Sarah tried hard not to ogle Nate. But his almost-nakedness made her mouth dry up and her hands clench. He’d taken off his shirt and wore only gym pants that rode low on his hips. His long hair was bound behind his neck, and his upper body shone from sweat.
God had put him together in layers of muscles and tendons, all stacked and shaped into a perfect male form. Even the random scars and tight, red skin on his arms that looked like burns seemed like they belonged, like he’d earned them. His green gaze widened, and his chest undulated with the force of all of that heavy breathing.
Probably from beating a man until he was almost unconscious. Nate had just kept hitting as if not aware of what he’d been doing or what was happening. She’d been around men her entire life, so straight-up virility didn’t frighten her. But she’d never seen this kind of raw, masculine action. Although the force of Nate’s attack concerned her, Nate’s opponent had acted like it wasn’t a big deal. So maybe it wasn’t.
“Sarah.” Her name came out on his exhale, heavy with surprise.
“Hi.” Good golly Moses. “I, uh, wanted…” She swallowed and clutched the letter she’d found on the floor near the front door. “Could we talk alone?” She nodded to his friend whom she’d seen outside earlier, the one with the long brown hair and tatted arms.
Now that she was closer, she realized the ink formed a dragon that started on one wrist and went up his arm and down the other arm.
“Of course.” Nate ran a hand over his head and led the way until stopping suddenly. “Would you wait in the office while I change? I’ll only be a minute. Zack will take you.”
“Sure,” she said.
Zack’s smile brightened his dark, intense demeanor, and she breathed for the first time since seeing Nate in the ring.
When Nate disappeared into the locker room, Zack put down his laundry basket. “This way.”
“Thanks.” The office was in the front corner, overlooking the street. Inside, she saw another man sitting behind the desk, typing on a laptop.
“Luke? This is Sarah.” She glanced at Zack. Had there been an emphasis on her name? “Sarah’s waiting for Nate.”
Yes. Definite emphasis.
Luke shut his laptop. “Oh.” He blinked before smiling. “Okay. I’ll be at the front desk.”
With his short brown military-style haircut—so different from Zack’s—and Atlanta Braves T-shirt over shorts, he seemed out of place with Nate’s buddies. Nate and Zack seemed like mercenaries, while Luke was…less threatening.
As Luke passed with his laptop under his arm, he said, “Nice to meet you, Sarah.”
She nodded, and Zack waved to a metal chair in front of the desk. “Nate will be in soon. No one will bother you, and you’re welcome to whatever’s in the coffeepot.”
Once alone, she dropped her bag on the chair and studied the room. Concrete walls and floor had been painted gray. Plastic bags from a hardware store lay in the corner, still filled with cords and plugs and cables. Cardboard banker’s boxes lined the perimeter.
A bookcase behind the desk held notebooks with years printed on the spines. Most of them were from the eighties and nineties. It was as if someone had just moved out and the someone who’d moved in had dumped the new on top of the old.
One wall was a picture window half-covered by Jolly Roger flags. Two other walls had corkboards filled with posters of boxing matches, MMA fights, and brochures advertising protein drinks. The last wall—the one not visible from the doorway—was decorated with the largest map of Afghanistan and Pakistan she’d ever seen.
She found her glasses and realized it was a topographical map, with the mountains and valleys outlined in green concentric circles. Pins with colored-glass tops were clustered in different areas, but all of the red pins were in one area: the Pamir River Valley. The yellow pins were grouped around the Wakhan mountain range.
Blue, green, purple, and black pins were stuck over the rest of the map but didn’t appear to be in any order. One gray pin was off on its own, in the northern part of the country, near the Hindu Kush. To the east, ten orange pins were stuck in Islamabad.
She ran her fingers over the orange pins. What a strange thing to find in a run-down gym on the edge of the not-nice part of town. Male voices sounded near the gym’s front desk, but no one came into the office. She placed her palms on files stacked on a plywood credenza to get a closer look.
She remembered, maybe five years ago, that an entire Wakhan village had been brutally massacred. But she hadn’t heard anything about it since it’d happened.
Male laughter made her turn, and she knocked files off the credenza. She picked up the folders and had to fish under the desk for a stray paper. It was a list of names written in teacher-perfect handwriting. Beneath the title LMCF, ten names were grouped into five pairs and marked with an alphanumeric code in sequential order.
The first two names were Jack Keeley and Tank Wofford. 3C-115. The second two names were Liam Casey and Quinn Jones. 3C-116. Sarah scanned the other three pairs until seeing two single names on the bottom. Alex Mitchell, 1A-102. Below that was N. Walker next to a phone number with an area code from the state of Maine.
None of this makes any sense.
She opened the top file and was about to toss in the list when she noticed something. A photograph from O’Malley’s Pub, similar to the one she’d found for her father earlier. Carefully, she lifted the photo only to realize there were more beneath. All of them were different pictures from her father’s crime scene that she’d never seen before.
She sifted through them only to get the second shock. Beneath the pictures of the crime scene that had destroyed her father’s and Hugh’s careers was the same photo Hugh had shown her. Below that was the third and biggest shock of all: photographs of her working at the Savannah Preservation Office. Of her talking in the garden with Nate when he’d brought her the map to authenticate. And one of them talking in the police station moments before he kissed her.
The last page, written in perfect penmanship, was about her: where she’d gone to school, her degrees and scholarships, her dissertation, her work experience, and the reason for her demotion to contract work, a.k.a. forced leave due to that article in The British Journal of Eighteenth Century History.
When the lights in the room began to spin, she forced herself to breathe. She needed to find the safe spot between shallow breaths and hyperventilating. She needed to get the hell out of there.
Using her phone, she took photos of the map, the list of names, and the O’Malley’s Pub pics and sent them to Hugh with a text.
Any idea what this all means?
She slapped the file shut, shoved it and her phone in her bag, and spun around only to find a man standing in the doorway, arms crossed, biceps almost as large as Nate’s.
His black sweats and Iron Rack’s T-shirt matched the fierceness in his brown eyes. He wasn’t as tall as Nate or as handsome, but his deep frown and long hair tied at the base of his neck told her he wasn’t the type a woman could flirt with or cajole to get out of trouble.
“What did you put in your purse?” He pounded out the words in a direct statement.
She hiked her bag on her shoulder and rose on her toes to maintain maximum height. “None of your business.” Then, because she was annoyed, added, “I’m leaving now.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
Really? “Then what are you going to do about it?”
* * *
Nate entered the locker room to find Ty mopping the floor.
“Hey, Nate. Win your fight?”
“Yes.” Nate hated seeing his friend scrubbing the gym when he should be leading an A-team halfway across the world. But this was their life now, and to feel bad about it would leave him stuck in the sea of self-pity with the Sirens luring him to their shores with the Song of the Fuck-up. The song that’d already stolen years of his life. “You okay with the chore chart?”
“It’s cool.” Ty swished the broom around benches between lockers. “Better than prison.”
Amen, brother. “I’m just going to shower and get out of your way.”
“Whatever.”
Nate found his jeans and a black T-shirt folded on top of the dryer in the adjacent laundry room. Then he sucked in his stomach, dropped his gym pants, and turned on the water. After untying his hair, he got in. When the heat hit the tight muscles in his back, he closed his eyes. He’d stripped the gauze off his arms before his fight and now let the water rinse off the salve. He was sick of the smell. Turning, he lifted his face to the waterfall.
Since leaving the prison hospital, he’d been exercising like death was chasing him. Despite the ongoing seizures, his body had responded to the new activity by forming muscles he’d never seen before. The irony was that he was returning to the psych ward while he was in the best physical shape of his life. If there’d been a time to meet his enemy and save his men, it would be now. But since his wishes always went to shit, he just soaped up as the water turned cold. The chill helped with the tension in the lower half of his body.
He opened his eyes and noticed Ty straddling a nearby bench. “I need to tell you something. Something I should have said two weeks ago.”
After he turned off the water, Ty threw him a towel. Although Nate wanted to get back to Sarah ASAP, he recognized compassion and maybe a bit of sadness in his friend’s face. Ty ran both hands over his crew cut and clasped them behind his head. A restless gesture Nate knew often preceded a lecture.
Nate finished drying before asking, “What is it?”
“Whatever happens, it’ll be okay.”
Shit. “You know. About my returning to the prison hospital.”
“Yeah.” Ty sighed. “Zack and Pete told us.”
“Perfect.” Nate tossed the towel toward the gray hamper. It hit the edge and fell onto the floor.
“Because of you and Pete, we know the name of our enemy. That’s more intel than we’ve had for the past five years.”
“Is it okay for me to leave even though we don’t have a plan to work the mission? Is it okay for our men in prison? Is it okay that our exit papers were stamped dishonorable discharge?” He ripped open his jeans and shoved his legs through.
“None of us can see the future,” Ty said. “But maybe the army will let you go for good behavior or some shit like that. Trust me, man. It’ll work out. It has to.”
Nate zipped up, found his socks and boots, and put them on. Then he reached for a brush and attacked his hair. He wasn’t used to Ty being the optimistic one. Positive thinking was Pete’s domain. Besides, since Nate’s release from that psych ward, he and Ty only talked about work. While they’d once been closer than brothers, now they were nothing more than teammates. And Nate wasn’t sure what to do with Ty’s sudden concern.
Nate brushed out his hair and tied it back. His heart hurt at the loss of the friendship. At the loss of his brothers. His parents were long dead and his sister was unavailable, so his buddies had been his only family. He slipped the black T-shirt over his head. “Thanks.” Although he’d no idea where all this emotion was coming from.
“No prob.” Ty stood, his blue eyes crinkling. “We’ve started a new life in Savannah. We have a second chance to make out with our demons.”
Nate had missed Ty’s bad jokes. “Make amends, bro. Not make out.”
Ty’s smile transformed his face from a hard-core operator into someone approachable. “Not when your demons wear a black leather mini, a lace bustier, and swing a whip.”
Maybe not so approachable. Nate laughed and found his towel to toss it into the basket. “Can we trade demons?”
“Not a chance, brother.” Ty started mopping again. “That bitch is mine.”
Their laughter lessened the ache in his chest until Luke ran in. “Hurry, Nate. Vane and Sarah are arguing in Kells’s office.” Luke smiled. “She’s kicking his ass.”