17. Adrian
SEVENTEEN
Nataliya dove for the phone. I didn’t miss the sheer panic on her face: it wasn’t time for her nightly call with Elias yet, and so far, calls at any other time hadn’t meant anything good.
“Sakharok,” she crooned as she answered, obviously ready for bad news. “How are you?” I couldn’t hear Elias’s side of the conversation, but I watched her face. The smile that curved her mouth was soft and real and wonderful. “Are you behaving for Sam and Owen?”
They chatted back and forth for a moment, and I got up and cleaned myself up in the bathroom. By the time I got back, Nataliya had tugged on her clothes. She was seated on the edge of the bed, and I didn’t miss the way she gripped the side of the mattress. Her knuckles were nearly white under the pressure of it…but she didn’t look upset. Instead, she looked elated.
“Really? Can he really get started?” she asked. She’s talking to Sam now, I thought. “Thank you. Thank you so much!” After a few moments, she hung up, and then she was in my arms again. “Sam said he’s ready to start treatment! He passed all of her tests; he meets all of the benchmarks.”
I held her close. “That’s amazing,” I said against her hair. “I knew he could do it.”
“He’s been so brave this whole time,” Nataliya said.
I nodded. “He deserves all of the good things.”
A look skittered over her face, and she was suddenly not as relaxed in my arms. “You’re right,” she said and pulled away gently. “He does deserve everything that I have to give him. Every bit of my focus and attention.”
It didn’t take a genius to realize she regretted letting herself get distracted with me, and I couldn’t even blame her. Aside from some temporary pleasure, what did I have to offer her, really? Why would she want to be with me? She had a lot on her plate already, and my job wasn’t the most stable. I was always running from one place to another.
You could give it up. That was what Gabe had said. I didn’t have to be leading the charge into every dangerous situation that called to me…but I didn’t know how to be anything else.
“Let me look at the files. I can send whatever needs to be decrypted to Drake,” Nataliya suggested, fishing the thumb drive out of her jeans. “By the time Gabe and Zach get here, hopefully we’ll have a better idea of what’s going on.”
“Sure,” I said. “Sounds great.”
Nataliya set up her laptop at the desk, much nicer than the one at the motel, and booted it up. I watched her pull files off the thumb drive, and then her fingers flew over the keyboard, eyes flicking back and forth.
She snorted after a few minutes of silence. “What’s up?” I asked, coming to stand at her side.
She looked up at me. “For a security company headed by a paranoid man, Hayes did shockingly little to make these files secure.”
“Really?”
“I mean, they’re encrypted,” Nataliya said, “but Anton made it harder for me to get into his files, and he wanted me to figure it out. This—” She gestured to the screen. “It’s almost pitiful in comparison.” She shook her head in disgust and went back to work, mumbling to herself as she did. “Not like I wanted it to be harder,” she grumbled, “but really, idiotka—have some self-respect.” I settled myself back on the bed and tried not to smile as I watched her. I was just telling myself that it wouldn’t be a good idea to get further involved with her…but I couldn’t look away. She looked so goddamn beautiful. Calm down, man, I told myself. She was just working.
It didn’t take Drake long at all to decrypt the files and send them back to me. Fear pooled in my stomach as I read through the email I’d just opened. It was clearly from Ian Hayes to my brother. Anton had helped him to organize the sale of AR-15s, and the message was a reply to one where Anton had given Hayes information on the shipping. Smuggling, I thought grimly. I knew that Anton was a criminal. Even if I’d never known the details, what we’d found on his cloud account was damning.
But there was something worse about things being so clearly spelled out.
“So this proves he was smuggling weapons,” Adrian said, reading over my shoulder.
“And more,” I replied. “Just like you said. Antiquities, drugs…”
“People?” Adrian asked, stepping back as he checked something on his phone—probably a message from Gabe or Zach.
I scrolled through more files, and my stomach churned. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that’s here too.”
I felt Adrian as he came back up behind me, and then his hand was on my shoulder. “You can take a break,” he said gently. “You don’t have to keep reading.”
I turned away from the screen, and in need of comfort, I leaned up and brushed his mouth with mine. “I can do this,” I said.
Adrian pulled me out of the chair, and I sighed when he wrapped me in his arms. It wasn’t a good idea, to seek comfort in his arms again, but it felt good to have him wrapped around me. It made the violent churning in my gut calm a little.
We stood, entwined, for a moment, but ultimately, we needed to go through the files. Once it was done, Adrian could do whatever he wanted with the information, and I could go home to Elias. Adrian seemed to understand that, because he stepped away after a minute, pulling up a chair so he could sit down beside me.
Together, we kept scrolling through the files, and it didn’t take long for Adrian to stiffen in his seat. “Stop.” He put his hand over the mouse and scrolled back up. “Read that.”
I did, and my chest hurt for him. Hayes had records of the movements and current locations for a number of US military groups. That on its own might not be suspicious—after all, he worked directly with the military in some of his operations, and it made sense that he’d know where some troops were stationed. But from the way the information was arranged…
“Are these what I think they are?” I asked.
“Hayes has been gathering details on US military operations and selling them to the highest bidder,” he said, sounding strained. ”Look at this—the date of our mission in the RoW. Hayes made a trade. He told this gun smuggler where he could find stockpiles of military weapons…in exchange for the smuggler and his men attacking our unit during the extraction and making sure Anton didn’t get out alive. He used US weapons to buy off the men who gunned my team down.”
This wasn’t entirely surprising information, obviously, but it didn’t answer the one question I knew Adrian had: who had told Hayes about the mission to extract Anton in the first place? We kept digging, and my eyes went wide as I opened the next file.
Beside me, Adrian had stopped breathing.
“This can’t be right,” he said.
On the screen, there were communications between Hayes and multiple high-ranking members of the US Department of Defense, including more than one Navy admiral. Hayes was reminding the members about their agreement: they would feed Hayes the information that he wanted and keep lobbying to continue his contract with the military, and he would keep the information that he knew to himself. It didn’t say what he knew, but the threat was clear.
“Adrian.”
He shook his head. “Tell me this doesn’t say what I think it says,” he said, and his voice was harsher, sharper. The expression on his face—a mix of horror and anger—hurt my chest.
I wrapped my arm around him and held him to me. “It’s going to be okay,” I said.
He didn’t relax. “This goes against everything I believe in,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. “I enlisted in the military the second I could, and I only left because it was the only way I could think of to get justice for Cuddy. I believed in the military—believed that the people whose orders I followed were on the side of justice.” He reached out and shut the laptop. “That’s…that can’t be right.”
I didn’t want to call him naive. He didn’t deserve that after such a nasty shock…but it was hard to bite my tongue. Maybe it was being born in a country that largely recognized its own corruption, maybe it was the unrest, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn the RoW was doing things like this all the way up the ranks into the highest reaches of the government and the military.
But Adrian didn’t need to hear any of that right now. Instead, I kept my arm around him as we opened the laptop again and read further into that particular file. It only got worse. A US congressman, a Representative Jackson Hilty, was also on the take from the Hayes Group. Hilty had lobbied hard for the Hayes Group over the years, constantly talking up the advantages of sending in private security instead of US soldiers—ensuring that Hayes had access to an endless pool of unstable situations all over the globe that he could manipulate to his own ends, cozying up to criminal elements for fun and profit, and stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down.
Anger was vibrating from Adrian’s body. “What can I do for you?” I asked. “What do you need?”
“Besides wiping Ian Hayes off the face of the earth?” he shot back.
I nudged his shoulder. “Besides that,” I said.
He scrubbed a hand over his face, frustrated beyond measure. “Nataliya?—”
I kissed him. He was rigid for a moment, and then he groaned, and his hands sank into my hair. Adrian pulled me onto his lap so that I sat astride his hips. His hands ran up and down my back, squeezed my ass, cupped my breast. It was like he couldn’t decide what he wanted, but everything he was doing was driving me crazy.
I moved from his lips to his neck, feeling the buzz of his moans against my lips as much as I heard them. This is a bad idea, I thought as I bit at his pulse point softly. We couldn’t keep falling into each other like this, using sex as a narcotic to dull our pain—but if it was wrong, why did it have to feel so good? No man could set fire to my nerves like Adrian; no one had even come close.
Adrian took hold of me beneath my thighs, picking me up as he stood. “Bed?” he mumbled between kisses.
I nodded. “Bed.”
He carried me across the room, and I bounced as he dropped me to the already mussed mattress. I watched as he yanked his t-shirt over his head; my eyes raked down his chest, and he smirked. “I like that look,” he said, and I shivered at how deep his voice had gotten.
“What look?” I asked.
He smirked. “Like you need me to touch you.”
“I do need you to touch me,” I said and sat up. “But I need to touch you too.” I reached out and dragged him down to me. We kissed, and my hands traveled the length of his torso. He groaned into my mouth.
Someone pounding at the door startled us apart, and Adrian was off me in an instant, grabbing at his shirt and the gun he’d placed on the bedside table. “Get down,” he bit back at me, motioning for me to get on the floor on the other side of the bed. I followed his direction and knelt so that the mattress blocked me from whoever come through the door.
I heard Adrian open the door, and then a sigh. “What the hell took y’all so long?” he barked. “Nataliya, you can get up.”
I stood, still a touch cautious, but I relaxed when I saw Gabe and Zach. “You made it back.”
Zach didn’t look thrilled. “Finally.” He gestured at Gabe. “This asshole circled the city during peak traffic.”
“For safety!” Gabe pointed out.
“We weren’t being followed,” Zach said. “I’ll bet Adrian didn’t drive for nearly four fucking hours.”
We, in fact, had not, but neither Adrian nor I was going to point that out, not when Zach looked like he was a second away from smoke coming out of his ears. Gabe held up the takeout bag in his hand. “We did bring dinner, though.”
Zach snorted. “It’s probably cold by now.” He set his eyes on me and Adrian. “Tell me good news,” he said. “Please.”
Adrian glanced at me, and I could see that whatever good mood I was able to work him into disappeared in an instant. “Well, we have good and bad news.”
“Good news first,” Zach said.
“We have a mountain of evidence that could put Hayes away for a very long time,” Adrian said.
“Bad news?” Gabe asked cautiously.
“We might have uncovered a conspiracy within the Department of Defense,” I said. “And Congress.”
“Might have?”
“Definitely have.”
Zach swore, and Gabe put the food down, half-ready to punch something. “God damn it,” he said, and Adrian wholeheartedly agreed with him.