Fearless: Complicated Creatures Part Three (5 page)

The phone vibrated suddenly and Rox held her breath. She wasn’t anticipating a call. There was no way she’d be able to fake Michael’s voice. But if she didn’t answer, that would be just as bad. She could try to run the trace again, but she needed to keep him on the line somehow to do it.

Rox released a breath and hit “accept.”

“Where are you?” came Lightner’s impatient rasp. “I don’t see you.”

Rox said nothing, counting the seconds out in her mind.

“Where are you?” Lightner repeated, his question clipped and irritated.

She cleared her throat, a gruff sound, then she rubbed the phone against her jacket, making a rustling sound.

“Michael?”

Another tense three seconds and Lightner hung up. The jig was up.

Rox peered out from her hiding place, wondering where Lightner was in the dark. It could just be fanciful thinking, but she could have sworn he was close. She glanced behind her, wondering if she was sensing him or having a premonition.

She had his money and his passports. He was injured. He couldn’t get far.

The phone vibrated again in her hand.

Rox didn’t wait this time. She answered immediately.

“Where is my son?”

“The hospital, I imagine,” Rox drawled, leaning against the container as her eyes tracked across the shipyard, looking for a sign.

“Roxanne de Soto,” Lightner murmured. “You’re a persistent one, I’ll give you that.”

“What can I say? I have a weakness for unavailable men.”

“You’ve got that right.” He paused. “What did you do to Michael?”

“I’d be more worried about what I intend to do to you, Lightner,” Rox answered. “I’ve decided to make my life’s mission nailing your ass to the wall. And I’m not the kind of woman you like to piss off. I’ve got a mean temper,
güero
. And I’m a little crazy—ask your boy the next time you see him. He wears my scars,” she taunted.

“I’ll pay you double whatever Samantha Wyatt is paying you to hunt me.”

Rox laughed at that. “How, man? I’ve got your money. I’ve drained you drier than your soon-to-be ex-wife. Jack Roman has taken over your business, and you can’t touch your assets with MI-5 on your ass, so really—you’re in no position to negotiate, are you?”

“You really think I’d put all my eggs in one basket?” Lightner taunted.

“I think you’re somewhere nearby and you’re desperate enough to risk me finding you in order to get ahold of your party favors,” Rox replied. “Come out and play, Lightner. Who knows? I might even do you in fast.”

A deep, resonate wail pierced the night air as one of the freightliner’s cables were detached from the crane as it finished loading the last of the containers onto the hull. The ship’s massive engines rumbled, churning the black waters surrounding it as it slowly disengaged from the dock. She’d heard the sound echo through the phone. Lightner was close. Hell, he might actually be on the departing ship.

“Last call, Lightner,” she called out over the noise.

“Keep the money, Roxanne. I’ll find you and come back for it.” And with that, Lightner hung up, leaving her standing in the dark by the dock. A million bucks in her hands when all she wanted was his head.

“Fuck,” she muttered, frustrated. She’d bet all the money in the duffel that he was on one of these ships, but she wouldn’t be able the check all of them. So goddamn close—but so far away. It was beyond frustrating.

She tossed Michael’s phone into the duffel and grabbed her own, dialing quickly. She heard the pulse of the foreign dial tone ring a handful of times before her brother picked up the call.

“Alejo, you better tell me you’re in Germany. I’ve had a fucking shitty day, and I need to know you’ve got Sammy’s back.”

“I took leave as soon as you called,” he assured her. “I’m on a plane now. I’ll be there by morning, though I don’t think Wyatt wants to see me.”

“Wyatt has to agree to this,” Alejandro reminded her. “She might say no.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” her brother told her.

“Just call me after you get there,” Rox replied. “If Sam’s up for it, I need to talk to her—bring her up to speed with what’s going on.”

“You got it.”

She hung up, looking around the darkened terminal again. She’d have to get ahold of all the manifests for the ships scheduled to leave the port tonight and early tomorrow morning. Not easy, but not impossible either, especially now that she had a duffle full of money to grease palms with. Rox may have lost him for now, but she was going to use all of Lightner’s
guap
to find him again, and that was fucking money well spent.

*

December—Early Morning

Asklepios Klinik Barmbek, Hamburg, Germany

S A M A N T H A

She was dreaming.
A feverish, hazy, morphine, and trauma-induced slide show flickered behind closed eyes. Samantha saw her little brother, laughing, running through the fields at the ranch. Then that image dissipated, transforming into Ibrahim Nazar’s leer as he drove the knife deeper into her back. She tried to scream, but couldn’t.

Trapped.

Darkness.

She was lying underneath the paper cranes dangling from her penthouse ceiling.

Suffering—
guilt, shame, loss—

In her mind’s eye, she saw her father drunk at his desk, a picture of her dead mother in his hand.

Your mother’s dead, Sammy. She ain’t coming back—

More darkness.

She recalled the warmth of Aunt Hannah’s embrace on the porch, smelled the soft rose scent of the talcum powder she used. Such comfort. Such love. But it didn’t last—
nothing
lasted.

She was standing on the tarmac in Rio, watching Carey take two slugs to the chest from one of Lightner’s men. She was screaming
, screaming
…

No.

Samantha struggled, trying to wake.

She dreamed of Jack, the way he looked at her the first time he told her he loved her, his silver eyes clear and incandescent. But his smile morphed into Wes’s grin, bright as the sun. He slid his hands around her waist, picking her up and swinging her around.

Wake up.

She was somewhere dark and heavy, her mind a prison. She tried to open her eyes, tried to wake up, but now she was staring into the empty, black eyes of the first insurgent she ever killed, mouth filled with blood, body riddled with bullets. Her bullets.

A sob caught in her throat.

No.

She had to wake up—she
wanted
to wake up—

“Sammy girl—I’m here—you’re going to be okay—I’m here—”

She groaned a low feeble sound, forcing herself up through layer after layer of consciousness, like rising up through murky water until she was just at the surface, her breathing thick and labored, her eyes so heavy that she wasn’t sure she could open them.

She felt someone squeeze her hand, and she tried to squeeze back, but the pain was too much, gathering, circling and tightening as it became more concentrated and powerful. As she came to—that pain refracted into a brilliant spectrum of white-hot agony, vivid and breathtaking.

“Ms. Wyatt is responding positively to all the stimulus tests,” she heard someone say in a brisk German accent, the silence punctuated by beeps and the whooshing sound of machines. “She will need intensive physiotherapy to repair the damage to her spine, but she’s responding to the stimulus tests.”

“Will she be able to walk again?” she heard Carey ask, his voice low and anxious.

“I believe so, yes; but she’ll need time. We’ll continue to keep her here in critical care, but if she continues to demonstrate consistent improvement, she should be ready to be transferred to private inpatient care within twenty-four hours.”

“Oh, thank Christ,” Carey responded with a relieved sigh. “Is she—” he took a pause. “Is she in a great deal of pain?”

“She’ll be in some pain, yes,” the doctor confirmed. “But we’ll manage that as she wakes up. We’ve reduced the amount of opiates to her system, because we wanted to measure her responses.”

“I don’t want her hurting, Doc.”

“I understand. I’ll make sure the nurse administers more morphine. She’ll hook Ms. Wyatt to a pain management IV, so that she can control the dosage as she needs it.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

Overwhelmed by her hurt and exhaustion, Sam drifted again, dozing off until she felt a gentle movement at her side. A nurse stood over her, adjusting an IV bag. She felt the bend of the mattress as a strong, sturdy arm slipping under her shoulders to lift her up gently. Sam opened her eyes slowly, registering Carey’s exhausted, worried expression as he cradled her, holding a plastic hospital cup to her mouth, nudging her lips with the straw.

“Drink, Sammy. You’ll feel better.”

Unlikely
, she wanted to say, but she didn’t or couldn’t.

The water tasted crisp, cool and delicious in the cottony desiccation of her mouth, and she gulped down fast, taking her fill as if she’d been dying of thirst in the Mojave Desert.

“Whoa, there, nelly—don’t choke on it, honey. It ain’t beer,” Carey teased, pulling the straw away before dabbing at the water trickling down her chin as she gazed up at him.

Over the two tours of duty she’d served, Sam had woken up from being shot, stabbed, strangled, and bombed. But the rippling, all-consuming pain she felt now had to be the very worst of it. Each hard-fought breath, each punishing wave of agony, brought her closer to comprehension, the memory of what she’d survived returning to her in splintered fragments, like the detritus from a shipwreck.

Sam blinked against the diffused light filtering into the room, her gritty eyes slowly adjusting to the luminescence. Carey as he hovered over her, his face haggard with worry, a couple days’ worth of bristle on his strong jaw. He lifted her hand, squeezing it in his warm clasp as he brushed her hair back.

“
Wh
—” her throat worked. “What happened?” she rasped.

He rubbed her cheek with the rough pad of his thumb. “You kicked the bucket a couple times, baby girl. Scared the absolute shit out of me and the boys,” he murmured. “Nearly lost you there, Sammy.”

“Where—” she swallowed again. “Where am I?”

“Hamburg,” he murmured, watching her closely, blue eyes lit with worry. “How do you feel?”

She tried to give him a reassuring smile, but the result was more a glancing wince. “Like a bug pinned to your 6
^th
-grade science project,” she croaked.

Carey chuckled softly, reaching over and pressing the button the nurse had put in her hand. An immediate languid haze doused the pain from a painful throb to a low hum.
Better. So much better.
Sam relaxed against the pillows, enjoying the hypnagogic effects of whatever was coursing through her system, like floating on a smooth and easy river.

“You remember anything?” Carey asked her after a moment.

“Afghanistan,” she answered drowsily.

“Yeah.” Carey sat back, pushing a hand through his blonde hair as he expelled a breath. “You killed Ibrahim Nazar, Sammy. Took out his team and that heroin-processing facility he had going. But not before he sawed his knife through your back,” he told her. “Rush carried you out of the compound before the SEALs blew Nazar’s compound all to hell. They took you out in a Dustoff chopper, but you almost didn’t make it—” His voice broke, belying his worry as he stroked her cheek.

“How did I end up here?” she asked, fighting drowsiness.

“The medics at Shindand did what they could, but the damage—it was too much, Sammy.” Carey’s eyes blazed with pent up emotion, his concern for her plain as day as he held her hand. “The guys flew you to Germany to have the surgery.” He kissed her hand. “Swear to God, during the entire flight here from Texas, all I could think of was how I’d tell my mama you weren’t ever coming home—”

“It’s alright, Bear.” Samantha squeezed his hand feebly, watching him work through the worst of his fears as he gripped her hand. She must have been at death’s door for him to look like that, her sweet and stalwart Bear. Always faithful. Completely loyal. “I’m here, Carey. I’m okay—”

He nodded, lifting her hand to his mouth. He pressed a kiss to the back of her hand, his eyes closing. “If I lost you…”

“Not going anywhere,” she mumbled, closing her eyes. “Who’d boss you around if I kicked the bucket?”

“You’re too damn mean to die. You remember that,” he told her, his smile endearing.

The pain continued to diminish, and with it, her ability to stay sentient. Sam felt the suck and ebb of the sedative, like being drawn out with the tide. She didn’t think she’d be able to stay awake much longer.

“Where are the guys—are they okay?” she asked sleepily, her eyelids falling.