Hot for His Hostage (26 page)

Zoe continued with a perplexed frown, along with Ry and Brynn—but Ellie’s eyes suddenly
ignited. “Oh, snap on the downbeat! Yeah, it makes sense now.”

“It does?” Brynn muttered.

“Damn.” Ellie pointed a congratulatory finger at Colton. “That’s brilliant, spook
man.”

Ry’s brows pushed together. “Hello, United Nations? Anyone there have an interpreter
for ‘El Browning Speak’?”

Ellie rolled her eyes. “Sheez, you guys. ‘Eleven from thirteen’. That refers to
Ocean’s Eleven
and its sequel,
Ocean’s Thirteen
. There was only one place used for filming in both the movies—the Bellagio. But he
also said ‘subtract,’ which told Shay to do the actual math. Eleven from thirteen
is two. Going south from the Bellagio by two, you end up here, at the Vdara. As far
as doubling his age?” She spread her hands. “Since we’re on the fifty-fourth floor,
I’m guessing Shay is twenty-seven.”

A long silence stretched.

Ryder slowly cocked his head at El. “You officially scare me.”

El gave a delicate snort. “I have piercings in my ears, sweet thing, not my brain.”

“You still scare me.”

Zoe, succumbing again to nervous energy, paced back toward the suite’s entrance foyer
of the suite. “I’m still scared, period.”

No. She was past scared and now at terrified. What if Shay and Ghid didn’t get here?
But what was she in for if they did? Everything still felt in limbo. She still kept
expecting to wake up from the dream—

Until reality bashed its way in.

There was a key swipe at the suite’s door. Zoe froze, her stomach lurching into her
throat. She rushed further up the entry but was hauled back by Oz, his dark eyes issuing
a silent dictate for her retreat. Colton, with pistol now drawn, yanked her even farther
back. He pushed her against Brynn, who grabbed the agent’s elbow before he pivoted
to join Oz. Brynn mouthed two words at him.
Be careful.

That was certainly the slogan of the damn night.

Wrong.

As soon as the door opened and Ghid staggered in, supporting a man who vaguely resembled
Shay beneath his cuts, bruises, and wounds, the night was stamped by a brand new refrain.
It was ripped from Zoe’s throat on a scream that began deep in her soul.

“
Ay Dios mio,
no!”

“
Zoe
.” Shay hated having to bellow it but the woman was practically tripping over herself
with panic and worry. It made his head pound—worse than it already did—to think of
the woman keeping her shit together through the hijacking and the mortar drop at the
base, only to tizzy herself straight out one of these windows. “For the twelfth time,
I don’t need a doctor.”

He finished the order by pulling her down on the couch next to him despite the rocket
of pain it sent up his arm.
There. Better
. Fuck, it felt good to have his
mariposa
against him once more. A haven of softness, smelling like cocoa, cream, and roses…

He tucked her tighter, regretting that in comparison, he probably stank like a hobo.
Ghid had brought him a fresh T-shirt, work boots, some underwear, and jeans, which
he’d changed into when they stopped at a gas station to redress his wounds, but a
cowboy shower in a roadside john wasn’t nearly what he needed to scrub away the stench
from the last four days.

He’d let her go in a few minutes. For now, he needed the assurance she was real, the
verification that he was truly free of the ugly cocoon of the last four days.

Ghid, who crouched next to him, grunted approval of his move. Not a surprise. Ghid
had his own version of a Zoe. Her name was Melody Bommer. Anyone with half a brain
cell in their head would figure it out after spending thirty minutes with the man;
Shay had now logged in a little shy of three hours with him. While the idea of the
guy shacking up with his mom had been jarring to accept at first, Ghid had gradually
won him over. The guy adored Mom so much, he’d snuck
back in
to A-51 just to bust Shay’s ass out. The lunatic had used the pretext of being some
chemical waste disposal dude, curling Shay up in one of his steel drums.

In doing so, the man had saved his life. There wasn’t a goddamn doubt in Shay’s mind
about it. If the “experiments” hadn’t eventually killed him, then the despair would
have.

Zoe snuggled a little closer, earning a soft kiss atop her head from him and a slightly
bigger smirk from Ghid. The man had already examined “the nicks,” as he called them,
from the side Zoe was pressed against, anyway—though when Ghid first used the term,
he’d glanced at Shay to communicate how he comprehended the word’s irony. “Nicks”
could be relative, couldn’t they? Shay had been bumped, bruised, and cut up a hundred
different ways just jumping out of a plane to a mission target. The sight of his own
blood was nothing new. But there was something different about the experience when
watching a “scientist” with high-level government security clearance slice a strip
out of his chest, then slide it under a microscope slide and make notes about it…

He washed away the horror by gratefully grabbing the beer offered by a lanky dude
wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the expression
PUH-LEEEZ
. The blond seemed weirdly familiar, though Shay was certain he’d never seen him before.

Christ. What
was
he “certain” of anymore? The reunion with Mom had been two hundred kinds of weird.
And the little chit-chat with Tait after his brother brought him down?
Fucking disaster
was a better term. Bash, Wyst, and couple of the other guys had been caught along
with him, meaning he couldn’t simply blurt the whole truth to T without compromising
the entire operation he had in place—and Dan Colton along with it. By the time Tait
relented and dragged him into a room for a one-on-one, Cameron hailed him on the radio
with disgusting timing. That had deep-sixed any scrap of trust Tait might’ve thought
about throwing his way. Tait had hurled the handset against the wall then marched
him back out to the hall, happily handing him over to the scientists with the clearance
badges.

By then, the bad that had become worse took a nose dive into hell.

So no, he wasn’t sure of a goddamn thing anymore—except the woman still pressed so
perfectly against him.

“Hey, hey, heyyyy, Mr. Shay.” The blond with the weird shirt tried crossing hipster
with talk show host. Neither worked, which the guy validated by muttering, “Shit.
I can be lame when I’m nervous.”

By then, the connection clicked to the voice. “Ryder.” He smiled and meant it. “It’s
good to meet you.” Hell. It was good to be alive, period.

Ghid leaned back, nodding his head with what looked like satisfaction despite eyes
that glittered with strange green glints. “I have good and bad news, kid. You’re going
to live.”

Zoe tensed a little. “So what’s the bad news?”

“That’s the bad news, too.”

Shay really wanted someone to laugh, to confirm he wasn’t as batshit as he felt, since
he couldn’t. Laughing at the nightmare felt too much like tempting it to return. Zoe
seemed fond of her perplexed frown, and Ryder was a loyal friend in backing her up.

Ghid to the rescue again.

“Hell’s fucking bells.” The man pinched the bridge of his nose but there was a chuckle
in his tone. “Mel warned me about the smart-ass streaks in you and your brother.”

Okay, better again. He could smirk and feel safe about it. “Well, half the show is
better than nothing, right?” He let his stare drift out the windows, taking in the
glittering city lights. “Probably a damn good thing, too. If that goat testicle who
calls himself my brother were here right now, I’d be wanting to—”

“Tear open all the stitches that the spooks’ finest sewed into you?” Ghid parried.
“Is that it?”

“Thanks.” He spat it while swigging the beer. The bubbles felt good at the back of
his throat, biting at the places still raw from his screams. He forced himself to
focus on how good every drop tasted, anything except the craving to tear out the thick
black threads holding at least eight gouges in his body together.

“That’s what I’m here for,” Ghid drawled. “Anytime you need a warm fuzzy, kid.”

Shit. The man had sarcasm down to an art. Shay tossed back an equally dry glare and
muttered, “Sure. Warm. Fuzzy. Got it.”

Only the images bombarding his mind were the polar opposite—literally. Like the morning
he woke up from a drugged sleep in a sub-zero freezer, stark naked, and was timed
on how long his body held out until he went severely hypothermic…

Fortunately, rage wasn’t so debilitating. “Cheers, mate,” he snarled, downing the
last of the beer then heaving the bottle at the wall.

“
Mierda
!”

Zoe’s exclamation was a stab of light in his darkness, jerking him back to sanity.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, but when she pressed a hand over his chest, he pushed away,
jabbing hands into his hair. Of course, his fingers landed on the long set of stitches
there, too. What had those fuckers said? Something about the importance of gathering
a “complete sample”? Oh,
that
was what they called it. Felt like a four-inch scalping to him.

It’s over, man. All over. Open your eyes. Focus on what matters.

He forced his gaze open, lifting it to Ghid, who’d moved to the ottoman in front of
the couch. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

If Ghid had a reaction, and that was a big
if
, it was replaced by another voice, from behind Shay.

“I’m sorry, too.”

Colton.

Shay didn’t want to stiffen but did. His head reconfirmed all the pertinent shit—that
they wouldn’t be safe at the top of this glass tower if not for the guy and that Colton
had kept his mission a very secure secret for six months—but then there were the facts
his gut wouldn’t let go. 

Spec Ops had given him over to the scientists without a second blink, which meant
somebody way higher than them had approved the plans for him. Probably
much
higher. But that also meant that at some point, that his file had to be run through
the system. Which meant that the CIA had to have a chance for throwing a flag on the
play—

A flag that had never come.

Leading to his four days in lab rat hell.

Who the hell had the pull to yank him that far off the grid? And why?

Then there was the shittiest question of them all—the one that demanded to be voiced
aloud, despite how it gouged at his lips with more painful incisions than anything
the science monsters had done to him.

“Where’d you go?”

He watched all three words drive into Dan like daggers, yet felt no satisfaction about
it. The emptiness of that was the worst of all. Their stares twisted into each other.
The months of their partnership, their
friendship
, had tied them like forest vines through the last six months, seeded by a mission
but grown through humor, honesty, and trust. Seeing the agony on his friend’s face
confirmed the disgusting truth: the shit that had gone down in A-51 was as much a
shock to Dan as anyone. Maybe more.  

“Christ, Shay.” His voice was ragged. “Where’d
you
go?”

He grimaced while eagerly accepting another beer from Ryder. “That isn’t a peachy
answer for me to give right now.”

“I’ve barely slept the last four days.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Three.” Zoe’s murmur, thick with emotion, tore at him in bad ways…and good. He was
surely going to a deeper part of hell for being a little touched that she’d lost sleep
over him.

“They pulled everything from the system.” Dan’s assertion tugged Shay’s head back
up. His friend waited for him with a nod of emphasis. “Yeah, man. I mean everything.”

“Don’t stop there, ball sack.” The opportunity to use his favorite pet name for the
guy couldn’t be better timed. Not if the gravity of what Dan inferred was true.

“As soon as I heard the big brass had sent in that SHRC team to bust things up at
the base, I knew it was time to step in and make sure CENTCOMM knew about your cover,
so that you weren’t pegged as a hostile in the mess. But when I went to pull up the
file on our op, it was gone.”

“Gone?” Fuck. The line sounded like an outtake from every lame confrontation scene
from every bad action movie made. But unlike fiction, this worse-than-the-worst possibility
couldn’t be fixed by blowing something up in the next forty-five minutes. “Gone…how?””

“Is there more than one way to do ‘gone?’” Dan returned. “They took it out, Shay.
It’s not in system backups or archives, either. Somebody deliberately extracted every
word, note, field intel, and status report we filed on your mom, her connection to
Stock, and our progress on the mission.”

Dan finished by lowering to the other ottoman. Shay didn’t blame him for wanting to
sit. He was surprised the guy didn’t use the floor itself as a landing strip. As the
shock set in deeper, the idea of splaying there himself gained appeal. “What about
the guys higher than you in the food chain? Did you take this bullshit to them?”

“None of them are returning my calls, texts, or emails. And as of three days ago,
when I went to the office to take my personal backup to them, my key card didn’t even
work for their floors in the elevator.”

Shay braced his elbows on his knees and dropped his head. He gazed down the neck of
the beer bottle dangling from his fingers. It was damn murky in there. He couldn’t
see to the bottom. Pretty ideal fit for this new piece of grand fuckery, its web apparently
stuck to the CIA’s upper ranks, too. “So the last six months of my life are gone.”

Dan exhaled with careful slowness. The sound was painfully familiar to Shay. It was
the sound Colton saved for moments he had crappy news to deal and was determined to
respect their relationship by dealing it straight. “The last piece of available information
I can see is your transfer request off the Seventh SFG, and onto the CIA Spec Ops
detail with me.”

“Six months ago,” Shay said.

“Six months ago,” his friend confirmed.

“And after that, I disappeared.”

Once more, he had a crap load of information. And absolutely nothing at the same time.

“So what does it all mean?” The query came from Zoe’s friend Brynn, who settled next
to Dan. She was more sober than the first time Shay had met her, and less terrified
than the second. And looking a little attached to Dan now, too. That was good. The
guy looked like he might need it.

Ghid pushed into the silence by unfurling off his seat with fluid grace, again reminding
Shay of a prowling komodo. “This feels like a damn good place to step in,” the man
stated.

“What the fuck?” Dan challenged. He chilled once Shay extended both hands, backing
him off
.
Ghid had earned the respect, at least for a few minutes. The moves he’d pulled when
helping Shay escape from the science monsters were just short of poetry, special ops
style. Shay had no idea if that was where the guy had learned his swagger, and at
this point, didn’t care. He was free. If that was accomplished by training from fucking
Sesame Street, then all hail to Big Bird for the moves.

“Go ahead, Ghid,’ he assured. “It’s okay.”

Ghid’s nod was far from effusive, though the appreciation was apparent. “Glad to hear
you feel that way, kid.” He dropped his head again, this time toward Oz. “Okay, big
O, bring him in.”

So much for camping out on the chill button. Shay couldn’t put his finger on what
made him hop right back into trepidation mode—perhaps the furtive speed of Ghid’s
glances or the urgency in Oz’s steps toward the foyer—but he knew the instinct to
slam his guard back up when he felt it. That proclivity was rarely wrong.