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“Is he calm now?”
“He drank the water,” Ethan confirmed.
I stared at his face and then the water, lifting it to take another sip but somehow missing my mouth. Everything was blurry, but I felt so calm, and peace flowed through my body from my toes to my fingers. Ben was okay; the big guy from the van was watching him… Ry something… Ryan… Ryler… Tyler… Similar… Smiles… Silos… Cows… Farm… Sheep…
My head was spinning, and I blinked at Ethan, who stared back at me.
“Wha’ya’do?” I managed to force out. Something was wrong. My body felt strange; every movement was puffs of sugar… marshmallow… sweet… soft.
“I’m sorry, I can’t let you hurt yourself,” Ethan explained, but I don’t know why he added the apology. He had Ben, or his friend did; that was all that mattered. I should care about Ruth. After all, she was Ben’s mom, my wife, ex-wife… we’d been happy for a while, right? Then, how did I know if she’d been happy? I’d been lying to her; I should care about her, but I’d seen Ben sleeping, heard Ethan apologizing, and saw the landscape whooshing past us as I moved one my fingers treacle-slow in front of my face. I closed my eyes and rested my head back on the headrest.
“Is he down yet?” The other voice from the front asked—the driver—I didn’t know him, but Ethan trusted him, and I had to trust Ethan… right?
“Not entirely,” Ethan replied.
I felt his hand touching my forehead, patting my face, and all I could think was that I wished we were back in that room making love because only at that moment was everything clear in my head. Not that it was making love, it was fucking… it was…
“Fucking… ” I muttered, but my tongue felt weird.
“It’s okay, Josh… we’ll fix this.”
And then everything went black.
ChapterEight
Ethan
I hoveredby the door for the longest time. Maybe it was to stall having to join in the big-ass heated debate in the comms room, or it was because I needed to check in on Josh. He was still out of it, sprawled on a bed in this safe house, snoring lightly, his head turned away from me. I’d fucked him, gotten involved, found my ethics, discovered a possible leak in the department, kidnapped him, and drugged him, all while running around trying not to get caught by the nebulous bad guys who didn’t have names.
When he woke up, he was going to kill me.
“What did you do?” Ali asked from my side. She’d arrived at this cabin in the middle of nowhere, Virginia, a little after we had. Nothing had changed between us despite her breaking away from our team. She was still the same Lieutenant Alison Windward who’d pulled me out of a burning car in the desert, laid down covering fire to keep us alive, saved our asses more than once, and she was pissed.
I don’t know what she was more pissed about—the fact I’d rolled into her life again, I was bringing Luca along with me, or that we’d stepped straight into the middle of the new life she’d been building. I didn’t know what she was doing now, that it was some private organization operating as both witness protection and strategic support. Whatever that meant.
“What did I do when?” I said, blinking at her and feigning innocence.
She rolled her eyes, then crossed her arms over her chest, and I knew that stance intimately. I might have been the team leader when we were enlisted, but she was the one in charge of this.
“Josh Anderson, ex-husband to Ruth, son, Ben. In a custody battle. Wife dating republican state rep Charles Rouxier and engaged to same. You’ve been working this case for two years, yet you fucked everything up for some reason?”
I winced at that. Josh had been nothing more than part of the case the FBI had been building—a small portion, collateral damage even. My team and I had taken a skin job at Rouxier’s behest to ingratiate myself with the guy, but yeah, I’d had an attack of conscience where it wasn’t all about getting the job done, whatever the cost. My head was so full of gruesome images from this case that I’d gone into sensory overload. This was the first time I’d fucked up with any case, and I always followed the rules before. I don’t know if it was reluctance to fuck Josh over and ruin his life because… or seeing the photo of his son, Ben… or was it that Ryder had discovered the leak in the department a week back, and we saw that as a team we were being set up to take the fall for whatever rules Danvers ordered us to break? Fuck knows.
Instead of answering her, I nodded toward the door through to the tricked-out comms room. “How bad is it?”
“You worked the case, Cap. You tell me how bad it is. I have a team that relies on me twisting in the wind, you’ve called in assets that are needed elsewhere, you’ve pulled in the last favor I owed you, and I have teammates behind that door demanding to know what is happening.” Her usual calm was splintering, and I felt so much guilt it weighed me down. I’d promised her we would leave her out of what we were doing; she told me she didn’t have the stomach for it, and she made me swear that what me, Luca, and Ryder were involved in was going to stay with us.
And now look at me, standing here, with an unconscious innocent, a kid in trouble, and Rouxier was still sitting pretty in his family fucking mansion.
“For the record, I’m sorry,” I murmured. “I couldn’t think of another person I’d want to turn to; you know I wouldn’t have involved you if I had another way.”
She stared at me, and then let out a sigh. “I’m glad you felt you could come to me, Cap.”
“You can call me Ethan, you know. We’re not in uniform anymore.”
She snorted a laugh. “Ethan? No way, you’ll always be Cap to me.” Then she punched me hard on the arm. “Get your ass into the comms room, Cap. We have the kid handed off in ninety, maybe less. Did you know he’s bringing a cat?”
A cat?
