Chapter 30
Cold hit Cara the second she stepped out of the guesthouse, and took her breath with it. Past six, by her watch, though the bright sun gave no sign of it. She'd have locked Owen in a room if she could, but the colloquium had a reception in an hour.
Not attending would give their Neptune watchers an all-too-clear heads-up. Normal was the only cover left, so she walked Owen straight back toward the people watching him.
She wasn't walking him alone. Gabe was out ahead, hands loose, reading the street like he'd laid it out himself.
Wade trailed the same distance back. Skye drifted wide to the right, working the angles Cara couldn't, and the channel murmured low and steady in her ear — Tom and Reagan at the guesthouse with eyes on every borrowed camera in town, David and Sophie already inside the hotel, an hour early, mingling.
"Public rooms read clean," Sophie said, somewhere warm and loud with small talk. "Lobby, bar, the long gallery. Nobody who pings. David's shaken half the conference's hands."
"All tweed and name tags in here," David said. "Come on in, the water's fine."
She set Owen on her left, where the other cottages and outbuildings offered at least a little shielding, and ran her eyes down the street the way she did every time.
The corner where the man in the gray parka stood every morning.
The bench. The black gap between two buildings where even this light didn't reach.
The corner was empty.
She didn't slow. She found the others without turning her head — the woman who scattered bread for the ravens, the man who smoked by the parked snowmobiles, the two regulars at the café window.
Gone. Every face she'd logged since they landed, every pair of eyes she'd learned by heart, and not one of them on the street this afternoon.
Her stomach dropped before her mind caught up. They'd pulled their own people back. They only did that when eyes stopped mattering, when the next thing was already moving.
"Owen. Keep walking." Light, easy, nothing in her face for the street to read — and under it, into the channel: "Our watchers are gone. All of them. Close it up."
"On you," Gabe said, already drifting in.
The hotel was two buildings down now, nothing but open white between her and it, and the bright sun came up off the snow so hard it lit the underside of everything and left nowhere — not a doorway, not a shadow — for a person to stand unseen.
Which was how she caught them the instant they stepped out.
Two from the left, between her and the dark little church. One off the right-hand corner, where the gray parka should have been.
Not running. Walking, fast and certain, angling to fold Owen into the middle of them. And no weapons up. Nobody had drawn on Owen. They wanted his hands working, not stopped. Whatever they carried was for the people who'd stand between them and him.
"Owen. Down." She had him by the coat before the word landed, hauling him off his line.
Skye got there first.
She stepped into the gap between Owen and the nearest man the way you'd cross a room to greet someone. Her hand moved, and he dropped to a knee in the snow with both palms at his throat. The second one came at her in a flat sprint. They went down together.
“I’m hot.” The announcement came over her comlink just before a dark shape raced past. Wade.
He piled into Skye’s attacker from the side and tore him off her, and then it was bodies and breath and the squeak of boots packing snow.
Cara quit watching. She ran Owen backward toward the door with both fists in his coat. "Move. Move. Mo—"
Gabe went past her shoulder the other way, fast and silent, and put himself between Owen and all of it. Her back hit the door frame. She'd dragged Owen that far without feeling herself move.
In front of her it was four seconds of something ugly and close. Gabe and one of the men traded blows, their heads snapping back with sickening force, except Gabe kept ending up on his feet. Off to the side, Wade and the first man came apart in the snow and rose together.
And then it was ending as fast as it began.
The men broke off. Professionals didn't die for a grab gone loud, and they couldn't afford to put a round through the one thing they'd come to carry off.
Three shapes pulled back across the open ground and turned into people again — walking, unhurried, gone around a corner the light couldn't follow them past.
Owen was talking, fast and high. Cara wasn't listening. She was looking at Skye.
The slender woman rose to her feet with none of her usual grace, one arm clamped low across her middle. At her feet, blood pooled, an awful, bright red against the boot-scuffed snow.
"Inside," Cara said. "Now."
Gabe and Wade got Skye up between them, an arm over each shoulder, both their faces already going dark where fists had landed. Cara took Owen — a flat hand between his shoulder blades to move him, because he'd quit walking on his own and started staring at the red going into the snow.
"Talk to me." Reagan, sharp in her ear. "Who's hit?"
"Skye. Low, in the side. Conscious. Open your kit."
"They boogied." Tom, reading screens fast. "All three, straight out the airfield road and not slowing. You're clear behind you."
Then David, low, from somewhere full of soft music and glassware: "The knitter just left. Cartwright. Picked up her bag mid-sentence and went out the side door."
"Feld right behind her," Sophie said. "Neither one of them said goodbye to a soul."
The watchers outside had pulled because the watchers inside already knew how it ended.
They got the door shut and the curtains dragged across. Seven of them in a room built for four. Then Reagan had Skye down on the table and her coat open before anyone thought to ask her to.
"Owen. My bag, blue zipper, by the bunks. Now." Reagan didn't raise her voice, yet Owen moved like he'd been shoved. She eyed their IT guru. "Tom, I need light here."
Tom whipped out his phone, shining the flashlight beam on Skye’s abdomen. "Through and through?"
"No." Skye, through her teeth. "Still in there. It's low. It's fine."
Still working, Reagan grimaced. "It is not fine."
"I've had worse from people I liked better." Skye’s words swelled with bravado, but Cara could see the effort it took.
Reagan gestured for Cara to move closer. “More towels. Lots of them.”
Cara lurched toward the bathroom. So much blood.
Lord. Not her. Keep her here.
She returned with every white towel the guest house possessed. Wade held out his arms. “Reagan’s got this. She’s good.”
Skye snorted weakly, then hissed in pain as Reagan worked. “She give you that one?” She eyed the thick white scar on Wade’s arm.
He grinned, holding out the thick limb. “It’s great, right?”
“T-totally.”
Cara and Gabe exchanged a look. No sarcasm present.
Reagan smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “We’ll see what we can do, sweetie.” Then she met Cara’s eyes. “This isn’t as bad as I thought. Once we get the bullet out, she’ll do.”
The stress hit Cara all at once. Her legs turned to jello. She sank down on a graceful Scandinavian chair, her body vibrating with excess adrenaline and a whole lot of residual fear. One bullet dodged. Almost literally.
Gabe was already on to the next challenge. He shook his head, cheekbone already swelling. "They'll come again."
Tom stood at the window with two fingers parting the curtain, watching the empty street. "We can't hold this town. One way in, through the air. No way out. They've got all the time there is, and they know it."
Wade sat down with a towel around his injured hand. "That was them being gentle. They could've had Owen in a vehicle in nine seconds if they didn't care whether he kept breathing." He looked at Skye on the table. "We got off easy. That won’t happen again."
Skye levered herself up on her elbows. Pain shot through her eyes. "We have to make them believe there's nothing left to take. No witness. No cipher. No prize left on the table."
Skye’s words landed in Cara’s chest like a roundhouse kick.
She'd spent her whole first life learning to make people believe a lie completely enough to bet their lives on it. Until Dom Adler pulled her out of prison, she’d never spent that gift on anything good.
And here it was, turning over in her hands like a tool she'd finally found the job for, and she made herself stop before the thought reached its end.
Cara met her gaze, two women with the same background who knew all too well how vicious desperate people could become. “Exactly.”