Betrayals (Black Cipher Files series Book 2) (17 page)

 Her breath was soft and shallow, as if she had just run five miles. Or as if caught in a bad dream.

Using his thumb, Jordan gently lifted her eyelid to check the murky blue of Staci’s eye, glazed with exhaustion, before letting her lid drift closed.

What could be dogging her so badly she would let herself go like this? Her body was a mess. While there was nothing wrong with the vintage clothes, her outfit definitely wasn’t her.

And why, why, why hadn’t she come to him? Maybe they'd left things very unresolved when she left, but she should know his personality well enough to use him and his expertise. Until she'd left for Afghanistan, it had felt like the beginning of something.

Something he’d never had before.

That alone should have scared the shit out of him. Because of his parents’ situation, he was always careful about getting involved beyond a certain level.

“Stace?” He pressed a hand to her forehead, noting the sheen of sweat with a frown. “You okay, babe?”

Stupid question.

An unfamiliar anxiety pressed in on him as he watched her sleep.

Staci stirred, a soft soughing of her breath as her eyelids floated gently open. A little V creased her brow as she looked at him for a moment.

“Jordan?” she whispered. He stroked his hands over her arms, and aware of her bruises, brushed gently down to clasp her fingers lightly in his.

His weapon lay on the coffee table; he kept his body between her and the gun. And dammit, it pissed him off that he even had to be thinking that way.

She wasn’t a criminal.

“I’m here, babe.” His voice rumbled deep in his chest.

Some people wake up right away and are perky, alert.

Not Staci.

In the morning, she needed a good fifteen minutes before she was coherent and pleasant. Still in that place between asleep and awake, her smile was soft and welcoming, her gaze warm with dreamy affection. God, he wanted to brush his mouth against hers, wake her like he used to.

“Hey,” she sighed. Her muscles bunched slightly under his hand, as if readying to move.

He leaned into her, inhaled the scent of her, a hint of gardenia on her skin, and surreptitiously brushed a kiss against her hair. “Take it easy. You passed out.”

He could see exactly when reality returned. To prevent her from pulling her hands away, he tightened his grip.

“Let me go.” Her tone was suspicious, harsh.

Sorrow bled through him, but he suppressed the emotion and kept his voice even. “You need to promise not to point a weapon at me again.”

“Yeah, sure.” Now that she was awake, her gaze was sharp, distrustful. “Where’s surfer boy?”

Jordan snorted with amusement. “I sent Zeke to get food.”

Her stomach growled.

“Not a minute too soon, sounds like.” He teased, still holding onto her hands.

“Why were you trying to find me?”

Because they’d been on the brink of something big and he hadn’t wanted to let it slip away. Because he thought he’d loved her.

But it was clear from her question and her actions that she hadn’t felt the same. He shoved that thought into a tiny corner of his mind, someplace where he could examine his feelings later, maybe never.

Jordan kept the smile on his face as he debated how to answer.

She’d lied to him, evaded him, ignored him, crushed his heart and he still had this powerful need to care for her, to protect her.

The feelings were illogical and ill-advised.

He’d have been better off to just...forget about her after she cut him out of her life so completely. Yet here he was, after following her trail for the last four weeks and she didn’t trust him.

He wasn’t sure what that said about him. He wasn’t a glutton for punishment. He wasn’t a masochist. So why was he here?

NINETEEN

Jordan’s smile slowly faded. “Why didn’t you contact me?”

My body reacted to the familiarity of his voice, unleashing a tension I didn’t anticipate.

My throat constricted, freezing the muscles, making speech impossible. My chest was a solid block of concrete, taking in air a struggle. Pressure built in my head, my eyes, and I trembled on the brink of tears.

I couldn’t let him see any weakness. I had to protect myself at all costs because Jordan’s rejection had the ability to wound me far deeper than physical torture.

Involuntarily, I brushed my fingers against the hollow of my throat, seeking reassurance from my touchstone, my mother’s necklace. But it wasn’t there. Because I'd left it behind when I'd gone to Afghanistan.

I blinked back the moisture and took refuge in the attack. “You want to tell me what the hell is really going on?”

“Welcome home, honey.” The tenderness he’d shown when I awoke was gone, replaced with a cold sarcasm. “I was kinda hoping you were going to tell me.”

“Why were you looking for me?” I couldn’t reconcile it. We hadn’t parted on the best of terms, and our last email had been stilted and distant.

I couldn’t afford to trust anyone. Someone had betrayed me and set me up to die in that prison.

“I didn’t believe you were dead.”

“Why would you think I was dead?” Zeke had mentioned the same thing right before I passed out.

“Because of these.” He grabbed a manila envelope and dumped the pictures out abruptly. Shock, horror froze me.

Fariya.

The stark picture zoomed me back to that place of cold, grit, hunger and pain. To that state of mind. To the sheer torture of existing.

I rubbed the skin around my wrists, still tender from the shackles. The yellow and purple contusions had faded from my skin, but not from my mind.

In some ways, I’d been lucky. Their methods of torture were old-fashioned and primitive.

“Did you ever go through SERE?” he asked quietly.

Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training. “Yeah.” I’d had it. I truly believed the training had saved my life.

"You okay?"

“I handled it.” No waterboarding, thank God.

He cleared his throat, as if wanting to ask but afraid of the answer. And he said brusquely, “I’ve read the reports on the Dark Prison and the Salt Pit in Kabul. It wasn't pretty.” Jordan’s gaze moved to the bricked-in fireplace.

“Those are our prisons.” Except woops. Yeah. Those prisons don’t exist. My bad. “This was strictly local.” My jailor’s methods had been primitive but effective. Making me stand for over twenty-four hours, shackled to the wall. At least I’d had underwear, so I wasn’t forced to stay naked for days on end. “Fortunately for me, their methods were not as sophisticated.”

Through the small window, high up in my cave room, I had been able to measure and track day and night, see the passage of time. Which saved my sanity. Taking away sleep and a sense of time and place was the easiest way to make a prisoner lose their humanity.

Plenty of people broke with just that little bit of deprivation.

“They gave you food?”

I knew why he asked. I was skin and bones. Since the Bahamas, I was sick most of the day. Usually in the evening I could keep down some food.

I didn’t know if it was a reaction to the pigment drug, or if I’d contracted some sort of bacteria in prison or escaping. “They fed me. But they varied the times and amounts of my food.” Limited though the sustenance had been.

“Did they give you the drugs that turned your skin tone dark?”

Oh, no. I wasn’t giving up what I’d done to get back into this country. Jordan had figured out I was still alive, tracked me to the Bahamas. Found me here in New York. He knew me too well to be trusted. And I still didn’t know exactly why he’d tracked me down. Once I recovered and got that information, I was outta here.

“No drugs.” At least...not that I remembered. I’d had some basic drug resistance training because of the places I traveled to occasionally. You don’t want your first taste of heroin to be when you’re in a stress-filled situation.

“What did they want?”

“Excuse me?”

“What kind of information. Usually when you’re tortured, they want information. Names, dates, plans. What did they want?”

They hadn’t really asked for any specific information. Maybe that’s why I was spared the more intense and damaging forms of torture. They had just seemed to be playing with me.

“Nothing,” I whispered. “They wanted nothing.”

And that’s what they had almost reduced me to.

Nothing.

Some days I felt as insubstantial as a puff of dandelion seed on the wind, being whipped about, blown here and there, without any clear destination laid out for me and an inability to control where I would land.

Forcing myself, I looked at those pictures again. To see, catalog, and then forget what had happened to me.

However, I had to remember Fariya. Her death would not be in vain. She had given her life so I could make a difference.

I would find out who had set me up and why and expose them and their sins to the world.

Then I could continue to fundraise for de-mining, and use my contacts at UNOCHA to work toward eliminating the poppy fields and the unwilling mules.

Maybe I would campaign to stem illegal heroin production by starting a program like we’d done with Turkey in the 1970's, legalizing and managing the production of poppy crops for morphine and other legal opioids.

I noted the fine tremble in my scarred hand as I traced the lines of Fariya’s tortured body.

I’m so sorry
.

Unable to stand another moment without some sort of contact, knowing the move was unwise, I rested my hand against Jordan’s chest in a bid for comfort.

The muscles underneath my hand felt solid, real, substantial. The steady thump of his heart against my fingertips was reassuring, reverberating through his muscles, his chest connecting my hand to his energy, vitality.

Jordan’s heat buzzed through my hand, my arm, my heart infusing my body with electricity. Warming my frozen emotions and awakening longing.

The longing to recapture the incredible sense of completeness I’d experienced when we were together flowed over me.

I stared at my hand cupped protectively around his heart, unwilling to look in his eyes, wondering if my sudden fear was for what I wouldn’t see.

Brutally I shoved back the tender sentiments. I had to get my head together and get out. I deliberately forced my gaze to the picture. “You thought this was me?”

“For a few minutes.”

Jordan reached over to the coffee table, picked up his weapon carefully, and put the Glock in his holster.

Away from me. Smart move.

Finally he mentally eased away from me. I saw the distance widening, the subtle but definite way he moved into the chair on my right.

The distance hurt. The burn in my breastbone was psychological rather than physical.

I needed to get my head back into what was going on instead of remembering useless and obsolete emotions.

He’d thought that was me. Despair, sorrow flashed over his face, his hazel eyes serious.

I didn’t want to deal with his emotion, so I redirected the conversation and searched for information I needed. Such as...what a member of the 5491 list was doing with him.

“How does surfer boy fit in to this?”

Jordan didn’t respond.

Zeke Hawthorne. Shit, more of what I'd discovered about Zeke Hawthorne came rushing back. He worked for the NSA. “Why is the NSA looking for me?”

“Because you were injected with an experimental drug and they have access to the antidote.”

I shoved my feet into the cushions pushing up to glare at him. “What?”

“You were injected with a DNA-altering drug.”

I shook my head back and forth while I verbally denied what was coming out of his mouth. “Are you crazy?”

“The NSA has access to an antidote. Which you need,” he said firmly. “I’ve been helping them look for you. Sort of.”

The ‘sort of’ gave me pause. What the hell does 'sort of' mean?

“How’d you hook up with the NSA?” Shouldn’t I be more suspicious since all the people on my 5491 list were being paid with funds from an NSA department, even if they didn’t work for the NSA?

“I was...looking for you. And so were they.”

As I started to rise, Jordan walked to the foyer, and physically blocked my exit. “My investigation crossed with theirs.”

“With the NSA?” I repeated slowly, my body tensing.

He hesitated. “I wouldn’t exactly say I was with the NSA, more like I joined forces with a few of their agents.”

“Zeke?”

He nodded.

“And?”

“Jamie Hunt,” he said.

Another 5491 name.

“I was trying to figure out where you might be hiding.”

“So what you thought you’d ride in and rescue me?”

He looked uncomfortably tense as if I’d nailed his motivation.

“Maybe I just wanted to find out why you didn’t contact me after being captured and escaping an Afghani prison and having numerous people after you,” he blurted with frustration. “We had that last weird email. And then you were gone.”

The uncomfortable truth in his expression convinced me more than pleading or anything else would have. He hadn’t necessarily wanted to discuss things when he tracked me down.

“I just...wanted to make sure you were okay.”

TWENTY

His words hit me.

No one bothered to make sure I was okay. No one.

From what I knew of his childhood, he’d feel like he’d have to care for me because of our relationship.

But I could look out for myself. Had been, in fact, since I was eighteen. I’d been alone for fifteen long and lonely years.

When we’d been together, having someone watching my back had started as a foreign concept and grown into a welcome gift.

I knew Jordan was there for me.

I had even come to rely on the surety of his presence, knowing if I needed him, he’d be there.

A quick little knock at the door startled me. Jordan had his weapon out and safety off before I could blink.

Bump-bada-bump-bump.

“One assumes the bad guys wouldn’t knock,” I said drily. Especially with the rhythm of a joke punch line.

Jordan assumed a defensive position right next to the door jamb anyway, listening to the key card slide into the lock and the tumblers click into place.