weaken my defenses. They guessed exactly wrong.”
“So they just up and left.”
Tate sighed. “The assumption was they received orders to move on to other targets.”
“Why leave you alive?”
Tate looked directly at him. “I don’t think they believe they did. I might have been breathing, barely, but I was hardly alive. I assume, if they thought of it at all, when they left me there they believed I’d starve to death, if my injuries didn’t get me sooner. I wasn’t exactly freed, I was abandoned, as useless to them as the house they were using to torture us in.
“As I stated in my debriefing, they didn’t treat me as a human being, merely as a conduit of information. When that conduit wasn’t forthcoming, they saved further expenditure of energy and moved on. The last day, they were talking with each other as they left the room I was held in as if I wasn’t there. They didn’t so much as look back when they walked out. Shortly after that, the house was abandoned. What was left of the village was already burned out and deserted. I was discovered a day later by an old villager looking to see if there was anything useful left in the rubble to loot. I was retrieved by the team two days after that. End of story. A story you know full well. So, what part of the story don’t I know?”
“They never did find CJ’s body.”
“I’m aware of that. Doesn’t prove her death was a hoax.” And just like that, the fight went out of her. She took a moment, and he watched as she tried to gather herself, regroup, but it was apparently beyond her at the moment. “I saw it, Derek,” she said, sounding emotionally raw, bruised. “I saw her.”
“I know,” he said quietly. “But I’ve communicated with her, Tate. She is alive.”
“I don’t understand.” Tate turned then, and paced to the window, stopping abruptly and staring out of it. “Make me understand.”
He closed his eyes and willed himself to focus. “I will,” he said, knowing his battle against the dark void that was pulling at him once again, was going to be a losing one. At least this time it was pure exhaustion, not the fuzzy fugue of drugs, that was pulling him under. “Rest, Tate. We both need it.”
“Derek—”
“You’ll know everything I do,” he said, promising her. He rarely made those. “I just…I’m fading. Let me rest. Then we’ll talk.”
She paced from the window to the bed, arms folded. “I need to get outside anyway. Damage control.”
“The storm.”
“The sky is black, heavy, but the ground is just as dry as when you dragged yourself here.”
“Shit.”
“And then some.”
He opened his eyes into slits, enough to see her roll her shoulders and take a deep, silent breath. “Let me get you some water—”
“Just need some sleep. You should, too.”
“I can take care of me.”
That was a fact he knew better than most. “There’s more,” he said, his eyes closing again, this time without permission. “A lot more.”
“Really,” she said, her tone dry and harsh. He could hear her footsteps moving toward the bedroom door. “And here I thought it couldn’t get any more exciting.”
He listened to her walk away, thinking that was the closest she’d come to sounding like the old Tate.
If he didn’t already know he was going to hell, he certainly would for that alone.
The next thing he remembered was being jolted awake by a booming crash. He instinctively tried to dive off the bed to the floor for cover until he determined the situation, then came screamingly awake when hot daggers of pain knifed through him, pretty much everywhere.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
That was Tate’s voice, shouting, then she was there, pushing him back down onto the bed from his slumped-over position, half on–half off the mattress.
“Heard—a crash. Thought—”
“Never mind,” she told him, her matter-of-fact tone telling him she’d likely figured out the chain of events. “Just lie back down, you’re in no condition to—”
“Actually,” he said, bracing his weight on one hand, on his good side, as she helped shift his legs back to the bed, “I don’t think I’m as bad off as I thought.”
“Why? Because you didn’t actually explode an internal organ just now? We still don’t know what’s busted up in there, so—”
“I know what shape I’m in.” Or he certainly did now. Now that the rainbow of consciousness-threatening pain was settling down into something that was merely excruciating, he was beginning to sort out the sources.
White light flashed through the room, creating a strobe-light effect, followed almost immediately thereafter by a wall-rattling crack of thunder. Neither of them flinched, but simply continued maneuvering him back into bed.
He put his hand on hers when she started to pull the covers around him. “I can manage.”
She stilled. “Three hours ago you could barely move your head two inches to the right, so you’ll have to forgive me if I make assumptions regarding your general health and well-being.”
He wanted to tell her he was the very last person whose well-being she should ever care about, but they both knew the only reason she was nursing him back to any level of health was so she could find out just how much jeopardy he’d put hers into.
“I’m beaten, not broken,” he told her, then immediately wanted to bite his tongue off at the look that flashed across her face. “Tate—” he began, only to have her cut him off with a quick tuck of the coverlet over him, making him grunt a bit in pain.
She continued on, straightening the corners with crisp efficiency, her gaze no longer anywhere in the vicinity of his. “Rest,” she instructed. “I’m making soup.”
His stomach growled at that announcement, but she merely arched a brow, still not looking at him as she stalked to the door. “Sounds like a ‘yes, ma’am,’ to me. I’ll be back later.”
And she was gone, down the hall, and from the sounds of it, out the front door, which he heard slam shut behind her a moment later.
Straight out into the storm. But then, he supposed she was in a storm regardless of whether there was a roof over her head or not.
I can take care of myself.
Her words echoed in his head. As did all the others he’d heard her speak. Both here, and during her debriefing.
He blocked those out. All of them. Because she was right. If she’d ever proven anything, and she certainly hadn’t needed to at that point in her quite illustrious career, it was that she could take care of herself.
She hadn’t needed him then. And she most definitely did not need him now.
The best thing he could do for her was to figure out the fastest way to get on his feet, so they could solve the problem at hand before the problem took them out of the equation.
Of course, it would be a hell of a lot easier if he knew exactly what the problem was. He didn’t look forward to the moment when he had to explain that little detail to her. All he could hope was that she had, unwittingly or not, the information he needed to fill in the crucial parts of the equation that were still blank.
So focus, dammit. Focus.
And though his head pounded like it was being used as an anvil, and his body screamed like a little girl every time he moved any part of it, he spent the next twenty minutes doing as thorough and methodical an assessment