Chapter 13
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E lizabeth opened her eyes, wincing at the pain from just that single small movement. Even still, it took her a moment to comprehend what she saw in front of her, but, sure enough, Masters was pushing someone in a wheelchair. As soon as she saw Nicholas, she bolted from bed and raced for him.
Masters held up a hand, stopping her from throwing herself at her brother. “Easy. I only brought him up here so you could see for yourself and would know that he’s alive, but I’ve got to get him down to the ER now.”
She shoved a fist in her mouth to stop the cries, as she turned to stare at her brother, whose face looked far worse than her own, and she hadn’t even thought that was possible. “Oh my God, Nicholas,” she whispered.
His lips twitched, as he smiled. “I’ll survive.”
Tears in her eyes, she watched as Masters turned the wheelchair around and headed out the door. “Get your ass back in bed now,” he ordered her, “and I’ll return as soon as I can with updates. In the meantime, know that he’s alive and that he’s getting help.” And, with that, he and her brother were gone.
She slowly crawled back into bed, suddenly exhausted. They’d admitted her last night, even though she shouldn’t have been surprised. Apparently something about head injuries needing to be monitored, blah-blah-blah . She wasn’t even sure what that was all about, but now that she was here, she didn’t even know what to say. She was completely overwhelmed to think that her brother was safe and alive and here at the base hospital with her.
She waited on tenterhooks, until she realized it would likely be a while before Masters returned. In between, she had nurses and doctors in and out of her hospital room, and the doctors agreed that she could leave later today, but they needed to run a few more tests first. If everything was clear, then she would get released. She knew that the minute she left to go do tests, Masters would show up, but still she saw no sign of him hours later, when she had finally been wheeled back into her room. She sent him a text, asking if everything was okay.
Be there in a few minutes.
She winced at that because it wasn’t a yes, and it wasn’t a no. It was more like a We don’t know yet . And considering what she’d seen of her brother, she couldn’t even imagine. But he’d recognized her, and he’d whispered, Hey, sis , so he knew who she was. Now all she could think about was getting down there to him. She knew she wouldn’t be allowed to touch him, and something crazy like giving him a hug would be out of the question. But just knowing he was alive made everything okay. She had finally relaxed back in the bed, just when the door opened, and Masters came inside, holding two cups of coffee. She stared at him, and the tears started flowing.
“Hey, hey, hey,” he murmured. He put down the cups and gave her a big hug. He held her close and whispered, “It’s all right. It’s okay. We’ll get through this.”
She nodded, but the tears wouldn’t stop.
He sat down on the bed and pulled her into his arms, so she was half sitting in his lap, and he rocked her. Just that simple comfort, knowing that somebody gave a damn, had listened to her, and had gone the extra mile to help her brother, it was,… it was everything.
When the tears finally dried up, she whispered, “I’m so sorry. I’m sure that’s not what you needed.”
He chuckled and pushed the hair off her damp face and asked, “Why? You’re sorry for being human?”
Her lips quirked at that. “Is that what that was? Being human?”
“You just saw your brother, who has been missing and you had thought quite possibly dead for months,” he replied. “He’s alive and he’ll recover, though he may need some extra surgeries,” he shared. “He’s had several broken bones that have been left to heal without being set properly, so he’ll need some corrective surgery.”
She listened to every word and nodded. “They tortured him, didn’t they?”
“Yes, though I think it was more of a pastime than anything more specific than that,” he explained. “I got delayed, caught up in the military investigations, as everybody is scrambling to figure out what happened to Nicholas and why, and are all talking to him.”
“But Nicholas is not talking, is he?”
“He can’t talk right now. He’s gone in for surgery. He’s got a few injuries that needed fixing right away.”
She winced and nodded. “And you mentioned more surgeries afterward.”
“Most likely, yes,” he confirmed. “They’ve gone in to fix a displaced and cracked rib that’s scraping against his lung, and another rib that’s completely broken and may need to have pieces removed. His leg needs to be reset, but I don’t know whether they’ll try do that in this same surgery or not,” he noted. “We’ll have to wait and hear what the doctor says.”
“Anything major -major?”
“He has some internal bleeding, and they’re not sure what’s causing that, but it’s not so bad that it’s the highest priority. There was some thought that his spleen is potentially damaged and needs to come out, but again let them go in and look, then figure out what all happened. He’s getting the best care possible right now. You did everything you could, and you didn’t give up, and this time it was enough.”
She looked up at him and shook her head. “This time you were enough.”
He smiled. “No need to go over who did what. The fact of the matter is, we found your brother and got him out of there.”
“And that was away from Rat?” When he frowned, she flushed. “The two guys who held me captive at my place, I named one of them Rat, and the other one was Gravelly.”
“And of course Gravelly’s the dead one.”
“Right.”
“We were able to find out some things. The dead guy,” he began, “his name is Jim, and he’s an ex-Marine. He was discharged about four years ago.”
“A Marine?” she repeated, staring at Masters and shaking her head.
“An ex-Marine, dishonorably discharged,” he clarified.
“And what did he do?”
“He attacked several women on base, with zero remorse, and thought he should be allowed to do what he wanted because he was a Marine.”
“Yeah, he had that attitude,” she murmured. “He was a complete asshole. That does make sense, and I’d gotten the impression that an awful lot of women had suffered at his hands.”
“We’ll do a full dive into his background to see just what shit he’s been up to, and, hopefully, if other people need help or have had problems with Jim, maybe we can bring some closure for them too.”
She nodded slowly, not at all sure about that. Finding people was one thing, but getting them to talk was another, although finding out that this women-beating guy was dead and not able to come back and hurt anybody again would be huge news. She settled back. “You found Nicholas,” she muttered in wonder.
“I did, but honestly it was all because of Rat sharing that detail with me, not because we had any intel that gave us any insight into where Nicholas was being held.”
She smiled, and then her smile fell away. “Will you get in trouble for letting Rat go?”
“Not considering we got this boon and brought back one of our men. I shouldn’t think so anyway.” And then he shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. It was a decision I made in the moment.”
“I suppose you could have killed him, couldn’t you?”
“Possibly. Or I could have also taken a bullet myself.”
She winced at that and shook her head. “I think there’s been enough violence.”
“Maybe. I’m not too bothered by Jim’s death either way,” he stated, his tone cool. “Not when he attacks women alone in their homes as a means to get to me.”
“And all because of… what?”
“I believe they were after the USB key.”
“Which means that key and all that information on it is incredibly important.”
“It is important,” he agreed. “I’m just not sure how much of it pertains to the case that we were supposed to be working on.”
She winced at that. “Of course. We’re talking about Mason’s shooting, right?”
He nodded. “And this has now opened up an entirely different avenue of exploration,” he murmured. “Yet we still don’t have any real connection to it being linked to Mason’s case.”
“God, his wife must be beside herself.”
“She’s as actively involved as she can be in keeping herself and her family safe.”
“Does she have children?”
“They have one toddler, a boy, and she’s about eight months pregnant,” he replied, with a glance around, as if the room would tell him. Then he smiled, shook his head, and added, “I don’t know—maybe she’s only six months along, but she’s big.”
At that, Elizabeth snorted. “ Big is not something she’ll want to hear.”
“No, I wouldn’t dare say that to her right now,” he stated, his own grin peeking out. “She’s very good people though, and, anytime we need help, she’s always been there.”
“And yet you don’t know her all that well? She’s Jasper’s cousin.”
“No, I just met her, but I do know Mason, and I understand that, whenever we’ve needed someone to go the extra mile on a case, if you had a connection to Mason, it gave you a hell of a connection to Tesla.”
“So that’s why everybody’s so friendly.”
He chuckled. “No, not necessarily, but we aren’t ones to have access to a gift like that and not put it to good use.”
“Of course not,” she murmured. “One day I’ll get to meet her.”
“You might get to meet her sooner than you think, as you are staying in the same hospital.”
“No, no, no,” she argued, tapping him on the cheek. “They were running a bunch of tests today, then told me that I could go home later today.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Yes, and I’m sure I’ll get that whole speech about staying home, staying in bed, blah-blah-blah . But more than that, I want to be here for my brother.”
“And you can be here for your brother, at least to a certain point. I suspect that, with everything going on with him right now, the doctors may keep him sedated for a while for his body to heal and for him to have a break from the pain he’s endured.”
She winced. “Which means he’ll essentially be in the same state as Mason.”
“Yes, except I think they may start bringing Mason out in the next day or two. In your brother’s case, I don’t know how bad it is, though I heard mention of months of recovery.”
“Probably more than that,” she murmured. “I don’t see how there couldn’t be after four months of torture and abuse.”
“That’s quite possible. We just need to give him a chance. He survived. Now it’s up to us to do the rest.”
She smiled. “You are a nice person. More than that, you went to bat for me and my brother, when I thought everybody else had given up.”
“We also had a little more intel coming through at the time.”
“I still think it’s a cover-up.”
“I don’t know if it was a cover-up as much as they had what they thought was a special case happening, and they were just keeping it under wraps. It’s never a good situation when investigators go missing.”
“Exactly, and yet, if you think about it, it makes perfect sense if Nicholas was onto something within his own team.”
“That’s what we’ll look at.” He smiled at her and said, “And, if you’re being released, no way you’re staying home alone.”
“I could go to my brother’s house and stay there.”
“You could, but you would still be alone there too. However, that’s something we’ll need to get ready for him too, maybe even to accommodate a wheelchair for several months. And I still need to go there and check to see if there were any bugs.” He pondered that, then nodded. “I need to do that at your place too.”
She stared up at him, and it hit her. “This isn’t over, is it?”
He slowly shook his head. “No, it’s not over. I would love to tell you that it is, but it just isn’t.”
She swallowed hard as she thought about it and realized so many things could still get messed up in her world. “That sucks, yet we have some good things going on right now.”
“And the good thing is, your brother is back with you, so you hang on to that,” he declared. “Let the rest of us deal with the other problems.”
“I’ll let you deal with them, but that’s only because I believe in you,” she admitted. “I don’t think the rest of the team is any good.”
“I understand why you would say that, but don’t tar Jasper with that same brush. He’s a good man.”
She smiled. “Okay, Jasper is allowed too.”
At that came a laugh. “I’m sure glad to hear that,” a man interjected from the doorway, “because I’ve never been considered one of the bad guys before. It would be a completely new experience.”
She watched as Jasper walked in and looked over at Masters. “Good job, by the way.”
Masters nodded. “It hurt to see him like that. He didn’t give in, but he was so done.”
“Especially after such a long time,” Jasper muttered. He looked over at Elizabeth. “And good for you for still fighting the good fight for your brother.”
Tears came into her eyes. “It just makes me so angry,” she muttered.
He nodded. “Of course, and that anger is something you needed to get you through this, but listen, Nicholas is here, and he’s safe, and now he can begin to heal. Meanwhile we will figure out what the hell happened to him and go on from here. The warehouse where he was being held is being torn apart right now.” He looked back at Masters. “Nobody else was there today. And the place had already been cleaned out, including the TV,” he added, with a note of humor.
Masters shrugged. “If I’d seen anybody else, I would have taken them down,” he stated.
“The two men that you secured were also gone.”
Masters frowned at him. “Shit, that means someone else was close enough to see me.”
“I suspect so, and, if we hadn’t gotten there as quickly as we did, you would have been taken out too. Still, in the process, they also managed to get their men out.”
“Damn,” Masters muttered. “I would have thought that the bad guys would have just killed the other bad guys and left them behind.”
“Maybe they did, but they probably just didn’t want us to have anything else to go by.”
Masters pondered that and nodded. “It’s quite possible. I don’t know. I wasn’t… Not a lot of time passed between my getting out with Nicholas versus you guys arriving, which means that the bad guys were there already. So they decided they wouldn’t stop me, wouldn’t stop you, or wouldn’t take the chance of themselves being taken, and they grabbed what they could and ran?”
“It’s still kind of surprising that they didn’t just shoot those two guards.”
“It depends if the guards were aware of what was really going on.”
Jasper shrugged. “The bottom line is, we don’t have any bodies to deal with, which I’ll take as a good thing, and we didn’t have any firefight going on in the warehouse. And now forensics is all over it.”
“Of course. That’s a damn good thing too.”
Jasper nodded at that. “It should be fairly simple from here on in, but nothing’s ever quite so simple.”
“No,” he muttered, “it’s not.” Masters looked back at Elizabeth. “She wants to get out of here.”
“Sure, she does,” Jasper agreed, with a smile. “She’s also been to hell and back.”
“Not like my brother has though,” she muttered. “I’ll stay here with him, if I can.”
Immediately Jasper shook his head. “He’ll be under full guard,” he shared. “The navy’s investigation department is doing everything they can to make up for having ignored Nicholas’s plight all this time. Still, you have to remember that it wasn’t willful ignorance on their part. They just didn’t have anything to go on.”
She frowned at that, then slowly shrugged. “I can forgive a lot because we found him,” she clarified, “but, for that, I’m crediting Masters.”
Masters shrugged. “I don’t work alone. It’s always a team effort.”
“Maybe, but it feels like it was your team, not the team already on base,” she declared. “I don’t think they gave a crap.”
“There’ll be an investigation into that too,” Jasper noted. “Not to worry.”
She nodded. “If I can’t be with Nicholas, I would love to go home and stay home, but Masters doesn’t seem to think that’s safe.”
“Nope, it isn’t. So, considering that you and Masters both need some recovery time, I suggest the two of you go home and stay there, whether at your place or Nicholas’s. If you need backup or another man to stand guard so you can rest, you let me know.”
Masters frowned at that.
She could see that he didn’t like the idea that he might not be up to snuff, and she glared at him. “If I have to rest, you have to rest too.”
He snorted. “Totally different story. You got the shit kicked out of you.”
“Maybe so,” she conceded, “but you’ve also been running on empty and need to sleep.”
“Sleep I could use,” he admitted, and he looked over at Jasper. “Let me take a look at her place, see if it’s been trashed.”
At that, she gasped and stared at him.
“We won’t know anything until we get there.”
“Christ, I didn’t even think about that,” she muttered. She looked around the room and frowned. “I would like to go, regardless of what we find. I would rather know how bad it is as soon as possible.”
“Of course,” Masters agreed, “but have you been released?” Then she glared at him, and he smiled. “I’ll take that as a no. Let me go track down the doctor, see if we can get you out of here, and then I’ll get you home again.”
*
It took an extra forty minutes to make that happen, but Elizabeth didn’t consider that all too long in the overall scheme of things, not now that Masters drove her back to her house.
As they pulled up in the front, he studied the area carefully but couldn’t see anything different.
“Satisfied?” she asked him.
“No, I’m sure not satisfied,” he countered, “but I will consider where we’re going and what we’re up to carefully as we move forward.” As he got out, he turned and added, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I want you to stay in the car with the doors locked and let me make sure the house is clear first.” He grabbed the black box out of the vehicle.
Frowning, she watched as he entered her house alone. When he came out ten minutes later and waved for her to come in, she raced up to him. “No bugs in your house. We’ll have to check Nicholas’s house tomorrow.”
She nodded. “I’m glad to hear everything’s good. You guys were pretty terrifying, talking about needing a guard.”
“I’m not sure we don’t,” he added, “because I don’t know if anybody’s coming back.”
“But why would they?” she cried out in astonishment. “They still didn’t get the contents of the USB key, and now we have my brother.” She winced. “Yet you don’t think they’ll just leave it at that, do you?”
“If it was me, and I was on a mission to get something, no, I sure wouldn’t stop,” he shared. “I also wouldn’t have waited this long, and it’s the waiting that I don’t understand. We’ll have to figure that out in order to get to the bottom of this.”
He was right. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then none of this made sense to her. It just seemed like it was a convoluted and unnecessarily complex issue. “Maybe it had something to do with a payment,” she suggested.
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Maybe they took Nicholas for a promise of money, and payment was never received, so they were waiting to get money from someone else. In the meantime, Nicholas just became a punching bag.”
“That’s possible,” he noted, looking at her in approval. “The thing is, at this point we don’t know. Until your brother has a chance to wake up, we don’t have a way to find out, and that may not even be something he remembers.”
“Four months is a long time.”
“Not only a long time,” he said, “but it was also a tough passage that he went through. So it is very possible that he won’t remember very much at all. Beatings like that on a consistent basis just kick everything out of your brain on a permanent level. It’s the only way to deal with the stress and the trauma of what you’ve been through.” He stopped and asked her, “How are you feeling?”
She winced. “Sore, tired, puffy.” She reached up and patted her face. “I’m not looking forward to seeing my face in the mirror.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t done so already,” he teased, his face cracking into a big smile.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“I won’t say it’s good because that’ll get me into trouble, but I for damn sure won’t say it’s bad either because that’ll get me into trouble as well.” When she glared at him, he shrugged. “What I can tell you is that, no matter how bad it looks right now, the swelling will go down in a couple days, and it’ll be back to normal.”
“A couple days?” she asked, narrowing her gaze at him.
He pondered that for a few minutes and shrugged. “Okay, so maybe a little longer than that, depending on how your face heals. I don’t think you’re used to getting punched like that.”
“No, I definitely am not,” she muttered, “but thank you for being honest.”
He shrugged. “No point in not being honest. Your face will heal. That’s the good news, and you have your brother back, the other good news. So, everything else is minor.”
She smiled. “You’re right. That does put it all into perspective.”
“Good. So, as far as the other crap going on, we need to get to the bottom of your brother’s case and Mason’s shooting as well. It’s not just me on Mason’s case though, so that helps.”
“Maybe, but I suspect that it’ll just be you.”
“No, it isn’t,” he clarified, with a smile. “I know a lot of good investigators, and we might need to pull in a couple. Of course, just because I’m here doesn’t mean that I won’t be on call for anything else,” he shared. “In the meantime, I could use some rest. I just need to know that you’ll stay in the house, that you’ll keep the doors locked, and that you won’t leave or open the doors for any reason,” he explained. “I will not sleep or rest if you can’t commit to that. If you can’t do that, I’ll bring in somebody to watch over us.” She frowned at him. He shook his head as he stroked a finger across her swollen cheek. “Some things are just too important, and right now we can’t take any chances of somebody coming back around.”
“And how do you think they would know?”
“Because chances are very good that they saw me on the street cameras. So, they’ll recognize me as being the guy here at your house and at Nicholas’s.” She swore at that. He nodded. “That’s one of the reasons why I must ensure that you stay safe and that everything from here on out is covered. We can’t have anybody getting into these hostage situations again,” he explained. “We’re into rescuing, not getting beat up. I’m very aware that, if I had gotten to your house a few minutes earlier, I could have saved you a beating, at least part of it. I’m still kicking myself for meeting with Jasper as long as I did, instead of coming here and sparing you that.”
He hated to see her face like it was. One eye was fully functional, but the other one was on the puffy side. Her face in general was swollen and bruised, under the splint that stabilized her nose and other facial bones. Yet she exuded this sense of euphoria because her brother was alive. He smiled. “At least you have your brother,” he murmured. “So, above all else, that is what you need to hold on to.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist and laid her head against his chest.
He held her close and asked, “Now, will you promise?”
She chuckled. “What? Are you afraid that I was just doing that to avoid promising?”
“No, I wasn’t afraid of anything, but now that you mentioned it…”
She smiled, still warm in the comfort of his arms, and nodded. “I promise because I agree. You need to get some quality sleep.”
He smiled. “You do too. So let’s lock up, head upstairs, and grab a few hours, if we can, because we have no idea how much chaos could happen after this.” Then he locked the doors securely and helped her upstairs.
With a final look out the window, he urged her into her bed. “Now get some sleep. I’ll be in the spare room.” And with that, he slowly crept to the other room.
“The bed in the spare room isn’t very comfortable,” she called out.
“It’ll be fine,” he muttered.
He was so tired that he wasn’t sure it would matter. On the other hand, he also needed to stay awake if anything happened with her. It would be better, much better, if he could stay in her bedroom with her, but he didn’t want to push it.
“You could stay in here,” she offered. “That way you can keep an eye on me.”
He turned and asked, narrowing his gaze, “Do I need to keep an eye on you?”
“In that case, you won’t sleep, will you?”
“No, I sure won’t, and now you’re worrying me that I’ll have to call for backup.”
“No, no, no,” she argued. “It’ll be fine. Come on and lie down in here.” When he hesitated, she smiled. “I won’t take advantage of you while you sleep, I promise.”
That startled a grin onto his face. “Comments like that just—”
“I promise.”
“I know that’s what you’re saying, but—”
“And I’m not a tease, by the way,” she added.
He rolled his eyes, as he sat down beside her. “Honestly, at the moment, it wouldn’t matter if you were or not, because I do need some sleep.”
When he tentatively stretched out on the bed beside her, she grabbed the folded blanket at the end of the bed and tossed it over him, then crawled under the top blanket on her side. “Now sleep. I promise that I won’t go anywhere.”
He hesitated for a brief moment, then closed his eyes and fell asleep.