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“You’ll have explanations to make. Tell her what the hell is going on,” Ian told him harshly. “At least as far as this mission is concerned. But you’re fooling yourself if you think she’s not going to figure out more than that. You didn’t see the look on her face when Kira and I arrived.”
Noah breathed in deeply. It would kill him, but he’d take care of that too. She wouldn’t suspect who he was when he was finished. After all, her husband never yelled at her, he didn’t fuck her like an animal, and he sure as hell didn’t put her in the middle of a dangerous assignment. No, Sabella would never suspect who he really was.
“You break open my stitches and you’ll bleed like you were gutted again,” Micah snarled.
He shook his head. “Get the hell out of here. Now. Leave Nik in the garage. Tell him to stay in place for cover. We can’t afford to have the team here like this. When those bastards move we need to be right behind them. Until then, we won’t have a break in this and we’ll never catch them.”
“And if you break with Belle?” Ian asked him. “If you tell her who you are, what you are. What then?”
Noah stared back at him. That wouldn’t happen. Ever. He couldn’t bear for his Sabella to know what had happened to the man she had loved so desperately that she came to him in hell.
“Dead men don’t talk,” he said, his voice bleak. “She won’t know. Ever. Her husband is dead.”
Ian stared back at him, his lips tightening before he turned to Micah and nodded to the door.
“He’s fooling you,” the Israeli snapped. “He doesn’t have enough control not to hurt her.”
Oh, he had control, Ian knew. More control than any of them realized.
“Get out of here,” Ian ordered. “Give the others their orders. This is his play, not yours.”
Micah rose to his feet, glared at both of them then lifted his lip in a sneer and headed to the door. Like the Russian, the Australian, the Englishman, their Israeli didn’t always understand some of the rules they broke, and others that they made. Incorporating these men into a viable working team hadn’t been easy. They were hard men. Dead men with nothing else to lose but their honor. But they were good men.
Ian turned back to Noah. He was wild with the lust, there was no doubt of it. But Ian had seen
him in a hell of a lot worse shape. He’d disappeared on them more than once in worse shape, and Belle had never suffered.
The man had lived for nineteen months pumped up on a drug that the doctors still couldn’t figure out entirely. Pumped so high on it that he’d been like an animal, nearly deranged with the need for sex. And he had never taken what Fuentes had offered him. He’d never broken his vows. He’d never let go of his wife.
Ian had to trust in his belief that Noah wouldn’t hurt her now.
Nodding, he moved to the door, glancing back at his friend and hating himself, hating Fuentes with a strength that still had the power to fill him with bitter rage.
His father had done this. The man who sired him. And Ian still let him live. Because he was his father or because Homeland Security needed him? And where, he wondered, was the line drawn?
He should have killed the bastard while he had the chance.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sabella was standing at the narrow counter that separated the kitchen from the living room watching the hall when Ian stepped out of the bedroom. She and Kira hadn’t spoken, the words were there between them, but neither of them had yet broken the silence.
The obviously Middle Eastern agent, and she knew they were agents, had stomped from the apartment with Nik and the others moments before, leaving an eerie silence between her and Kira.
The other woman watched her closely, her gray eyes thoughtful. Now, as Ian moved into the room, Sabella straightened and glanced back to the closed bedroom door.
“Is he okay?” She shoved her hands in the pockets of her jeans and stared back at the man who had been her husband’s greatest friend. Strange, wasn’t it, that he seemed to be Noah’s friend as well.
“He will be.” He stood straight and tall, though his arm went around his wife as she came to him.
Sabella held his gaze, she didn’t hold her tongue.
“Who is he? What is he?”
Was that surprise that flickered in his eyes? Ian didn’t speak.
She stomped to the kitchen drawer, jerking it open and practically slammed the Glock on the counter. She bent, opened the doors beneath the sink, and pulled free the weapon Velcro’d onto the cabinet frame.
She stalked over to the couch, bent, and pulled the smaller handgun from the little pocket beneath the couch and added it to her pile.
