Boston, Massachusetts
10:17 a.m. EDT
The safe house was a detached townhome spread across two levels, essentially a single-family unit on a tiny, low-maintenance plot. Located on the east side of the city, it was steps from Boston harbor. An active area with lots of Airbnb rentals, where strangers wouldn’t be noticed.
To access the attached garage, Castle entered a five-digit code and pulled the Hummer inside. He cut the engine, tapped out another PIN on the digital lock, and disabled the alarm from a panel beside the hall closet.
Pain compressed Alistair’s features as he hurled insults that blistered even Castle’s ears. At least he was conscious.
Quickly, Kit helped Castle get Alistair into the house. Each of them draped one of his arms around their shoulders and hauled him in.
The private entry led to the main floor through a laundry room and into the kitchen. Not wanting to take any chances in case they’d been tailed without his knowledge, Castle engaged the high-security function. With a push of a button, bulletproof shutters rolled into place, covering the windows and doors to prevent forced entry.
As they passed the kitchen, Castle did a quick visual sweep. “Bedrooms must be upstairs. You’d be more comfortable there. I could carry you up.”
“How sweet,” Alistair said, gritting his teeth through what must’ve been sheer agony. “The Beast wants to take this bromance to the next level. You can sod off. Dump me on the bloody sofa.”
“Just when I was starting to think I was special,” Kit said, “here you are offering to carry everyone.”
Castle bit back a grin and bore the brunt of Alistair’s weight as they got him to the leather sofa. “Your pants have got to come off.”
“First the bedroom and now my trousers.” Alistair tsked, setting the medical kit on the sofa, and undid his belt. “Whatever will she think of you?”
“I’m more concerned with you bleeding out.” Castle had shaved fifteen minutes off the estimated travel time, but it had still taken too long. The wound needed to be treated quickly.
“Might want to shield your eyes, luv. Once you’ve seen all my glory, you’ll never want to go back to that.” Alistair gestured to Castle.
“Kit, would you mind looking for some towels?” Castle asked, putting on latex gloves from the med bag. “Check to see if there’s a change of pants that’d fit him.” Every safe house was stocked with medical supplies, weapons and ammo, extra clothes in a variety of sizes, and nonperishable food.
She nodded and left the room, going upstairs.
Alistair dropped his pants around his ankles and peeled his blood-soaked boxers down far enough to expose the injury.
Castle lowered himself to one knee. “Ready?”
With a curt nod, Alistair tensed and leaned against the couch, bracing for the pain.
Castle wiped blood away with gauze to assess the damage. “You’re one lucky son of a bitch.”
“How’s that? A hole in my bum doesn’t feel too lucky.”
“You’ve got two holes. Not one.”
They both knew what that meant, an entry and exit wound. Left buttock and hip, three inches apart. Castle wouldn’t have to put him through the torture of digging out the bullet.
“I can practically hear the jokes already.” Alistair flashed a tight smile.
Yeah, their tightknit crew would give him a good ribbing over this.
Kit returned with towels, a pair of sweatpants, and a glass of water for Alistair that he promptly chugged. They set the towels out on the sofa, and Alistair settled onto the cushions, lying facedown.
Castle cleaned the wounds with a premade saline solution. “I have to check for frag.” The bullet might have broken apart as it entered or exited. Any tiny pieces left in his body could cause further damage. “No need to suffer through it. Or worse, make me suffer through your mouth.” He held up an autoinjector of a powerful painkiller mixed with a sedative.
They were high-speed low-drag operators who handled the toughest of tough assignments. No Gray Box operative had anything to prove or to gain through pointless suffering.
Alistair flashed a lopsided grin. “Only to spare you.”
Castle injected him in the leg. “I’ll call the chief, have you airlifted out of here.”
He deliberately hadn’t requested air transport to Cambridge. Reaper, their only pilot, had been out along with the others working a mission. Regardless of how hardcore his friend was, the man needed sleep. But a more complicated reason was that Castle didn’t want to deal with any scrutiny from Sanborn where Kit was concerned.
That was unavoidable now. No way Alistair would make it nine hours in the Hummer to get back to Virginia. At least Kit had led them to the hard drives. The win had to count a little toward changing the chief’s mind about her.
Within a minute, Alistair’s eyelids grew heavy, his gaze turning detached and floaty. “That’s beautiful. You’re a good chap. Can’t remember…the last time…” He was out.
Castle prodded the wounds, pressing around the edges. No sign of any fragments. “Clean shot. No vascular damage.”
Lucky. But Alistair would have a solid week of throbbing discomfort and a couple more before he’d lose the limp.
Castle tore open a packet of Celox and poured the gray granules into the injuries, ensuring they got deep into the holes to stop the bleeding. Then he bandaged them.
“Is he going to be all right?” Kit asked.
“Yeah. Alistair is always all right.” He’d been through dark, terrible things and lost more than any of them in the Gray Box. But that smile still stayed on, hiding pain that ran deep. “I’m going to change his clothes.”
Kit took the hint, leaving the room, and went upstairs, taking the package with her.
Castle cut Alistair’s bloody things off and put the sweatpants on, adjusting him into the most comfortable position possible, considering.
By the time Castle found Kit in one of the bedrooms, she’d opened the box and set the hard drives on the bed. Three of them were dark gray, four inches wide, two inches thick, and six inches long with Sentry written across the top. The other was a commercial external hard drive. A couple of cables lay beside the laptop that she hadn’t yet turned on. “What’s with the external drive?”
“It’s blank. It’ll hold a terabyte of data. I got it with the little cash I had left. I’d thought about copying some of the files and sending the drive to friends in Romania. But I didn’t feel right releasing it out in the world without the ability to monitor what happened to the information. Not when I had no idea what it was. I didn’t want to inadvertently make the situation worse.”
Smart call. While on the run for her life and desperate for answers, she’d kept her wits about her, used prudent judgment. No easy feat for a civilian with no training.
Kit opened his encrypted laptop. “Copying everything the Outliers worked on for those two days will take time. I should get started.”
“You should copy more than that.”
She recoiled, her eyes narrowing. “We had an agreement.”
“You said the Outliers were asked to pass some test. When did that happen?”
“About a week ago by now.”
“And you don’t know how Jasper found Bravo?”
She shook her head. “He never said. I think he hid it to make himself seem like an irreplaceable team member who could bring in a seven-figure payday.”
“What if Jasper met him online? If he did it at the Lair, there’d be a record of it, wouldn’t there?”
“There might.”
“Give me everything from the time Jasper walked into your life.”
Kit considered what he’d said, her gaze never leaving his. “Okay. You’re right. I want to make sure you—your team—has everything they need to catch those men.”
She slid her hand across his thigh, derailing his thoughts, filling him with a wild desire that electrified him ten times better than adrenaline. Heck, they weren’t even having a verbal sparring match.
He corralled his libido and forced himself to focus. “Can you show me the video you decrypted?”
“Of course.” She inserted a cable into the laptop and connected the other end to one of the hard drives from the Lair. It took her less than a minute to scroll to a media file and bring it up on the screen. She hit play.
The video was what Kit had described. A man wearing a balaclava spoke to the camera in Arabic with an Islamic State flag in the background.
Castle wasn’t as gifted as his sister, Maddox, who spoke six languages, but he knew four and this was one of them. As he listened, he compared what the man said to the English words scrolling across the screen.
One word, attack, had him rewinding and replaying it to be certain. “He’s claiming responsibility for the attack that happened last Thursday—but the date makes it this week. In three days.” Not much time, but they had a definitive day to work with. “Get started making the copy. I have to make a call.”
While she set up the external drive, he phoned Sanborn.
“I’ve got it, sir.” Castle stayed seated beside Kit, watching her sort the files and initiate a copy as far back as four months. “But there’s a hiccup.”
“What is it? Did Westcott try to run?”
As a matter of fact, she did. But Castle would sooner swallow his tongue than give credence to what his boss already thought of her. “It’s Alistair. He’s been shot. Not critical. I patched him up, but he’s going to need an airlift. We’re up in Massachusetts.”
“So you’re the one who just accessed my safe house in Boston.”
Sheesh, he stayed abreast of everything. “Yep.”
“You said you have the hard drive?”
“I do,” he said, trying to decide how to explain that Kit had lied, there were three drives, and he was only handing over a copy. Not the originals as ordered. No words came to him. The good news was that he wouldn’t have to face his boss with a rock-solid explanation until tomorrow after they drove back. Plenty of time to sort his story out. Instead, he said, “I watched the video and translated it. D-day is Thursday.”
Sanborn groaned. “That’d explain some other recent developments. We need the drive ASAP. I was about to send Reaper to check on something we just discovered, but I’ll have him fire up the helo instead,” Sanborn said, “and contact you with a pickup location.”
“Roger that.”
“Good work. I owe you a box of macarons.” Sanborn hung up.
Cookies were a little premature. There wouldn’t be cause for celebration until they had stopped Bravo, thwarted whatever dastardly deed was in the works, and Castle made sure Kit was safe.
“It’s in progress,” Kit said. “It’ll take a while. Why don’t you get some rest? You drove all night and haven’t slept. You must be exhausted.”
On the contrary, he was wired. “I can’t.” He glanced at the laptop, noting the progress bar on the screen, and looked back at her.
“Wait.” She shifted on the bed, setting the laptop down. “You can’t sleep because you have to watch the computer? Because you have to watch me on the computer, with the hard drives?”
He needed to be one hundred percent positive that everything they’d discussed would indeed be copied. “Don’t take it that way. It’s a chain of custody issue.”
Her brow furrowed and she shot to her feet. “You think I’d tamper with the copy?” Hurt whispered in her voice. “You still don’t trust me. Even after I’ve told you everything, practically bared my soul to you.”
She stormed around him, headed for the doorway.
Rising from the bed, he caught her slim wrist and tugged her flush against him. An intimate ripple of warmth went through his body.
“I think you want Bravo caught more than anyone and you know this is the only way that’s going to happen. The only way to ensure your safety.” He cupped her face. “Giving my boss a copy instead of the original hard drives contradicts a direct order, one I’ll have to answer for. I need to be able to tell him with complete confidence that we have everything we need.”
“Why are you risking this for me?”
“Because you won’t yield.” He brushed his thumb across her cheek, and her breath caught in her throat. “If I took those drives from you by force, I’d only prove your worst fears, and you’d hate me.” He dreaded that more than anything. The prospect of losing her. Never feeling this charged sensation with someone else.
“This is real.”
What she meant was clear. This was real. Real stupid. Real trouble. A real spark in a bed of dry grass, bound to kindle a wildfire. “It is.”
A small, bright smile lit up her face.
His heart clenched unexpectedly. His physical reaction to her was exhilarating. And terrifying.
“What about the things Alistair said at the gas station? What about the things you said? Not shitting where you eat was the poetic phrase.”
The effect she had on him, even when he’d uttered those words, was staggering.
“It’d be a hundred times simpler if I weren’t attracted to you.” Need churned inside him like a man possessed—to be near her, to touch her. It was only growing stronger. “I’ve never believed in chemistry, besides the kind to breach a site with explosive charges. Not until you.”
“You say the most romantic things.”
“Around you, the lines blur. The rules become fuzzy.”
“Is that a warning or an invitation?”
“Both.”
Maybe he got such a thrilling high from her because he wanted what he wasn’t supposed to have. If he gave in to temptation and slept with her, would the draw cease to exist?
Once Eve bit the apple, all she tasted was regret.
She slid her thigh between his legs and her hands up his chest. “I want you, Castle.”
The teasing whisper of his name on her lips made his cock thicken and ache.
He’d been dead inside for a long time, only invigorated when bullets were flying. Yet Kit was like heroin mainlined straight into his veins, eradicating any cold detachment.
She was the best rush.
He wanted her with every breath he took. A reckless, soul-deep longing that made no sense.
Just this once, he couldn’t deny himself. Not for duty. Not for country. Not for God.
Not for anything in the world.