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“Right?” His eyes, wild and wide, confirmed every drop of her dread. “You see it now. All of it. This is what we saw, fifteen years ago. What we all committed ourselves to achieving.”
“All of us…who?”
How she got it out evenly, she had no damn idea. Despite that, Sol’s head jerked as if she’d slapped him. He stabbed her with an irritated glance before snapping, “All of us, dammit. All of us. We—we were in the same battalion. We were together, hating the senseless terror of it all. The same monsters fighting each other—in the name of what? Of what? Innocent lives paid for their quests. Cities were burned. Families were torn. Planes came down. Malls were bombed. Destruction. Death. Atrocities even the US ignored…” He flinched again, interrupting the mournful trail-off. “We made the resolve then. Promised each other…that we’d spread across the world, infiltrating from back doors…where nobody would notice. We kept recruiting. Revising. Rededicating. Doing whatever was necessary to make all the pages fall into place. To recalibrate it all, in one perfect swoop of decision. All the pages had to fall in place.” One corner of his mouth jogged up. “They almost didn’t, you know.”
“Do I?” It was the bare minimum to keep him talking. The time she needed to buy, still scouring her brain for some way to make him let go. But when a man was clinging to a cliff, even one he’d climbed to, prying his hands free was up to the wind and his resolve. And right now, Sol Wrightman’s resolve was very fixed on her.
To the point of dragging his heated perusal down to her toes again.
All the way back up to her face, where he lingered over her features for unnerving seconds, before restarting his account with a murmur so arrogant, it belonged more on a Hollywood red carpet than the middle of a Kaua’i shore. “So interesting,” he remarked, “that so many were so willing to believe Duane Sanford just keeled over in the middle of the golf course that day. Bet he didn’t even think it would happen.” He tsked, setting the stage for the knowing angle of his lips. “And just three days after his cardiologist gave him the all-clear for another year.”
Once again, breaths were rusty blades in and out of her chest. “I—I don’t want to hear this, Sol. Dammit, why are you telling me this?”
“Because you have to see all the rest, Tracy.” He pushed in closer, the whites of his eyes and the grit of his teeth turning his face ghoulish. “You have to know the rest. How important it was…that they all were taken, and you were spared.”
Her throat closed up. Her stomach roiled.
“Sp-spared?”
He nodded with slow deliberation. “Given back your life, beautiful woman. By me. Because of me.”
And there it was. The cuckoo in his nest she’d suspected…dreaded. Still, she forced herself to blurt, “Wh-why?”
He rushed out a breath. “Come on, Tracy. Connect the dots, baby. They eliminated Sanford, when he balked at following through with the recalibration. But LeGrange was already on board, and the golden boy for the VP nod—until the president defied everyone in DC by appointing you.” He snorted, pushing at once into a quirked smirk. “And just to throw an extra twist into things, you refused to back out of the gig for Dan Colton in Las Vegas—right on the day we were scheduled for global recalibration.”
A new need to retch swelled, but churned at once into rage. “If you’re looking for an apology, you can kiss my ass.” Global recalibration. He declared it like some tech sector guru unveiling a software trend, not the annihilation of the free world’s infrastructure.
Shockingly, that only caused the monster to laugh. “Nah. You just made everything a little more interesting, that was all. We all scrambled a little to pull off the last-minute fireworks show, but as you know, we made it happen.”
“You—you mean finding someone to plant that bomb at the Bellagio.” As the words tumbled out, her composure finally dissolved. Her head throbbed with horror. Her chest crumpled in like an acid-dipped soda can. “A bomb…intended to kill me. And my friends. Oh God.” A sob spilled out. “And my son. Oh God!”
Fool. You have been such a damn fool.
She’d been holding out, even now, to somehow find the scrap of humanity Sol still had left—to discover where the monster could be breeched, then redeemed. And if he could be redeemed, then there was a hope of her escape.
But there’d be no redemption. Insanity had taken over her friend.
Meaning she had to fight now.
With everything she had.
She wrenched. Bucked. Squirmed. Kicked. But Sol, with his wiry stamina and vicious zeal, was stronger. Dammit, so much stronger.
“But it didn’t blow you up, Tracy.” His voice was as savage as his hold, sliding down to manacle her wrists. “It didn’t, dammit—because I didn’t let it.” He hauled her in, forcing her tight, until his mouth was at her ear, shoving his hot, greedy breath into her. “Because I love you, Tracy. Fuck, how I love you.”
The chaos in her stomach threatened to become the mess all over his shirt. Holy crap, how she wanted to give in to the urge but held back, battling to trade the bile for words. “You—you l-love me?”
He let out a long snarl, squeezing thumbs into the hollows of her wrists. “I haven’t told anyone that. You’re the first—and the only. They all suspect now, of course—which is why they’ve sent me now. I’m supposed to prove my loyalty to the movement. Turn you…or kill you.”
A new ice storm raged through her senses. Her nerve endings were its brittle icicles, snapping off and shooting away from her consciousness.
Icicles aren’t options. Burn them. Turn them into steam. Power them into daggers. Push through the fear, Tracy. Transform it. Use it as new energy. Think. Think. Think!
“Or set me free.” She steeled her will, ordering her stare to lift and meet his. Making him see the open plea in her eyes. “Option number three, Sol. Prove you love me. Let me go!”
His features pinched in, aging him ten years in ten seconds. “Not an option, Trace.”
“And that’s not true,” she countered. “You can make it an option. You can give Luke back his mother. Return the country’s hand of leadership to its rightful owner. Reach inside and find the humanity you thought you sacrificed in those trenches with your battalion—”
