Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
COLE
I shove a hand into my hair and look around. Plush leather. Gleaming wood. Perfect lighting. The chartered plane would be nice, if I gave a fuck.
Honestly, you could have strapped me to a missile if the damn thing could have gotten me to Virginia faster.
Only one thing matters—seeing Sierra safe with my own two eyes.
Simona watches me as I get up for the fifth time in the last hour. “You’re making me tired,” she mutters.
I cut her a dose of side eye. “Take a nap.”
She raises a brow and twists her lips to the side. If Simona’s anything, she’s a hardass. “I don’t need a nap. But someone does.” Her gaze falls back to the gun magazine in her hands as she curls her legs beneath her in the chair, effectively dismissing me.
This flight needs to end.
Now.
After a lap down the aisle and back, I land in the seat again, as agitated as I felt the time I got fire ants in my uniform during a field training exercise. Only this time, ditching my clothes would do nada to fix the problem.
For lack of anything else to do, I watch Simona casually flipping through the pages of ads for pistols and holsters. She glances up, pinning me with her ice-blue eyes.
“How’d you meet her?”
Way to kick a man while he’s down.
My frown deepens as I recall the day I met the woman who would be the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to my heart.
“It was an Air Force deployment briefing. She walked in…” I let out a slow breath. “Felt like a thousand pound bull had hit me square in the gut.”
She motions her hand for me to go on.
“Of course, it was taboo. She was an officer. I was enlisted. So we danced around the subject for a month until I got my discharge papers. I didn’t want to take a chance of wrecking her career with fraternization.
And since I was close to the end of my enlistment, I decided to wait until I got out ”
In her signature move, she raises one very narrow, perfectly tweezed brow. “Hm.”
Turning to the window, I let the memories of that day loose inside my head.
“Sierra was as beautiful as any model, even in her plain Air Force uniform. Confident. Totally in her element. And those eyes… the most amazing shade of smokey blue. The second she turned them on me, something hard inside of me had evaporated. I wanted her. Full stop. Nothing was going to keep me from having her.”
I’d have pursued her like a possessed man. Only she held my gaze and grazed the tip of her tongue over her lip, and I knew it was game on.
It’s a wonder something didn’t ignite in that meeting room, because the sparks between us could have been measured in megawatts.
I scrub my hand over my face. Holy mother of sanity. “One thought about that day and I’m a freaking wreck all over again.”
Simona grins at my discomfort, and I scowl at her.
“When did you know you loved her?”
I laugh darkly. This is one of those stories. “Literally, the moment I laid eyes on her.”
She waves a hand, scoffs, and says in her accented English, “I don’t believe in love at first sight.”
“I get it. Neither did I.”
She tips up her water bottle and sips. A few seconds later, she thoughtfully says, “Lust maybe. Sure. But there’s no way you can know that someone is right for you so fast.”
“Oh, I had lust alright, but there was a knowing in my gut that this girl was going to be the woman who left a lasting mark on my world.” I shove my head back into the seat.
“That knowing has never gone away. Hell, it’s only gotten deeper and harder to deny every single day since Sierra walked into that meeting and stole my sanity right alongside my heart. ”
Leaning toward me as if I’m suddenly an exotic animal in a zoo, Simona studies my face. “Love, huh? What’s that feel like?”
Shifting in my seat, I try to ease the ache inside of my chest. “Big.”
She stares at me expectantly.
I shake my head once. “I’m not a poet. It felt fucking big. Huge. Like my insides couldn’t hold in the energy that filled me up every time I looked at her.”
Emotion takes hold of my voice, making it rough and sparse. “We were like wildfire. And that flame brought new life to me, like it does to the forest when a fire burns it down. She brought me back from the brink of something so dark it was eating me whole.”
Simona inhales swiftly. The look in her eyes is unmistakable. It’s crystal-clear understanding. The kind that happens when you recognize a piece of yourself in someone. In a rough whisper, she says, “You were going to kill yourself.”
I glance away. “No. Yes. Hell, I don’t know.
I was wrecked and didn’t even realize how bad it really was.
Sierra recognized it for what it was, PTSD.
She got me to see the value of therapy. Which is ironic, given that I didn’t think therapy was the right thing for her brother.
But I wasn’t punching and kicking an innocent woman. "
I shake my head. Not the time for this.
But, I keep on talking. “I just felt like shit. Three friends from my unit got killed within six months. They were good men. And left behind wives and babies. It rocked me. I’d seen so much death and war. I was just broken. And—”
She looks me in the eye. “You don’t need to explain.”
I shift in the now uncomfortable seat. “Have you ever been in love?”
She presses her mouth flat as her eyes skate away toward the window. “Men don’t love women like me.”
Without another word, she gets up and walks to the restroom at the front of the plane.
Shit. Aren’t we a pair?
Feeling even more out of sorts, I unbuckle and lurch from the seat. Near the rear of the plane, I find Marshall at a conference table. His head is dipped low as he works on his laptop.
His gaze moves over me. “Good timing, Cole.” He motions to the chair across from him. “Since you said Sierra will go looking for her brother, I wanted to know more about the guy. What I found isn’t good.”
My mind tracks to the worst outcomes first. “Did someone find his body?”
“Nothing like that. But came across some rumored shit about the guys in his unit that might shed some light on Bryan’s downward spiral. Do you know if he was using B-zene?”
Shaking my head, I say, “Never heard of it. I didn’t know what he was using when she and I broke up. He was a mess.”
“Be glad you haven’t heard of this crap before. It’s a new synthetic drug that’s added to other drugs. The results are really fucked up. More addictive. And people are super aggressive when on it. But here’s the weird part. They are also highly controllable by people they see as their source.”
Marshall hits a few keys on his keyboard. “According to an informant, there were some guys in Bryan’s Army Ranger unit that were suspected of being in some kind of drug ring, and B-zene was one drug they might have been handling.”
This shouldn’t shock me but it does. I rub my temple. “You mean, his Ranger unit was smuggling drugs?”
“It’s never been proven. Word on the street is they’ve got a pretty big operation going. But my source tells me they’ve got connections, and no one has been busted yet.”
Fuck. Really? I lean forward in my seat and say, “But command would know if the guys in the unit were all strung out.”
“Of course. But guess what? The best drug dealers in the world don’t do drugs. It’s bad for business.”
Shaking my head, I try to process the idea of a rogue Special Forces unit. That’s so far from how the teams I worked with were that it’s almost unimaginable. “Wow. That’s disturbing. Are they still active duty?”
Clearly as unhappy as I am, he says, “I’ve got someone looking into that right now.”
My unease grows as I steeple my fingers. “Do you think Bryan is dead, then?”
“If not, there’s probably a reason they want him alive. Maybe he’s got something on them. Supposedly, these guys are bad news.”
All the blood in my body chills. “Christ, Marshall. If Sierra’s going to go out looking for her brother...”
Simona appears beside my shoulder. “What if she didn’t get her memory back?”
“I know she did. That’s why she came back to Virginia.”
Simona’s thinking. She chews on her nail. “Isn’t she a trained Air Force officer? So, she has skills.”
Grimly, I say, “If she can remember them. But these men are trained killers. She’s not. She never was. And there’s no reason for her to have left if she didn’t get her memories back. At least some of them. My worst fear is that she's walking right into the middle of this.”
Marshall’s eyes flash black. “Not if we can stop her first.”
If. A big damned if. We’re hours behind her.
White knuckling the table, I ask, “Does this plane go any faster?”
“No. The pilot knows we need to get there as fast as possible.”
My sheer agony is interrupted by the satellite phone on the desk ringing. Marshall picks it up with his scarred hand. He says, “Agile Security and Rescue, this is Marshall Lake, go ahead.”
His eyes shift to me, then he passes the phone over. “For you. Cade Slaughter.”
I don’t give Cade the time to speak before I say, “Where the hell have you been?”
I freeze when he tells me he’s been on a training exercise. Flying jets. “So you haven’t gotten over to Sierra’s?”
The tips of my fingers tap a furious rhythm on the table as he says it’s going to be several more hours before he can get there.
He asks, “Are you close?”
“No. We’re in the air. Another couple hours.”
The silence on the other end cues me in that he’s holding something back. My worry amplifies to a near screaming roar. Marshall watches me as my veins start to pop. “What aren’t you saying?”
“My buddy, this old retired guy that lives in my apartment complex, is a police scanner junkie. I asked him if he’d heard any weird calls. He heard one in the middle of the night for Sierra’s apartment complex. A bunch of car alarms were going off.”
I hinge forward. “What the hell was going on?”
Cade says, “Two officers responded and found nothing other than car alarms randomly going off, according to the info he heard over the scanner.”
“Fuck, I don’t like this.”
Cade grunts. “Neither do I. Look, I can’t get there right now, but I’ll see if I can figure out someone who can go.”
“I’m coming, man. I just hope it’s fast enough.”
Cade disconnects when he has to get back to work. I drop my head into my hands as my gut twists itself into a knot that’s never going to unwind. “There’s trouble. But I can’t tell you what.”
Roark, a former SEAL on the Agile team, approaches the table. His shadow casts the whole damn thing in darkness as his mammoth shoulders block out the lights. “I have some questions.”
Marshall nods to the other chair. “Roark’s got a sixth sense for finding things the rest of us miss.”
I don’t know the SEAL well yet, but he seems solid. And if Marshall recruited him, I know he’s a force to be reckoned with.
I clench the arm of the chair. “Fire away.”