Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
And yup, captivity being one of the key takeaways for Chris as Carter unraveled information. The last thing Chris wanted was to be locked up again. From the assholes on the yacht to the go-fuck-themselves Trott brothers, he was ready for freedom.
Granted, his room was like a suite in a luxury hotel that included a fully stocked closet of random menswear. It was a massive upgrade from the other locations they’d found themselves in over the last two days, but he wasn’t in control, and he hated losing control.
Punching Carter hadn’t come close to appeasing his anger.
Rory’s scars.
The scum of the earth whose vile and atrocious dealings had given Rory cause to go after them in the first place.
The danger she was in now.
All of it.
Blood-boiling anger.
Rory’s beautiful hazel eyes swept over him like a hot caress on his skin, and some of his anger loosened a fraction. A small, one-tenth-of-a-hundredth kind of fraction.
“We’re all connected, which I know sounds crazy, but we are,” Rory said after Carter unraveled the shocking news Rory’s first partner, Jolie, had been Carter’s wife, Rebecca—the partner Rory had spoken about at the campfire.
Did that mean Rory’s list of twenty-five smugglers originally came from Carter?
Did Rebecca steal classified intelligence her husband assumed his wife would never look at?
He’d been a new officer, only a few years in, from what Chris knew.
But that would have been a rookie mistake on Carter’s part to allow that to happen.
And damn, come to think of it, what were the chances both Rory and Rebecca had really been going after the same target back in Cartagena in the first place?
He’d meant to ask that back on the island by the campfire, but his thoughts had been whirling around.
Looked like this was part two of the dizzy ride of information.
“Sit, please.” Rory motioned to the table since Chris was the only one still standing during Carter’s quick bullet point-like confession of “holy shit” moments as to what had gone down in the last three years.
He hesitantly circled the table to sit alongside her. The aroma of the food on the table had his mouth watering on instinct. His hunger pains pissed him off because he didn’t want to have an appetite after hearing Carter speak.
The only thing Chris liked about the man was his dog.
He had to find a way to contact his people.
Let Bravo and the rest of Echo know what was going on.
He’d mapped out the property in his line of sight on the way from his room to the outside dining area and counted the guards.
But he’d been blindfolded from the moment the helo picked them up at sea until they’d arrived at the estate, which made providing his people with a location difficult.
Somewhere in the western half of Puerto Rico was his best guess.
“How are you feeling?” Rory asked Roman, breaking the eerie silence that no one else seemed tempted to cut through. Chris, on the other hand, was inclined to use a big-ass knife to cut through it. Or hell, maybe he’d leave it heavy and thick to lose sight of the prick at the head of the table.
“The men took him to our in-house medic as you demanded,” Carter said before Roman could answer. “He’s fine. I saw to it.”
Rory looked to Roman for confirmation, and he nodded and mouthed, “I’m good.”
“Eat,” Carter said a moment later. “Don’t be stubborn. You’re all starving. I didn’t poison the food.”
Chris was inconveniently out of throttling range of the man. Rory was a buffer between them, which only made his palms itchy with the desire to strike him again.
Chris reached for the wine, swirled it in the glass once to decide whether he was seconds away from getting drugged for the second time in a weekend, then brought it close to his mouth.
Nope, can’t do it. He set the glass back down and side-eyed Rory sitting erect and tense next to him.
But shit. “Let me test the food, then you should eat,” Chris announced, realizing Rory and Harper had to be starving.
Chris hesitantly cut into the full plate of food in front of him and took a bite, which was basically cheesy deliciousness. He chased it down with water, then waited for a reaction.
Carter watched Chris, then Rory lifted her fork, and Harper followed suit.
“You saved us because you need us. Why?” Roman spoke up.
“I need Rory. I’m undecided about the rest of you.” Carter’s attention shot to Chris as if expecting a challenge, and yeah, he’d be getting one.
Chris dropped his fork and slowly stood once again, the legs of the chair scraping across the stone pavers.
“I won’t help you without my team.” Rory’s statement surprised the hell out of Chris and had him looking down at her before he could throw daggers at the man by way of his words.
Team? He liked the way that sounded. The team part. Not so much the helping Carter part. “You want to help this man? Again?” She wasn’t obliged to do what Carter wanted. Chris could get her out of this place. He’d find a way.
She set a hand to his arm and gently tugged, urging him to sit.
“The Italian most likely knows who I am. If we don’t take him down, I may never be safe.
My life and, more importantly, the lives of everyone in my family depend on it.
And”—Rory closed her eyes for a contemplative second—“for Rebecca. We take The Italian down for her. She was trying to do good, same as me.” Her eyes glistened as she peered at Chris, and damn, his heart was going to break.
“You’re not willing to let your family be bait, though, right?” Chris asked.
Rory had given up her mission in order to protect her family. He knew she would never compromise them in any way.
“No, which is why we need to send people I trust to keep an eye on them,” she began, “but since The Italian has probably known about me for years and has yet to make a move, I don’t know what to think.”
“As much as you want to hate me,” Carter began in a calm voice, “you also know you need to work with me.”
“It’s not that I want to hate you, I do hate you, fairly fucking easily.” Chris finally sat again.
“I need to reach out to my people.” Harper peered at Carter, her eyes set on him in a pretty awesome stare-down moment, one Chris hoped she’d win.
But Carter shook his head. “Not until we have a deal.”
“I don’t make deals with the devil,” Chris responded and reached for his food again if only to encourage Rory to fill her stomach.
“It’s a good thing I’m not him,” Carter countered in a low, steady voice.
“And what would Rebecca say to what you’ve done? The man you’ve become?” Harper asked, and Carter’s eyes immediately fell to his plate.
“Rebecca’s dead. She can’t say anything.” Carter looked to the sky, then returned his focus to the table after drawing in a deep pull of air and slowly letting it go.
“How about you fill in the blanks that I am sure you left out of your brief explanation. Start from the beginning,” Harper demanded. She was doing what she did best—searching for clarity, looking at all the angles. Chris was grateful she was more levelheaded than he was right now.
“When my wife died, I had always assumed I was the true target of the so-called home invasion, given my job with the Agency. I mostly dealt with smugglers of all kinds while at the CIA. I figured one of them, probably a high-value target I’d been working to take down, had discovered my identity.
Maybe they killed Rebecca as a warning to me.
Faked the burglary since there had been a string of them in D.C.
to hide the fact they were also searching the house for my files,” he explained, his tone void of emotion now, and Chris was certain he was working hard to make it that way.
But his memories had to be ripping him apart.
Chris hated the guy, but to learn your wife was murdered, then to blame your chosen career as the cause . . . It was something his teammates also feared, a reason they’d tried to avoid falling in love over the years. And now only three of them were still single.
Well, am I single? When he looked at Rory, he sure as hell didn’t feel that way.
“All of this time, even when Santiago admitted to the Agency two weeks ago that he murdered an officer’s wife—he just didn’t yet specify whose wife—I still believed Rebecca died because of me.
” This time, Carter couldn’t prevent the emotion from grabbing hold of his voice.
And for two hot seconds, Chris felt sorry for the guy.
“So, you did ambush the CIA’s transport?” Chris asked since Carter had excluded that pretty important detail in his “briefing” after Chris had punched him.
“My old colleague was one of the men tasked to interrogate Santiago after he was retrieved from El Salvador two weeks ago. Santiago offered to give up the person who hired him to kill the wife of a CIA officer two and a half years ago, but only if he could return home instead of winding up in a CIA black site.”
“Let me guess, the Agency wouldn’t deal,” Harper said, and she knew a thing or two about the CIA since she’d been an officer before joining the teams.
Carter looked at Harper and nodded solemnly.
“No, but my friend put two and two together that it was my wife Santiago was talking about. He supplied me with the transport details so I could get my hands on Santiago before he got locked up. He’d been a friend of Rebecca’s as well, and he wanted the son of a bitch to pay. ”
Chris blinked at the news. He’d known Carter had Rory followed, she’d told him as much. Rory had been inside the same compound in El Salvador before Chris and his men had grabbed Santiago. And the room with the slithering snakes came back to mind.
And maybe he knew that, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t processed it until this moment, hearing the words from Carter.