Hard to Let Go (10 page)

“Here we go,” Becca said, pressing the Call button. Her hand shook, just a little.

Ring. Ring.

“Hello?” came an old, familiar voice.

“Hi, General Kaine. It’s Becca Merritt. I hope it’s not too late,” she said, looking at Nick. He gave her a nod of encouragement.

“Becca. No, no, of course not. I’m glad you were able to get back to me. I know it was last minute.”

“Well, it was a nice surprise to hear from you, sir,” she said. “Are you home for a visit?”

“Yeah. Every so often they like to haul me into the Pentagon and make sure this old man’s still kickin’.” Beckett scrutinized Kaine’s words, his tone, his pauses and emphases, searching for anything that might give them insight into the man’s intentions. But the guy was cool as a cucumber.

Becca laughed, and it sounded mostly genuine. “You’re hardly an old man, sir.”

“Well, look, I flew into BWI this afternoon, so I’m at a hotel out by the airport tonight. I’ve got a meeting in D.C. at noon, but I wondered if you had time for a visit around that.”

Becca locked eyes with Nick and nodded. “I’d love that. Would you be up for meeting for coffee in Baltimore in the morning before you head to D.C.?”

“That’ll work. Feel like I owe it to Frank to check in on you. And Charlie. How is your brother, anyway?”

“Oh, uh . . .” She looked at Nick, who shook his head. “Honestly, we’re not as close anymore.” She grimaced, uncertainty clear in her expression, and then she gave Charlie an apologetic look.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. So, where should we meet?”

As Becca laid out the coffee shop idea and they discussed a time, the exchange about Charlie—brief as it was—bugged Beckett. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly why, but his gut was throwing up a red flag his brain hadn’t yet identified.

And then the call was over.

The minute Becca hit End, it was like the room collectively breathed again for the first time since she’d begun the call.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said, looking at Charlie.

He shook his head. “I know. Don’t worry.”

“I wasn’t sure what to say about Charlie. Did I do okay?” she asked.

“You did great, Sunshine. You handled that fine.” Nick pulled her into his arms and pressed a kiss to the top of her hair.

“I’ll go let Sara know we’re done,” Shane said, taking off across the room.

“Well, what’s everybody thinking?” Marz asked, looking around.

Beckett waited to hear what the others thought, because he still hadn’t put a finger on what was bugging him. Maybe he was looking for a problem where none existed?

Easy shrugged one big shoulder. “Seemed . . . normal. Doesn’t mean the visit’s not damn coincidental, though.”

Shane and Sara hurried across the room, and a few Ravens came in behind them and gathered around the table in the far corner. Nick glanced from the bikers to Sara. “Any trouble?”

She smiled. Beckett hadn’t gotten to know her well, but based on everything he did know, she seemed tough as nails. Because, young as she was, she’d been through some shit and come out the other end standing. And she couldn’t have been sweeter or more easygoing. “Nope. They told me dirty jokes while we waited.”

Shane’s eyebrow arched. “Dirty funny or dirty inappropriate?”

Sara chuckled. “Funny. About the Harley-Davidson creator meeting God in heaven.” She waved her hand. “I won’t do it justice.”

“Oh, I know that one,” Jeremy said. “Ike told me . . .” Ike Young was a Raven who worked as a tattoo artist in Jeremy’s shop. It was Ike who had initially connected the team up with the Ravens. Now he was back at their compound outside of the city, protecting Jeremy’s receptionist and piercer, Jess, who they’d realized had slept with a guy with a Seneka tattoo. Recently. Another way-too-coincidental-to-be-coincidental development, particularly since a Seneka team had attacked the tattoo shop a few days afterward. All of which made her a potential target, so she and Ike had decided to split town until this mess was over. Whenever that was gonna be.

As Beckett listened to the chatter and the Ravens broke out in laughter across the room, thoughts started to fall into place. Thoughts that made him ask questions. “Uh, guys,” he said, interrupting Jeremy’s retelling of the joke. “Sorry, Jeremy, but some things are bugging the shit out of me.”

Nick’s gaze cut to Beckett’s face, eyes sharp, jaw set. “What?”

“What are you thinking, B?” Marz said, turning toward him in his seat.

“It’s weird to me that he flew into BWI. Totally possible, of course, but Reagan is right next door to the Pentagon, and Dulles is a much bigger international hub, assuming he came from overseas.” Beckett shrugged. “But what’s bothering me worse is him asking about Charlie.”

“Why?” Nick asked.

“Kaine said he owed it to Frank to check in on Becca. And Charlie. I’ll admit I was looking for something the whole time he spoke, but the way he said it made Charlie seem like an afterthought. Except then he went on to ask about him directly.”

“Yeah. And?” Nick asked, his gaze narrowed.

Beckett shifted his stance as he thought more about why that had bothered him. “Okay, let’s assume for a minute that Kaine is in on the conspiracy somehow.” Nods all around. “If he is, then that means he should know that Charlie got abducted and that someone rescued him from the Church Gang. But because we’ve kept Charlie under wraps, no one knows where he is.”

Marz’s eyes went wide. “And whoever Church was working with—Seneka, we presume—knows Charlie had information they needed.”

“How to access the Singapore bank account?” Charlie asked. “That was the key thing they kept asking about. Why this happened,” he said, holding up his bandaged hand.

Beckett nodded, all of this gelling in his head now. “Charlie didn’t know the account access information then. But they don’t know that.”

“The night we rescued him,” Nick said, “Church was meeting with someone one of their guys referred to as ‘company.’ About Charlie.”

“Probably a Seneka contact,” Marz said. “Hell, maybe this ‘company’ was actually—” He swallowed his words, like he’d realized he’d been about to say something he shouldn’t.

“Manny?” Emilie asked. She’d been sitting so quietly behind Beckett that he’d nearly forgotten she was there.

Marz turned toward her. “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s the reality,” she said. “Really.” Emilie had told all of them over and over again not to tiptoe around the subject of her brother. But given the horrific way she’d found him—head blown off and lying in a gutter—just a few days before, it was hard not to remember her outpouring of grief and shock. Nobody wanted to pick at that wound any more than they absolutely had to.

“I doubt the point of bringing Charlie to Confessions would’ve been to hold him downstairs,” Sara said. “When that happened, it was almost always women. My sense was that Charlie was a delivery. That’s horrible to say, isn’t it? I’m sorry,” she said, looking at Charlie.

“You played a part in getting me out of there, Sara. No apologies necessary, ever,” he said.

Beckett nodded. “So, still playing this out, if Kaine was in on all this somehow, he’d know a lot of that. And he’d probably even know the same people who grabbed Charlie made a failed bid to get Becca, too. And now he’s here, wanting to meet with Becca and asking about Charlie.”

“So, if we were looking for bad intentions—and we are,” Nick said, “this could all really be about finding Charlie.”

“Can I just say that I really hate that I just followed all that
and
that it makes sense?” Becca asked, worry piercing her blue eyes.

Nods went around the group.

“Which means, we need to plan an op to put in place by oh eight hundred tomorrow morning,” Nick said. “Because I’m not taking any chances. With Becca or any of you.”

Chapter 10

K
at had been listening to Nick and the other men brainstorm plans for Becca’s meeting with their former base commander for nearly a half an hour. And here she’d been worried about her own ass for offering up confidential documents. When Becca was about to walk into the middle of a situation that could put her in actual danger.

That sure as hell put things in perspective, didn’t it?

“The real question is who goes along with Becca in case shit goes down,” Beckett said. “Because none of the five of us can. Kaine will recognize us in a heartbeat.”

Nick nodded, his expression growing darker and darker the more they planned this. And Kat felt for him. She really did. She wouldn’t like knowing the person she loved was in danger either. “Yeah.”

Looking around the room, she realized that every person there had gone through the same experience one way or another. Becca had nearly been kidnapped. Nick had been shot in the neck—the bullet had just grazed him, but still. Shane and Easy had been shot, too. The gauze covering the wound on Easy’s arm just peeked out of the sleeve of his tee. For their part, Sara and Jenna had both been targeted by the Church gang. Emilie had been carjacked by a dirty cop, and her brother had held Derek at gunpoint and beaten him with a bat. Kat’s gaze moved to her other brother. Not even Jeremy and Charlie had escaped the madness. Charlie had been abducted and tortured, while Jeremy nearly died when a mortar took out part of his building.

That was a long fucking list of near misses.

“What about Vance?” Marz asked. “He works in plainclothes anyway, so he’d be able to pass as a customer.”

Beckett made a disapproving noise in his throat. “If Kaine’s dirty, he could have cops working with him. If any of them are on the scene, they’ll make Vance. Too risky.”

“Well, who the fuck does that leave, Beckett?” Nick asked.

“Whoa,” Marz said, holding out his hands. “Let’s just talk to Dare—”

“I’ll go,” Kat said, acting on instinct. Nearly a dozen pairs of eyes cut to her. Before anyone had the chance to argue, she pushed on. “I’m the only unknown quantity in the whole group. The Ravens have all participated in other parts of your mission here and therefore could be recognized. None of you can go. Vance can’t go. No other cops we can trust.” She planted her hands on her hips and nailed Nick with a stare—since he was likely the one she’d have to work hardest to win over. “That leaves me.”

“Kat . . .” Nick said, voice full of frustration.

“What about the older Vance?” Beckett said, his face set in a hard scowl. “He’s retired now. Even if there were other cops present, no reason to think he’d be there for any kind of work.”

Kat’s gaze narrowed at Beckett. “Please, do go right ahead and ignore what I said.”

Beckett’s gaze sliced into her. “I didn’t ignore it. I considered it and discarded it.”

Anger whipped around inside Kat’s chest. “And why would that be?”

“Maybe because Kaine’s a trained warrior and anyone who works for Seneka is a coldhearted mercenary. While a hard wind could blow you over,” he said, eyes blazing at her.

It was like a haze of red descended over Kat’s brain. She’d maybe never felt angrier in her life. “Are you kidding me right now? I can handle a weapon. I can hit. I’m practiced in jiujitsu. And I would never let anything happen to the woman my brother loves.”

“I could pin you in five goddamned seconds, Kat,” Beckett said.

Shame and heat lanced through her in equal measure. Shame because of what Cole had done. The difference here was that Kat would be ready—for anything. And heat at the images Beckett’s words evoked. But way bigger than either of those was the absolutely volcanic rage building inside her at the way he discounted her. Like she couldn’t contribute. Like she was just dead frickin’ weight around here. Kat gave a humorless chuckle. “I have thrown bigger men than you over my shoulder.”

Nick held up his hands. “Kat, Beckett—”

Beckett took a big step closer, but the desk kept them separated. Kat was pretty sure he’d be in her face if it hadn’t. “In. A. Fucking. Class. Not in a real-life situation? Right?”

The way he asked that last bit was so condescending that she wanted to pull her hair out, even as the truth of his words shamed her. Again. Had she really slept with this asshole? Twice? “So, the first time you took your training out into the field, you weren’t actually qualified to make use of it? Because you’d only done it in exercises up until that point?”

Marz rose from his chair and put a hand on Beckett’s chest, but the guy sidestepped him, his big thighs coming up against the desk. “Not even close to being the same thing, Kat. But, please, do continue to equate nearly two years of elite military training to some self-defense classes.”

Marz grabbed Beckett’s shoulder, but the bigger man shook him off.

Heat poured into Kat’s face, and it took everything she had not to fly up over that desk and tackle Beckett to the floor for a good, would-serve-him-right pummeling. “Oh, my God, do you even known how ginormous an asshole you are? Like, for real?
All
I’m asserting is the ability to watch out for Becca. Period.”

“Kat,” Nick said, from right beside her. “
Kat
.”

“What?” she yelled, turning. “You feel the same way? Because, please, if you also believe I’m too damn inept and untrustworthy to keep an eye on Becca in a public place—all while you guys have established a defensive perimeter around the building
and
she’s wired—please say so now and I’ll happily keep my useless, scrawny ass out of it.”

The tension in the room was so strong, it nearly formed a physical presence in the air itself.

For a long moment Nick didn’t answer, and a sting bit at the backs of Kat’s eyes. “I think you’re a good choice for being on the inside with her,” he finally said. “I don’t love the idea of it, but it makes sense.”

Kat wasn’t sure why or even what it really meant, but she felt as if Nick’s words had somehow hauled her back from jumping off a ledge. Though she didn’t even have to look at Beckett to know he was royally pissed. She could feel it boomeranging off of him. At least what he thought of her was perfectly clear now. And she’d almost entertained the idea that they could be something . . . more.

Ha fucking ha.

The rest of the conversation went much smoother after that. And Kat made sure of it by pointedly ignoring Beckett and not making any eye contact with him whatsoever. She didn’t need the stress, and the team certainly didn’t need the distraction of whatever bullshit lay between them.

Over the next forty-five minutes, they laid out a timeline, mission assignments, and objectives, namely:

Feel Kaine out for what he was really doing there.

Have Becca feed him select information to assess his reactions and see if he acted on said information.

Plant listening and tracking devices on his car and person, if possible.

Easy peasy.

Except, if Kat was honest, her insides were vibrating nonstop. Because while she believed she could handle whatever might happen inside a crowded coffee shop, just the very act of planning an actual covert op was so damn foreign. Still, being a lawyer trained you in a certain amount of deception—both sniffing it out and, when necessary, practicing it. Her head would be ready when the time came. No way was she losing Nick’s confidence or letting anything happen to Becca, who Kat already adored.

Kat felt like a million years had passed by the time they wrapped up. She’d been perched on the edge of Marz’s desk, and was about to hop down when he spoke.

“So, since we’re all here,” he said, “I might as well share that we weren’t able to find anything useful on the names from Kat’s personnel files. After the meeting tomorrow morning, I’ll work up a Plan B.”

Nick nodded. “Well, the lack of information is telling in and of itself, so it’s a start.”

“Roger that,” Marz said, his voice tired.

“Hey Marz?” Kat said in a quiet voice. He looked her way, and she gave him a small smile. “Go to bed tonight. For once.”

He winked and shrugged. “We’ll see.”

“No seeing,” Nick said. “She’s right. If the shit’s about to hit the fan, I want you running on full power. All of you. So get a decent night’s sleep.”

Words of agreement all around.

Emilie slid off her table and came up behind Marz, then looped her arms around his neck. “I’ll take good care of him.”

“I’m sure you will,” Kat said, chuckling at Emilie’s suggestive look. “Annnd on that note, I’m outta here.” She hopped down and kept moving, not wanting to get wrapped up in any small talk with anyone. Or, mostly, with one person in particular . . .

“Kat?” Beckett. Of course. Even among the din of other conversation, she picked his deep voice out of the group. How annoying was that? Annoying enough that she didn’t stop.

He didn’t call out to her a second time.

B
ECKETT HAD LESS
than four hours before they’d leave to get into position at the coffee shop, and he couldn’t fall asleep. Despite his exhaustion and his stress and his need to just power down for a while, his brain was a speeding train of chaotic thoughts. About the op. About this whole clusterfuck. About Katherine freaking Rixey.

She was pissed at him.
Beyond
pissed. And he wasn’t too thrilled with her either.

Although, to be fair, it was less that he was unhappy with her than really fucking irate at the idea of her being a part of the morning’s op.

The minute she’d volunteered to accompany Becca into the coffee shop, something in Beckett’s brain had snapped. Fury had washed through him, squeezing his chest and kicking him in the gut. Anger, he was used to. But his reaction had been more than that, and he’d been lying awake for hours dissecting it. What he found at the end of his mental microscope he didn’t like one fucking bit.

He was . . . worried. About Kat being put in harm’s way.

Sonofabitch.

And worry was not something he was all that used to feeling. The closest he got was with Marz, because he knew the guy’s leg hurt him. But that was also all wrapped up with Beckett’s guilt over Marz’s injury in the first place. And it wasn’t like his feelings about any of that had done either him or Marz the slightest bit of good. In fact, as far as Beckett could tell, all this bullshit he felt about the whole situation with his best friend had only served to damage their relationship. Better to tamp that shit down good and tight and lock it all away.

That was his usual M.O. And it had been more than good enough the past thirty-four years.

Kat Rixey was screwing it all to hell and back.

Beckett pushed himself off his stomach and swung his legs off the side of the bed. No use lying here when sleep had absolutely no chance of finding him. Not with his head all filled with churn and burn. For fuck’s sake.

Might as well make himself useful. They had a shit ton of documents that needed reading through, and they weren’t going to read themselves.

He crossed to his bags, the air cool against his naked body, and found a pair of jeans in the darkness. He didn’t need lights because there wasn’t much to navigate in his room in the unfinished third-floor apartment. Only a mattress set in the one corner and his bags in the other took up any space on the floor. Not so different from his place back in D.C., really. Beckett hadn’t felt at home anywhere since being discharged from the Army, so he hadn’t made the slightest effort to turn his rental into anything more than a place to lay his head at night.

But maybe that was his thing. Maybe he was meant to float through life—unattached, unfeeling, unwanted.

Although, reuniting with his team a few weeks ago had taken the sharpest edges off those feelings. He’d felt more grounded while here than in the whole year before. What the hell was going to happen when they finally solved this mystery?

No time to worry about that now.

He hiked up and zipped the jeans, then found the black T-shirt he’d worn earlier in the day. He’d barely brought the cotton near his head when Kat’s scent washed over him. Which was a big
no fucking way, not going there
. Dropping it to the floor, he blindly searched for another shirt and tugged on the first thing he found.

Good efuckingnough for two-something in the morning.

Quietly, he made his way through the apartment he shared with Marz and Emilie and Easy and Jenna. The rest of the Hard Ink team slept in the Rixeys’ apartment downstairs, including Kat. Like he really needed to be thinking of her lying in bed, her body all stretched out, her hair sprawled over the pillow, her heat warming the sheets.

He took the steps down to the second floor one at a time, not wanting the noise of his footsteps to echo into either apartment and disturb anyone. And then he keyed in the pass code to the door. He pulled it open and found relative darkness—only the lights in the far corner over Marz’s desk were on.
Damn. If that boy didn’t get some sleep soon—

But as the door closed behind him, Beckett didn’t see Marz at his desk. In fact, the computers were all empty. As was the room as a whole, since Dare had all the Ravens pulling extra watch shifts.