29. Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Twenty-Nine
You are a weapon. You were made for Command to point at the enemies of this great nation. You have no wants. You have no name. You are known only as the Hound.
The Handler’s voice was back inside Finn's head after endless days of Milford talking to him. It had been drowned out, at first, with thoughts of her, but now, however-many days later, all he could hear was the Handler’s voice. He felt nothing.
“Are you defective?” the Handler asked.
Finn shook his head.
Out of the corner of his eye—because Finn was careful not to watch directly—Finn thought he saw the Handler frown. Displays of emotion like that were unusual. Emotion was a weakness.
Milford’s breath went out, long and low. “Report to Medical for a check-up. Dismissed.”
Finn did an about-face and left the office. Medical was a floor up. If he failed the examination, he could be sent to maintenance. As an exercise, he thought about the myriad of ways he could escape the House as the elevator rose.
“Ah, good.” The white-coat-clad doctor who met him at the elevator squinted from behind his glasses before looking down at a tablet. “Come this way.”
He turned without waiting, and Finn followed obediently into a small examination room.
“Sit,” the doctor ordered.
This was familiar, if uncomfortable. The doctor drew blood and checked Finn’s vitals. A new tracking chip was inserted into him. The doctor didn’t offer pain medication, and Finn didn’t ask for it. The clean cut would heal quickly. There were no questions about what had happened to the old tracker.
The doctor hummed to himself and left the room. He gave no instructions, expecting Finn to stay until told otherwise.
Finn could hear the footfalls, hear a second door open.
The doctor’s voice was slightly muffled but still audible to his exceptional hearing. “I have the Hound in exam room two. There seemed to be some question about whether the Agent needed to be sent to maintenance?”
A second voice, one that was familiar but he couldn’t put a face to, answered, “No. Milford believes he’s functioning correctly, only there’s a distraction in play. He’s sent a team to handle it, so we expect the Agent to be in top form again after that.”
A distraction. A team to handle it. They were talking about Kathleen.
You have no wants, whispered the Handler.
It was false. Finn did have a want, and searing anger swept over him, burning away the numbness. His limbs jerked into movement, and he leaped off the examination table, throwing himself at the door and through it. He pounded down the hall to the elevator, pressing the button. He heard it whirring somewhere above.
Behind him, there was a cacophony of panicked voices.
“Shit!”
“You forgot to close the door! He must have heard!”
“Sound the alert!”
One of them triggered a silent alarm because the whirring descent of the elevator stopped. Finn put his fingertips in the door’s seam and forced it open, exposing the elevator shaft. Without a second’s thought, he leaped, grabbing the cables dangling in the center of the shaft. The friction burned his fingers as he fell. The pain felt unimportant.
He descended two floors before he leaped across to the tiny ledge by the door and prised that open as well. Anticipating a welcoming committee, he tensed, ready and alert. The corridor was empty, though.
Perhaps the alarm had locked down this floor, as well—or they had expected him to exit via the roof. Logical. Except he knew that wasn’t the only way to leave Cloverton House.
Running at full speed, Finn headed down the corridor, guided by his mental map. He couldn’t remember having been on this floor before—the executives of Command worked here—yet he knew the way, much as he had known the layout of the Marriott Marquis hotel without knowing how or why he knew it.
An engraved plaque hung on the door: Director, Special Operations Covert Command.
Some fragment of memory made him look to the right, where another door hung with a simplified plaque. This one had only one word: Control. The longer he looked at it, the more uneasy he felt.
Focus on escape.
He brought his attention back to the Director’s door. The second he reached for the handle, Finn sensed the rush of air as two points of entry opened behind him. He threw himself to the floor as six darts slammed into the door. He knew what they were: fast-acting sedatives that worked on someone with his rapid metabolism—at least for a short time. Long enough for them to subdue him through other means.
Finn had no intention of allowing that to happen.
Flipping onto his feet, he drew his Ka-Bar and slammed bodily into the nearest figure. The guard was dressed in full riot gear, making the use of the knife ineffective. Mostly so; the man’s hands weren’t covered, so he could handle his weapon. Finn yanked on the guard’s right hand, exposing his wrist, and cut along the radial artery. No doubt he severed several nerves, but that wouldn’t matter. The man would bleed out in five minutes if not treated.
The scuff of feet against the floor warned him, and he ducked into the small alcove the man had come from. A second later, he was out, snatching up the dart gun from the now prostate guard and firing back at the second. One caught the guard's leg but didn’t penetrate, though the second one that slammed into the guard’s hand had an instant effect. The amount of sedative necessary to put down someone like Finn was too strong for the unenhanced man: his heart faltered and stopped beating.
In death, Finn recognized the man as the angry server in the mess hall. He had been washed out of the program only to end up with a short life.
Finn didn’t expect the flood of anger that curled his fingers. He stooped, collected their guns and rifles, and turned back to the Director’s door. He heard nothing from beyond, so he pushed open the door. Soft carpeting muffled his steps into the lavishly appointed office. Giant wall screens that mimicked the bright windows of an above-ground office spilled light across polished mahogany furniture. He was interested in none of it. He reached underneath the desk and pressed a button. A panel on the wall slid open, and he stepped inside.
Two minutes later, after walking through a series of dimly lit tunnels, he emerged on the street a block away, his too-sensitive eyes stinging in the bright sunlight.
Finn needed to find her, before the Command team did.
“Harper? Harper! Christ. The fuck’s wrong with you?”
Gibson sounded annoyed with her and not without reason. Over the last several days, Kathleen had had trouble focusing. Some of that was to do with the fact she had hardly slept—and the nightmares had been worse than usual when she did—but most of it had to do with the man with intense blue eyes who had crept past all of her guards and made himself important to her.
Finn Kingsley.
Kathleen had been using her extensive access to every law enforcement database to find him. She had even pulled in some favors from FBI agents she had worked with to access less legal ones.
He was a literal ghost. There was no record of him in the military, civilian, or criminal databases she had access to. Kathleen had even promised to owe a friend of Gibson’s a huge favor for checking sealed military files.
Nothing.
Like he had never existed. It was both frustrating and a little alarming. If Finn was his real name, someone had scrubbed every mention of him from every intelligence database. Despite her failure, she was still trying, using every spare moment between report writing to search. Like right now.
“Sorry, Gibson,” Kathleen uttered, and she meant it.
If it weren’t for him, she wouldn’t have eaten and certainly wouldn’t have made it to the end of the week. They had been reassigned from the Lachlan Hayden murder case without explanation—though the frosty regard of Captain Sam Murphy suggested someone, maybe Wilson—had blabbed about her interference.
The new case was a burglary gone wrong, with the homeowner shot dead. No witnesses. Their week had involved the mind-numbing yet necessary leg work of canvassing the neighborhood for CCTV and witnesses. All the while, her head was elsewhere.
And Gibson knew it.
When she’d showed up at his door at the start of the week, he had taken one look at her and given her an ultimatum: tell him everything.
So Kathleen had.
Afterward, they drank whiskey while he tried to process it. It was a lot, she knew. He told her she was risking her career, and she hadn’t been lying when she told him she didn’t care.
Gibson, of course, had told her she was a fucking idiot, which was a fair assessment of the situation.
Kathleen’s job was everything she had worked hard for. Everything she had always wanted. She had been happy, content with what she was doing… hadn’t she? The idea of giving up her life’s work for a veritable stranger would have been ludicrous to her mere weeks ago.
Then again, the idea of letting someone into her life and falling—hard—would have been just as absurd. She had to admit—at least privately—that part of her obsessive search was an excuse not to think too hard about the constant ache squeezing her heart tighter the longer she went without hearing anything.
Wondering if Finn was dead or alive. Wondering if she would ever see him again. Wondering if she had made a huge mistake in letting him get so close.
Before Finn came into her life, Kathleen hadn’t wanted a relationship that was anything more than friends with benefits. She didn’t want the attachment. The way she felt about Finn had changed all that. It was everything: from the lost look in his eyes that stirred her protectiveness, the way simple choice paralyzed and delighted him in equal measures, to the way his face lit up when he smiled at something new. And, not insignificantly, the way he made her feel when he stared at her with such intensity and awe, how he woke her body to pleasures and heights she’d never experienced with any other sexual partner.
Kathleen’s feelings scared her, but she knew he was what she wanted. What she needed. What she chose. He had stolen her heart and her breath, and she didn’t want to run.
If only she knew he was alive, maybe her headache—and the constant pressure around her heart—would ease and finally let her breathe again.
In the meantime, she had to keep going. She had sensed some tails following her and Gibson as they moved around the city, and she had even spotted the same car multiple times. She had no doubt it was Command. Thus far, they had kept their distance. She wondered whether they, like her, were waiting for Finn to appear or to make some move.
She hated the waiting more than anything else.
“You look like shit, Harper,” Gibson said. “Are you getting any sleep?”
“On that awful spare bed of yours? Shit, no,” Kathleen said.
She didn’t add that the lack of sleep wasn’t so much because of the bed as the obsessive thoughts in her head, but she didn’t want to stretch Gibson’s already tenuous trust in her.
“Seriously? You’re going to give me shit over my spare bed, which I generously donated for you to stay on, at no expense, eating my food, using up my hot water, watching my full-screen plasma television—”
“The television’s pretty amazing.”
“Shut up, Harper. I’m yelling at you.”
“Sorry, please continue.”
Gibson glowered at her over their joined desks and exhaled. “You make even yelling at you not fun right now, Harper.”
“I know. I have that effect on people.”
“Just go home. I’ll finish up the paperwork from the witness interviews.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It’s Friday night, and if I have to look at your depressed face any longer, I’m going to start crying myself.”
“Ass.”
“A very nice ass who is going to do your work.”
The rush of gratitude that washed over her was intense and unexpected. “Thanks, Gibson. For everything. I mean it. You didn’t have to back me. Hell, if I had heard the story I told you, I would have walked away.”
“And that’s what makes you ten times smarter than me.” Gibson smirked. “Usually.”
Kathleen wanted to come back at him, but he wasn’t wrong, so she settled for a grimace instead. “I’ll pick up some noodles on the way to your house, throw it in the microwave to keep it hot for you.”
“Add some beer, and it’s a deal.”