first met him. The angled planes of his face were more gaunt than usual, his darkly tanned skin pulled taut over a visage that seized her chest with its very dearness. Not handsome, of course, because he was too battered and bruised from his years of spying to have stayed pretty, but no face except his had the ability to make her stomach flutter and her breath catch like this.

She wanted to trace the line of his nose, kiss his scar, lick the small gap in his teeth. She wanted to know him, this man who’d chased her across the globe for ten years, whom she had chased in turn. The
real
him.

As she watched through her scope, he nodded to the Afghani man with a reassuring smile and pulled the pale blue scarf at his neck up over his nose. His rangy body moved with lithe grace down the street, away from the awninged building under which he’d been talking with the man, his broad shoulders squared as the sunlight fully blasted him with its heavy rays. The dust and dirt of the dangerous street swirled around his ankles, whipping against the tanned leather of his military-issue boots. Cargo pants the color of coffee grounds clung to leanly muscled thighs, and the white tee beneath his structured sand-hued jacket appeared to have been lacquered on.

Another sigh escaped as the comm in her ear crackled. Gavin Bok’s voice, a low murmur. “Target incoming. Black SUV, tinted windows. Looks like five occupants total—two in front, three in back.”

“Okey-dokey.”

“
Copy that
, Beth. You’re supposed to respond with
copy that.
” Her partner made a grumbling noise. “Remind me again why I got babysitting detail.”

A running joke between those in the upper ranks of Faraday Industries hierarchy. Beth was accustomed to being teased about her age, having worked for the company since the tender age of sixteen as the youngest-known contract assassin on current record. Lucky for Gavin, her longtime field partner and the best friend she had, she was in a magnanimous mood today—likely due to having unexpectedly seen her favorite spy on the ground—so she let the kidding slide. “Because your other option was going with Casey to Venezuela, and, let’s face it, your Spanish is abysmal.”

“Funny, I don’t recall having any problems communicating the last time I was in South America.”

Beth snorted. “Oh, is ‘communicating’ the new word for ‘sex with the floozy café waitress’? I must have missed the memo.”

Gavin’s good-natured chuckle filtered through the earpiece. “Ah, Marisol. She was so very good at...communicating.”

She made a face. “Gross. I don’t want to hear about your love life any more than I want to hear about Casey’s.”

“No lovin’, just livin’, sweetheart,” he drawled in his syrupy Georgia accent. “Now, what’s the correct response when I give you a status update?”

“Copy that,” she mumbled, but she was smiling as she tracked the progress of the black SUV carrying her target down the road, watching as it braked in front of the same three-story building where her spy had conversed just moments ago.

“It took three years, but I knew you were trainable.”

“You can’t see it right now, but I’m giving you the bird.” Beth swallowed, throat parched from the unforgiving heat of the midday sun, and depressed a small button to digitally display the time inside her scope. “Ninety seconds.”

Gavin was all business with his murmured, “Copy that, B.”

Clicking her sightline the barest of degrees to her right, she waited for the target to step out of the vehicle. Her mark, Rawad al-Fariq, had scheduled a meeting on the top floor of the building with Karlin Kedrov, a noted Russian arms dealer suspected of having some less-than-sterling ties to both the British and French covert intelligence services. Rumors had swirled for years about Kedrov’s nasty habit of taking and turning Western spies, but nothing on record.

The purpose of the meeting, according to the info Beth’s hacker brother Adam had gathered, was to arrange the shipment of weaponized biochemical explosives from a transport station in Peshawar, over the Pakistani border and safely into Jalalabad. From there, the explosives would be dispersed among various Al-Qaida terror cells, and the United States government—who’d contracted Faraday for this hit in the first place—would be royally fucked.

And how. Rawad al-Fariq was believed to be the second-in-command to Aariz Javed, a man so scary even Beth would hesitate if the order ever came through to take him out. Because if you failed with Aariz Javed, and he caught you...well, you were pretty much guaranteed to never be heard from again.

Ignoring the unease gathering at the nape of her neck, she took a moment to adjust the light scarf she wore over the lower half of her face. The rear door to the SUV opened, and out came two guards in forest-green camo carrying assault rifles, followed swiftly by al-Fariq. He was heavier than he’d appeared in the grainy black-and-white picture in his file, his
dishdasha
oversized to accommodate his thick torso. He didn’t glance at his surroundings as the guards covered him, preventing her from taking the shot, and she swore under her breath as he disappeared into the building. The SUV with its remaining two passengers sped away as soon as al-Fariq and his contingent cleared the door.

“B?” Gavin, his tone concerned.

“Too quick. I’ll get him on the third-floor landing. Has Kedrov moved in the room?”

“Nope. Heat signature says he hasn’t left the couch along the north wall of the unit since he arrived twenty minutes ago.”

“Right. Okay.” Adjusting the rifle sight on the busted stairwell window, she disengaged the safety and settled into the slow, familiar deep-breathing she’d learned early on in her training. Her finger curled around the trigger.

A flash of reflected light crossed the path of her scope. Lifting her head, she squinted into the distance and saw it again. One flash, then two—a signal of some sort.

She peered through her scope again, clocking al-Fariq’s progress. “Great,
now
he’s moving slow as fuck up those stairs,” she muttered.

“B, you seeing this?” Gavin asked, voice grim.

“I see it.” Gritting her teeth, Beth shifted her sightline until she caught another flash of light and immediately zoomed in...on none other than the man she shouldn’t have had to think about today. In his hand, he held what appeared to be a coin.

She adjusted the sight once more, zooming in further. The shiniest British pound she’d ever seen in her life glared back at her, the face of a disapproving Queen Elizabeth clearly defined on its gleaming surface.

Beth knew, as surely as she knew her own name, that he was signaling
her.
“Shit.”

She swung her scope back to the building, to the landing visible through the broken window, to Rawad al-Fariq’s broad white-draped back. Maybe it was the increased magnification from her zoom that showed what hadn’t been obvious before, but there, beneath the terrorist’s long tunic, was the faint outline of explosive charges belted around his middle. Quickly decreasing the zoom, her breathing no longer controlled, she saw the detonator gripped in his hand, his thumb hovering over the depressor...and noticed that his guards were marching him into the third-floor flat, like a prisoner being led to execution with their guns pointed at his back.

“Bomb,” she snapped at Gavin, and took the shot.

For a few silent moments, she thought she’d succeeded. Gavin’s voice sounded in her ear, but she couldn’t make out the words over the pumping of her blood as she swung her scope toward her spy.

He was running hell for leather
toward
the building. Shouting—Beth could see he was shouting because he’d yanked down his scarf, but the sound didn’t carry to where she lay hundreds of yards away.

That was when she saw the children.

Little girls. Ten...fifteen...eighteen middle-school-aged girls, veiled and smiling. Happy smiles, just like his, but he wasn’t smiling now. He was yelling and his face, his lovely bruiser’s face, it was terrified, and Beth started to shake. The girls congregated in the open doorway beneath the ground-floor awning, staring around in concern as he raced to them, arms waving.

Between one second and the next, the building exploded in a symphony of orange and black, with white fire at its heart. The boom traveled across the distance to echo in her ears as eighteen little girls, four terrorists and one brave, stupid man with hands that had loved her so very well disappeared into the rubble.

Beth sat back on her heels and vomited, violently, into the dirt.

Chapter Five

So this is what a panic attack feels like.
Lungs constricted, head dizzy, eyes wide and unblinking. With the Beretta in a death grip against her chest, Beth tried to slow her thundering pulse.

Tried, and failed. “Who
are
you?” she whispered, the sudden wash of memory nearly causing her to pass out where she sat. He wasn’t—But he couldn’t be. She would have known if Preston Barnes was...was
her
spy.

No, her spy was dead. Fire and stone had rained down on him, buried his body and snuffed out his vibrant life force, as it had all those little girls.

Nausea roiled, as it always did when she thought of the bloody afternoon in Kabul one year earlier. That was the day when Beth had ceased to think of herself as someone with a “special skill set” and instead as a murderer. It didn’t matter that Rawad al-Fariq had been the one with explosives strapped to his torso—Beth had failed to take him out before he entered the building, and in so failing, had caused the deaths of twenty-three people, most of whom were innocents.

It was a failure you didn’t come back from. Beth certainly hadn’t, though in the months following her resignation from the family business, she’d managed to construct a wall in her mind. Behind the wall were locked filing cabinets, filled with mental printouts of all her misdeeds, failures and crimes.

She’d needed to wrap chains around the cabinet labeled “Kabul.”

But so long as she didn’t peer inward, peeking at that wall, she could function in her daily life. So long as she didn’t consider how freaking unfair it was, that
she
had received a second chance she most certainly hadn’t earned.

Which was why she was so determined not to fuck this new life up. When she and Gavin had arrived at the primary Faraday compound outside Boston, Beth had immediately sought out her younger brother, Adam. The ride from Afghanistan had given her plenty of time to think about her future, and she’d known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that her future no longer involved killing.

“Baby bro.” Beth had barely managed the breezy greeting as she strode into Adam’s lair. “How up-to-date is my cover identity?”

Adam Faraday had swiveled in his tricked-out desk chair, running a lazy hand through dark hair about a month overdue for a trim. “That’s how you greet me? You haven’t stopped by the Cave in weeks.” He pouted as his light gray eyes darted around his office space, taking in the various monitor feeds mounted on the admittedly cave-like walls of his subterranean workspace. “If you’re not careful, Imma start thinking you don’t like me.”

Crossing her arms, Beth had reined in her anxious impatience, content to banter with the only Faraday sibling younger than her. Less than two years her junior, Adam was brilliant, handsome and full of the easy charm only the baby of the family could feasibly get away with. “I’ll have you know, I swung by four days ago, before my assignment, but you weren’t here. Your assistant said you were...occupied.” An arched eyebrow. “Let me guess—Jennifer.”

Adam had grinned, his smug smile nothing but blinding white teeth. “No.”

“Hmm. Jessica?”

“Nope.”

“Please tell me you didn’t hook up with Jane again.”

“Of course not. Bitches be crazy, yo.” Linking his fingers behind his head, he’d rocked back in his chair and waited a beat. “Jared.”

At that, Beth had laughed and offered her brother a fist bump. “Dude, he’s totally hot.”

“I know, right?” Adam’s expression had turned serious. “So why’re you wondering about your cover? Something happen?”

The sudden knot in her throat had taken her by surprise. “Yeah. Something happened.” Then her jaw had clamped shut, and she’d been unable to say more.

Instantly, Adam had jumped from his seat, rounding the desk to wrap his arms around her in a comforting, brotherly hug—exactly what she’d needed but been unable to ask Gavin for. Because Gavin, though a damn fine Faraday employee and a loyal friend, wasn’t family, and family always came first. “Anything you need, Bethie,” Adam had murmured against her temple, hand rubbing up and down her spine in an effort to soothe. “You don’t need to go through Pops. I’ve got your back.”

And he had. Man, had Adam ever come through for her that night. In less than an hour, just as Beth had been ready to blow the Faraday Industries popsicle stand and hit the road for a motel that didn’t require ID at check-in, her little brother had updated her fake résumé, printed off a new driver’s license, changed the expiration on her cover passport, set up two separate bank accounts and a Roth IRA, negotiated the purchase of a silver Volkswagen Jetta from a dealership in Chicago’s Northwest suburbs, and booked her a train to the Midwest. By the time she’d arrived at Union Station, Adam had lined her up a job interview with the Art Institute’s head curator, who’d been desperate to fill a maternity-leave spot.

That had been one year ago, and in that year, Beth had never looked back. Sure, her parents had visited, but only once, a week after she’d purchased the third-floor condo. Casey had arrived soon after to set up security to his specifications. Tobias and Beth weren’t close, hadn’t been for years, so it was no surprise that her thirty-two-year-old attorney brother had stayed away, but Gillian’s absence had stung. Granted, her older sister was basically under lock and key at Faraday’s weapons engineering facility in San Diego, and her FBI watchdog, Agent Theo Rochon, was unlikely to think a jaunt to the Windy City was worth the risk to Gillian’s safety.

When you guarded a woman infamous the world over for being able to construct weapons of mass destruction out of scraps found in the average American two-car garage, you didn’t tend to take vacays. Not even to hit a housewarming hosted by said woman’s sister.

Beth’s knuckles started to ache with how tightly she gripped her gun.
Oh
,
right
,
panic attack.
“Your name isn’t Preston Barnes.”

“No, thank fuck, because doesn’t he sound like a twat?”

Part of her wanted to laugh, but she knew the abrasive, abrupt noise would make her appear...unsteady. Unbalanced. It was a show of weakness she refused to reveal to this man, a man who was quickly turning into something of a nemesis. Beth had plenty of demons already; she didn’t need another nemesis in her life. “I already told you I’m not in the mood for smartassery tonight.” A quick exhalation, and she forced herself to step away from the edge of panic and relax her grip on the gun. “So let’s try this again. Who are you?” When he opened his mouth, she shifted her aim to his shoulder. “Full disclosure, if I think you’re lying, I’m going to shoot you. So I’d urge you to attempt honesty.”

He appeared to process her statement with a sobriety she appreciated, blue eyes flicking over her face in open study. “Your brother knows me as Wendell Martin,” he said slowly, gaze never leaving hers, gauging her reaction.

Lucky him, she reacted. “Which brother?”

“Which brother is less likely to piss you off?”

“Casey.”

“All right. Casey, then.”

She glared at him. “Is it actually Casey who thinks you’re this Martin person, or is it Tobias?”

His palms flattened against the tabletop, but there was nothing acutely threatening in the move. It felt more like a reminder—that this man may have taken a bullet tonight, but he was still battle-ready. “I’ve worked with both Tobias and Casey as Wendell Martin, and I’m certain even Adam would recognize the name if it popped up on his computer screen.”

Her thumb toyed with her gun’s safety. “Not sure I like how familiar you are with my family.” Yes, the Faradays were famous the world over, with roughly two hundred and fifty years of recorded history in the business of war and violence. But the one thousand individuals who comprised Faraday Industries in its current incarnation were kept conspicuously anonymous—thanks in no small part to her brother Adam’s wizardry with information security. “We’ve only collaborated with MI6 once in the past decade, and that was in—”

“Colombia, four years ago.” When she arched a brow, he shrugged carefully. “Yes, I was there.”

“So was I.” And she didn’t recognize him. It would be hard to miss those piercing icy-blue irises, the sturdy breadth of his shoulders. This man took up space and dared you to call him on it.

He nodded. “I know.”

Her thumb hovered over the safety. “Did we...did we meet?” Four years ago, Casey had recruited her and Gavin, to aid in a joint-venture rescue mission in the wooded region outside of Medellín. Two CIA operatives and a British intelligence officer had been taken hostage by a high-ranking leader in Colombia’s
Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia
organization...but instead of ransoming the hostages, the FARC leader, Felipe Marin Donado—better known as “Pipe” among international counterterrorism forces—had decided to indulge in some creative message-sending.

As in, he’d started overnighting bits and pieces of the hostages to their respective governments.

It had been a power play, with no demands made by FARC, no ultimatums, and that, ultimately, had been what had scared the CIA and MI6 into hiring an extraction team. Faraday was the obvious choice, Casey the most decisive team leader they could have asked for, and in the end, the three hostages were returned home alive.

Alive, but not necessarily well. Beth and Gavin had embraced their role as snipers, and when Pipe had come storming into Beth’s sightline, it had taken all of her willpower and every last tattered scrap of her morality not to do the world a service and end that monster. But there was a line she had long ago learned not to cross, the line that said she wasn’t the decider when it came to who lived and who died. Beth only killed on order, and Casey had very clearly stated that Pipe was not to be killed. Not that day, anyway.

Aside from Casey, Gavin, Beth and four other trusted Faraday employees, the CIA and MI6 had both furnished the extraction team with two agents apiece. Beth thought back to the two British agents. One had been a short, athletic blonde not much older than herself but with a deadly gleam in her sharp gaze, the other a nondescript man of medium height, probably in his late thirties or early forties.

Neither had been the man sitting at her table. “I remember the agents with us on that mission. I don’t remember you.”

Something in the way he watched her caused her face to heat. “No, you likely don’t.” Again, his hands flexed in front of him, long fingers stretching, reaching, yet not moving toward her at all. “I was the hostage.”

A heavy beat of silence passed as she stared at him, a tingle starting at the top of her spine and slowly creeping its way down. “You were the hostage,” she repeated, uncaring how stupid she sounded, parroting his brusque words. She scanned his face, his chest. No visible signs of permanent trauma. “But...but parts of the hostages were missing.
Parts.
”

His smile was as quick as it was surprising. “For me, it was a toe, a few molars. I was collateral damage, for the most part. Pipe was far more interested in making a statement to the Americans than he was to my government, so I was mostly ignored.” He shifted in the chair, and she saw a wince cross his starkly handsome features. “Technically, you and I never spoke down there.”

Technically, no, they hadn’t conversed. But she remembered the tall, too-thin man Casey had pulled out of that hut in the forest, beaten to a pulp, eyes swollen, lips broken and bleeding. No way she would recognize the man in front of her as the rescued MI6 agent from the mission in Colombia. But he wasn’t completely correct. “I talked to you on the plane.” He’d been unconscious, his battered body covered in a utility blanket as he rested on a cot in the hold of the transport jet, hooked up to a saline drip. “Your people had left you alone to check in with their boss, and I thought you looked...” Abandoned. Forgotten. Neglected.

Would he have ever escaped that sweltering hell if Pipe hadn’t also taken two Americans? Something in her chest had tightened at him lying there alone, no one caring for him or fussing over him, not like was being done with the two rescued CIA agents. Beth had knelt next to his cot, checked his drip and adjusted his blanket higher over his lacerated chest. And then she’d told him that it would be all right, that he was safe now. That the nightmare was over.

“I heard you. I just couldn’t respond.” He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again, his voice was a soft rumble against her senses. “Thank you for caring for me.”

Swallowing past the heavy knot in her throat, Beth nodded and, in a show of faith, carefully set the Beretta in front of her. This must be what had drawn her over the past months—the knowledge, however faint, of her senses recognizing his. She mirrored his pose, hands flat on the tabletop. “So that’s when you met Casey.”

“Owing someone your life is one means of forging a friendship,” he quipped, tone bland. “We got together for drinks a few months later, when he was in London. I got the feeling he wanted to make certain I was still in one piece.”

Beth felt her lips quirk in a fond smile. “Casey’s a bit of a mother hen. He saved you, so now you’re one of his chicks.”

“There is nothing about that analogy which appeals to me.”

She couldn’t help the unladylike snort-giggle that escaped her at his grumpy scowl, but she quickly sobered. “You said my brothers ‘know you’ as Wendell Martin. Except that’s not your real name.”

“I haven’t told a civilian my real name in fifteen years.”

“But you’re going to tell me.”

“I think I will, yes.” His gaze assessed her, a healthy pink flushing his neck, the tips of his ears. “Vick. Raleigh Vick.”

Bond.
James Bond.
“So I should call you...?”

“Vick, please.”

“Then Vick it is.” Why was her chest clenching tight, her breathing suddenly ragged? There had been an echo in his voice when he told her his name, a layer of something familiar couched within the foreign shape of his syllables, and it plucked painfully at the threads holding together her damaged heart. Recognition tickled the back of her brain. “I know you,” she whispered, uncertain. “I know you, but...but I don’t see someone I know in your face.”