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“If the Kovac or subcommittee missions don’t yield good results, will the team still be together a year from now?” she asked quietly.
“Between you and me,” I met her steady gaze and refused to tell a lie to one of my closest friends in the world, even a little one she so desperately wanted to hear, “the honest answer is, I don’t know.”
5
Ashlee
I arrived at the gym on Wednesday afternoon ready for a fight. It had barely been forty-eight hours since my last workout, but I had energy to burn and a whole host of erotic dreams to forget.
They were notable for more than the hot sex. For the first few days following my rescue six months ago, I’d had nightmares of being trapped, drowning, and even falling off cliffs. Three months of intensive therapy and sleep medications alleviated those terrors. I eventually weened myself off the sleep aids, but I hadn’t remembered a dream or nightmare since then. Until Sunday night, when the vivid, Technicolor fantasies featuring my mystery-man rescuer had started.
I was the first one in my class to arrive at the rubber-mat-lined exercise room. I stepped inside and tugged on my hand wraps to test them.
“You’re early,” Barry, the instructor, said.
“Excess energy,” I said.
“Good.” He moved to the middle of the mats and pointed to a spot in front of him. “Then you can go a few rounds with me before class starts.”
I put up my fists, bent at my knees, and tensed my core. Barry repositioned one of my fists and directed me to shift my hips to square better, then picked up a rubber shield and got into his own stance. I started with slow, relatively gentle kicks and jabs as he resisted and pushed toward me with the shield. As minutes passed, he came at me harder and stronger with each series of combination moves. There was a moment when I thought I had him off-balance and moved in for a hard kick to push him out of the center of the mat, but he swooped low and took my feet right out from under me, knocking the wind out of me.
As I gasped for breath, he extended his hand to help me up. The class clapped as I dragged myself to the edge of the mat to join them. I assumed they were showing appreciation for Barry’s expertise until one by one they complimented me for my strong showing.
“You should go for your belts,” she said.
“I’ve been telling her that for months.” Barry smiled at me.
He was right, we’d had the discussion many times. But that would take a level of intensity and focus that I needed to reserve for my work, so I kept putting him off.
After our warm-up of running and jumping exercises, Barry told us to pick sparring partners. I gravitated toward Jessica, an early twenty-something yoga instructor who was working on expanding what she called her ‘fitness profile’, but Barry stepped in front of me and pointed me toward Ted, a man with six inches of height and probably a good fifty pounds on me. Fear clawed its way up my throat as I thought about absorbing punches and kicks from him, even with the protection of the rubber shield.
Barry grasped my shoulder. “Deep breaths,” he said. “Relax.” To the rest of the class he said, “I want you to mix it up today. In the real world, you’re probably not going to be attacked by someone of similar size, and ladies, you know it probably won’t be another woman.”
I controlled my breath the way my therapist had taught me. In through my nose. Out through my mouth. Stay in the moment. Still, snatches of memories pushed through to the surface. Being grabbed in the narrow hallway of a harbor cruise ship, dragged back into the small bunk room, zip-tied with my hands behind my back, gagged with a bandana, and shoved to sit down on the bed beside Aiden.
As classmates squared off against each other and Barry talked through the combinations we would be using for the benefit of the newer members, I switched to another technique my therapist had taught me. I pulled up different memories. Having the gag removed and the zip ties cut. Being half-carried up the stairs to the ship’s deck. Seeing the sun crest on the horizon. Feeling a sharp prick in my palm. Falling into the strong arms of a stranger.
I blinked fast to clear my head. Why had a memory of Saturday night insinuated itself into my mental slideshow? And why did something that should make me feel vulnerable leave me with a sense of being safe?
I stopped thinking and focused on the task at hand, which was to try to remain standing while fighting a bigger and stronger opponent. One of the joys of the physical challenge of kickboxing was being forced out of my head and into the present. When my hour-long class was over, the world, my job, and even my mystery man would still be out there, waiting for me to deal with them. But for the next sixty minutes, I could have a reprieve, mentally catch my breath, and sink into an illusion of peace.
Then I would get back to work investigating Luka Kovac and digging into TJ Russo. But given what I suspected TJ was, everything I was learning about him could be a cover. Until I knew for sure, I would keep my distance, proceed with caution, and try to exile him from my dreams.
* * *
TJ
I adjusted my headset and leaned back in my seat, which was in front of one of three monitors in the back of an unmarked black van. Jensen, who was running the tech side of the operation, Bond, who was there in the unlikely event one of the team members required medical assistance, and I were parked a block from Ashlee’s fitness club. Alder was back at HQ, coordinating data, and Penn was in the driver’s seat of a nondescript white Toyota parked across the street from the club.
Kessler and Li waited in the back seat of Penn’s car in case Sparks sent out a distress call. We all hoped this was as easy a job as it appeared on the surface and wouldn’t require a tactical crew intervention that would blow our cover with Ashlee, but stranger things had happened when the team had been in the field.
“She’s on the move,” Sparks, who was undercover inside the club as a new client, said over the comms. “Her class is over, and she’s headed for the showers.”
I did my damnedest to keep it professional and not think about Ashlee naked and slippery. That went about as well as I’d expected it would, so I gave up trying. To distract myself, I reached for the thermos bottle Jensen handed me when we boarded the van. He’d filled it with a portion of the green smoothie he’d made after lunch. I took one sip, then gagged as something sour and sticky and sweet all at the same time slid over my tongue and caught in my throat.
“You didn’t really just try to drink that,” Bond said without turning in my direction.
“Trying not to take offense to that,” Jensen said, keeping his eyes on his screen and his fingers on his keyboard.
