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“Kaiya. Stop. You need to rest. Period. No more shop talk.”
She leaned back in her seat and crossed her arms over her chest, huffing. He didn’t care if she was mad. She wouldn’t be worth a damn if she didn’t heal from her beating—deal with it and they could then move on to getting NSH shut down.
She gave him the cold shoulder all the rest of the way to her house and even when he gathered her up again, carried her inside and set her on her bed. “Do you need any help?”
She shook her head and disappeared into the bathroom with a set of PJs. He went to her kitchen and got her some water. By the time he got back to her bedroom, she was in bed.
He pulled out the pill bottle and gave her a tablet, helped her to drink the water. He figured she was still angry with him until he turned to go. Then her hand shot out and clasped his. “Could you…lay with me while I fall asleep,” she whispered.
He unbuckled and pulled out the belt from the loops of his pants and kicked off his boots. He rounded the bed and crawled onto it, folding down around her as he cupped her body and spooned her against him.
Relief ran through him again as her breathing evened out, but he couldn’t seem to settle with her plastered against him.
9
GQ stoodin the doorframe of a small stucco house tucked into the desert on the outskirts of Vegas. True to her word, Bree had procured the house and local law enforcement had secured the suspect—Eugene Townsend, TransitExpress employee who had helped to transport his beautiful and sweet Celeste to her incarceration.
Eugene was currently sitting in a chair positioned on a cracked cement floor in the basement, the small windows, with dead flies on the sills, barely let in enough sunlight of the blistering desert rays to illuminate the dust-dry and shadowed area. A tumbleweed blew by one of the windows, making GQ’s muscles tense at the sudden movement.
Eugene was still trembling and had been ever since the three of them settled into the nondescript white van he was waiting in, a hood over his head and his hands handcuffed in front of him. They could hear the desperation in his voice. He had asked repeatedly what was going on until Iceman clipped him on the side of the head and told him to shut up.
Iceman paced, his muscles flexing as he moved, slick with a thin coat of sweat, the very air full of a kind of intensity GQ only usually felt when they were in combat. Iceman pulled the hood off and positioned himself in front of Eugene. The guy took one look at him and shrunk back. Iceman wasn’t only a man in his prime, but he was fucking scary when he wanted to be, a kind of white wolf ready to rend his prey into bloody shreds.
“Wha-at do you want?” Eugene stammered. “Who are you?”
“I’m the guy who owns you now.” Iceman pulled up the footage of him accepting the crate and the envelope. “Who are these men?”
Eugene licked his lips, his eyes darting around the room, his shoulders sinking as he realized that there wasn’t just one of these men, there were two more. Bree, Kat, and the NCIS agents had stayed in the car. “I don’t know their names.”
Iceman crouched down, bringing them face to face, and his voice dropped into a lower octave. GQ stepped into the room and Preacher tensed. Iceman was balancing on a hair trigger.
From a sheath on his tack vest, he pulled his knife, and the blood drained from Eugene’s face, his eyes bulging in terror.
“Hey, they paid me cash to look the other way and take the crate,” he said, his words fast. “I don’t know who they were. It was so much money!” His chest heaved and his breath came hard. “When we landed in Vegas, there were different guys who took the crate and paid me more money.”
Iceman was so still, GQ took another step forward, his pale eyes focused on Eugene were cold, killing frost.
Eugene’s eyes darted to the knife, and his face contorted in abject fear and realization that what he had done was going to get him killed. He closed his eyes, his words a panicked stream. “I looked inside. There were women in there, beautiful women, all dark hair, with oxygen masks on their faces.” He took a hard breath. “OhGodohGodohGod,” he said in a rush. “It was too late by then. We’d already taken off.”
“And you didn’t think to alert the authorities,” Iceman said.
“No. I was already in too deep,” Eugene wailed, his nerves obviously fried, frazzled, and frayed. Iceman sighed and the sound of it went through Eugene like an arctic gale. He shivered and swallowed hard. “I saw the bill of lading. I know where the crate went.”
“Where?”
“If I talk, they said they would kill me.”
Iceman set the knife on the guy’s thigh, and way too close to his femoral. From the sudden look of blank, unadulterated terror on the man’s face, GQ figured they were getting the last bit of information Eugene had. “The crate was going to Portland International Airport.” He rattled off the flight and departure time. “That’s all I know. I swear.”
Eugene’s information was enough to lead them to the correct TransitExpress plane and another duped employee, who told them the crate had been transported to Anchorage. That’s where the trail ended. A private company had picked up the crate, the TransitExpress guy wasn’t holding back, not after the way Iceman looked, but when they got to the company the guy said had received the crate, it was a dead end. No one there had any information about the crate. It had vanished into thin air.
* * *
Kodiak cameout of the bathroom, steam escaping as he stepped into the cooler air of Kaiya’s bedroom. Hazard had dropped off a bag for him, along with some groceries, and he’d gotten out of the clothes he’d slept in. He ran a towel through his wet hair and left the damp strands around his face. The view of Kaiya made him sigh, her body curled in a semi-drugged sleep, her face mottled with bruises. She had woken up briefly, enough for him to medicate her and set ice packs on the most swollen areas, then she’d fallen back to sleep.
He’d been scared for her when he realized she was in Cox’s brutal hands. He’d had to get a handle on this need to protect her and take her away from the dangers. She was in law enforcement and had dedicated her life to her job. She wouldn’t appreciate his idea of protection, and she would never agree to it. He needed to accept that.
His emotions got the best of him, leading to this raw feeling and a caveman-primitive protectiveness that scared him. He knew what happened when emotions ran amuck and why he always worked to lock them down and keep them on a balanced edge. But all his failsafes and attempts to keep things under wraps didn’t work with her. She was amazing, tough, and vulnerable at the same time, devastated by her experience in Afghanistan and hostile to Americans, a woman who cared deeply about the people caught between terror and their innocent lives.
