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by Maya Banks
“I’m with him,” Skylar muttered. “Fuck the goddamn greater good. Especially when it means an innocent woman, whose only crimes were giving aid to people nobody else in the world gives a fuck about and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, is punished.”
Donovan scowled, his legendary regard for women and children coming roaring to the forefront. He looked ready to take on an entire fucking army and take apart anyone who would so abuse a helpless woman.
“Just how the hell do we know that if we help you recover Honor Cambridge, we aren’t just finishing the job you started—and evidently failed to complete? I—KGI—won’t be used to send an innocent woman, any woman, to a fate worse than death and we all know that Maksimov, ANE, take your pick, would be a nightmare of unimaginable agony and degradation.”
“Fucking Bristow tried to rape her before passing along the used goods to Maksimov,” Conrad said in a brittle tone that in no way belied the fury laced in every word. “To save herself—or hell, maybe she really did want out—she slit one wrist and then the other and then she faced that motherfucker down holding the knife to her throat after he’d savaged her and told him if she died, then so would he, because Maksimov would kill him for not following through with his promise to deliver her to him.”
“Holy fuck,” P.J. breathed, her eyes darkening, shadowed by the past, likely not even realizing she trembled against Cole, whom she leaned into, again, likely without being cognizant of it. She was not a woman who ever showed vulnerability in front of others. Especially her team.
“Did you kill him?” Garrett asked calmly.
“Fuck yeah, I did, and I made damn sure it wasn’t quick and it sure as hell wasn’t merciful. Hancock would have done it himself. He wanted to take him apart with his bare hands, but he was the only one who had a prayer of talking Honor down, and he did. But if you could have seen him in that moment, if you could have seen him when he gave the order that the mission had changed, you would not question his—our—motives in the least bit. She means something to all of us, Kelly,” he said, using the common address for them all. “She’s ours and we are not giving her up to that sadistic piece of shit. All we wanted was to give the appearance that we were making the exchange and we were going to take him out. Fuck making it clean and tidy, building evidence, dismantling his empire and allowing countries to fight over who got what of his seized assets. We wanted his goddamn ass dead and that was all that mattered to us.
“He had more than one mole in Bristow’s organization. We knew of one. We killed Bristow because we no longer needed him and even if we had, after what he did, he was a dead man walking. But Maksimov still wasn’t quite sure and so he showed himself when they ambushed us. Hancock betrayed his emotions for Honor when he tried to keep Maksimov from taking her from his grasp. A sniper had already put a through-and-through in his left shoulder. This time Maksimov shot him in the chest with a cop killer at close range, and he’s not doing good. Not good at all. I’ve already lost a damn good man and goddamn it, I won’t lose Hancock. And I sure as fuck am not losing Honor Cambridge to that twisted asshole who thinks he’s a god.”
Maren burst in, her glasses askew, her hair in disarray as if she’d run the entire way. Steele immediately took Olivia from her arms and gently guided her toward the phone.
“Conrad, Maren Steele, our team doctor, is here and you’ll give her the rundown so she can see if there’s any hope for him.”
“I’m more interested in knowing if there’s hope for any of us. Especially Honor,” Conrad ground out.
“Cool your jets. We’ve got to think about this for more than three seconds. Talk to Maren. Let her help you help Hancock.”
At Hancock’s name, Maren’s head jerked up, her eyes widening in concern. Steele’s hand slipped comfortingly around his wife’s nape, his expression grim.
“They need you honey. Hancock needs you.” He sighed, knowing despite his misgivings over the man, he owed his wife’s and daughter’s lives to him, just as Rio did. “It doesn’t look good,” he added quietly. “You need to talk quick and help his man any way you can while we prepare to roll out.”
Maren briskly took the sat phone but turned off the speakerphone, much to Sam’s chagrin. She frowned at him and shook her head. “I need to think, damn it, Sam.”
She pushed away from the others, talking in urgent, hushed tones, her questions calm and efficient, not allowing Conrad to panic.
“What the fuck, Sam?” Garrett asked in a low voice. “This is some deep shit. This goes deeper than even we’re up for.”
“What else can we do?” Rio asked simply, his dark eyes flashing. “I get that Hancock is a wild card. But he’s got a code. It may be fucked up to you and me, but he is an honorable man. Before you laugh me out of the war room, just remember that he could have taken Grace at any time. I carried her halfway out of the mountains attached to my back, and she walked the rest of the way in unspeakable agony until she wanted to die from it. Me and my men were in no way prepared to ward off a full-scale attack from Titan. Instead? Hancock gave me a pass. Said it was my only one, but it was bullshit. Saving face. Looking like he owed me because I saved his life. It was what we did as a team. No one kept score. That was bullshit. We did what we had to do and we offered no apologies or thank-yous. And then he warned me. He gave me everything I needed to know about who and what was after Grace. All he didn’t give me was why, and you want to take a guess why that was?”
“No, but I’m sure you’ll tell us,” Donovan said in a weary voice.
“Because he knew Grace was too goddamn weak to heal a kitten. That she’d likely die if he brought her to Farnsworth right then and forced her to attempt to heal his daughter. So he bided his time, waiting, knowing damn well she was in good hands with me. And when he knew she was well enough to have a chance to save Elizabeth, then he took her. He never hurt her. Never laid a hand on her. But she was also fucking fierce and he admired that about her.”
“Is this going somewhere, because the clock is ticking,” Garrett snarled.
“Yeah, it is,” Rio snapped back.
“Let him speak because I have a hell of a lot to say too,” Steele said in a frigid tone.
“Only when he was certain Grace had a good chance of surviving Elizabeth’s healing did he take her in. He could have taken out Farnsworth at any time. Why wait? Why would a mere child matter to him?”
Joe cleared his throat. “It wouldn’t appear an innocent woman means much to him.”
“He wanted to save Elizabeth,” Rio said quietly. “And he wanted to save Grace. I didn’t figure it out until the whole thing with Maren went down, and I only told Steele. But you all know. I’ve told you. Titan was the real deal. Failure was tantamount to dishonorable death. And yet he gave up his chance to nail Maksimov for good because he feared for Maren to stay another night as Caldwell’s prisoner. She was pregnant, scared out of her mind, and so he called me and he pulled her out.”
“I think this is where I take over,” Steele said pointedly, glancing at his wife, his eyes briefly haunted as if he were reliving the experience all over again.
“He showed up at my home beaten to hell and back. Never seen a man so badly beaten, and it was because he let Maren go and could no longer control Caldwell. Maksimov was sending him a message. Don’t fuck with me. Ever. And then he took a bullet for my wife, my child,” Steele seethed. “And when the chopper went down, he covered her body with his own, and I still don’t know how the hell he survived.”
“That’s because the fucker has nine lives,” Garrett said darkly. “Okay, I get it. We have to go in, but we don’t go in not knowing what the fuck we’re up against. This is bigger than anything we’ve ever taken on. Maksimov’s reach extends around the globe. I don’t trust anyone who isn’t in this room, and that’s fact.”
Maren’s voice rose in agitation. “Of course I wouldn’t expect you to have a chest tube in a field kit. You’re not a surgeon. You’ll just have to find something y
ou can sterilize and use as a chest tube. Isn’t that what you’re trained to do? Adapt and overcome?”
Her response was greeted by a raucous round of hooyahs, oorahs and “Oh hell yeah, that’s our girl.”
Steele scowled but looked absurdly proud of his petite wife with so much ferocity in such a tiny body. “My woman. Not anyone else’s.”
“I don’t think it’s as bad as you think it is,” Maren said soothingly to the man on the phone.
“He can’t fucking breathe and he’s bleeding like a stuck pig!” Conrad bellowed loudly enough for the rest of the room to hear. “How can it not be as bad as I think it is?”
Steele wrested the phone from Maren’s grip despite her heated protest and a glare that promised retribution.
“You will watch the way you speak to my wife, and you will treat her with the utmost respect she deserves. She’s damn well earned it,” Steele said in a dangerously soft voice. “If she says it’s not as bad as you think, then it’s not. So shut the fuck up and start doing what she tells you or you’re going to have yourself an even more fucked-up mission.”
Maren rolled her eyes and yanked the phone back down, explaining the need for a chest tube to drain the blood and air that prevented his lung from reinflating. While the bullet didn’t penetrate Hancock’s chest, only the vest, the impact was great enough to break ribs and damage his lung. The bullet to his shoulder was a clean through and through and all that was needed was to ensure there was no further loss of blood and get an IV started immediately to replenish the lowered blood volume. And she instructed Conrad to start him on antibiotics, since the risk of infection was great given the conditions.
“Are we really all just going to risk our lives for Hancock?” Dolphin asked, as if he couldn’t quite grasp how such an ordinary afternoon had become something out of some bizarre government conspiracy theory.
Dolphin had more reason than most to dislike the man. He’d been shot by a sniper, though he knew it wasn’t intended to be a kill shot, nor had it been, when Hancock had made his move and taken Grace from KGI. Dolphin had a long memory and he tended to especially remember things that took him out of action for prolonged periods of time.
At Dolphin’s question, Maren’s frown deepened and she lowered the phone, pressing it to her thigh so she wouldn’t be overheard.
“Somehow I think Eden would have a different opinion,” she said softly. “As do I. He saved me. Three times. He took care of me. You, none of you, spent all those months with him that I did,” she said, not sparing a single person in the room her piercing gaze. “He was . . . kind. Caring even. Even when he was scary as hell, he was also very gentle with me, and he told me he wouldn’t allow any harm to come to me or my child. He could have died because he saved me. He nearly did.”
“I owe him much,” Steele said gruffly. “I owe him everything.”
It was obvious just how much he hated expressing his vulnerability and revealing the shadows that still occasionally haunted his eyes when he recalled just how close he’d come to losing Maren and Olivia.
“So do I,” Rio affirmed. “What he did more than compensated for me saving his life. Saving a teammate’s life isn’t some goddamn favor. It’s not recorded on a scorecard. It’s your fucking job and if you get your teammate killed, you get one ginormous F on your report card.”
“We all owe him.” Swanny spoke up in a quiet tone. He swept his gaze over the room. “He’s Eden’s family. Which now makes him my family. And if all of you were speaking the truth about the fact that we are all family, then that makes Hancock your family as well. Eden will never forgive you and neither will I if you leave him to die. That isn’t who we are. It never has been and I pray to God it will never will be.”
“When you finally speak you take no prisoners,” Sam said in a sour voice.
“Fuck!” Garrett exploded, knowing they’d been had. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK! And furthermore I don’t give a flying fuck who tattles to Sarah. If this doesn’t call for a hundred F-bombs, then what does?” He made a show of pulling the hair on the sides of his head. “Goddamn fucking Hancock. Swear to God, if even one of us gets killed saving his sorry ass, I’ll undo all Maren’s handiwork and kill the bastard myself.”
Donovan held up his hand. “No one ever implied we would turn a blind eye on this matter. The decision will be who goes and who stays. Not whether we act or not. That’s a given. What I won’t do for anyone or any mission is make taking part in the mission mandatory. No one is going to be sent into a situation with sketchy intel with no idea just what we’re up against.”
Maren had resumed giving instructions to the man tending Hancock in a quiet voice, but she kept a wary eye on the proceedings around her, as if not trusting them not to take her along. As if she were staying behind under lock and key when Hancock had saved her life three times. She owed her entire world to him and it was a debt she could never hope to repay in a thousand years.
“This mission will be volunteer only,” Donovan said quietly. “I’m going.”
“I’m in,” Rio says. The rest of his men quickly followed suit. Terrence went back far enough with Rio that he had been part of Titan when Rio had trained a new recruit called Hancock, though not many people were privy to that information. Rio doubted even Sam knew it. With everyone ever associated with Titan marked for death, it would be a death sentence to the members and families of KGI.
Rio wasn’t stupid, though. He had an insurance policy of sorts. A get-out-of-jail-free card. He had enough damning information on high-ranking government officials, domestic and abroad, and he’d made it very clear that if he were to ever die under any circumstances, the information would be made public and entire countries would crumble. This card he held could come in very handy in just this sort of situation and could very well save Hancock’s ass, provided he kept his nose clean in the future.
“I’m in,” Steele said. “My team makes their own decisions.” He no longer looked to P.J. when missions involving such horrific circumstances came down the pipeline. He respected that she knew herself well enough to know what she could handle and what she couldn’t after her ordeal at the hands of three rapists.
And it was equally clear she was grateful to her team leader for not singling her out and drawing attention to her past.
“I’m in,” she said firmly. “I will never allow another woman to endure what I had to endure if I can stop it.”
Her team—and the others—looked at her in surprise. Pride shone in her husband’s eyes. Cole. For so long, she never spoke of it. It was an unspoken rule. It was there. Always there. But never acknowledged aloud. Until now. Cole squeezed her hand and whispered softly in her ear so only she could hear.
“I’m so damn proud of you, P.J. I thank God every day that you chose me. That you love me. And that I’m married to the strongest damn woman I’ve ever known.”
Faint color dusted her cheeks, but over time she’d grown accustomed to him displaying his love and affection and admiration for her in front of others, though it had taken a lot of adjustment on her part.
“No one should ever have to suffer such degradation and humiliation. No one should ever feel so ashamed that they literally want to end their ceaseless suffering by taking their life. And yet she apologized for almost fucking up the mission,” P.J. said, terrible rage blazing in her eyes. “She apologized for being weak, for fuck’s sake, and not being able to save all those people because for that one moment she only wanted to die so the pain would finally end. No wonder Hancock can’t and won’t hand her over to Maksimov. Swear to God if he did, there wouldn’t be a safe place on this earth for him because I’d hunt him down and I’d repay in kind every hurt done to her.”
“Singing to the choir, sistah,” Skylar said, anger dulling her usually sparkling and infectious smile and gaze.
Nathan and Joe exchanged glances, then looked to their team, where Swanny stood tall and rigid. Before the twins could say anything, Swanny stepped forward, d
efying the precedent set by Rio and Steele’s team of waiting for their team leader’s decision before falling in behind him.
“I’m in,” Swanny said in a determined voice.
“So are we,” P.J. said, as she and Cole stepped forward, P.J.’s hand clasped tightly in Cole’s. There were flickers of surprise at P.J.’s lack of hesitation. It wasn’t a secret that she’d love to get Hancock between the crosshairs of her scope for one of her team members being shot by Hancock’s team when the mission to save Grace went all to hell. She’d sworn to kick his ass if she ever met up with him in a dark alley somewhere.
Zane and Skylar stepped up on either side of Swanny, not even voicing what their action implied. There was no need. Their actions did all the talking for them.
“I think we have mutiny on our hands,” Joe said with a wry smile.
Nathan shook his head. “Like our team is going anywhere without us?”
All attention turned to Sam and Garrett, the only two who hadn’t spoken up.
“Fine. I’m in,” Garrett said, throwing up his hands amid more muttered F-bombs.
Sam sighed. “Do you all honestly think I’m letting you infants go off on your own? Fuck that. I’m in. If only to save your goddamn asses.”