dare you,” she hissed, not intending to speak at all, but her rage at his gall robbed her of her better judgment.
“Had no choice.”
“There are always choices.”
“Open the door. I haven’t—I can’t—”
There was a thump against the door, as if his body weight had collapsed against it. Or the body weight of someone else. Holy Mother of—if he’d brought some wounded team member to her door, thinking she would play doctor—
“I will shoot you both if you so much as set foot inside this house. Find somewhere else to bleed to death. Anywhere else.” To anyone else, the comment would seem callous at best, heartless at worst, but they had all been trained to do what they could to right very difficult wrongs in exceedingly impossible situations. Every single time they went to work, they put their lives on the line, knowing every mission could be their last. The risks sucked, and nobody wanted to die, but that was part of the job. And the other part of the job was to accept those risks…and never put innocent bystanders in danger in order to save yourself. You’d inserted yourself willingly into a potentially deadly situation. They hadn’t.
There was a grunt. Then another thump. “Just me, Tate.” Another thump, then a scraping sound. “Just me.”
She leaned against the wall of the cabin, willing her racing heart and even more swiftly racing mind to slow down long enough so she could think and act clearly. “It’s Tara. I don’t work for you any longer, and I sure as hell don’t owe you anything. Get off my property, Derek.”
“Can’t.”
“Won’t.” And that was just it. Short of calling the authorities or putting him out of his misery right there on her front porch, there was going to be no way to get rid of him. She looked at the small table on the other side of the door, and the drawer where she kept a charged cell phone. She’d only gotten it for emergency purposes. Otherwise she didn’t need one. There was no one to call, and no one who would call her. But if anything constituted an emergency it was this. Only without knowing the parameters of the mission that had driven him to her doorstep, even calling the locals to haul an apparent unknown trespasser off her property could unwittingly put others in danger. Which meant she couldn’t make that call, and she hated him even more because he damn well knew it.
“You need to be anywhere else but here,” she informed him.
“It’s about CJ.”
Tate’s heart stopped all together. A split second later, she was yanking the door open, and dragging a half-hunched, half-crumpled Derek into her living room. He grunted when she left him to lie where she’d dragged him, stepping over his prone body to close the door, unable to tell, in the pitch darkness, whether he’d left any telltale signs of his presence on her porch. Like a backpack. Or a pool of blood.
She rolled him to his side, not particularly caring what injuries he’d sustained—and it was clear he wasn’t healthy at the moment—or how much worse she might be making them by her rough handling. She gripped the collar of his black, Kevlar-lined jacket and yanked up so his face turned up toward hers. “CJ is dead. I saw her.”
“You were wrong,” he choked out.
“Wrong?” She shook him, stunned, beyond even fury now, unable to process the whole of what was happening. Her training might never wane, but she wasn’t as mentally sharp as she used to be. In any other instance, she’d be happy—proud, even—to know that about herself. It wasn’t healthy to have your brain wired to register, analyze, and process life-or-death information in an instant, and do so as if it were as natural as breathing. “Wrong how? I saw her. I know I’m not wrong. She’s dead, Derek. Has been since three days before they pulled me out of that godforsaken village.”
“No,” was all he managed.
“How could that be? Is this some kind of sick hoax? How dare you come here and—” She made herself stop, and swallowed hard, jaw so tight it ached. “Tell me, all of it, right now, or so help me, God—”
“They still had her. After you…she was still there. Is still.”
Tate’s grip loosened. “No,” she said, the whisper sounding like it had been tortured out of her. “That’s impossible. Not after what we—oh God.” Her fingers went completely slack. His head thumping against the floor barely registered as wave upon wave of unwanted memories flooded her mind. “It’s been three years,” she said, her voice toneless now, hollow, as she fought against the swiftly resurfacing past and the wave of nausea that accompanied it. The fury that had built up inside her fled so quickly it left her feeling lightheaded.
Think about CJ. Not…not what had happened back then.
Back there.
CJ. Alive. She simply couldn’t put that together. Not in any rational way.
She looked at Derek, who hadn’t moved. Her eyes had adjusted to the low light, but it was still too dark to make out much. He was in significant pain, that much was certain. Tough shit, she thought, resisting with all her might the avalanche of nightmares that were piled up behind a mental door she’d very carefully, and very thoroughly, closed the day she’d left Washington. “How?” she choked out. “How do you know this?”
“Not…now,” Derek ground out. “Not yet. I’m—I’ve been…” He grunted as he struggled to lift his head on his own, scan his surroundings.
“I’m not bugged,” she retorted sharply, thankful for the sudden resurgence of fury. “No one has been here.”
“I have.”
Her throat closed over as the new reality she was trying to stave off battered its way through her carefully constructed walls.
He’d been here. In her space.
Her world here, her life, was truly compromised, then. She wanted to shake him, hard, wanted to scream and shout and inflict pain, the likes of which he was inflicting on her. “How dare you!” she half-sobbed, half-growled.
“Better me,” he managed, his voice, what there was of it, wavering badly as he let his head loll back to the floor. She could barely make out his features, but it looked like he had his eyes squeezed shut.
Interrogation and detainment rule number one: never shut your eyes. Never.
“Derek—”
“Than them,” he finished, then his head rolled to the side and his jaw went slack.
“Derek?” She leaned over him again. Despite her earlier threats, her heart tripped. “Don’t you go dying right in my foyer, dammit. You’ve already brought enough trouble to my door. You’re not about to leave me to figure out what to do about it by myself.” She pressed her palm to his cheek, turning his face to hers, trying to catch what little moonlight there was so she could better assess his condition. She didn’t dare turn on so much as a flashlight until she learned more about what she was up against. The muscles in his face had gone slack, but his eyes were closed, and she could feel the warmth of his breath. He was still alive. “Good,” she breathed, relaxing a little. She turned his face a bit more toward the spare wash of moonlight coming in through the front window. “Don’t think that means I won’t personally strangle you, though,” she warned, leaning closer to get a better look.
He’d either taken a hell of a fall, or a hell of a beating. She was betting on the latter. There was a gash over his left eyebrow. A black and blue contusion swelling over his right cheekbone. The corner of his mouth was dried with caked blood, and his chin was all scraped to hell. And that’s just what she could make out in next-to-no-lighting. It was also a bitch of a time to notice how thick and dark his eyelashes were.
She lowered his head back to the floor and rocked back on her heels to look over the rest of him. He was five years her senior, which put him at thirty-eight now. And while her past and what she’d gone through had left an indelible stamp on her, aging her in body,