Night Moves: A Shadow Force Novel (32 page)

The doctors and nurses had been mostly FBI agents. And they’d had to do this before, many times, and in hospitals all over the world.

She gratefully stripped off the bulletproof vest, because it was hurting her ribs, which were already sore from the shots. The fake blood looked a little too real and for as long as she lived, she’d never be able to forget the look on Reid’s face when he thought she was dying.

“He thinks you’re gone. It had to be that way,” her boss had argued when he’d come in her room after Reid left, but deep inside her heart, in a place she hadn’t realized existed, she disagreed.

She took the clothing that the man named Dave handed her. Changed without modesty because there was no time for it. A pair of jeans, a white T-shirt, hair pulled back in a ponytail until she could dye it or cut it or whatever she needed to do.

She didn’t even know where Dave was taking her.

“This was the only way, you know that,” her supervisor had told her.

She was one of them now—one of the nameless, faceless WITSEC victims who walked around with fake names and fake documents, looking over their shoulders every second of every day, no matter what their handlers told them.

“This is temporary,” she’d said and her boss had nodded, but she could tell he didn’t really think so.

They had no leads on this man Crystal. Only a death threat so serious that the head of the marshals had decided that it was not only a danger to Grier if Crystal thought she was still alive, but to every other marshal she worked with or had come into contact with.

She’d hated the plan, railed against it for hours in the hospital room with the door shut and her supervisor—and his—waiting her out calmly, knowing she’d come to the only conclusion possible.

They’d laid it out for her, step-by-step. They’d used the hospital before—had a doctor and some nurses who would help by getting her down to the morgue, where she could be taken out without anyone seeing her.

When she’d finally consented, and then requested to be left alone until morning, they relented. Still, she was sure they’d posted some kind of guard to make sure she didn’t sneak out on her own, which for the first half of the night she’d seriously thought about doing.

The next few hours she’d spent holding her phone, staring between the keypad and the card with Reid’s number on it.

He hadn’t been back to visit her, but she supposed
he was busy hunting down Chambers and Crystal. He’d been telling her the complete truth, she knew that now.

You can call him … tell him you need to disappear for a while
.

But she’d be going against all the tenets of witness protection—and possibly putting him further in harm’s way.

He would feel guilty, but she supposed that was all there was to it. They’d known each other for a matter of days, and no matter how much they’d bonded, it was still too soon to know if there was anything close to real between them.

She was getting proficient at lying to herself. Hopefully, she’d be just as good when she got her new identity.

D
ylan prided himself on his ability to get into places others deemed impossible—and he’d made a career out of it. Anywhere, anyplace, any-fucking-time … and this trip would be no exception.

He and Riley and Cam flew into Florida, hitching a ride on a Coast Guard plane that would be flying into the hurricane to study its center. He’d called in more than a few favors to get on that flight, which ultimately dropped them several hours from their destination.

It was either that or take the trip into the hurricane with the crew. Once they’d landed and procured a truck, they got on the road, the two-hour ride to Riley’s house taking four.

Cam dropped them as close to Riley’s house as he could get—the area was a fucking mess, and Dylan and Riley needed to make their way through an
obstacle course of downed trees and power lines. It took them two hours to get near the place.

There were roadblocks stopping people from entering the affected areas without reason. Riley thankfully had her Florida driver’s license, claimed she was picking up her mother from the house. The police let them through and they approached the house hesitantly … as though neither of them really wanted to see what was inside.

There were no outward signs of struggle—everything was locked up tightly, hurricane shutters in place, and there was lots of storm damage to the plants and trees but thankfully not the roof. The garage door was closed and the generator was running.

They stood outside the front door, Dylan calling Kell’s phone … and hearing it ring and ring inside.

Shit
.

Dylan motioned for Riley to use the key—she did, then backed up to let Dylan go in first, gun drawn. She was right behind him, with the same weapon stance.

Riley’s camera lay broken, smashed to pieces on the floor. There were a few blood splatters, but they were small, like from a split lip.

A few streaks were on the hallway floor, as if someone had been dragged against their will.

Kell’s phone was on the floor of the kitchen. The only thing that had been disturbed was a bowl that had crashed beside it. There was also a syringe—empty—that had rolled under the table. Dylan picked it up with a paper towel.

“At least one of them was drugged,” he said.

Riley’s expression looked pained. “Crystal has both of them, then.”

“Chambers could easily be with him,” Dylan muttered. They’d heard from Reid earlier that there was no sign of Chambers at his house or any of his usual haunts. “Where the hell would he have taken them?”

“You’re going to hear from him soon—the whole point of this is to make you suffer,” Riley said grimly.

Dylan picked up Kell’s phone. The camera was open and he clicked on the last photo.

Crystal—standing in Riley’s kitchen, posing for the fucking shot.

There was also a new number in there, entered about twelve hours earlier, the same time the picture had been taken. He dialed it and put the phone on speaker as Riley came in after having checked the other rooms, shaking her head as if to say,
no go
.

Crystal picked up on the second ring. “Dylan, I’m disappointed it’s taken you this long.”

“Blame mother nature.”

Crystal chuckled, the bastard. “Better late than never, I guess.”

“I want Kell and Teddie back—safe and sound, in the condition you found them,” Dylan told him through gritted teeth.

Crystal laughed. “You really have lost your edge, haven’t you? The Dylan I knew would’ve protected his friend a little better.”

Dylan winced at the characterization. “Are they safe?”

“They’re fine—for now. You want them back, you do a job for me. Otherwise, no deal. I’ll give you twenty-four hours to decide, and then I can’t be
responsible for what happens to Kell. But just so you know, I’m not responsible for Teddie at all.” Crystal hung up and Dylan stared at the phone as Riley touched his shoulder.

“You can’t let him hold you hostage like this, Dylan,” she said fiercely.

“What choice do I have?”

“You have plenty. We’ll come up with them together.”

Dylan acquiesced for the moment, although he knew that Riley didn’t really see any way out of it, just like he didn’t.

He’d started this by partnering with Crystal early on. The only way to end it was to put himself back under the man’s thumb, and then kill him.

K
ell felt better now that he knew Teddie was all right—and that he’d passed her the old rectangular piece of metal he’d found in the dirt under the crumbled portion of the floor. It was as good as anything he’d used for wet work because it had a sharp edge, but Teddie using it effectively would be a far different story. He’d never thought he’d be grateful that she’d seen him use a pen to kill someone, but at least she knew the correct spot to try to land the metal into Chambers’s neck.

He had twenty-four hours to make sure she could do it properly.

What would you tell someone you loved if you knew you only had a day left with them? It seemed like a bad movie, but right now it was his life.

One day was more than enough for him to come up
with a way out. The storm was on their side. Now that the eye had passed, it had picked up in intensity again, which locked them inside with Crystal and Chambers. This house was nowhere near secure—if he was lucky, the roof would blow off and take Crystal and Chambers with it. If not, he’d just have to figure out a way to kill them, while keeping Teddie safe.

“You still with me?” he asked Teddie now, since she’d been quiet for a few minutes.

“Yes. I’m just practicing what you told me.”

Practicing how she would attack Chambers if he came near her. Reid’s gut clenched. “Good. I know you can defend yourself, Teddie. Right now, that’s what you need to concentrate on.”

“Right now, I’m really glad you’re dangerous.”

“You’re as dangerous as I am, you just don’t realize it.”

She blinked. Thought about every death-defying stunt she’d pulled since she’d had her outing with Samuel the week before, including pulling a gun on both him and Kell.… and discovered that maybe Kell was right about her. “That’s what attracted you to me?”

“Part of it.”

“It’s that simple,” she mused.

“That’s what Reid told me,” he said. “I’m finally beginning to believe it.”

“Maybe this isn’t the time, Kell—or maybe it’s the best time—but we never finished our conversation back at Riley’s house. About your parents.”

“That’s the last thing I want to waste my breath on.”

“Something must’ve happened, something really bad, Kell. Because when you talked about your parents earlier, you got this look in your eyes … I haven’t known you that long, but I’d never seen you come so close to looking …”

Hollow. That’s what she wanted to say—he was sure of it. He’d seen the look in his own eyes in the mirror often enough throughout childhood to recognize when someone was upset by it. Social workers, judges, his foster mom, they all tried their best to rid him of it.

He knew it never went away—he’d simply learned to hide it, to push it down and forget about his past. The jobs he did as an adult made it easy. Concentrating on staying alive took up a hell of a lot of his concentration. “They pushed me too far. I pretended I was like them for a really long time. That I had no conscience. That I enjoyed pulling the scams. And then, on that last one, I knew it was over for me.”

“Tell me,” she urged, and yes, she’d already spilled her deepest, darkest secret to him, so it was only fair.

But while she’d had no control over her situation, he didn’t have any excuse for what he’d done in those spring months right before he turned fifteen.

“When I was a freshman in high school, we moved to Connecticut. I was enrolled in an expensive private boarding school, because it was easier for me to get information for my parents about the wealthy families of my classmates than it was for my parents to seek it out. And they’d use it to run cons, but it was never tied back to me. The perfect crimes. I was far away from them, and for the first time, I felt … normal. I had a real friend, my roommate, which doesn’t
seem like a big deal, but at that point it was everything to me. He was really wealthy. I hid that from my folks for months, because I knew what they’d do. And I just wanted to be a regular kid who went to class and played sports and had parents who gave a shit. And Brandon’s parents … they visited him all the time. They’d take me along to dinner with them. In those months, they were more like parents to me than my own had been in fourteen years.”

He paused, didn’t want to bare his belly like this, expose his soul to her … but he’d come too far to stop now. She deserved to know.

She seemed to already, because she said, “Oh, no,” very quietly, could see the setup a mile away.

“My parents found out about my roommate. Or maybe they’d known all along. Maybe they allowed me to get close to him to teach me, once again, that I couldn’t trust anyone or anything, that I should never let myself get close to anyone, because the world was out to get me. And then they told me I had to help them run a con on Brandon’s family. If I did it, he wouldn’t know it was me who robbed them. If I refused to help, they’d make sure Brandon thought I alone had stolen from him. Either way, I would lose my new friend and his family. I didn’t want him to ever know I was involved. And so I distanced myself from him, so it wouldn’t hurt when I screwed him over, the way I’d always done … And it wasn’t that hard at all.”

“They lied about not letting Brandon know, didn’t they?”

He nodded. “It was an object lesson for me. One of their many, and I learned it.”

God, the look on Brandon’s … It would haunt him forever, or so it seemed. “My parents moved us to Alaska to escape the heat, because Brandon’s parents were intent on hunting us down. After we got settled and my parents thought I was over it and stopped watching me like a hawk, I called the police and social services and turned them in.”

The police came, because he’d called them. He’d thought about it before, had stood, receiver in hand. One time, he’d even waited outside a police station for a few hours, but had ultimately gone home.

Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree … No one’s going to want you anyway
.

Beyond his parents, he didn’t have anyone. They never talked about their families, and he never found any pictures or letters or any kind of connection to relatives. And he’d begun to hate being in his parents’ company, had only taken the job of attending the out-of-state fancy boarding school so he could escape them. Although it turned out it had probably been the worst—and best—mistake of his life. It was the last time he’d seen either parent, although they’d attempted to contact him since.

He’d spoken to them exactly five times since he turned fifteen. He didn’t know how they’d gotten all the information they had about him, although really, it shouldn’t have surprised him. If they’d been normal, they would’ve been great covert operatives. But having no soul did not make for a good op, or even a good merc.

“I was put in a temporary juvie place for a few weeks before I went into my foster mom’s home. She was nice, but I didn’t make any friends after Brandon,
because I never again wanted anyone to hurt that badly because of me. If I was cold and calculating, like my parents said, no one could touch me. And for a time, no one did.”