11. Easton
Easton
Gwen is still tethered to me, fingers buried in my shirt, as Wyatt attempts to speak but keeps failing.
“I thought . . .” Wyatt sounds like he’s battling more than just tears. A whole world of emotion. I can relate. I experienced half a dozen in the space of seconds since I laid eyes on Gwen tonight.
“Is Gwen okay?” Natasha asks in the background. Her voice is small under the low hum and chatter of what sounds like a plane cabin.
“I’m, um, s—safe. I wasn’t hurt. Drugged, but not hurt.”
Regardless, she still needs to have a full medical workup done, but I can’t exactly help with that since it’s not my area of expertise. I can slit a man’s throat, but use a needle to draw someone’s blood? I’d probably puke. Makes total sense.
“I don’t understand why they brought me to where Zoey and Easton happened to be, but thank God they were here.”
Thank God, yes. Coincidence? No. I rub Gwen’s back in slow circles, wishing I could do more, like absorb her pain. Every last ounce of it.
“We’re in the air now. Heading to Brisbane.” Carter speaks this time, and his tone remains steady and measured. He may act like he’s fine, but I know he’s secretly been a mess. Not that he’ll cry in front of anyone other than his wife.
But how in the hell do they happen to be heading to Australia?
“We’ll redirect to where you’re at and get clearance to land,” he continues. “We’re about three hours out. You’re at the safe house, I take it?”
“We are,” Zoey answers for me.
I remain locked on to Gwen, doing whatever I can to keep her calm. I went from a killer to a comforter, without much room for a transitionary period.
“Jezebel got away,” Zoey drops the shit news, “but we took down most of the men on the compound before escaping.” She leans against the wall, one boot braced up like she needs something solid behind her.
“And she got away with my rig. My, uh, laptop, I mean. And my—my password, too,” Gwen stutters. “I—I had no choice. She, um . . .”
The hotel. I almost forgot about that horrific tragedy with everything that’s happened tonight. She’ll crush herself beneath guilt for it, too, and I can’t let her do that.
“I assume you all heard about the explosion at the hotel by now,” she whispers, lifting her eyes to the ceiling as I drop my hands to hold her arms again, “but that’s why she has my—”
“Explosion?” I’m not sure who said that. Carter, maybe?
“Jezebel blew up the hotel in Dubai.” I drop the news so she doesn’t have to. “A warning to Gwen that she’s willing to kill as many people as need be to get the password to her laptop.”
Gwen starts to cry again, slow, racking sobs making her entire body shudder, and I don’t know what to say or do. All I can think is to pin her tight to my chest, ignoring the sharp, stinging pain as she buries her fingertips into my back.
“Nothing happened to the hotel,” Carter announces after a full thirty seconds of all of us rightfully losing it. “I have someone with eyes on it now. Just spoke to them, and they shared their view over FaceTime. It’s fine.”
Gwen jerks upright, letting go of my back, and I can breathe again.
“But I saw it happen with my own eyes. She showed me the timer, and I—I couldn’t save them. She was going to blow up my brother’s hospital in London next if I didn’t give her the password.”
“I’m positive. The hotel is fine.” Carter’s news is what we need. Fuck do we ever.
“Oh my God,” she cries, shaking in my arms all over again, but this time, I assume from relief. “She—she tricked me. I’d never have . . .”
“It’s okay. Shhh.” I hug her again, vaguely aware of the fact my legs are starting to lose feeling with us in this position, but I’d sooner lose a limb than budge. “Not your fault.”
“He’s right, listen to him,” Carter says.
“How do you happen to be so close by?” Zoey asks while Gwen takes time to recover from the news innocent people didn’t die.
Thank God for that. Now Gwen won’t have the weight of any lives lost hanging over her shoulders. Not that it was her fault, but she’d have seen it that way.
“Julian helped us get a lock on a possible location.” Carter’s response has my spine going straight, and my hand on Gwen’s back stops stroking her for a second.
The mere mention of that man’s name shouldn’t disturb me, and yet, it does.
“Hey, Gwen.” Julian’s also on the plane, so that’s fantastic. “Bloody relieved to hear you’re okay.” He was born a Brit like Gwen, but unlike her, he doesn’t have an accent.
“Thank you for helping.” Gwen’s voice remains so damn small, it breaks something in me when she talks. “Please tell me you already—”
“We saw they took your bag, and Juliette confirmed your rig was in it. We couldn’t get a hit on it, but we already initiated lockdown protocols. Revoked your encryption keys, logins, VPN certificates, API tokens, and . . .” He continues sharing more tech-y shit that goes over my head.
“Oh thank God.” Gwen lets go of a deep, warm breath that caresses my skin.
“We’ve burned everything that was on your network. Aliases. Safe houses. Moved assets. Pulled people off grid. I personally severed any trust between your laptop and the world.” Thank you, Natasha, for using language I actually understand.
Before Gwen, if someone mentioned a “rig” to me, I thought they were talking about an eighteen-wheeler. Or the gear I wore over my chest on missions—the kind with ammo packed inside it.
“We just can’t do a full drive wipe without it going online”—Julian does one of those ahem-coughs as if embarrassed for explaining that—“which, of course, you already know.”
“She’s going to clone the drive offline, but she’ll expect you all to burn everything, so she’s gotta be after one of my tools or programs. Changing the locks won’t matter if she’s walked off with the blueprints.
” She tenses against me. “My main box at The Sapphire is my vault server, but my travel rig is what I use on ops, which means it’s already pointed at the world like a loaded gun.
The things she can still do with it . . . ”
“We’ll worry about that later. We did all that we could do for now.” I’m on the same page as Natasha.
The last thing I want or need is Gwen feeling guilty about something else she can’t control. And no, no parallels to my helo crash, that was different.
“We did manage to flag two guests at the hotel in Dubai as possible matches for two of the masked men who took you,” Julian shares.
“A few things stood out to us about them, and they had the same body composition as two of the masked men. They had their eyes on you at the bar the night before you were taken as well. Something was off about them, so I ran them through my program. Turns out they checked in with aliases. And they were both in Brisbane before they went to Dubai, which is why we were on our way there before you called.” And now it finally makes sense why they’re so close to us.
“It was our only lead, so we had to take it.”
“I’m so sorry. It, um, looks like they had eyes on us from the beginning, and I hate that I missed that,” Natasha says, and I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“I bet even those guys by the pool I thought were there to protect us were working for whoever took you, too. We’re looking into their backgrounds now. ”
“Don’t you dare blame yourself for that.” Gwen has a lot of practice with that line, and something tells me she’ll be tossing it around quite a bit more.
“I sh—should have had bodyguards with you.” Hearing Wyatt stutter just might fuck me up, not gonna lie.
I’m doing my best not to lose it myself, which is something I’d prefer not to do. Holloway men only cry when a dog dies in a movie. Even then, we fake “something being in our eyes.”
“No one is to blame, you hear me?” Gwen could win an award at back-seating her own feelings if it means helping others. “Just tell me Juliette’s okay, and no one else got hurt after I was taken.” Case in point.
If my sister wasn’t fine, Carter would’ve already broken the news to me, but I’ll be happy to hear the words.
“She’s good,” my brother-in-law takes over as Wyatt, no doubt, continues to unravel.
It makes sense Constantine would join the mission. Also, I’ll take hearing his voice over Julian’s any day. And damn, I really need to stop this shit. It’s not hate I have for the guy, it’s that green-eyed-asshole jealousy, isn’t it? What the hell is wrong with me?
“Any chance the masked guy who hit my wife is—”
“He’s dead,” Gwen interrupts Constantine. “Easton, um, killed him.”
The same guy who almost . . . he’s the one who punched my sister?
“I’d, uh, have enjoyed doing that myself.” Constantine’s quiet for a beat, then clears his throat as if that’ll be enough to dial down his rage.
Holloway men may not cry, but Costa men? Well, from what I can tell, no one lays a hand on their wives without losing that hand, along with a couple other limbs. All of us seem to have that quality in common.
“Send Juliette my love. Tell her I’m sorry she was hurt.” I’m shocked I manage to get those words out.
I resume rubbing Gwen’s back, not sure if it’s to comfort her or myself.
Maybe both. It’s as if I’ve touched her a hundred times before, and it’s the most natural thing in the world for her to be sitting on top of me.
Of course, it’s not, and I have enough sense to know better, but I’ll do whatever she needs until her dad gets here to comfort her himself.
“Will do,” Constantine finally answers back.
“Did, um . . .” Gwen starts in a hesitant tone, “you all tell Grandpa about my rig being taken?”
Natasha’s dad may not be Gwen’s blood, but she told me she slipped and called him Grandfather a few years back, and after seeing the smile on that tough man’s face, she couldn’t help but refer to him as that going forward.