Three and a half days later
“Where is she?” I roar, bursting through the conference room doors. “Where the fuck is she?”
“Easy, big guy,” says Grayson, rising from his chair at the long mahogany table. He’s got his hands up and an apologetic smile on his face. There are ten other men seated around the table, several of whom I recognize, a few I don’t.
But I spot that ugly fuck, Thomas Aquinas, the head of the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, right away.
Grayson jumps in front of me as I lunge in his direction, snarling.
“Declan! Chill the fuck out!”
He’s trying to get me to slow down, shoving and pushing me back with every ounce of his considerable strength, but I’ve got the demon of fury in my veins, thirsting for blood. Nothing on this earth is going to stop me from getting it.
I shove Grayson aside and punch Thomas in the face.
He topples backward in his chair with a cry, feet flying. He hits the conference room floor with a thud, rolls to one side, and starts flailing, trying to clamber to his hands and knees to crawl away. The fucking cockroach.
Before I can kick him in the gut, three men tackle me.
They take me down to the floor. I’m up within seconds, headed back to kick the life out of their boss.
I stop short when the remaining men at the table—now all on their feet—pull pistols from the holsters under their suit jackets and point them at me.
“Everybody calm down!” commands Grayson, holding his hands out. “He’s a friendly! Put your weapons away! That’s an order!”
Reluctantly, the men obey him. They glower and grumble, but obey.
Always the fucking peacemaker, this guy.
Breathing hard from rage, I point at him. “I’m holding you responsible for this. If there’s even a tiny fucking scratch on her, if there’s one miniscule bruise, I’ll kill you and your piece-of-shite boss.”
The man in question is still struggling to get to his feet. He’s gripping the edge of the conference table like it’s a life preserver and staring at me with all the whites of his eyes showing, holding his bleeding nose.
“I’ll put you in prison, you maniac!” he screeches. “You can’t come in here and assault members of the federal government!”
“I can and I did, and if you don’t shut your piehole, I’ll do even worse. Where is she?”
“She’s in a holding cell,” says Grayson in a tone meant to be soothing. It’s fingernails down a chalkboard instead.
“A holding cell?” I thunder, infuriated. “You put my woman in a bloody holding cell?”
“She’s fine. In fact, right now, she’s sleeping. Okay? Take it easy, brother. Take it easy.”
“Don’t give me that bloody ‘brother’ shite, you traitorous fuck. What the hell were you thinking by picking her up? I’ve been going out of my bloody head!”
“I know, and I’m sorry. But this was the only way we could vet her. We couldn’t tell you about it in advance. You know the ropes.”
Vet her? Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. “I said I potentially wanted to make her an asset! Potentially! I never gave you the green light!”
He shrugs, looking sheepish. “I told you I had to run it up the flagpole. This is what the top brass wanted. And now we know.”
Sucking hard breaths into my lungs, I curl my hands into fists and try to contain the homicidal urges making me want to stab him repeatedly in the face until he’s as unrecognizable as a pound of hamburger meat. “What do you know? What are you talking about?”
“He’s talking about your little girlfriend!” shrieks Thomas, still kneeling on the floor. “She’s as crazy as you are!”
I point at him, blood pulsing in my vision. “Say that again. Go ahead. Call her crazy one more time.”
“What he means,” says Grayson soothingly, putting a hand on my outstretched arm, “is that she passed with flying colors.”
I lower my arm. When I only stare at him, he nods. “She refused to admit she knew you at all, even when we showed her the pictures.”
“The pictures?”
“Don’t get your hackles up. You know how this works. Would you like me to tell you more, or would you prefer to continue the rampaging-gorilla routine?”
“You can tell me on the way to where you’re holding her. And so help me, god—”
“I know,” he says drily. “If she’s got even a miniscule bruise, you’ll kill me. Copy that.”
He heads to the door, knowing I’ll follow him. On the way out of the room, I notice one of the men who pulled a gun on me has two black eyes and a white strip of medical tape across the swollen bridge of his nose.
Oh, baby. My fierce little lion. Hold on a bit longer, here I come.
We walk through a labyrinth of passageways, our footsteps echoing on the floor. Marines in fatigues nod at us as we pass. There’s an elevator ride down, then we exit into a small room overlooking the cargo hold of the vessel.
It’s a vast space. Three stories of steel-enforced walls the length of a football field. Metal shipping containers fill the main part of the floor, painted on the top and sides with a letter and a number in white.
“She’s in C-9,” says Grayson, pointing to a windowless red metal container.
“I’ll kill you for this.”
“Man, you know I don’t call the shots. You start talking about making someone an asset, wheels start to turn.”
“Why did you wait almost four bloody days to tell me where you were keeping her?”
“Standard operating procedure. Most people cave during the intake interview. The ones who pass that have to be isolated without food or water for seventy-two hours to see if that’ll break them. Which it almost always does.”
“Without food or water?”
He turns to me with a half smile. “You’re focusing on the wrong shit, here, Dec. She’s legit. Fucking hard core. She didn’t even wobble.”
“I could’ve told you that, you bloody wanker.”
He chuckles. “She broke Cliff’s nose on her way in. Took Aquinas down with a kick to the kneecap during her interview, too. The deputy director is impressed.”
He picks up the receiver of a phone hanging on the wall and presses a number. “Discharge on C-9. Paperwork’s been processed.” He listens a moment, then says, “Copy that,” and hangs up.
He turns to me. “It’s gonna be a while. They’ll clean her up, debrief her, and give her something to eat. After that, she’s all yours.”
I look out over the graveyard of shipping containers with a feeling like a hundred pounds of sandbags are on my chest. “She’ll never forgive me for this.”
“Yeah, she will.”
He sounds confident. I shoot him a querying look. He smiles.
“No woman backs a man like she did you unless it’s true love, brother. Just give her some space when you get her home. She’ll get over it.”
I mutter, “Enough with the ‘brother’ shite,” but what I’m really thinking about are the two words he said right before that one.
One thing’s for sure. If she doesn’t love me, I’ll find out fast.
The minute she buries a knife in my chest.
