No Stranger to Danger (5 page)

Mara went limp under him.

Chapter Five

2100 hours, Sunday

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Logan's head rolled limply against his shoulder, and he groaned as he began to stir to awareness. He tried to lift his head, but he wasn’t sure he even made a single movement.

They had pumped him so full of drugs he didn’t know his head from his feet at the moment. Slowly, excruciatingly slowly—complete with bright stabs of light flashing behind his eyes and pain spiking into his skull—the effects were wearing off.

Logan paused to listen. He wasn’t alone.

He used every fiber of his conscious mind to open his eyes and test his vision, but found only a sea of dull colors. Minimally, as the room swirled, he realized he was no longer on the table, but at some point, they had moved him to a chair. A faint scuffling noise caught his ear, and Logan strained to hear past the sound of his blood pumping, the sound of his own breathing.

There was something over his mouth. Tape? Logan rolled his head again and felt a tingle. He would suspect they had tied him to the chair, but he did not yet have the strength to find out. Hell, how long had he been here like this? How long since the last thing he remembered, which was Conyers leaving the room after sending a man to collect Mara?

His thought process halted.

Did they have her?

A cry split his head, and Logan made a sound of pain against the tape covering his mouth. He tossed his head against the chair back to clear the echoing scream from his mind and looked up to see a wide blur of color expanding and contracting distortedly as it entered the room, mostly black and—his brow pinched … peach?

Mara?

A flicker of strength stirred in him at the thought of that blur of color in a sea of drab being his ex-wife.

"Logan!" a female voice cried frantically.

A voice he had not thought he would ever hear again.

Logan growled and shifted in his seat, pulling at his arms where they were taped to the chair at his wrists and again directly below his elbows.

A murderous rage began to storm through him at the thought of what they may have done to her. He would kill every last one of them.

Logan attempted to move his legs, but got less of a response than he had wished, just enough to tell that his ankles were also trapped to the chair.

"I've brought you a surprise," Conyers said. The man leaned down, and Logan let his head fall back so he could focus on his former handler.

Conyers bent down further, braced his hands on his knees, and gave Logan a wide grin. "Thought you might like to see the love of your miserable life one last time." He ticked his head to the side and waited, studying Logan. "You clearheaded enough to talk yet?" Conyers rose and turned to someone across the room. "How long has he been conscious?"

"He just came to, boss," an Arab voice said.

Logan grunted. His vision was steadily becoming clearer as he strained to see. He looked behind Conyers, back to where he thought Mara was, and tried to bring her into focus. Slowly, the peach-colored dress came together and the twin images of her met to form one body. She was barefoot, and her hair streamed around her wildly. Tears streaked her cheeks, the wet trails slightly darkened by the remnants of her makeup. Patchy bloodstains smeared her tattered dress, her hose ripped and torn around her knees. There was a slight bruise on her cheek and a dried smudge of blood on her lip.

He looked at the man holding her arms behind her back and instantaneously jerked at his restraints, darting his stare between the other American spy and Conyers. Red hazed over what vision he had regained, and all he could see was the other man's hands on his ex-wife. If he had been the one to strike Mara … Logan marked the other man with his gaze. He would remember that face.

Conyers smirked. "You think you were the only one to follow me?"

Logan growled against the duct tape covering his mouth and turned his stare up to Conyers.

Those weren’t the words he would use.

He had never
followed
.

The look he gave his former handler said so, full of ice and contempt.

"Yep, you're coming around," Conyers said and clapped a hand to Logan's shoulder, reached for the tape and yanked it from his mouth.

"
God
," Logan growled through gnashed teeth and cursed all in the same instant. He shook his head forcefully and squeezed his eyes, blinked back the pain. The sting left across his cheeks and mouth ebbed quickly.

"Now tell me where the microchip is and I might kill the two of you quickly," Conyers said.

"Fuck you," Logan snarled.

"What?" Mara cried. "Logan!"

Her scream cut through the room, but Logan had no choice but to ignore her.

Conyers chuckled and motioned for two men to take Mara from the spy and bring her forward. "That will be all, Raven." Once he handed her over, the spy left the room, and Conyers turned his attention back to Logan. "I don’t think you have an option, boy," he said.

Logan snorted.

There was only one option.

And it wasn’t die.

"At least tell me what you are doing before you kill me," Logan said, slightly clearer. He pushed himself to regain some modicum of coherence.

A fist slammed into his jaw and knocked his head to the side.

"Give him some water. We need to flush the drugs from his system," Conyers ordered.

"Maybe I have the chip," Logan said, spitting blood from his mouth onto the floor at Conyers feet. Their gazes locked. "What will you give me if I tell you where I put it?"

Everything changed now that they really had Mara, but at the same time, he couldn’t let her presence distract him.

Not if they were going to survive.

Conyers paused and turned back to Logan. "Where is it?" he demanded.

Logan cocked his head at the man. "You let her go and give me confirmation that she is alive and safe, back at home—"

"Not going to happen," Conyers snapped. "You think I can risk letting her go to run to the nearest government agency and tattletale. I don’t think so. Neither of you are walking out of here alive. So, you can be a good boy and tell me where the chip is and I kill the two of you or I torture her until you talk and you both end up dead anyway!"

"Logan?" Mara cried again, pleadingly. "Just give him what he wants, damn it."

"Doesn’t give me much incentive to tell you then, does it?" Logan asked. "Guess you'll be searching for a long, long while." He relaxed against the seat and met Conyers's furious look with calm.

The other man sighed heavily and raked a hand through his hair as he began to pace. He snapped his fingers, crooking them at the Arabs holding Mara and the two men began dragging her to him.

A screech filled the room, followed by a fleshy
smack
and a gurgled cry—not from Mara. Logan jerked his head up to find one of the men holding his throat.

"Get your damn hands off me, you
sonofabitch
," she screamed, rearing back to throat punch the other man, too, but this time he caught her fist and gave her a shove toward Conyers.

"
Goddamnit
, can't you two handle a single woman?" Conyers yelled and stalked forward to grab Mara by the hair and pressed into her mandibular nerve at the back of her jaw with his other hand.

"
Ow
!
Ow
!
Ow
," Mara cried as Conyers forced her to her knees in front of Logan.

Logan squirmed straight in his seat and pulled against the tape holding him.

"Fucking let her go, damn it," he yelled at Conyers.

Conyers pulled his
Hekler
& Koch from the vest under his jacket and charged it, then stuck the muzzle into Mara's tousled, black hair. "Don't move," Conyers warned her.

"Oh God, Logan! What in the hell is this all about?" she cried, lifting her arms.

Her shoulders, arms, chest shook from the nerves racing through her. Even her fingers trembled as she held her hands up to show Conyers she was not going to move. The undersides of her forearms were scabbed with dried blood. A twinge of fury seized Logan at the sight. She had been through hell already.

"I'm sorry," Logan said to her.

"I'll ask you again, where is the microchip?" Conyers asked. He seemed to no longer be concerned with
whom
Logan had been in contact with.

Logan narrowed his eyes on the man. "Move the weapon away from her head and then I'll tell you."

He was a damn fool to have thought he could go this alone, but as a spy, being alone was so ingrained in him that he didn’t know anything else anymore.

He should have asked for help after Brazil.

Now, it was save his country or save his ex-wife.

Logan looked on Conyers, noting the three others in the room with them from the corner of his eye.

But
he wasn’t former Delta Force for nothing.

Slowly, and with reluctance, Conyers disengaged the sidearm and removed it from Mara. He even pulled her to standing by the arm, but kept her at a short distance, reminding Logan she was, ultimately, under his control right now. At his will.

"Okay, Logan. Now your turn."

"I downloaded the chip to an injectable and destroyed the original, as you might have guessed. If you want what I have, you're going to have to cut off this tape and get a scalpel, ‘cause right now I'm sitting on it." He lifted a brow at Conyers, and the man's face fell at Logan's lie.

A snarl ran up the side of Conyers's nose, and he reached beside him to grip the front of Mara's dress, thrusting her back toward the two men standing by the door. She screamed as she stumbled into one of the men, his hands coming down to yank her to her feet. When she reared back to slap him, he grabbed her arms behind her back to hold her in place.

"This is bullshit!" Mara yelled. "Damn you, Logan."

Her cutting stare reminded him of how he had deserted her, of everything left unspoken between them.

It wasn’t fair that she was now paying the price for his mistake.

Conyers motioned
Taj
to cut him loose.

"Be quick about it," Conyers said. "And don’t let him get away from you."

The haji started across the room, shaking his head. "He still too drugged up,"
Taj
muttered as he reached for Logan. "He cannot do much."

The tall, dark-skinned man sliced through the bindings on Logan's feet first and next freed his arms.

Logan remained sitting, rubbing his wrists a moment as
Taj
put away his knife.

He looked up at the man and gave him a smile. "Thanks, bud," Logan said, and came up out of the seat faster than
Taj
could dodge him. Logan grabbed the man by the face and slammed his forehead into Taj's nose, then threw the man into Conyers as Conyers was lifting his
Hekler
& Koch and knocked them both to the ground, the sidearm scattering across the floor under a shelf. Logan turned and took the chair he had been restrained to, lifting it to slam into both men.