Chapter Eighteen

What the fuck had he been thinking?

Marcus yanked on the change of clothes Josue had provided as he left the room without another glance.

Problem was, he hadn’t been thinking. He’d been reacting, running hot on adrenaline and terror. He’d gone into the back room to check on Leah, make sure she was unharmed, and give her the change of clothes, but all his good intentions had flown right out the window when he saw her.

Naked. Head tipped back as the sad excuse for a shower drizzled over her round, full breasts. Something had snapped in him then, unleashing a beast he’d kept tethered too long. It hadn’t been enough to see her and know she was safe and unharmed. He’d had to touch her. Feel her.

And when he’d moved inside her, felt her body clench around him like she never wanted to let him go, he’d felt like he was finally, finally home. Right where he should be. Right where he’d wanted to be for longer than he cared to admit—with Leah in his arms and his cock deep inside her, claiming her as his.

No. Jesus Christ, that was wrong.

So very fucking wrong.

She wasn’t his anything. Not his home, not his woman. She had a home with three gorgeous kids, ones she’d created with Danny. And, yeah, Danny was gone, but that gave Marcus no damn right to start calling her his.

His stomach twisted painfully and bile surged up his throat. He swallowed it back. He had a job to do right now. He could drown in his guilt later once Leah was back safely with those kids of hers.

He strode out into the main room of the church.

And that was something else he’d have to berate himself for later. Fucking his best friend’s wife in a church. Shit, if he hadn’t been headed to hell before today, he definitely had a first-class, nonstop ticket there now.

He purposely didn’t look at the crucifixion painting behind the altar as he searched for Josue. He already had enough guilt weighing him down. He didn’t need to add any of that good old-fashioned, ingrained Catholic guilt on top of it, thanks.

Everyone scurried to get out of his way. They were afraid of him. Probably for the best, because his mood hung like a storm cloud around him, charged and rumbling, ready to unleash all that pent-up energy at the slightest provocation. He’d hate himself if he snapped on one of these people, who had already gone through so much.

He found Josue praying over Mercedes. She still hadn’t regained consciousness, and her face had gone grayish-pale. Even with only the most basic of battlefield medical training, he could tell it didn’t look good for the woman. That made his stomach twist again.

True, he didn’t like Mercedes. Didn’t trust the woman’s wishy-washy loyalties. But she had thrown herself into the line of fire to save Leah and, for that, he owed her.

“How is she?”

Josue looked up. “Habiba has done what she could, but your friend is in need of hospital care.”

Marcus studied the room, the huddled mass of displaced people. “I don’t suppose there’s one around the corner?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

Marcus winced. He hadn’t meant to sound so surly with the priest. He had to pull himself together, rein in his emotions, and get his head in the game, or they were all going to end up dead. “Where would we find a doctor?”

“The closest is the Russian woman at the mercenary camp, but you do not want to go to her.”

“You mentioned that before, and so has Abel. He said people go to her for medical care and never return. Any idea what’s happening to them?”

Josue shook his head and climbed to his feet, his knees cracking with the movement. “At first, I thought she was a blessing sent by God. She brought food and medicines and vaccines, but it was all a lie so we would trust her. When people started vanishing, she would tell us they were very sick and she had sent them to Russia for treatment. We thought they would come home once they healed, but none have.”

“How long has this been happening?”

“She came here about two years ago.”

The woman had been operating with impunity for two years. Jesus. “How many people have vanished?”

Josue’s lips curved into a sad smile. “Too many to count. Maybe hundreds. Probably more. It’s hard to keep an accurate census in a country of refugees.”

Marcus again scanned the people huddled together around the big room. The benches that made up the pews for the church had all been piled against one wall, and the Muslim refugees slept on thin cots or sometimes just a pile of blankets. War was an ugly thing.

But his gut told him something even uglier was happening underneath this particular war.

He returned his attention to Josue. “Do you have a phone? Radio? Any way to contact the outside world?”

Josue shook his head with each question. “We have nothing like that.”

“Yes, we do, uncle.” Abel appeared at his side and handed Marcus a satellite phone. His uncle said something sharply to him in the local language, and he answered back. Then he turned a sheepish grin toward Marcus. “I took it from the dead man.”

No wonder Marcus hadn’t found any form of communication equipment on the man. Abel had beaten him to it. And here he’d thought the kid had been too numbed by shock to be useful.

“Thank you.” He dialed the long string of numbers that would ring him in to HORNET’s headquarters back in Wyoming. He had no idea where the team was, but he knew for sure that either Gabe or Quinn would be commanding the mission from HQ.

“Who is this?” Gabe Bristow demanded.

Marcus exhaled softly with relief. It was nice to hear a—well, if not exactly friendly, at least a familiar voice. “Utah,” he said, using his call sign. The nickname had started as a joke, since he was a surfer and FBI agent like Johnny Utah from Point Break, but over the years, it had stuck.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Gabe said on a loud exhale. “Where are you?”

Fuck if I know, he thought. “Hang on.” He covered the receiver with one hand. “Do you have a map?” he asked Josue. The priest nodded and hurried over to the desk situated against the wall of his private quarters.

Right then, Leah opened the door. Her eyes were red, puffy in her pale face, but her head was held high.

Shit, had she been crying? Had he made her cry?

Of course he had. He’d fucked her and walked away without a word. What kind of asshole was he? He should have stayed. They should have discussed things like rational adults. She had to be just as twisted up with guilt as he was.

Josue returned with a map and a pencil. He spread the map out on the floor next to Mercedes’s cot.

Marcus ripped his gaze from Leah and focused on the task at hand. “Show me where we are.”

Josue helpfully marked an X for their location.

“Deangelo!” Gabe barked in his ear.

With his full attention on the map, Marcus ignored him. “And how about the Russian camp?”

Again Josue sketched an X about 15 klicks from their current location. Not nearly far enough for Marcus’s comfort. He studied the map, then finally spoke into the phone again. “We’re somewhere in Central African Republic.” He gave the coordinates as best as he could figure them.

“Roger that,” Gabe replied after a tight silence. “The team is already en route.”

“How the fu—” He caught Josue’s eye and swerved around the curse word. “How are they already en route?”

“Ian tapped an old friend for intel.”

“Ian has friends?” For some reason, his gaze went straight to Mercedes, and a fuzzy memory danced up from his subconscious.

Snow swirling. Ian blocking a door he desperately wanted to get through.

He’d wanted to hurt Mercedes that night for their failure in Switzerland, but Ian had protected her.

Suddenly, he knew exactly who had passed on the intel. “I wouldn’t exactly call her a friend.”

“What do you mean?” Then after a beat, Gabe added, “Her?”

Nah, he wasn’t ready to say yet, and he got why Ian had kept his mouth shut on the subject. As tenuous as his trust in Mercedes was, it was still trust. Of a sort. But the team didn’t even have that much. As far as they knew, she was still the enemy. And maybe she was, but she was an enemy with the same goals.

Though it did make a guy wonder how she’d had Ian’s number so readily available.

“It doesn’t matter right now,” he said into the phone. “What’s their ETA? We have critically wounded.”

“Leah?”

“No.” Thank God. He wouldn’t be functioning at any level if Leah was lying on that cot instead of Mercedes.

Gabe’s voice tightened with tension. “Not you.” It was a command, not a question.

“No, not me.”

“Good. ’Cause I plan to stomp your sorry ass into the mud when you get home. I’d hate to have to delay that to let you heal first.”

“Nice talking to you, too, boss.”

“Yeah, about that. Am I still your boss?” Anger-laced sarcasm hung heavy on each word. Gabe was seriously pissed off. He usually had a concrete lock on his emotions, which had earned him the nickname Stonewall when he was with the SEAL Teams, but this convo was far beyond his usual level of stoic grouchiness.

“Going by your tone,” Marcus said carefully, “I’m guessing not.”

He could actually hear Gabe’s teeth grinding over the line. “We’ll see. The team’s still two to three hours out. Keep this line open. I’ll call you with evac instructions.”

“We can’t evacuate.” It spilled out his mouth before his brain told him it wasn’t a good idea to argue with Gabe right now.

“You said you have critically wounded.”

“We do, and she needs a med evac stat.” He again looked over at Mercedes. She’d awakened sometime in the last few minutes and watched him with pleading, pain-filled eyes. “Alexander Cabot is here, a prisoner of Volkov. He sent Leah to us so we’d find him, so let’s find him.”

“We don’t even know who he is,” Gabe said. “Harvard and Sami found next to nil on him, and that makes me twitchy as hell. For all we know, he could be leading us into a trap.”

“It’s possible,” Marcus granted. “But I don’t think so. He worked for Danny as an informant.”

Gabe was silent for so long that Marcus started to wonder if he’d dropped the connection.

“Go on,” Gabe finally said.

“I don’t know what or who he was informing on, but there’s something big going down here. The place is crawling with Russian mercs, and locals are disappearing by the hundreds. Whatever intel Cabot possesses has to be of the earth-shattering, twenty-four-hour news cycle variety. The kind of intel that bad, powerful people want to keep buried. We need to find him or else Leah and her kids will never be safe from this.” As he laid out his case, he searched the church for her. She’d found a spot to sit on the floor near the altar. Abel had scrounged up a plate of food and was encouraging her to eat.

Good kid.

She still looked shocky as hell, but a splash of color had returned to her cheeks as she picked at the rice dish. The borrowed tank top showcased her gorgeous breasts, and the colorful skirt did great things for her ass.

She looked perfect.

Man, he had it bad.

Gabe was saying something in his ear. He refocused his attention on the conversation. The only part he caught was, “…we’ll reassess then.”

It wasn’t a no. He’d take the small victory and run with it. “Thank you, Gabe.”

Gabe pushed out a gusty sigh. “Get some sleep. You sound like you need it.”

“You, too.” He winced. Again, there went his mouth before his brain. “I mean, you sound a little tense. More than usual.”

Gabe groaned. “Babies, man. They should be outlawed as torture devices.” Despite his words, his tone all but oozed with pride.

And that took him off guard. In all the chaos, he’d forgotten Gabe’s wife had been pregnant when he left headquarters all those months ago. “So, uh, Audrey had the baby?”

“Almost four months ago. March twenty-second.”

Great, another thing to feel guilty about. He should’ve been there for the birth of their first child. Then again, until recently, he hadn’t been in any shape to be trusted around an infant. He cleared his throat. “Uh, congrats. Boy or girl?”

“Girl. Rowan Kendra. She’s as beautiful as her mother. And as bossy.” He paused. “It’s time to come home, Marcus.”

Those last six words hit like a punch. Because Gabe was actually saying he never should’ve left. He should have stayed and let his brothers-in-arms help him. He should’ve stayed and helped Leah.

Instead, he was a coward who ran away from his problems and left everyone hurting in his wake.

His gaze caught on Leah again. She looked up right then and their eyes met.

No more. He couldn’t run from this fight as long as Leah was in danger.

“One problem at a time, boss,” he said into the phone.

“Yeah,” Gabe agreed reluctantly. “Roger that. Keep this line open.”

…

He could barely stand to look at her. Spent the last several hours doing everything in his power to avoid her.

Why was she surprised? It was perfectly on-brand for Marcus, after all. He’d rather run away than discuss what happened between them in the shower.

Okay, that wasn’t entirely fair.

He had more important things on his mind than figuring out what sex between them meant—like coordinating a rescue before Mercedes died.

And, really, if she was honest with herself, she wasn’t ready to talk about it, either. It was the only reason she hadn’t approached him since he’d left her without a word. She didn’t know how she felt and was too exhausted to figure it out right now.

Leah sat down next to Mercedes’s cot. The woman didn’t look good. Her skin was kind of gray, her lips had a blue tinge, and the few times she’d regained consciousness, she hadn’t been fully coherent. She shivered despite the muggy, oppressive heat that seemed even worse inside the church due to all the bodies crowded into the space. Marcus and the local nurse, Habiba, were worried about blood loss. They managed to staunch the flow from her wounds, but she had lost too much and wasn’t out of the danger zone. She needed a hospital.

Leah folded Mercedes’s cold hand between both of hers, hoping to lend some of her body heat. If not for this woman, Leah would be unconscious on that cot, bleeding out.

“Why did you jump in front of me?” she whispered. She was grateful, no doubt, but it made no sense. They barely knew each other. She didn’t expect a response and sucked in a sharp breath in surprise when Mercedes’s heavy eyes opened a crack.

“I owed you,” she whispered back, her voice thick and raspy.

“You didn’t owe me—”

“You don’t even know the whole truth,” she scoffed. There was a spark of the old Mercedes, scornful and sarcastic. She stared up with defiant eyes. “It’s about time someone told you. The man who shot your husband? He was my lover. More than that. I…loved him.”

Leah dropped her hand as if the contact burned. “What?”

Mercedes groaned softly as she lifted herself into a sitting position against the wall. “Sebastian Haly. I slept with him the night before he left to take your husband’s life. I knew where he was going and what he was going there to do.”

Why was she talking about it like it was no big deal? Like it was an everyday, average thing for your lover to do? It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t right. “Why didn’t you stop him?”

“It was a job. It was what he did. What I did. If it’s any consolation, he told me Danny wasn’t his target. Marcus was. When Seb missed the shot, he was torn up about it, wanted to get out of the life. Danny’s death brought out the best in Sebastian. So, yeah.” She waved a hand toward her wounds. “I owed you.”

Mercedes should have let the bullets hit her. It would’ve hurt less. “You think this makes us even?”

“No. The only way we’d be even is if I died.” She winced in pain, hissing out a breath through her teeth. “But I’m not planning on doing that. Sorry.”

Leah jumped to her feet and stared down at the woman. “You’re…” She couldn’t even think of the right word to describe her. “Evil.”

“Hey, I never claimed to be a saint. And for the record, your boyfriend over there isn’t one, either. How do you think he knew about Sebastian?”

Leah shook her head and backed away. She didn’t want to know.

“He tortured me. He and his team held me captive for months.”

Leah couldn’t hear more. Didn’t want to know more about any of it. She spun on her heel and walked away. She needed out of this cramped church, needed air. She shoved through the front door.

Still raining.

She didn’t care. She walked out into the rain and gulped down lungsful of the humid air. She wanted to hit something. She wanted to throw herself on the ground and kick and scream until all the pain and anger and sorrow left her body. She was shaking with it all. Couldn’t keep carrying it around, bottled up inside, or she was going to explode.

“Leah!”

She whirled at Marcus’s voice. He was right behind her, reaching for her.

She knocked his hands away. “Don’t touch me.”

He ground to a halt and if she wasn’t mistaken his complexion lost a few shades. “What did she say to you?”

“You know exactly what she said.”

“Leah—” Again he tried to reach for her, but she stalked away from him. She couldn’t stomach his hands on her right now.

“No! You dragged Danny into this world where people kill like it’s as normal as buying milk, where people torture one another for information. He’s dead because of you.”

He flinched like she’d struck him and dropped his arms to his sides. “I would trade places with him in a heartbeat. You have to know that. I’d give anything to—”

“But you can’t.” She was beyond reason now, drowning in a deep, dark, ugly tsunami of grief. “He’s gone and you might as well have pulled the trigger yourself. Why did you come back into our lives? Why couldn’t you have just stayed away when you left the FBI?”

“I…” He lifted his hands but then dropped them uselessly to his sides again. “I’m sorry.”

He looked miserable, aching down to the bottom of his soul like she was.

No, she couldn’t let it sway her. She’d been so convinced Marcus had nothing to do with Danny’s death, but all along it was one of his personal enemies who had pulled the trigger. His enemy, not a random act of violence during a hostage situation like he’d led her to believe. He’d lied to her. Then he had the audacity to put his hands on her. And she’d let him. She’d welcomed him. She’d wanted him.

Oh God. She was going to be sick. She pressed a shaking hand to her stomach, where the little bit of rice she’d managed to eat was threatening a return visit. “When this is over—”

Headlights splashed over them, and she flinched back like a frightened mouse. She hated that she’d become a scared little waif of a woman who jumped at shadows. Where was the woman who had buried her husband and conquered single parenthood? The woman who had her world yanked out from underneath her and still held her head high, persevering, surviving?

She didn’t feel like that woman anymore.

Maybe she’d never been her. Maybe she’d been deluding herself into thinking she was strong when all along she was one bad storm away from snapping.

Marcus stepped between her and the two vehicles that rolled to a stop in front of the church’s gate. And that act of chivalry just twisted her up more inside. Despite the horrible things she had just accused him of, he was still willing to jump between her and any danger.

He pulled his stolen rifle off his back and aimed it at the driver’s side door of the first car as it popped open. The lights were too bright, blinding, and she couldn’t see more than a shadow’s movement on the other side.

“Identify yourself,” Marcus demanded.

After another second, the lights cut off. More doors opened.

“Mais, if you don’t want our help,” a male voice said in a lazy drawl, “we can turn around, head home…”

Marcus exhaled audibly and lowered his weapon. “Cajun.”

“Gonna let us in or what?” Jean-Luc Cavalier asked.

She recognized his voice now. She’d met Jean-Luc during the many parties—birthdays, weddings, baby showers, backyard barbecues—that she and Danny had attended with the team over the last few years.

HORNET had come to the rescue.

So why didn’t she feel the least bit relieved?