Virtues (Base Branch Series Book 8) (10 page)

E
ach sob fractured
Tyler’s heart. For all the fucking analytical skills in the world, he’d never understand women. Especially not one as complex as Cara was. He wanted to, though. He sat with his back to hers. A door between them. A door and something else that had nothing to do with his tenderhearted tendency toward taking lives.

When he’d confessed what he’d only ever whispered to himself, her vibrant blue eyes had locked on him with something far from repugnance. He didn’t know what the look meant, but nothing could top the way it wrapped around him like a full body embrace.

The shift in her had come after he’d made the comment about safety. Immediately, she’d quieted, and then when made to talk about the subject, she had shifted away from her to him, or the move, or Rin, or Luck, or anything except what truly ate at her. He should have forced her to face him, it, whatever she needed to battle before she could be free. Had he, there wouldn’t be an ever-widening gap between them.

But really, before he could expect her to face her demons, shouldn’t he face his?

“Growing up on a farm, I learned to nurture life. I bottle fed calves whose mothers died in labor. I spent nights in the barn with sick baby goats. Sure, some of them didn’t make it, and then later, I realized what my family did with the cows after they came of age. I also learned animal CPR and worked on everything from horses to cats. When I was in junior high, I worked illegally in our family veterinarian’s clinic, knowing that’s what I’d do with my life. Then the perfect storm hit.”

He didn’t know if she could hear it all or if she’d even care. It didn’t matter. “Half our herd came down with Bluetongue. We spent a fortune properly quarantining, making enclosures, subdividing fields, and creating boundaries. And then there was the cost of spraying to eradicate the ugly little bug infecting them. Next, Oprah announced to the world she’d never again eat beef because of the outlandish practices of some factory farms and the cattle market took its biggest hit since the Great Depression. Then the fucking test came along.”

Her sobs had stopped.

“Suddenly, my parents were up to their eyeballs in debt, and I had the option to have my education paid for and a job that assured my future. I never realized how much I resented everything about how it went down. I hate killing, but maybe I hate that it wasn’t my choice more.”

Tyler scrubbed a hand down his face and took a deep breath. “Huh.” His head bobbed. A bit of the weight lifted from his chest. “I know what I have to do, Cara. What do you need to do?” When he stood, rocks and dirt scraped under his boots. He looked at the door for a long minute, hoping it would open but knowing it wouldn’t.

“Figure it out, darlin’. See you in the morning.”

“
S
eems
we need to do a better job of disorienting people when they have on those black bags.” Vail Tucker exited a bleak conference room, all hard, cold surfaces, and strode down the hallway toward her. A striking woman in kickass leather pants, vivid red lips, and a fuck-off scowl departed behind him. Her aggressive pace overtook the Base Branch director in three long strides.

Cara’s heart rate kicked. Her breathing evened, and her muscles loosened, ready for anything.

“Bloody time you came to your senses, Lee. Welcome aboard.” The woman’s barbed British accent took its prick of flesh and blood, while she maintained the stormy stride past Cara down the hall and around the corner.

“Don’t mind Khani. She’s looking for her brother, after just finding him and losing him again.” Tucker skirted the corner and headed toward his office. The flick of his head stood as her formal invite.

“I imagine she’ll find him before long. She’s determined.”

“Among other things,” he agreed.

“I also imagine I’m not the first to find their way back after the black bag roundabouts.” Cara followed Tucker into his office and closed the door behind her.

“The good ones, the ones we want, always find their way back.” He placed a stack of files on his desk. She read each label in a quick glance. US Elite. Anosov Sadovsky. Classified. What an interesting combination, especially the one without a label that was stamped classified. Tucker lowered his head, catching her curious gaze in the act. “Can I get you anything. Coffee? Water? A pillow? It’s moved past late to pretty damn early.”

“And you’re still here.” She looked around the sparsely decorated space.

“I am. And I’ll catch hell about it from my girls, but cooking them a big breakfast should save my hide.”

“Do you usually stay ‘round the clock?”

Tucker folded his arms and propped a hip on his desk. “I’m not going to lie. There have been weeks when I haven’t seen the light of day. Most of them were because I didn’t care to. Now, it’s easier to leave. I have something to go home to.”

“How long am I going to have a babysitter?” Cara braced her legs apart and folded her own arms. “Until I accept the job? What if I decline?”

“Khani is heading back to London, and we need someone incorruptible with field experience, undercover prowess, and socio-political understanding.” A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

Basically, yes. She was stuck with Tyler until she agreed or fled. Not much of a choice now was it.

“The last time I was here, you told me to live my life.” Cara swallowed the emotion creeping into her voice. “I don't know what that is anymore.” Anger shored up the edges.

His arms uncoiled and folded at his waist.

“I’m still figuring it out. Nearly fifteen years ago, my wife and unborn child died as a result of the work I did.”

“So I’m S.O.L.?”

“No.” His salt and pepper head shook. “It takes time…signing a truce with your past and looking at the future.” He stopped for a minute and then swallowed. “The truce is a real bitch.”

“Pull Grace off me. I’ll work for you. I just need some time to handle something before I start, and I need distance from this organization to do it.”

“Fair enough.” Tucker stood and offered his hand. “Just know, if you need anything, we protect our own and are at your disposal.”

“Thank you.” She took it, not at all surprised by the strength behind the gray hair, proper suit, and blue tie.

Cara’s phone vibrated in her pocket. Nausea gagged her with every vibration. The only person who would call her at this hour wouldn’t call because she’d hurt him deeply. Two other people had her number. If they were calling in the middle of the night, the news couldn’t be good. She whipped the phone from her jeans and checked the screen. A blocked number. For a split second, she thought about not answering, but this was no telemarketer. This call was deliberate.

“Until our upgrade, our phones didn’t work behind these thick walls. The new system allows us to funnel the calls, detect any tracking software, and reroute it.”

“Fancy.” Cara said the word but didn’t hear anything except the insistent vibrating. She initiated the call and placed it on her ear. “Hello?”

“I’m sending you an email. You’ll especially enjoy the attachment,” an enhanced voice said over the line. “I’ve been waiting for you, Cara. Don’t make me wait any longer.”

Someone found her. When you live in the open and have as many enemies as she’d gained over the years, what else could you expect?

The room chilled twenty degrees, freezing her to the marrow.

Please God, don’t let them have found Rin
.

If only the cold brought with it an anesthetic. It didn’t. Every breath scalded her lungs. The simple act of depressing the screen to disconnect the call hurled a surge of caustic terror through her body. Nerves clattered together, creating chaos out of calamity.

She swallowed fetid saliva. The haunting email sat boldly unopened at the top of her inbox. Something so innocuous held such power over her. She reviled the feeling so much that it lent her strength enough to press the subject,
My Shame
.

Inside, the body blinded with its static white. The two attachments lanced her heart.

T
he file attachments
next to one another at the bottom of the email showed no thumbnail image. Each had its own label.

Tyler. Marina.

Cara clicked on the first. A small window appeared with an opaque play button. Behind it, Tyler hung in the dark barn. His hands coiled with a rope stretched above his head. A floodlight illuminated his taut expression, the rage in his gaze, his naked body, and the blood coating his skin.

The impact knocked her back, forcing her to plant both feet on the ground and face the devastating reality.

She loved Tyler. And she might never get the chance to love him.

“Everything okay?” Tucker stepped forward.

The action kicked Cara out of her petrified stupor. Her gaze tore away from the grim scene, and it met Tucker’s knowing eyes.

Was Marina a victim in all this or the orchestrator? She didn’t know. The two possibilities spelled out two very different ends for the girl.

“I have to go make peace with my past…or kill it.” She headed for the door. “Call me in ten minutes. I’ll know more then. I’m borrowing a car. A fast one. You can have one of your guys bring me the keys, or I’m wiring the thing. Oh, and drop that security wall. I don’t have time to screw with it.”

“Cara.” His voice wasn’t loud, but it demanded her attention.

She didn’t want to give it. It took time, and she had to hotwire a car and drive a distance that a few weeks ago had taken her and Tyler more than an hour. Her hand landed hard on the knob and jerked the door open, but she spared Tucker a glance.

“I have a chopper headed to base with two agents. If you’ll wait, it’s yours.”

“How far out?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Does it have to refuel?”

“Yes.”

She calculated the numbers. If she pushed, she could get there faster. The drive might kill her, but it would be hard and fast. Sitting around would turn life into a torturous series of milliseconds.

“No go,” Cara decided.

“Then take this.” A key fob sailed through the air in her direction. On instinct, she snagged it before it hit her.

“Thank you.”

“Thank me by bringing it back in one piece. Take a right out of the bank of elevators. It’s next to the red truck.”

If she needed to drive—what was apparently Tucker’s personal car—through a battlefield to save the people she loved, she wouldn’t hesitate. Instead of making false promises or wasting any more time, Cara sprinted to the staircase. She gripped the rail and leaped. The balls of her feet grazed every third step on her climb up three levels to the parking garage. Reverberations of her labored breaths echoed off the concrete.

The metal door smacked into the wall from the brunt of her exit from the stairwell out onto the lot. Her feet didn’t slow. She depressed the unlock button and ran full tilt toward a sleek black Audi parked next to another monstrous truck. What was it with people in this country and their hulking automobiles?

Her thumb held the phone’s center button until it beeped. “Call Luck.”

“Did you mean call Luck?” the robotic voice asked.

“Yes! Mother fuck.”

“What’s wrong?” Luck answered after one ring.

“Gear up and meet me at the coordinates I’m texting you right now. And don’t bring Rin.” She hung up before he could ask questions. She didn’t know answers yet anyway, but she needed him moving toward the location.

Cara threw open the driver’s door and dove inside.

Once belted in, she put every rumbling horse to the test. The suspension got its workout too. The engine growled, and the tires screeched, but it weaved through traffic like it was in a Nascar race—bumping other cars, boxing them in, and pushing hard toward the finish line. When the wheels hit the highway, her furious grip on the steering wheel loosened enough for her to grab the phone that had skittered onto the floorboard during a particularly stunning maneuver that left a mark on Tucker’s car she’d be paying back a long, long time.

Her hands—so sure moments ago playing chicken with her life—quaked. The slender metal phone shook with each command her fingers gave. Finally, the email opened. Cara diverted her gaze from Tyler’s video and clicked on the second attachment.

It wasn't a video, but a still shot of Marina bathed in a pool of light. The same kind of rope Tyler had used to truss up Nate bound her hands above her head. A length of the rope coiled twice between her parted lips. Tears soaked the girl’s lashes. Mania plagued her eyes.

The sight of Marina in pain twisted Cara’s guts. Betrayed or not, she cared about the young woman.

Cara gripped the phone between her thumb and index finger, hooked her other fingers around the leather wheel, and clicked on Tyler’s attachment. Too soon and, somehow, too many stilted moments later, the screen burst to life.

A car she dashed past—a little too closely—blared its horn. The driver probably gave her the finger, but she didn't see it. Her gaze locked on the image of Tyler’s face, and it ate up the entire display. Lines creased his brow. His full lips stretched thin over blood-coated teeth.But he didn’t make a sound. Not the breaths puffing his cheeks nor the agony pouring from his expression let loose a note.

“He’s so tough, Markus.” The deep voice, so close to the camera, shook the speakers in her phone. Then the camera panned right.

“No,” Cara barked, willing the large man that stepped into the full frame to be anyone but Markus Royan.

The sick son of a bitch didn’t kill people. He destroyed them. He stripped them limb from limb until he bared their soul and then crushed it from existence.

Cara had made the unfortunate acquaintance of Markus and his brother, Tor Royan five years ago in Sweden. They’d been Marina’s pimps and none too happy with Cara for stealing away their best girl. Never mind that one of their customers had left Marina for dead. They’d have preferred it that way. With her death, they’d have owned the rich bastard for the rest of his miserable life and replaced Marina by day’s end.

On Marina’s behalf, she’d forced a bargain on the brothers that had left them pissed but, ultimately, hog-tied…as Tyler would put it. Forget Marina or have their every foreign and domestic bank account drained and donated on their behalf to various battered and underserved women’s groups across the world.

Tor, in particular, had taken the news hard. He was accustomed to being the deviant, dismantling people’s lives with blackmail and manipulation.

As it turned out, he’d gotten the last laugh.

A year to the date of Marina’s final liberation from the Brödraskapet backed brothers, she’d turned on them without warning.

Cara had followed through with her promise, siphoning six million dollars off their accounts. She’d distributed it through world organizations that helped women and kept enough to bankroll her own cause, keeping Rin safe. In essence, she’d had the last laugh. The second knife wound in her back made it hard to breathe, much less find the humor in the situation. Duplicity—first, from her country, and then, from the broken girl she’d looked upon as a daughter—ruined her ability to trust once and for all.

And now, she watched the demon loom frightfully dark over her future. Over Tyler. A man she trusted, despite herself.

The camera panned right, away from the man she loved and away from the agony he silently dueled.

Markus’s six-foot-five, 320-pound form stepped into the shot. The smile on his split lips ripped the beating heart out of Cara’s chest and hoisted it into the air in victory.

“Yeah, real tough.” Markus’s ominous boom reverberated through the video and then through her bones.

“He’s ruining your reputation,” a man in the blurry, black background jeered. Several oohs and laughs followed, turning torment into entertainment. Toss in beer and they’d have a party fit of a pub.

How many of them were there? A lot, considering they’d taken Tyler as a hostage. Though not unscathed by the looks of Markus’s mangled face.

Cara’s molars nearly cracked under the pressure of her impotent rage.

“Fools. You don’t understand a thing.” Markus turned toward the crowd. He bent at the waist, folding his broad belly in two, and hefted the board she’d strained every muscle to heave off the barn’s door latch as if it was a nine iron.

“No.” Cara whispered the futile prayer.

“The more he resists, the sweeter his relent will be.” He waggled the end of the board, a batter readying for his line drive. The cameraman hustled backward, widening the shot and bringing Tyler back into view. “And when I break him, Cara will have no choice but to come.” Markus’s ice blue gaze found the camera. “I know how you love fixing the broken.”

Muscles and meat stretched the dingy white shirt binding Markus’s hammy biceps. He wound the large plank back around his head.

Cara’s heart stilled. Her lungs stuttered. The blood in her veins fermented.

Markus backloaded the board. His front biker boot lifted off the ground. The sneer on his gruff face compounded with his effort.

Every taut muscle in Tyler’s body formed a topographical map that screamed.

Clamped lips.

Bulged veins.

Angry ridges.

Canyons of furor where the eye used to be.

Markus released the raging force Cara had fueled. The small hunk of tree parted the air like a bolt of lightning. Its impact landed in the middle of Tyler’s thigh. The bone under a mountain of thigh muscles split, birthing thunder that rolled through the miles, knocking a roar from Cara’s chest.

Tyler’s clamped lips turned ashen white. He gulped air.

“What was that?” The cameraman moved in tight. “Do you want to scream? Cry?”

“Cara.” Tyler pushed her name through clenched teeth.

“Aww. He wants his girlfriend,” the cameraman announced to the group.

“Me too,” one of the men said with a lewd tilt to his voice.

“Don’t come for me.” Tyler had breathed the words before his body went slack.

Cara’s eardrums trembled. Her throat ached. She dropped the phone into her lap, unable to watch more. The steering wheel shook under her grip. She heaved a breath and forced it through her larynx again.

A litany of curses filled the car, for herself, for her regrets, but mostly, for Markus Royan. Dead man walking but not for much longer.

The phone rang, shooting another dart of adrenaline through her veins.

“What?” she answered.

“If you don’t make it there in one piece, Tyler’s chances of rescue decrease. Stop driving like a lunatic. Do you know how many favors I’ve had to offer to keep your ass out of jail? I’m leveraged up to my eyeballs with the D.C. Metro Police. It’d better be worth it because I won’t see straight for—”

“How do you know they have Tyler?” Cara’s voice cracked. She couldn’t handle another turn of treachery.

“We hacked your phone.”

That she could handle.

“How do you know the Royan brothers?” Tucker demanded.

“Marina Sorensen. They have her too.”

“Who is she? She’s not in our system.”

“She’s an innocent.” The moment the words exited her lips, she knew they were false. At one point, Marina had been innocent, but now, she was as unassumingly deadly as Cara was. So why had she stayed with the brothers, and why had they turned on her?

“That’s the barn at the Sanford’s house, right?”

“Correct.”

“Why there?”

“Nate Harlow.”

“I don’t understand, but you can explain later. There are at least five of them and two possible hostages. You can’t go in alone.”

“I’m not. Luck is meeting me.”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that but hear this. I have two of my guys in a HELO hot on your heels. If you need to wait for them, wait. And don’t shoot them.”

“Tell them not to get in my way and I won’t.”

“Won’t wait or shoot them?” Tucker asked.

“Either.”

* * *

“
H
ow the hell
did you get here so fast in this thing?” Cara waved Luck into the passenger seat of the white panel van he’d used for surveillance through the years while keeping an eye on Rin.

Luck wore green digital camo with a loaded vest and belt.

“It sprouted wings once or twice, but I just got here.” He crawled over a black vest with all the trimmings and into the other seat. “I was twenty miles closer than you were so that helped a lot. That and I had everything packed for the move. I tossed a few cases and boxes in the back.”

His hand wrapped around the vest’s shoulder strap and then lifted. “This is for you.”

“They’ll just make me take it off before they let me in.” Cara shifted the car into drive and gunned the engine.

“Now, you care to tell me what the hell’s going on?”

The driveway came up fast. It tended to happen that way when you drove in aggressive excess of the speed limit. She wheeled the van onto the gravel drive.

Luck braced both hands on the dash.

“Markus Royan is holding Tyler and Marina to get to me.”

“Son of a bitch.” Luck glared out the window at the horses in the fields. He didn’t stare long. As fast as Cara drove, they morphed into blurry specs.