In the Air Tonight (11 page)

“Someone Cael knows.”

“You know her too, right? It’s the woman you told me about earlier. The one he loved?”

Mace nodded, and she continued, “So he’s beginning to remember.”

“Looks that way.”

“Maybe you should fill in the gaps.”

“What if …” He stopped, shook his head. “Fuck, Paige,
what if
?”

M
ace watched Paige retreat up the stairs and closed the door again, locked it and grabbed the bottle of whiskey she’d taken a drink from earlier. He opened it again and took a nice long swig, and then another, and another—the first time he’d allowed himself to drink like this or have any kind of fucking pity party since he’d returned from the mission with Caleb.

But now Caleb was really starting to remember the important shit and all bets were off. He grabbed the notebook and flipped through the pages, taking his time studying Caleb’s sketches. Staring at the faces of the two men who’d repeatedly ordered the torture—the two men they’d been sent to kill.

Kell, another member of his Delta team—and Reid’s best friend—had taken it upon himself to recon them … and hadn’t been heard from in three months. This was getting out of control faster than Mace was ready for. But hell, no one promised it would be on his time line.

He turned the pages until he got to the one of Vivi’s face. Vivi smiling. Vivi serious, hunched over a computer … Vivi sleeping, hair spread across the pillows.

The guilt welled up inside of him again as he thought of her, and of Paige. Closed his eyes and
thought about her tied up and at his mercy and opened them and took another drink.

Paige
.

What the fuck had he been thinking, taking advantage of her like that? It’s not that he hadn’t wanted her, that he didn’t want more. He knew, from the second he saw her take down Big Harvey, that he could love her. That he would. And that it would be the most dangerous thing he could ever do.

He also knew that he had to push her away before they got any closer. If he told her the truth, she would run. There was no way she could handle this shit. He could barely handle it himself and he’d lived it.

She’d have her truth, she would leave and he’d be alone again. Wouldn’t have to worry about keeping his own secrets from her fucking magic hands.

He kept the bottle pressed tightly to his side, unlocked the door and checked in with Caleb. Cael, who had a shit-eating grin on his face and called, “I’ll close up if you’re still busy.”

Asshole
.

Mace climbed the staircase, and the farther he got from the pounding music, the faster his own thoughts came rushing back to him.

He fought an urge to search his friend’s room to see if he’d drawn anything else but resisted, turning the knob to his own room instead. He’d taken over the master suite after his grandparents died—it had a bedroom, a small side room and its own big bathroom. Lots of space for a guy used to living out of a bag.

The door to the master bathroom was closed and he heard water running. Under different circumstances, he’d be in there with her, but not tonight.
And so he went into the guest bath and washed up and met her as she came out of his bathroom, wearing his T-shirt and a pair of his sweats, and dammit, he liked her in his clothing.

The first thing she did was look at his face and the bottle of whiskey he still clutched. He took a defiant swig and then another before he sat on the edge of his bed, wishing he could pass out before they had this conversation.

“You’re not okay, Mace, so don’t try to pretend with me,” she said simply. Not unkindly, and it was all he could do not to tie her to his bed and not keep there until neither of them could see or walk. But that would be easy … and for him, easy was never the best option. Easy made him suspicious, and he was too hardheaded to change now.

“Can’t tell you, Paige. I can’t, and I want to … need to. Fuck.” His voice rougher than it had been before.

“I’m good at keeping secrets, Mace,” she whispered.

Yeah, usually so was he. But he wanted to unburden himself so badly. How was that fair to her, though? She already had so many burdens of her own to bear.

And still, she wanted to know everything.

“Those pictures … the two men Caleb drew over and over …”

“You know them too.”

“Yeah, I know them.” He laughed softly, even though there was nothing funny about it, closed his eyes for a second and wondered if he could simply
drift off to sleep and put this conversation off completely.

When he opened his eyes and saw her still waiting patiently next to him, he realized there was no escaping this time. Maybe it was better this way.

Hell, it couldn’t be any worse. “The guys in Cael’s pictures are two terrorists who captured me, Gray, Cael and Reid.” The remaining higher echelon members of DMH, the ones his team had gone there to hunt. Instead, they’d been turned into prey as easily and efficiently as amateurs.

It made Mace sick to think about it. “They’d kept a really low profile. We had no pictures, no idea who they really were. So we walked into a trap. By the time we realized that we didn’t really have food poisoning from the hotel dinner, it was too late.”

He saw the two faces in front of him in his nightmares, and when he let his mind wander during the day—both far too often.

Caleb obviously had the same problem. His friend just hadn’t put two and two together yet.

“We’d gotten some intel that they had some kind of underground compound, but we knew we couldn’t just storm it, or even recon it.” It had been far more rudimentary than they’d expected, given DMH’s resources. They quickly learned how effective the stark, primitive space could be—dark, dank, alternately sweltering and freezing, depending on the time of day and the weather. Sometimes, it was the only way Mace was able to keep track of the passage of time.

Part of the earth and never coming out …

He would get out of this if it was the last thing he did. And it damned well might be
.

He stood, his shoulders and head hunched since the ceiling was shorter than his six-foot-four frame, looked through the bars and saw darkness. He pressed hard with his upper body, and the grating groaned and gave slightly
.

And then he was hauled up by rough hands, his body protesting from the many beatings he’d endured over the past three days
.

At that point, it had only been three days—seventy-two hours. He’d counted, refused to lose track of time
.

He shook his head to rid himself of the memory and instead told her, “It was all a mind fuck. A damned good one.” But it hadn’t ended there. “We were tortured.” His words were quick, clipped—the torture hadn’t been. Day after day turned into weeks as Mace desperately tried to keep track of the time—the hours—and his men.

He’d been in charge of the op, had been separated from the rest of them—somehow, their captors had known he was the man in charge, even though he’d never told them. And Gray and Caleb never would have, that Mace knew for sure.

Except the drugs they’d given Caleb …

No
. He shook his head again so that he could banish the thought.

Caleb had been drugged simply by luck of the genetic draw. Reid had been down for the count and the three of them that were left—himself, Gray and Cael—were equally capable, but Caleb was broader, definitely the biggest of the men, and DMH had figured they needed brawn.

Mace still shivered when he thought about what
they’d wanted Caleb to do, what he may have done to one of his best friends in the entire world.

How in the hell would he ever survive knowing that? Mace could barely hold it together on the mornings that followed the particularly rough nights filled with nightmarish renditions and endless replays of the twenty-four days, four hours and seven minutes before he woke up with his throat slit.

“Was it over quickly for Gray?” she asked, and fuck, he wanted to tell her yes, that Gray had bled out quickly.

Truth was, Mace hadn’t been anywhere near him. “Yes, it was quick.”

She didn’t believe him, he knew that, but she didn’t press.

“You were hurt.”

“I healed fine.” His shoulder still ached most days, his vocal cords sustained some damage, giving his voice a low rasp at times. The bruises had long faded but the scars that ran along his back and the backs of his thighs from the strap they’d used hadn’t faded as well.

Why don’t I have those marks?
Caleb would demand.

Because they broke you …

But
You were lucky
, was what Mace would tell him.

“How much does Caleb know, then?” Paige pressed on.

“He knows we went in. But we were separated from one another—at least I know I wasn’t with the rest. Reid says he was unconscious shortly after they put him in a cell and he woke up in the same position
on the floor, right before Caleb ran out with me. I can only tell Caleb what happened to me.”

“But you haven’t told him everything.”

He stared at her. “I couldn’t.”

“You can tell me.”

He looked like he wanted to break her gaze, but he didn’t. “I woke up gasping for air.”

He was sucking wind. The hand he pressed to his throat came back covered in blood and it was then that he saw Caleb coming into the room, holding a bloody knife. As Mace watched helplessly, Caleb moved forward and only when he reached Mace did he seem to remember the knife he held. He stared at it for a second before he threw it on the ground
.

“It’s okay, I’m getting you out of here,” Cael told him, then pressed a cloth to Mace’s throat and picked him up
.

Everything was hazy. He shifted his eyes, refusing to let panic take over when Caleb carried him out … and that’s when he saw Gray’s body, prone on the ground where Caleb must’ve left him. Gray had sustained the same injury as Mace, but hadn’t been nearly as lucky
.

Lucky
.

He laughed as he finished talking, a sharp, bitter sound after he told her what he remembered about those moments, as bitter as the whiskey that now burned in his gut.

Paige looked worried. Scared. And fuck yeah, she should be both of those things, and more.

He heard the explosions next—grenades. AK fire. Shouts. And then Reid burst in, with other men behind him
.

“Mace, we’re rescued. It’s all right.”

Was it? Mace wouldn’t know for sure for a damned long time
.

“It was twenty-four hours before Caleb spoke a single word. Even then none of it made much sense. He was freaked. The only way they could calm him down was to put him in the hospital room with me. Guarding me seemed to ground him, but he didn’t remember anything. He just knew he wasn’t supposed to leave any of us behind.”

“And he didn’t.”

“No.” Despite the massive amount of drugs that lingered in his system, confirmed by various blood tests. “What DMH told me they were doing to him … well, let’s just say they weren’t lying.”

“Why did they target you?”

“They were looking for Kell. He killed one of DMH’s major players last year. But he wasn’t on the mission.” And since then, Kell had been MIA. Though if Mace had to guess, Noah knew exactly where the man was.

No doubt making sure that the men who did this to his team were ripped apart, limb from limb.

Mace wished him all the fucking luck in the world with that task. Wished he could’ve joined him, but realized that his job at the present was of equal, if not greater, importance.

Paige blinked, hard, fast, as if to keep tears at bay. Crying would do neither of them any good, but he wouldn’t blame her if she broke down.

“We were there for three weeks. The DMH men kept telling me that Caleb was doing well with his indoctrination. Fuck, we still don’t know what they fed
him, don’t know the long-term effects beyond the memory loss. Or if the memory loss is from the drugs or the trauma or a combination of them.” He ran a hand through his hair in obvious, heartbreaking frustration.

“What does he remember?”

“He remembers carrying me to safety. There’s no way he would’ve done that if they’d somehow brainwashed him.” Mace sounded more like he was trying to convince them both. “Cael told me later that when he carried me out, he saw Gray and that Gray was already cold. And he kept asking me,
What happened, Mace? What the hell happened in there? Was I next?
” Mace scrubbed a hand through his hair. “I know he knows on some level what really happened. I know he didn’t hurt any of us, wouldn’t care if he never remembered the hell he went through. Except he’ll never rest until he does.”

She wasn’t going to rest easy either—he could see it in her eyes, the shift of her body as she said, “I want to know, with Caleb, what he did …”

He knew exactly what she couldn’t fully articulate. “You want to know for sure whether or not he tried to kill us. Whether he killed Gray. But if you knew Caleb the way I know him, you’d never question it,” he told her fiercely. “Caleb saved me. It was too late for him to save Gray, too late for any of us to. Reid is so freaked that he didn’t help anyone, he’s gone—disappeared.”

He couldn’t talk about this anymore. “So now you know what happened to your brother. You know as much as I know, and I’ve risked my career telling you.”

“I won’t tell anyone that you told me.”

“Was it worth it? Does it help you to know? Because it doesn’t help me at all.”

She hung her head for a few long moments and he lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, remembering the bars and the dark sky above, the rank smell of the earth.

In so many ways, he’d never really left that hole. Not yet. It was a slow climb, and he was still reaching for the surface.

When he finally looked at Paige, she was staring at him, and he couldn’t tell if she believed him—or if she was just in shock. He was probably in shock himself, and he’d lived through it.

She swallowed hard. Blinked back tears. And then surprised the hell out of him by saying, “I’m sorry, Mace. So sorry for what you’ve been through.”

“Me? I don’t want your sympathy. I’m here. I’m alive,” he said.