Chapter 5
Chapter Five
A choked sob escaped Audra’s mouth as she flung herself into his arms. Gage wrapped them around her, cupping the back of her head as she buried her face to his chest and shuddered against him.
Relief swept through him, more powerful than when he’d woken up from surgery after his right leg had been blown off by a landmine his team had missed.
At the time, he’d been grateful he wasn’t dead.
But now, seeing proof Audra was alive put that previous moment to shame.
He had been willing to die for his country, and had accepted that fate as he bled out.
Audra had made no such oath. She wasn’t a soldier, but she was a fighter. A fighter battling her breast canc—
Shit! Her breast cancer!
Grabbing her shoulders, Gage set her back so she wasn’t pressed against him.
She’d had cancer treatment mere weeks ago, and what little information was available regarding the procedure to eradicate it had been more horrifying than any of the pre-Ukraine Convention POW torture examples he’d learned about as a young recruit.
To survive the chemo-cocktail that ravaged the cancer cells, to have radiation pinpoint any remaining cancer cells… her bravery shamed him.
“Audra—” His voice cracked with emotion. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Audra, are you okay?”
He couldn’t ask directly about her surgery. He wasn’t supposed to know about it, having been told in confidence by Mags from HR. Instead, he gently wiped at her wet cheeks, trying to decipher the meaning of her tears and the look in her eyes.
She merely answered with a shrug and a wan smile, her voice watery. “Oh, you know. It’s all SNAFU. Situation normal, all fucked up.”
He’d once given her the same answer. That fateful morning when she had invited him into Higgenbotham’s conference room for a hasty, yet torrid and memorable, tryst. He had told her his week was SNAFU, and the saucy minx had offered the alternate option SNALF—Situation Now Awesome, Let’s Fuck.
As much as he’d like to offer that alternate option to her now, he couldn’t.
Sex would be the last thing she’d want, since she was still recovering.
Plus, he now had a voice in his head that popped up at inopportune times.
He was losing his mind, and no woman in her own right mind would want to engage with that.
“Ask her why she ran away from the Pentagon.”
Yeah. That voice.
Gage sighed, ignoring the voice’s ill-timed demand, and took a quick visual inventory of the Audra Muir who stood on wobbly legs before him.
She’d lost weight, her heart-shaped face slimmer, her cheeks almost concave.
Her eyes were dull behind the shimmer of her unshed tears, and dark shadows surrounded their murky blue depths.
She was exhausted. Even her curls were tired and lax where they flopped out of the baseball hat she wore.
Her oversized sweatshirt drooped on her petite frame and her faded jeans hid the rest of her.
He couldn’t see any hint of her cancer treatment results beneath the thick sweatshirt material, but she’d been a small-breasted woman to begin with.
The shirt would have swallowed her pear-shaped frame even before her treatment.
“Well, I’m here now.” For whatever comfort that would provide her.
They weren’t really anything to one another, not even fuck buddies.
But she needed a friend, and his task to return her to the Pentagon could wait a couple days until he’d nursed her a bit so she didn’t look and act like she stood at the precipice of utter hopeless.
“You need sleep, a refreshing shower, and food. In that order.”
“Ask her why she ran away from the Pentagon, dumbass!”
The voice in his head was a demanding prick on a good day, but apparently had decided to take up name-calling. Fortunately, Gage could ignore its demands.
He reached around her and tugged the blanket down.
She watched his efficient motions like watching a passing dream.
He carefully urged her down on the bed, tipped off her hat, and removed her shoes.
When he picked her bag off the floor, she reached for it.
Whatever the contents, they were important to her, so he tucked the bag into bed next to her and she wrapped her body around it like it was a lover.
“Why are you here?” Her eyelids dipped and her words slurred as sleep swooped in. She was exhausted, but still wary. “How did you find me? How did you get a key to this room?”
“Why aren’t you interrogating her? Now’s a perfect time to interrogate her!”
Gage closed the room’s door, ending the seep of early winter chill into the room and cocooning them in darkness save for a slim line of early November afternoon sun slipping through the seam of heavy curtains.
He returned to her bedside and brushed his knuckles along her cheek.
“Sleep first, then answers.” He didn’t specify which questions would be addressed. “You’re safe. I’ll keep watch.”
“INTERROGATE HER!”
The scream was a sharp jab of pain in his head, like someone shoved a spike in his temple. Gage was no stranger to pain, so merely winced and then continued to ignore the voice’s demands.
After he fulfilled his mission, he’d secure an appointment with a therapist. Maybe they could explain his sudden schizophrenia.
Audra’s breathing deepened and lengthened before he stepped to the room’s one chair and eased his weight onto it, grunting at the twinge of pain when the connective joints holding his cyborg leg in place pulled.
The chair looked ready to collapse from a stern look, but it held.
He watched her sleep, their breaths loud in the silence of the room.
Even the outside noise of other motel guests and occasional passing cars were muted in the dark solitude of the small room.
It smelled of disuse, its decor decades outdated.
What had brought Audra to this derelict little motel in the middle of Indiana?
From the little bit of her background he been able to extract from interviews with Higgenbotham, coworkers, and the sparse personal effects of her apartment, she didn’t have any ties to Indiana.
No family, no friends, no special interests.
Maybe she was meeting a boyfriend. If that was the case, Gage had a few choice words to say to him for making her travel.
Hell, for not being at her side in D.C. while she suffered through her cancer treatment.
Gage’s fists clenched, his short fingernails digging into his palms. If she was truly meeting a boyfriend or lover, he’d better have damn good medical insurance to cover the ass-beating he’d get from Gage.
Good thing he had declined Higgenbotham’s offer to lock and load his cybernetic leg, or the loser boyfriend/lover might be pumped full of a thousand rounds before he blinked.
Gage forced a few calming breaths. He could get angry if a negligent boyfriend actually showed up. Until then, he needed to focus on helping Audra.
Taking care not to break the chair, he extracted a picture from his back pocket.
He’d managed to get access to Audra’s apartment without even picking the lock or breaking the hinges.
Oddly enough, an amended version of the truth had worried the fretful landlady into letting him check to ensure Audra wasn’t a dead body decomposing somewhere in the apartment.
Fortunately, she hadn’t been there. Unfortunately, neither was there anything to give him a hint where she might be or what direction to go to find her.
No paperwork, no computer, no phone… not even any photos except for the one currently in his hand.
And he’d found that one, creased and faded, tucked between the wall and her headboard.
He glanced at the photo again, seeing its image with unhindered clarity.
His cybernetic eye allowed him all manner of viewing choices, from night vision to sniper-level acuity.
But he didn’t need them. He’d stared at the photo for hours in hopes of gleaning its secrets.
Two children, a girl around ten years in age and a boy around five or six.
Possibly friends, but looking like brother and sister from their curly hair several shades apart.
They posed in a nondescript front yard, arm-in-arm, for the picture, but their smiles were hollow.
Big and fake as if someone demanded they smile for the camera when all they wanted to do was cry.
The boy’s eyes were cold with resentment, a sentiment Gage understood even if he couldn’t explain why a young child should know it.
The barren emptiness in the girl’s eyes were familiar.
He’d seen that same expression upon entering this hotel room.
The girl in the photo must be Audra. But who was the boy? There was no record she had a brother, much less any other living family member. This one and only clue to her past… was this boy the reason she’d run away from her life in D.C.?
The photo hadn’t given him any answers to finding Audra…
just more questions. Yet the voice in his head had demanded he follow oddly specific and ever-changing GPS coordinates.
If this was schizophrenia, how could the voice have known where to send him, if the knowledge wasn’t already in his brain?
When he’d entered the hotel room and found her crying on the bed, he’d been just as shocked as Audra had looked.
A soft, pained groan escape Audra’s lips, jerking Gage’s attention away from the photo.
He stood, returning it to his pocket, and tested her forehead with the back of his hand.
No fever. Good. Her eyebrows knotted together and she flinched in her sleep.
Bad dream, likely. She groaned a few more times, each one a hammer to his nerves and a call for help to his Army-honed fight instinct.
But he refrained from swooping in and waking her so he could hold her in his arms and promise her everything was okay.
If she was awake enough to understand what he said, she’d be awake enough to know the words were a lie.
And he wouldn’t lie to her.
He waited for her bad dream to pass and the tension around her eyes to ease as she drifted back into a deep sleep.
After an eternity, she calmed, her breathing deep and ending with an adorable exhale past her parted lips that sounded like a breathy pooh.
He returned to his chair. Higgenbotham wanted her back immediately.
The voice in his head wanted something else, a series of strange questions answered that had little to do with anything Gage understood, and was certainly proof that he was going mad.
And he… he just wanted her to feel safe.
He gazed at her peaceful face, thought about the desolate expression of the little girl in the photo, and knew with a certainty more resolute than a bead on a target that Audra Muir was the sense of purpose he’d longed for all these many years while wasting away at the Pentagon.
The Army Motto played on repeat like a mantra in his hear. This we’ll defend.
Hopefully he could be successful in it all.