Wicked Lies: A Dark Mission Novella (2 page)

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.

It shouldn’t be him.

The baton didn’t lift away. Instead, right over the bruise Jonas knew it had just imprinted, it jolted enough wattage into the kid to peel back every nerve. To short-circuit every pain sensor in his brain.

Jesus.
“Scream.”

Danny’s body twanged like a bow, seized and spasmed. Sweat blossomed over his skin in seconds, soaking into his shirt, catching in the blue radiance. It painted every last detail into stark relief, outlined the youthful muscles of his chest as they bunched under his shirt.

It hurt. God damn them all, it had to.

The baton arced again. Crackled. A muted thud, a crack and the flicker of blue energy, and a strained sound locked behind tightly clenched teeth. Every sound, every detail told Jonas the interrogator wasn’t here to tease. After a week in captivity, a week of failed attempts to get answers, the missionaries weren’t playing anymore.

They’d tried the same with the woman who’d once been Jonas’s boss. Parker Adams hadn’t held out long, but he’d helped get her escape before it got this far; he and a handful of the missionaries who’d sensed which way the wind was blowing long before Jonas had seized the courage to act on it.

The first thing he’d done was find that footage. He found it easily, destroyed it. The memory of seeing the cool, composed Mission Director screaming still haunted him.

This was something else entirely. Something vicious and worse. Jonas missed the beginning, hadn’t seen how it started. Maybe with questions. With bargains. With reason. Maybe since the
coup d’état
that had turned the Mission inside out, the new face of the witch-hunting arm of the Church skipped the pleasantries and went right for blood. Jonas didn’t know. Only that by the time he’d managed to hack into the Mission’s security feed, they’d already worked their prisoner over with fists and worse, and had moved to the so-called
humane
application of the electrical prod.

Humane
could cause a man to bare his soul in terror. Could leave a woman a sobbing, traumatized wreck.
Humane
just meant it wasn’t supposed to leave marks.

And this time, skin flushed and eyes scrunched shut over bared, bloody teeth, not even Danny’s seemingly endless supply of willpower could lock back a hoarse scream.

Save my grandson.

Ragged sounds of anger and pain and fear filled the speakers. The garage. Slowly, feeling so much older than his thirty-two years, Jonas dropped his face into his shaking hands.

T
HEY LEFT HIM
alone after he dropped unconscious. Maybe they didn’t want to waste the effort; maybe they decided it’d be easier to draw out the special kind of torment that blurred into hours upon an eternity of pain.

Daniel Granger didn’t know. He couldn’t even guess. This was so far outside his realm of expertise that he’d fallen right through the other side of reality.

This was a certain kind of hell.

Pain had long since plateaued into one giant knot of agony. What had started as sharp bursts of it in his bruised head and ribs had morphed into a living, breathing,
seething
tide of pure sensation. The kind that pounded in his skull and his heart and his bones and, hell, his
hair
hurt.

Clink.

The sound filtered through the dull, throbbing ache that was all he could hear from within his own head. Muted. So subtle, he could have imagined it.

His door? A chain? Something metal.

Even as he realized that gravity wasn’t pulling his head down to his knees, that he was lying prone on the cold, hard floor, he stirred.

And then Danny groaned as fireworks exploded through every cell in his abused body.

Maybe he’d just take another second.

Or maybe he ought to man up and pretend like he knew what the hell was going on.

He cracked open an eye, raised a hand to knuckle away the grit crusted into his eyelashes. Blood, maybe. Tears and sweat and dried mucus. The faded blue light that was all they left him with to see by speared through one eyeball, but not the other. That one had been swollen for . . . a day? Two? More? He had no idea.

God, he just wanted to lie here. Just rest a second. Just breathe, even as little sparklers of pain flared with every breath he forced himself to take. Bruised ribs. Probably cracked. Maybe even broken. As soon as he learned to figure out which bits hurt at what intensity, he’d be able to catalogue his various injuries.

Until then, he just wanted a moment.

But he couldn’t. Because something had clinked.

Rolling over nearly yanked the empty husk of his stomach out through his sinuses. Heaving with the effort, Danny managed to get to his hands and knees, locked his jaw as the cell swayed. He forced himself upright, knees splayed, and grabbed the bolted chair for balance. The room—gray, stark, cold—rippled, spots flaring in the corners of his vision.

Upright was good. It was a start.

The room they kept him in was eight feet by eight. Just big enough to house the chair, him in it, and whatever brute of an interrogator filled it with him. There wasn’t anything else to see in the gradient blue light. Just a gray floor, gray walls, and a gray door with a slot built into the solid panel.

And a tiny black dot on the floor in front of it.

He squinted. It didn’t move. It didn’t even skitter, the way he expected a spider would. Or a fly. Or something that was anything but an innocuous black dot inside his prison cell.

His mouth quirked. The motion tore a ragged edge through his upper lip, but he didn’t care.

There was no such thing as innocuous anything when his grandmother was involved. And he’d known the fiercely protective woman would find him. Whether or not she should.

They all knew the risks. Fighting for her,
with
her, came with a single guarantee: trouble. He’d known it all his life. Accepted it.

But he’d be lying if he didn’t admit to stark-raving relief now.

Not all the objectors the Church captured warranted the risk to free them. A strict policy of disavowal is what helped keep the cells alive, even after the Mission did everything in its power to run them to ground. Danny had never known if he’d be one of the lucky ones, or if they’d leave him to rot to keep the rest safe.

Part of him hoped to be rescued. The rest of him knew that dead men revealed no secrets.

But that wasn’t true, either. He didn’t know if he’d last another round.

Crawling across the floor, he hissed out words that would have had his feisty grandmother reaching for the back of his head. It took more effort than he wanted, more energy than he’d have strictly liked, but he did it. And the metal bit he found as his fingers closed around that swaying black dot had his heart singing hosannas. Within seconds, he’d managed to fit the small comm into his bruised, tender ear. “Hello?” It came out a guttural rasp.

“You found it, great job.” The voice that filled his straining ear sheared through . . . damn, everything. Pain and fear and impatience turned to a focus so sharp, so intense, that for a single moment, the gray cell faded to nothing. “My name is Jonas.” Masculine, warm without edging into inappropriately cheerful, Danny listened to the finest tenor he’d ever heard and fell back with a raw, visceral shudder. His shoulder collided with the far wall. He didn’t care.

There was someone out there. Someone real. He wasn’t alone.

“Danny? Danny, are you all right?”

Trembling, he cupped one hand over his ear and rasped, “Nice to meet you, Jonas.”

“We’ll meet face to face soon enough,” said that finely tuned voice. “Stay with me, kid. I’m going to get you through this.”

He closed his eyes. “I think I love you,” he managed through the shudders gripping him, rocking through his hard-won sense of calm.
He wasn’t alone.

There was a brief moment of silence, and then a touch of amusement murmured through the link. “I bet you say that to all your rescuers.” His mysterious benefactor didn’t wait for a response. “Hang tight, man. We’re going to have to wait for the right moment, but I’ll be with you every step of the way. Can you walk?”

Danny’s eyes squeezed tighter. Even through the red and white fireworks detonating behind his eyelids, he knew what he’d say. “You bet.” Now, he just had to make sure he meant it. “Can . . .” His voice cracked, embarrassingly loud in the still silence of the cell. He braced an elbow against the wall behind him, wincing through the pull of abused muscles. “Can you see me, Jonas?”

“No,” he immediately replied. “So I’m going to have to rely on your eyes.”

“Eye.”

“What?”

Danny’s mouth quirked again. Another flick of wry humor. Another twinge of torn scabs. “One’s swollen shut.”

The man said a word that turned the comm link electric.

It took effort not to laugh. “It’s a good eye,” he assured the mystery man. Jonas. He didn’t recognize the name, but he didn’t know all of his grandmother’s people. She liked it better that way. Hell, he was only one of a handful—a seriously trusted handful—who even
knew
she existed.

He shifted on the cement floor, cringing as his tailbone failed to find a comfortable spot on the unyielding surface. “How long?”

“I’m not sure.” At least the man was honest. “A few minutes? An hour? A day? When it happens, it’ll happen fast, so you better stay with me, okay?”

Maybe it was the pain. Maybe it was the surreal kind of intimacy in the small cell; just him and a mysterious voice from God. He couldn’t see Jonas’s face. Didn’t even know what to picture, with that smooth-as-milk-chocolate tenor and decisive optimism. He kept one dirty hand cupped over his ear, only vaguely aware he did it.

“With a voice like that,” Danny murmured, his chin sinking to his chest, “I’ll follow you into hell itself.”

Chapter Two

E
VERYTHING FROZE
. H
IS
mind went blank. Jonas’s fingers spasmed across his keyboard, sending a string of gibberish into the communications relay and forcing him to concentrate enough to delete the extraneous digits.

Be cool.

This wasn’t the first agent he’d gotten out of a tight spot. Jonas knew the amount of strain something like this put on a body and on a mind. Hadn’t he spent untold hours flirting with Naomi West during the most stressful times? Of course he did. He’d done that with most of the female missionaries, and teased the men when he thought he could get away with it. He was—no, he’d
been—
a technical analyst, the master of the wave. Information had flown to and through him; at the time, he was one of a handful of tech analysts who served as a touchstone for every operative who’d ever gone into the field.

Every analyst knew the game.

And nobody—
nobody
—had known his. Jonas had preferred it that way. He still did.

So he took a deep breath, let it out in an easy chuckle that felt like glass in his throat. “No need, kid. Follow my directions and I’ll lead you right out to freedom.”

On the screen in front of him, he watched Danny raise his head, but he didn’t look around. He’d taken Jonas at his word. Jonas didn’t mind lying. Telling him the truth might have put Danny in an uncomfortable spot. Made him think twice about everything he said or did. The kid had pride, and nobody liked to be seen at their worst.

Jonas needed him to trust everything he said. To believe in him. And, if that meant a little harmless banter, that’s exactly where Jonas excelled. Well, that and masterminding technical sabotage.

As if on cue, a silhouette passed under the security camera mounted in the far corner of the hall outside the cell.

“Okay,” he said, keeping his tones even and light. His fingers danced over the keyboard, a complicated jig that didn’t take much more than a fraction of his attention. “There’s someone coming in.”

“Do I—?”

“No,” he said quickly. “Don’t do anything. Don’t even look up. Act normal.”

In this case,
normal
meant
beat to shit.

He’d seen some brutal things over the years, but this ate at him.

Danny didn’t move as the operative swiped his thumb across the access panel outside the door. While the security system filed through its database, Jonas’s fingers skated across the keys in a pale blur.

Almost there. On a third monitor to his left, two columns of code compiled.

Jonas watched the screen, disengaged his right hand from his contest of man versus machine and tapped in a command that brought three more cameras up in a split-screen survey. The largest remained focused on the cell.

“Got it,” he murmured, a nanosecond before the mechanical tumblers released.

The Mission had changed their security parameters. Smart move. He would have done the same.

But not good enough.

On the surveillance screen, the operative with the close-buzzed hair crossed the narrow cell.

“Shit,” Danny muttered. It fractured into a grunt as the operative bent, fisting a hand in his collar and hauling the prisoner back into the chair. “Round two?” He grimaced. “Round three?”

Try round fifteen.

The interrogator—a different one, Jonas noted; broader but more squat than the last—wasn’t wearing a jacket. He also didn’t bother with the restraints. Cocky. And helpful.

“Stay calm,” Jonas murmured.

Danny didn’t verbally reply, but Jonas saw him close his eye. He stiffened, bracing for an impact that didn’t come.

Jonas adjusted the rimless glasses on his nose. A habit born from waiting too long before tightening the frame’s grip on his temples.

Why was the interrogator just staring at him? Like a statue, all wide shoulders and breathing heavily enough to pick up through the earpiece and the surveillance camera.

After too long, Danny cracked open that crusted, blood-smeared eye. “Don’t make me wait for it,” he complained, even if it did shake.

“Brave,” Jonas said into the line. “But don’t get cute with him. I need you on your feet.”