Night Moves: A Shadow Force Novel (7 page)

“Stupid would be going with you,” Kell snarled.

“Dead or alive—those are my orders. I know which one I’d rather.”

Just then, the blue-shirted one came up from behind him, reached out to grab Kell around the neck, holding a gun directly to his temple.

“Dead sounds good to me,” he said, and Kell shifted to elbow him in the throat—a risky move, but he was not getting taken. His head throbbing, he reached blindly for the gun with his hands still shackled behind his back as he heard a sharp crack and saw
the man with the other gun pitch forward toward him, gun clattering away across the alleyway.

Teddie stood behind him, still half in shock, the bat held tight with both hands—and goddammit, to his right, Blue Shirt was regrouping again.

“Go,” Kell told her harshly, ignoring the fact that she’d just saved his life. “Get out of here, now!”

Finally, she moved, but only to drop the bat. It fell with a dull clatter and he cursed and forced himself to his feet.

As the man in yellow got up too, Kell swung around with a vicious kick. He heard the satisfying crack of Yellow’s jaw, saw the man Teddie hit was still nice and unconscious, but having all three only temporarily disabled wouldn’t be enough in this situation.

No, he needed them dead and then investigated, in that order.

A
s she watched, Kell rooted in Blue Shirt’s pockets awkwardly, pulled out keys and managed to get his cuffs off.

The man with the gun—the one she’d hit—stirred and she shifted to move away, wondered what the hell she’d been thinking coming back here, trying to help.

You saved him
.

Kell was up, moving closer to her, pushed her out of the way roughly as he neared the stirring danger, as if daring the downed man to rise.

She caught the glint of metal in the dark as Kell’s
hand whizzed through the air. Only when she looked down again at her original captor did she realize the metal was the barrel of a pen. Now it stuck out of his neck.

Kell’s eyes glittered in the dim light as he looked down the alleyway.

“I told you to run,” he said, and in the next instant she did, refused to look back for him no matter how badly she wanted to. Instead, she concentrated on keeping her footing, on trying to anticipate what might lay ahead of her.

It couldn’t be worse than what she’d left behind, could it?

Her footsteps echoed in the near-silent night, too loudly, her heart banged in her ears and she wanted to scream for help, but that would be stupid.

She was done being stupid.

A black truck screeched to a stop across the alley, and she nearly ran into it. She moved to try to go around it but then heard her name.

Reid was coming toward her. “What the hell?”

“Kell … a fight …” She could barely breathe again and she cursed her weakness.

“It’s okay,” Reid told her. But it wasn’t. None of this was okay. She pushed against his chest in an attempt to move past him.

“Whoa.” Reid grabbed her before she could escape.

She flailed again, felt the panic overtake her, and he cursed.

God, she knew these men had saved her ass, but they were also just as capable of ending her life in a second if things got too complicated.

Things had just gotten
too complicated
.

“Teddie, come on, get into the truck,” Reid was saying, and she jerked when she heard the sharp echo of footsteps heading in their direction. She went still, as did Reid, and it seemed like forever before either of them moved, although if she had to guess, only mere seconds had passed.

Reid pulled his gun, trained it on the dark alley, and she struggled again as she heard Kell call out, “Get her in the truck—we’ve got to get out of here.”

Reid shoved his gun into the back of his jeans and grabbed her so her arms were pulled behind her back. He drew her wrists together, cuffed them the way they’d been earlier, and then he unceremoniously picked her up and shoved her into the back of the double cab, as though she weighed nothing at all.

In seconds, Kell was next to her, Reid was in the driver’s seat, the doors closed and locked.

She tried to lunge forward as a sudden attack of claustrophobia overwhelmed her, needed out of the car, the cuffs …

“She’s hyperventilating,” she heard Kell say, and there was rustling—at the same time her hands were freed, a paper bag was placed over her mouth. The truck began to move, the windows opened and fresh air poured in.

Breathing became easier and she felt less closed in. After several minutes, she moved the bag away from her mouth, realized Kell was watching her, but he’d shifted, so they weren’t touching.

That was good, because she realized she did not
want him near her. “What happened back there?” she asked finally.

“Don’t worry about that now. Come on, sit back and try to relax,” he told her, his voice slightly hoarse, his face bruised, and she realized how close they’d both come to being seriously hurt. Again.

She complied with his request, as if in surrender. But she was far from actually doing so. Reid continued to peel down the streets, finally merging the truck in with the light nighttime traffic on one of the main streets.

“How did those men know you?” she continued.

Kell didn’t answer her and she pressed, “Those men weren’t after me, they were after you. I’m in more trouble with you than without you.”

Or it could be in equal amounts, but still. She’d known that since she’d heard them fire their rifles earlier, when she’d first stumbled into them.

Neither man said a word to her as the truck whipped through the streets, although Reid made a cryptic phone call that she assumed was about the attack. Her gut tightened and the abrasions on her arms and palms began to sting. Her muscles were sore and tight from the running and the stress and she was sure she’d see a mess of bruises when she took her clothes off.

She wanted out, but she had nowhere to go. “I know you killed people when you had me handcuffed in the Jeep—I heard the shots. Who was it then? Was that connected to this?”

Kell gave her a long look. “Better you don’t know a thing, sweetheart. You’re in enough trouble of your own.”

“You need to answer me. Who were those men in the alley?”

“No clue,” Kell said finally, and she didn’t know if he was lying.

“What did they want with you?”

“Seemed like they wanted me dead,” he said mildly, infuriating her further. “I know what you want—but I don’t owe you an explanation.”

“I saved your ass,” she spat, and Reid snorted.

Kell drew closer to her and suddenly the backseat seemed far too small. “You think your little stunt helped matters? I told you to run—you put yourself in danger by not doing it.”

Then she wouldn’t have seen what she had. These men were deadly. She knew that, but watching Kell single-handedly take on the three in the alley …

The violence had been mind-numbing. And still, he’d saved her life. Again. “I didn’t want you to get hurt.” That was the truth, spilling from her before she could stop it.

In the light that shone in from the storefronts and street lamps, she swore she saw his expression soften, but his tone didn’t reflect that. “What do you want? You want us to bring you someplace where there’s no danger? Right now, for you, that simply doesn’t exist.”

The implication that it might never wasn’t lost on her.

“You have no idea what I want.”

He turned to face her. “You think you’re safer without us. You’re wrong. You might even be thinking you’re safer with the marshals right about now. You’d be wrong again.”

She would be wrong—because Kell was the better choice to keep her safe from the men who’d murdered her family.

It took like to fight like. And right now she needed that on her side.

D
ylan took Riley to dinner, and then instead of heading straight home, he took the route past the Adirondacks, telling the woman he planned on spending the rest of his life with that he had a quick errand to run.

Partial truth, and Riley was full and happy from dinner and wine, so she turned up the radio, put her feet up on the dashboard and didn’t question him. The truck strummed along the open road and his stomach tightened with the knowledge of what he was about to do.

He’d met Riley years earlier, when she’d been hired to kill him. Instead of holding it against her, he’d ended up in bed with her—and ultimately fell in love. Their road here hadn’t been easy, but after Riley had gotten herself into trouble again, she and Dylan had worked together, and they’d made their peace.

Since leaving Delta Force years earlier in order to do private contracting—akin to spy work but without the yoke of the CIA around his neck—Dylan had helped his friend Cam successfully leave the military behind and had finally gotten to a place with Riley where they were working with and not against each other.

She was as good at the spy game as he was.

This past year had seen an awful lot of things come together and some others fall apart for the group of men he considered friends. His best friend, Cam, had found love himself. Cam had saved a woman he’d fallen in love with on a mission. Her name was Skylar and she made Cam the happiest Dylan had ever seen him.

Dylan’s youngest brother, Zane, had also found love, with a doctor he’d saved from the clutches of a terrorist group after finding her in Sierra Leone and facing his own personal demons. And Dylan’s middle brother, Caleb, had suffered a devastating blow on a mission with his Delta team, which included Reid and Mace and Gray—lost a friend and teammate and most of his memory as well.

It had returned—along with a woman who loved him, Vivi—thanks to both her and Mace’s help.

Mace, another former Delta Force operative from Caleb’s team, had battled his own losses and helped Paige Grayson, the stepsister of their murdered teammate Gray. And he’d fallen in love with her.

Definitely a pattern there, with the men letting the torture of their souls go and finding love.

Cam and Sky had tied the knot months earlier, at Mace’s bar before the construction started. It had
seemed fitting to give the place a happy memory before rebuilding. Now the bar it was in the middle of full-fledged construction, with the majority of the work being done by Caleb and Mace, since they needed to do all kinds of special security wiring. When Cam returned from his honeymoon, he’d moved in to help Mace, while Paige and Vivi moved into Sky and Cam’s house for the month, since their soon-to-be home was unlivable.

Vivi was thrilled to have access to Cam’s bank of computers and the three women bonded during the month-long sleepover. They also got closer to Riley, as she moved back and forth between Sky’s house and some jobs she needed to complete. And while the women hammered out their roles in this new organization, Dylan began to make some plans of his own.

The first party in the rebuilt bar would be Mace and Paige’s wedding. Mace had proposed soon after he’d rescued her from her from her biological brother—the man had escaped from prison, intent on killing her, and had almost done so, right in Mace’s bar. Mace and Reid and Caleb had all helped to save Paige. Now Mace wanted to wait until the construction was finished to christen the new bar with a happy memory, the same way they’d honored the old bar with one.

But just as things were settling into place, with Cam, Mace, Caleb, Kell and Reid all agreeing to work together with Dylan and Riley—taking charge of their own destinies and leaving the military behind—Dylan caught wind of some unsettling intel.

When Vivi mentioned that there had been action on their names, meaning that someone had been looking
them up and actively searching for information on all of them, Dylan did some checking on his own. Although he wasn’t one hundred percent certain, he had an idea of who was behind the searches and he felt his past coming back to haunt him in a way he’d never worried about before.

Kell and Reid had finished their mission in Mexico, but not without bringing along some added trouble. After he’d gotten Reid’s call, Dylan had put Vivi on figuring out who the hell was behind the attack on Kell. He assumed the attackers were tied into the searches Vivi had stumbled upon.

It was all starting to make sense in an absolutely terrible way, and Dylan, always a realist, wouldn’t admit that it was true—not yet.

Before anything else blew up in their faces and despite the late hour, he knew it was time to take action on the plan he’d been putting into place for the past couple of months. He’d wanted things to be perfect.

Dylan turned right at the stop sign—the road was private and poorly lit, but he knew where he was going. He’d been here a few times before.

But this time, it wasn’t a dress rehearsal, this was the real thing … and the woman sitting next to him was that as well.

“Where are we?” Riley asked for the millionth time. He’d been holding her hand for a while across the console and she was curled up in the truck’s seat, looking even more gorgeous than the day he’d first seen her.

She’d tried to blow him up, had only succeeded in ruining his car, and they’d been fighting—and making love—ever since.

But for the past eight months they’d been together. Working, living—and he wasn’t about to let anything come between them. “Almost there.”

She sighed a little, but she wasn’t complaining.

The fact that she trusted him enough to go along for the ride made him even more firm in his decision. When he drove up the long driveway and parked, she turned to peer out the window. He got out and went around to open her door, and she looked at him with a million questions in her eyes.

“I’m guessing if I needed to bring my gun, you would’ve told me, right?” she asked.

“You’re fine unarmed. Come on.” He took her hand and led her toward the small, private house.

Richard was waiting on the porch and he waved as soon as he saw the couple approach. The porch had several lit candles scattered around it, which Dylan had to admit was a nice touch.

He didn’t have much in the way of traditional romance in him, but there was almost a primal need to do this right.