Chapter Five
Dallas, TX
Twelve Years Later
“Kala, you went through something traumatic.”
Kala bit back a groan and wished her father wasn’t so invested in freaking therapy. “I like to call it Tuesday, Lena.”
The therapist sighed and sat back. Lena Gallagher didn’t normally work in Dallas. She wasn’t an everyday, ordinary therapist working at the Ferguson Clinic, though for the last week she’d held sessions here.
Because apparently the Agency was worried their experimental team was twelve kinds of fucked up after their last mission.
No lies there. It had been a lot.
“All right, Kala. I have a job to do. After what happened in Montreal, the director is worried about the state of the team.”
Lena was in her mid-thirties, a pretty woman who dressed in a neat and efficient manner that still managed to be feminine. She reminded Kala a whole lot of Eve McKay. Lovely and intellectual, and she didn’t exactly like Kala. “You’ve spent three days saying nothing.”
“I know. It’s been a good time, Doc.”
She was hell on shrinks. Oh, they tended to look at her like she was their Disneyland, but all of her rides were closed, thank you very much.
An elegant brow arched over dark eyes. “You know I can bench you, right? I understand that the Kara construct you use is very important to several ongoing operations, but if I decide you’re not stable, I’ll still pull you out of the field.”
She had places she could hide a body. Always. It was probably sad that she kept a list. Uncle Jesse and Aunt Phoebe just moved and were renovating, including putting in a pool. Getting the dead body of one of your enemies buried right before the frame went in was chef’s kiss. Lou’s dad’s place had a lot of land. Oooo, Uncle Boomer had a couple of pigs now. They loved to eat dead bodies, right? See, this was why she liked animals more than most human beings. They were helpful.
“All I’m asking is for you to talk about what happened.”
Lena crossed one leg over the other, showing off the red soles of her shoes. “You do that and I’ll clear you. I’ve cleared everyone else.”
“Everyone who’s still here,”
Kala grumbled.
“Yes, I would like to talk about what happened with Captain Reed as well,”
Lena replied, frowning. “But we should start with how you were caught by the suspect’s men.”
She’d been over this a million times. Or at least once, and that should be enough. But no, the Agency needed her to go over and over it…like they were waiting for her to trip up and reveal something.
Like she was the real suspect.
Damn it. Her father had told her to take this seriously, and she was fucking up again.
“I wrote a report. Several, actually,”
she replied, sitting back and mimicking the shrink. Though she was wearing combat boots and ripped jeans.
Lena watched her every move and made a note in the small book she held on her lap.
Kala could guess what was in there. The rest of the team had already done their time with her.
Louisa Ward – sweet and charming. Einstein-level IQ. An asset for the Agency, with the singular exception of her poor taste in friends.
Natasha Taggart – organized and emotionally intelligent. She’s the heart of the team as she manages to keep their big personalities in check.
Tristan Dean-Miles – makes things work despite his natural repulsion when it comes to making hard choices. An asset, though more behind the scenes and less in the field.
Cooper McKay – Captain America through and through.
Kala Taggart – morally ambiguous, with anti-social tendencies. Keep an eye on her.
At least that’s what the last one said. She should know. She’d stolen the notes. That probably played into the whole morally ambiguous thing.
“I read the report. Now I want to hear it from you.”
Lena’s perfectly cut bob shook. “Or we can close this report, and I can get back to DC early.”
“I thought you were hanging around for a while.”
If she could shove the Agency shrink out early, everyone would cheer her on. It would be easier than convincing Aunt Phoebe she needed to Poltergeist her pool. That’s what she would argue. Those X’ers knew how to use a pop culture reference to hammer a point home.
“I was. I’m here to gather information about more than the Montreal mission. I’m interviewing the team about Captain Reed and the possible reasons for his recent decision to…take a break from his responsibilities.”
Zach. She carefully schooled her expression. Zach Reed had been her team’s Army liaison since they’d formed. He’d been sent in to try to find the team’s weakness, but he’d become a part of them. Or at least it seemed so. Now she knew he had more secrets than she could have imagined.
Forgive me. Take care of him.
She hadn’t told anyone about the text she’d found on her personal cell the morning after the Montreal op. She had no idea why Zach would send her a message like that. She had to figure he’d screwed up and used the word him instead of them.
Which him could he be talking about?
“However, I can certainly do the work I need to do back in DC since if I decide the team needs a long time out, everything touching the Huisman operation can transfer to another team,”
Lena pronounced.
Uncle Sean had a freezer. He ran several restaurants, and those had plenty of places to stash a body.
Fuck. She was going to have to go along with whatever the shrink wanted. “Fine. Do you want me to start at the beginning? It was a beautiful day in North Texas when a helicopter decided to take out my cousin’s wedding. Not the helicopter itself, of course, but the assholes inside it.”
A long huff came from the doctor. “What were you doing in the bar, Kala?”
Yep, this was going to be an ass kicking. And she’d already gotten such a heinous one. This op sucked. “I went to the hotel where the assets were staying.”
She didn’t need to mention that the assets had been her cousin, Carys Taggart, and Aidan O’Donnell, one of her fiancés. Tristan was the other. They’d gotten involved in the seemingly never-ending mission to prove Dr. Emmanuel Huisman was the head of an international terrorist organization devoted to burning down the world. Carys and Aidan were doctors, and Aidan had been invited to a conference by Huisman himself. “The comms units we were using had gone out, and the big boss decided to send a couple of us there to ensure everything was all right.”
The comms units had been turned off because the threesome had been having a knock-down, drag-out fight that led to some serious sex. She’d been in the audience for a bunch of the fight but had definitely been happy to leave before the sex.
Sex. Even the word was hard to deal with. It had been oddly easy to ignore sex for years, but then Cooper McKay had come back into her life, and now it was on her brain again.
“You were acting as a bodyguard?”
Kala nodded. “Yes, but you should understand I didn’t leave my charge without protection. She was with Tristan the whole time.”
“And you were in the bar.”
Lena managed to put a lot of judgment into those words.
Kala sighed. “Yes, and that is where Tasha and Zach found me. Carys joined me while Tasha and Zach went up to the hotel room to deal with the comms units. We talked for a while, and then I realized the drink I’d been watching the bartender pour was somehow drugged. I watched him open it, so he must have had the sedative already in the bottle.”
“All right. I won’t go into why you shouldn’t be drinking on the job.”
“It could have been water,”
Kala argued. “I wasn’t drunk, and let me say if you want spies to not drink… Well, you’re not going to have any spies.”
Lena’s lips actually quirked up. “Truth. So the bartender drugged your drink and you and Carys were taken to Toronto.”
They’d been taken to hell. Absolute fucking hell.
She thought she’d gotten over what that asshole Dimitry had—or hadn’t—done to her. Well, she thought she’d come to terms with it. If she’d gotten over it, maybe she wouldn’t be a twenty-seven-year-old… She couldn’t even think the word. It was pathetic. It was easier when she could convince herself she wasn’t a sexual being. Not everyone was.
“Yes. I woke up bound to an exam table,”
she said, her tone bland. “Dr. Huisman was there. He intended to use Carys to get Tristan to tell him where he could find the bombmaker he’s been looking for.”
“And he brought you along for the ride?”
“The idiots he hired mistook me for Tasha. All they’d been told was to pick up Carys and Tasha. I was with her. They thought I was her.”
She kept telling herself she was lucky because if they hadn’t thought she was Tash, she would likely be dead.
But she could still remember what happened next, and there had been moments during that time with Huisman that death would have been acceptable.
“Why would they want Tasha?”
Lena asked.
“Because Huisman knew Zach worked with Tristan on The Jester project. Tristan had been working a long-range undercover project. He took over the identity of an arms dealer known as The Jester. Zach worked with him. The rumor on the Dark Web was that The Jester knew how to contact the bombmaker Huisman wants to work with. I don’t know why the dude doesn’t like give out cards or have an Etsy shop or something. He’s not a great businessman. He doesn’t know how important discoverability is.”
“So why Tasha?”
Her humor was utterly lost on this woman. “Because somehow he knew Zach had feelings for her once. He thought he would have Tristan’s girlfriend and Zach’s one true love.”
Luckily the fucker hadn’t been completely up to date since Zach had made a serious connection with her cousin Devi Taggart before he’d decided to go AWOL.
Or he’d played her. He hadn’t been able to get close to one Taggart so he found another.
She hated the suspicions playing through her head. She’d trusted Zach. She’d gotten close to him. Zach had been the one to coax her to join him and Cooper many times. The last few Devi had joined in on, and it had felt like…like a stupid double date. Like they were all normal people having fun with their significant others and their friends and family.
It was one more lie the world told her.
Lena nodded as though pleased with the answer. Probably because everyone had given her the same one. “Did you talk to Dr. Huisman?”
“Yes. He monologued like a motherfucker. I mean it. That dude likes to listen to the sound of his own voice.”
“Was this before or after he tortured you?”
She hadn’t been able to move. She’d woken up on the table and been in the exact same place she’d been when she was fifteen. Wondering what had been done to her body while she’d been completely helpless. She’d sought out knowledge, trying to figure out where she ached, and she hadn’t been able to move at all. “He used an experimental paralytic on me. I believe the guys in R&D got my blood work from the hospital later on. They were hoping there would be traces of the drugs he used on me.”
“Drugs? You’re referring to the sedative and the paralytic?”
“I’m talking about the torture drug,”
Kala said, keeping her tone as no-nonsense as possible. “He told me it’s supposed to make it feel like my body was on fire from the inside out. The paralytic meant I couldn’t fight, and he didn’t need to hold me down.”
“And did it?”
Kala shrugged. “I’ve had worse.”
She’d screamed and screamed until one of the assholes gagged her, and then she’d screamed but it was a useless, futile thing. She’d burned from the inside out and prayed it would be over. At some point she’d lost consciousness.
At some point her heart had stopped.
She’d come to and the Canadian operative who’d been working with them had been pumping her chest. CPR. He’d given her CPR.
Not today, Maggie. Not fucking today.
Ben Parker was in love with her sister. He’d thought he was saying the words to her, and in that moment she would have done a lot to have him morph into Cooper. To have Cooper staring at her, tears in his eyes, praying she would live.
“Kala,”
Lena admonished.
“It’s a very effective torture technique. I would have likely told them anything, except of course I couldn’t stop screaming. He needs to refine it. There’s a happy medium. Also, the paralytic wore off before the torture drug did, and then I couldn’t control my body. I’m pretty sure I have a bunch of nerve damage. All in all, not how I wanted to spend that particular day.”
Lena’s expression went soft. “I’m sure it wasn’t. Kala, I’ve read your file. You’re brave and reckless and still young. You’re already a hell of an operative, but this is the kind of event that can break a person.”
“I’m not that breakable.”
She wished the woman in front of her was more like Kai Ferguson. He’d been her therapist after the first kidnapping. God, she had to number them at this point. Kai had taken her to a rage room and given her a baseball bat. And then when she’d destroyed to her heart’s content, tears and screams included, he’d taken her for ice cream and they’d talked. Really talked.
She wasn’t fifteen anymore. She shouldn’t need to beat the crap out of a bunch of stuff to have a breakthrough.
“Everyone breaks, Kala. Everyone.”
Her father had told her the same thing. “Well, I didn’t have to. My team saved me, and now all I want to do is find Emmanuel Huisman and ensure he can’t do it again.”
She knew better than to put into words what she was going to do to the doctor.
Make him hurt for days. She would find that drug and see how he liked it. Or she could go old school. There was something pure about putting real physical work behind the torture. The drug seemed like a cheat. She would slowly eviscerate him and feed him his own testicles.
Lena closed her notebook. “I’m not going to get much more out of you, am I?”
“There’s not much more to get.”
She certainly wasn’t going to tell the good doctor that when she passed out, she’d had the dream again. The one that followed her since she was fifteen.
In the dream she was always sitting and waiting. It could be on a park bench, the sun warm on her face. At the kitchen table in the house she grew up in. On the bean bag in teenage Cooper’s room where they would make out and she would get so hot she didn’t care about anything but him. And the door would open and she would know it was her mom.
Then Julia Ennis would walk through, the ghost she couldn’t quite shake. She would start walking in as Charlotte Taggart and morph into Julia. A reminder that there were always two sides to every coin. And Kala knew which one she was.
“Tell me one true thing and I’ll close the book on this part of the investigation,”
Lena offered. “I still need to profile Captain Reed, but I’ll clear you for duty if you can be honest with me about anything. What were you thinking as you lay there?”
“I thought it hurt. I thought I wanted to die.”
Both truths, but not the truth. What the fuck was she so afraid of? Her father did this. Her mom still went to a survivors of domestic abuse group from time to time. She was so tired. “I wished I’d been better. Seen more. Done more. I wished I’d…I wished I’d been in love and had someone love me back.”
Lena nodded. “All right. This is done, but you should know I think you should see someone regularly, and I’m not talking about just for checkups. I won’t force you, but I am recommending it.”
Her father could get her out of it. “Fine. I can sit in a chair and stare a couple of times a week.”
“It takes more than that,”
Lena replied. “I’m going to ask you a question and you don’t have to answer. Think about it, and if you come to a conclusion that leads you back here, well, I’m in this office for at least another few weeks.”
“Shoot.”
She wouldn’t be coming back.
“Is this how you want to live? I’m not talking about the job. You’re excellent at the job. I’m talking about the walls you have up. I’m talking about the regrets you had as you lay there thinking you would die. Many people find an experience like that can jump-start a change they need in their lives.”
“What kind of change?”
“For you, I believe it’s the acceptance that you are worthy of what you feared you missed. It’s the acceptance that you’re lovable. If you don’t believe it, why would anyone else?”
She didn’t want to admit it, but the doc had her there. How many times had she asked the question? How often had she lied and pretended to be something she wasn’t so Cooper wouldn’t see she was still a scared girl who had no idea what happened to her?
Was it time to put it aside and see what she could be?
Was it time to put Cooper out of his misery? She knew she couldn’t be what he needed. Cooper McKay would want a sweet wife and a picket fence, and she wouldn’t ever fit into that life, but when she’d lain there praying for death, the only thing she’d wanted more had been to know what it meant to be with him.
If she did it, offered herself to him again, he could be free, too.
“Kala, are you okay? I have some tissues.”
Damn it. She hated Manny Huisman. And all the stupid couples around her who made her freaking long. She didn’t long. It was a dumb word.
Her father had found her mom, had forgiven her and let her love him. In his less sarcastic moments, he credited therapy for all of it.
She wouldn’t ever have a real life with Cooper, but maybe they could have something, something she could hold on to when he found the life he’d been born to lead.
But she wouldn’t if she didn’t find a way to change even the smallest bit.
“I don’t need a freaking tissue.”
She stood, wiping the tears. “But I’ll make another appointment. I won’t be happy about it.”
Lena stood, her lips almost curling into a smile, but she seemed to know that might not be the best move. “I won’t either.”
Kala strode out, wondering if she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life. Or started down a road that might lead her home.