Wicked Lies: A Dark Mission Novella (3 page)

“Been a while.” The interrogator’s voice was deeper than the previous one’s, lacking the refined polish of higher intelligence. A meat-man, then. Fists and facts. All Jonas saw of his head capped in hair buzzed so short he couldn’t tell if it was brown or blond. Thick rolls carved lines into the back of his neck, disappearing into his collar.

“Can you hear everything?” Danny asked.

“Oh, yeah, I’m all ears,” said the operative, but Jonas knew it wasn’t for him.

“I hear it loud and clear,” he replied softly. “Go easy.”

The man put his fists on his hips. A posture Jonas had seen other missionaries adopt, especially the men. Fist to hip, elbows wide out, legs braced. A stun baton hooked into his belt beside his right fist, a knife sheathed by his left. The man was a fighter. And he obviously didn’t count Danny as a threat. “You going to tell us anything?”

Jonas found himself holding his breath, his hands frozen over the keyboard as Danny stared at the squat man in the white button-down shirt. The thick line that was his lashes, crusted into dark spikes, dropped.

Then swept up again. “Blond.” Pure terror fought for control under a nonchalance Jonas sensed Danny struggled to maintain.

The man bent, bracing one hairy-knuckled hand against the back of the metal chair. “What?” He frowned. “You out of your head already?”

Jonas’s eyebrows rose.

“Maybe not,” Danny murmured. “Too smooth for blond. Maybe a redhead. I like redheads.”

Something twisted in Jonas’s chest. Something that felt a hell of a lot like laughter. And warning. Because Danny wasn’t talking to the interrogator.

“I’m not blond,” Jonas confirmed quietly. There was no way that operative—Jonas couldn’t bring himself to call the unknown man a missionary—could hear the earpiece. Even still, he didn’t risk it.

“Quit playing,” the interrogator demanded, shifting his hand to Danny’s short hair. He wrenched the kid’s head back, scowling down at the blood and bruises. “You going to tell me where your people are or not?”

Danny’s grunt of pain echoed in the suddenly vise-like tension of Jonas’s chest.
Come on, Gordon. Hurry your ass up.

Through his teeth, Danny gritted out, “Red?”

Jonas’s breath shuddered. “Nope,” he managed, somehow keeping his anxiety, his fear from his voice. Nice and easy. A touchstone. “Afraid not.”

Danny’s bloody mouth curved up. Just a hint.

Just enough to break the operative’s patience. As Jonas watched, horrified, he drew back a heavy hand and slapped Danny across the face. Right on the side already swollen nearly to twice its original shape. Already strained flesh tore. Danny cursed; pain and anger twisted together, strangely obscene coming from the kid’s lips.

Come on!

“Brown, then,” Danny gasped. Blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

“Hang on” was all Jonas trusted himself to say. It was as good as a confession. “Help is coming. Just hang on a little bit longer.”

The interrogator closed both hands over Danny’s shoulders, wrenching him upright. After being restrained for so long, Danny’s muscles would be stiff. Jonas knew that from experience. Too tense to take his own weight easily. The pain of it locked Danny’s shoulders, pushed the tendons of his throat into stark relief as Jonas seized the edge of the monitor and held on tight.

So strong. So . . . hell, the kid was too brave.

“Please tell me you have—” Danny sucked in a breath, hands limp by his sides even as the operative held him. “Green eyes.”

What would it hurt?

“More or less.”

“You stupid fuck,” the interrogator said grimly, and let go. Danny’s knees buckled. “Keep playing the games, witch. You’ll break. They always do.”

They always did, too.

Jonas swallowed a surge of nausea. Then forgot all about it as motion in one of the thumbnail sections on his monitor caught his attention. “Shit,” he whispered. “Not yet.”

Not until the operative was gone. Danny was in no shape to—
too late.
Every light on the systems array hooked into his computer went red. The virus was in. Way earlier than expected. May’s mole must have hauled ass. He had ten minutes before the Mission caught on.

Less if they’d managed to find some technical talent in Jonas’s wake.

The guard reached for the door, sure the broken body behind him remained no threat.

Jonas straightened, hard enough to send his spine into spasms of shock and pain, but he didn’t care. His hands darted over the keyboard, even as he ordered, “Don’t let him go.” Every word compressed to a firm line. “Danny, he can’t get out, or the jig’s up.”

The noise Danny made—not quite a grunt, too shrill to be a sigh—didn’t sound like a confirmation.

Shit.
No.
“Kid, I know you can do this. I’ve talked with your grandmother. Your blood is pure hot sauce.” Even as he poured all the encouragement, the reassurance, the
strength
he could into the line, he mainlined command after command into the program his insider had dropped into the Mission computer banks.

One by one, coaxed along with every keystroke, the cameras along his plotted escape route flipped back on a loop. Locks clicked open. All that idiot had to do was reach for the security panel and he’d know.

Please.

It wouldn’t be enough. They waited too long. Hell, even a hard-ass agent like Silas Smith would be thinking twice after a week of beatings. The shaken wreck that was Danny Granger didn’t have it in him.

“Fine.” A bare murmur.

“Christ,” Jonas breathed as the kid shifted. Between one scudding heartbeat and the next, soundless, he lunged across the three measly feet separating him from the squat man’s back. Quicker than even Jonas could catch, the stun baton at the man’s belt was in Danny’s battered hands. Clumsy as hell, but it didn’t have to be anything but unexpected to work.

“Fu—!”

Without a blink, without even hesitating, Danny’s thumb depressed the rod’s power switch and the live end slammed into the back of the guard’s head. Just at the base of his skull, where the thick rolls of flesh began. The exclamation tangled in the man’s throat. Body jerking violently, the man folded in on himself like a building with its foundations torn out.

If he didn’t die with that much voltage to the brain stem, Jonas might just reconsider his shaken faith in God.

The narrow figure on the screen swayed, dropping the baton. “Okay, angel,” he muttered, rough and
just
this side of keeping it together. “Now what?”

H
E’D KILLED A
man.

At least, Danny thought he had. The baton was a thing of sleek menace, beautiful in that he’d had no sense of the voltage arcing through its slender haft. If he hadn’t been on the receiving end already, he could have spent hours just poking at the guy and never know how bad, how horrifyingly painful the fucking thing was.

But he knew. And so he left the baton where it rolled under the bolted chair and didn’t touch the heavy-set man at his feet. Dead or not, it wouldn’t make any difference to Danny’s need for escape.

Or to his mysterious rescuer’s state of mind, apparently. “Out the door,” Jonas instructed, his sublime voice calm. “Hang a left, and keep going.”

Danny wasted no time. He didn’t hop so much as stagger over the prone torturer, but given the circumstances, he didn’t care. He’d have plenty of time to convalesce and get his usual athletic stride back before he went hunting for the brown-haired, green-eyed man with the voice of an angel.

And when he did, Danny knew he’d be holding his breath.

Maybe he misread the signs.

Maybe he
wanted
to misread the signs. It wouldn’t be the first time. Danny wasn’t quiet about his sexuality; at least not in the kind of crowds that didn’t care. He saw a man he liked, he took a chance. He just had to get there.

But as he gripped the edge of a door he couldn’t get away from fast enough, he didn’t stop to wonder why the mystery voice in his ear pushed his buttons. It didn’t matter. He wanted to push a few of his own. If it worked, he’d find himself enjoying those first tentative steps of the relationship dance. Sleek and sweet and just a little bit clandestine, given the Church’s views on men like him.

If not, if Jonas tended toward a thing for women, he’d move on. He always did.

He reached back behind him, shut the heavy door with a final, audible click. All at once, a vise unlatched from around his lungs, and he took a deep, painful breath. It stitched a cramp all the way up his side; he didn’t care.

He was out. He could breathe.

“Now I can see you,” the angel said in his ear, low and soothing. “Good job, kid. I knew you could do it.”

“Only because you’re there.”

The truth slipped out without Danny’s conscious permission. A tight, intense statement of fact that seemed to throw Jonas off as much as it did Danny. The man on the other end of the frequency sucked in a hard breath.

The silence in his ear stretched taut.

Wow
. Even if the man ended up straight as a playboy on a woman-conquering bender, walking away from this one would leave a mark. He could add it to his collection.

He closed his eyes, shoving a filthy hand through his limp hair. “Which way?” First things first. Whatever the case, whether Jonas made a habit of flirting on comm lines or Danny was a special case, he owed the man his gratitude.

In person.

With his heart on his sleeve.

“Left.” Normal, if
voice from God
counted as normal for the man.

He turned left, hands curled into tight fists as the effort to walk sapped what little energy he had left. Every step drilled another note of pain into the symphony filling his head. A crescendo slamming into every part of his body.

He hadn’t been this worked over in years.

“You with me, Danny?”

Oh, yeah.
Jonas’s voice skimmed over parts of his body Danny figured would be long since numb. But it wasn’t all sexual. Hell, he’d have to be hard pressed to really call it that. Not even he had the drive to push it through this much hurt.

But as he raised one hand to the side of his bruised face, he couldn’t help but tease. “Are you asking me out, angel?”

Another one of those little sounds. A smothered gasp. A choked off laugh. He didn’t know. But that raw edge of his mouth flared painfully as he bit back a smile.

No, it wasn’t completely sexual. But the man had a way of making Danny feel like he stood right there. Hand out. Patient as hell, encouragement and reassurance and challenge all in one go.

No wonder Grams chose him.

“Hang a right,” Jonas told him as he came to an empty crossroads. Doors inset into the walls remained closed as he passed them, locked tight, windowless but fitted with narrow panels. Viewing ports, like his cell.

Was the whole floor a jail?

He dragged a forearm across his forehead, sweat coagulating into a sticky sheen on his skin. By the time two minutes passed, his stomach had tightened into a vicious ball of anxiety, launched into his chest somewhere, and every step became a contest of wills.

Danny versus the floor.

Lie down, just for a second.

No way.

Nausea pitched in his stomach. He staggered.

“Danny!”

It took him a moment too long. Danny flung himself backward, grunting as his shoulders collided with the corridor wall. It didn’t rattle beneath his weight, the place was built too solidly to rattle, but his already-scrambled brain did a jig inside the confines of his aching skull.

It wasn’t him.

The floor vibrated beneath him. The walls thudded, but it wasn’t his doing. It couldn’t be.

“What the . . .”

“Don’t move,” Jonas ordered, his voice low and even. “Just stay there.”

“You just want to spend as much time with me as you can.” But even as he dredged up a rasping kind of humor, he stared down the empty corridor. Like his cell, it didn’t have much going for it. Gray walls, gray floor, gray ceiling interspersed with simple fluorescent lights every third fixture. The floor wasn’t exactly dirty, but he wouldn’t eat off it. Especially as a fine rain of plaster dusted it.

Within the space of four seconds—the longest in his life—everything went silent.

Jonas let out a hard breath. “Trust me, kid, I can think of better dives to take you through.”

There.
Flirting. It had to be.

A corner of his mouth twitched. “Why am I kissing this wall, then?” he asked softly. It was a small lie, of course. His back pressed against the cold surface, not his face, but it was funnier the way he’d phrased it. He hoped.

His reward came as a chuckle so rich, so vital despite its quiet volume, that every fine hair from his sensitive nape to his fingertips lifted. His vision blurred until all he could see, all he could hear, was vibrant white noise.

He wanted to see the mouth that made that sound. See it, meet it.

Claim it.

Focus.

“The whole security feed’s lit up like a bonfire. I don’t know what the hell just happened, but don’t move.”

“Great.” Danny shook his head hard enough to send tendrils of pain shooting into his forehead. “Did you say you can see me?”

“Yeah.”

Well, that would kill any chance he had on seducing a man over to the dark side. “And here I didn’t dress for company.”

“Relax, you look fine.”

Shut up,
Danny thought swiftly as something rippled through his gut. Pleasure and anticipation.
Fine
was the kind of word everybody used as dismissal. Even him.

“Whatever happened, it’s caught most of the building unprepared.”

“It caught
me
unprepared,” Danny muttered.

“Lucky for you, I’m on your . . . hold it.”

He held it.

On cue, a door ten feet ahead of him opened. Danny held his breath. Commands spilled into the narrow hall. Feminine, too shrill given his raging headache.

“Don’t move,” Jonas cautioned.

“I’m not even breathing,” he whispered, a sound so low he wasn’t sure the mic picked it up.