Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
“Stack.”
Charlie team formed along the latch side of the door, shoulder to shoulder, muzzles angled—every man knowing exactly which slice of the house was his.
Ash took point.
The house was dark and sealed. Curtains drawn. No movement.
Chickie set the charge on the door and waited for Con’s nod to detonate.
Con gave the signal.
The charge thudded, and the door blew inward. They were inside in under five seconds.
Ash entered through smoke and splintered wood, clearing the left as the team flowed in behind him. They moved swift and silent, boots barely audible on the old floors.
“Stairs clear.”
“Kitchen clear.”
Ash zoned out of his body and let muscle memory take control. But when he turned a corner and saw the door at the end of the hall stood open, his blood ran colder.
He turned his head and waited for Con’s call. An open door usually meant they could expect shots fired.
Con gave a hand signal, and Ash moved forward in a silent glide. When he reached the door, he scanned the room through the crack. Then pushed through.
What he saw had his chest going tight.
Cipher stood in the center of the room, waiting.
Ash felt the team fill the gaps behind him.
For half a second, no one moved.
Their weapons snapped up in unison. Red dots climbed the terrorist’s chest.
Cipher looked at them, a calculating expression on his face. But he knew he was finished.
And Ash saw the acceptance in his eyes.
Slowly…deliberately…Cipher reached for his weapon at his side.
“Don’t,” Ash warned. If he made a move for his weapon, they’d have to neutralize him.
Cipher’s jaw shifted. It wasn’t fear or defiance.
It was a choice.
His fingers closed around the grip of his gun.
“Take the shot, Charlie 8.”
Ash squeezed the trigger.
Cipher dropped before he could pull the weapon.
The entire room seemed to hold its breath as Ash stepped over the body, kicking the gun aside. His pulse was an even drumbeat in his ears.
His senses prickled. Ellory was close.
If she was hurt, or fuck, worse—
He didn’t let himself finish that thought.
Con gave the order for two men to take care of the body, but Ash was already out the door. A hand on his back indicated Sinner was on his six.
Two other teams of two continued searching the house. When he came up against a closed door, Ash reached out and tested the knob. Slicing a look at Sinner, he signaled for him to open it.
He held up a hand, flashing his fingers in a countdown.
Sinner shoved the door open. Ash cleared the threshold with his weapon up—and stopped dead.
Ellory stood in the center of the room in nothing but pale lace and bare skin.
He felt air fill his lungs. She was alive and on her feet, which was everything.
A man had his arms locked around her, and Ash had his weapon trained on him before his brain caught up with what his eyes were seeing—that she was holding on to him too.
At the sound of their entry, the pair broke apart. Ellory lifted her head and he saw her face, tear-streaked and the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life.
A cry burst out. “Angelo!” She stumbled forward, and he rushed to her. She reached for him with both hands and he caught them. That was when he felt it—the wrong angle of her thumbs, the swelling already starting at the joints.
Jesus Christ. His jaw locked.
Later. He had another issue to address first.
“Who are you?” Ash didn’t look away from the man. Tall, muscled but gaunt. His eyes were sunken and his hair and beard long and unkempt.
She swung back to the man beside her, and Ash caught the look on her face. Like a kid seeing Santa Claus for the first time, an enormous emotion she could barely contain.
“Angelo.” Her voice broke. “Meet my brother, Archer.”
He studied the man again. He’d seen the effects of torture, and Archer wore the hollowed-out mark of what had been done to him in this house.
But his eyes were clear and the set of his jaw was the same as Ellory’s.
Into his comms, he said, “I found her. Safe. And another civilian.”
He looked at Archer. “You okay?”
He gave a single nod, indicating he was functional, not fine. Ash understood the difference without needing it explained.
Only then did he allow himself to pull Ellory into his arms. She pressed into his length, trembling and chilled.
“Sinner,” he grated to his backup.
“I’ll make sure Archer gets out safe.”
When Ash lifted Ellory, she buried her face in his chest and let him carry her out of that place.
In another room, her captor was being zipped into a body bag.
A man who’d terrorized many, including those associated with this team.
The mass destruction of bombings and the annihilation of the entire Blackout Echo team.
He’d killed thousands to mete out punishment for the death of his mother in Syria.
As he carried Ellory out of the house, her skin pebbled with goose bumps at the cold air.
“Angelo…”
“I got you. You’re safe. No one is ever going to hurt you again.”
“Cipher—”
“He’s dead.”
He felt her still at that information.
“You’re sure?”
The incident replayed in his head like a movie reel—Cipher reaching for his weapon, knowing damn well that he couldn’t fight his way out of a room full of SEALs.
“I’m sure.” His voice was a rasp.
He reached the van and opened the back doors, steadying her with a hand as she climbed in. He located a blanket in their supplies and wrapped it around her shoulders. She was shaking harder from the drop of adrenaline, and he gathered her close to share his body heat.
He’d give her the world if he could. He’d find a way to pull the moon and stars out of the heavens if she asked.
After her shaking subsided a little, he examined her hands properly.
His stomach sank.
“Talk to me.” His tone was quiet and low.
“We were handcuffed. We had to dislocate our thumbs to slip the cuffs.” Her voice was shockingly steady. But when she dropped her chin to glance at her hands, he stopped her with a knuckle beneath her jaw.
“Archer put his back in. Then helped me get free. But…”
He searched her eyes for a long moment, not even trying to hide what he was feeling because she’d see through it. She always saw him.
Mason appeared at the van door. In a blink, he clocked the situation with Ellory’s thumbs and started forward, prepared to use his skills as a medic.
Ash held up a hand. “I got her.”
Mason backed off without a word.
Ash sat in the van and lifted her onto his lap. She twisted her face into his neck as he worked fast, because the faster he did it, the sooner it would be over.
The small sound she made when he slipped the joint into place—first one hand, then the other—cost him more than he could put into words.
After it was finished, she succumbed to her emotions, and he held her through it all with his mouth pressed to her hair until her breathing evened out.
Suddenly, she made another noise—this one a rough squeak.
She threw herself off his lap and barely cleared the van before she folded over and was sick in the gravel. He held her hair and kept his hand on her back as she dragged in gulps of air.
When it was over, she straightened. He glanced down at what she’d produced.
“There’s the tracker.”
“Oh god,” she whimpered.
Mason, who hadn’t gone far, issued a deadpan, “I’ll bag it.”
Ellory groaned. “In another situation, that would be funny.”
But as she said it, Ash looked up to see Con and Steele emerging from the front door of the house with the body bag between them. They lay it on the ground by the porch to be loaded into another vehicle and taken away.
That was Cipher. That was the end of it.
Ash stood in the cold Pennsylvania dark with Ellory and absorbed that it was finished. Not satisfying. Just done. It didn’t feel like much of a win, but it was closure.
For all of them.
Then Sinner walked out of the house with Archer beside him. When Ellory spotted him, she let out a cry. Ash tucked her against his side, wrapped in the blanket, as her brother crossed the yard to the van.
Ellory reached over and took his hand.
Headlights panned across the shadowy house, over the black lump on the ground in front of it, and then a dark vehicle pulled in.
It took just moments for the authorities Con had called to take away the body of a mass killer and just as long for the team, with Ellory and Archer, to pile into the van.
The chopper was waiting in the field two miles out, rotors already turning. Ash kept his hand at Ellory’s back the whole way across the ground, feeling her lean into his touch, that small unconscious shift that told him how much she trusted him.
Thank god he hadn’t let her down.
He got her up into the bird first with Archer behind, and he swung in after them. When they were all loaded, the noise drowned everything in a roar that shut off conversation and left everyone alone in their own heads whether they wanted it or not.
Ash didn’t want it. Didn’t want to think about what could have happened tonight. What he could have lost.
With her tucked against his side, he studied her hands, motionless in her lap. The swelling had spread, and she’d need real medical attention once they reached base.
He looked at Archer across the cabin.
He stared out the window at the dark landscape dropping away below them. His jaw was working slightly, the way a man’s jaw worked when he was processing things too large and too recent to make any sense yet.
He was thin in a way that wasn’t just recent weight loss. It was sustained deprivation from months of the body eating itself to keep the mind running.
He’d been in that house a while. Possibly all thirteen months.
There would be time for questions later. Right now, the man needed food and warmth and the relief of a door that could lock between himself and the world. Ash could provide all of that within the hour.
He turned back to the window and let the noise blank his mind until the lights of the base appeared below them.