Iyara let out a bitter laugh. “You can’t possibly think American hands are less dirty?”
“I can’t tell you who has clean hands,” Bethan said. “I like to think it’s a sliding scale, but none of us come out fresh on the other end of it. I will tell you this. Our client is an individual whose concern here is not building himself a weapon but studying the effects of the science involved in controlled, nonmilitary environments.”
“Why should I trust anything you say? Because you’re a woman?” She shook her head. “I know better than that.”
Bethan held her gaze. “I’m not asking you to be my friend, Iyara. I’m asking you to think about what future you want. A brutal death at the hands of men like these? Because you must know that’s what’s on offer if we leave you here. Or a chance at a real life?”
She saw something like hope move across Iyara’s face, quickly blinked away, but Bethan knew she had her.
“How can I trust that?” Iyara asked, but Bethan heard the ache in her voice for the first time.
Bethan handed her the pack she carried, with the medical supplies. This time, Iyara took it.
“The world is a grim place. We both know that,” she told her softly. “Don’t trust it. Trust me. You can, Iyara. I promise.”
Two
Jonas called in the cleanup crew on their way out of the decrepit old mining town, despite his serious doubts that anything would be there when they arrived. Not when this particular sector of the Atacama Desert was home to far too many desperate and dangerous individuals—not to mention whoever was behind the group that had met Alaska Force there with so much unexpected force.
Then it was a long four days to get back out of the high desert, made more precarious this time because they were transporting the scientist’s sister. Iyara Sowande might have held her own against the men who’d held her in that run-down building, but that didn’t mean a civilian recovering from a traumatic event was prepared to travel at the same pace as the team. But she did her best without complaint, and once they made it to their waiting jet in the port city of Antofagasta on the Chilean coast, it was a comparatively smooth and quick flight to Lisbon.
And once there, Iyara took them directly to a nondescript flat outside of Lisbon proper, in an unremarkable suburb that wasn’t notable in any way.
Jonas called into command back in Alaska. Oz, resident computer genius, listened to the mission rundown in silence, though Jonas could hear Oz tapping away on his keyboard.
“Should I let the client know the package is incoming?” Oz asked when Jonas was done with his report. “Or do you think there will be more roadblocks?”
Jonas took a quick scan of his team, the scientist and his sister, all crowded into the small apartment in a Portuguese city half a world away from the desert where they’d found Iyara. “We’ll be wheels up inside an hour and on our way to Montreal. Make sure the client is ready.”
“Roger that,” Oz replied.
When the line was terminated and his duty done for the moment, Jonas stayed where he was in the farthest corner of the flat, not quite ready to rejoin his team.
Who was he kidding? It wasn’t his team that he needed to keep his distance from. It was Bethan. Jonas had been working with Griffin for a while now. He’d always liked Rory. And August, one of the new crop of Alaska Force members, could more than handle himself. Jonas had spent his entire adult life in militaristic scenarios like this one, in and out of the service, and had always been good at teamwork.
Better than good.
He just wished that Bethan Wilcox wasn’t quite so good at what she did.
If he’d had his way, she never would have been accepted into Alaska Force in the first place, but no one had asked him. And he hadn’t had it in him to veto her selection, which he could have done. Not for her sake, but because he had no intention of telling anyone why it was she got to him.
Not even the only men alive he considered brothers and friends, Isaac Gentry and Templeton Cross. Together they’d been in and out of too many fires to count. The three of them had started Alaska Force after the last mission they’d all been on had gone so spectacularly wrong.
But Bethan was his very own ghost. She’d been haunting him for years.
Jonas hadn’t been prepared for the kind of damage she could do to him by actually being there, in the flesh.
He still wasn’t.
As usual, Bethan was aware of it when he stared at her too long. She looked up from her position next to Iyara on the small couch, and he saw that deliberately blank look take over her face.
The same expression she always threw his way, and more power to her.
But he remembered too well. That was the problem.
He remembered her eyes wide and terrified. And worse, determined. He remembered her hands on him, checking him, coaxing him, then somehow, while he flickered in and out of nothingness, physically dragging him across rough ground.
He remembered those long hours of consciousness, too, and that was worse.
He remembered too much.
And he found it all as unforgivable as he always had.
She rose and crossed the room to him, which didn’t help.
“Are we good?” she asked.
Not for the first time, Jonas wondered why no one else seemed to hear the challenge in her voice. As if she were forever daring him to say the things he really thought. About her or anything else.
Because she, better than anyone, knew that he wasn’t the ghost he liked to pretend he was. She knew he bled. That he was flesh and bone, and both too fragile.
He didn’t think that would ever sit well with him.
“Everything’s fine,” he said shortly.
Griffin stood over by the door, that cold gaze of his out the window beside it, watching. Waiting. Rory was directing Dr. Tayo Sowande, their scientist, to pack his things. August had point at the far end of the apartment, where there was potential access through another window.
Jonas didn’t scowl at Bethan, because that was the same as broadcasting an emotion, and he’d stopped making mistakes like that when he was still a kid. But if he expected the blank look he trained on Bethan to get to her, he was disappointed.
He always was.
“Shouldn’t you be tending to the sister?” he asked in a low voice.
“She’s had enough tending,” Bethan replied.
She irritated him by not standing before him, searching his face for answers, as if she wanted something from him. He would have known what to do with that. Instead, she treated him the way she always did now that she was in Alaska Force. Now that she’d distinguished herself by being one of the few women in history who’d made it through Army Ranger School. Now that she was, indisputably, a superhero in her own right. Something he would have celebrated, had it been anyone else.