Badass: Deadly Target (Complete): Military Romantic Suspense (3 page)

I lay my cheek on the floor as I listen to him move room to room, my tears sliding down into the carpet. He searches the guest bedroom, then the bathroom, before walking back downstairs. Minutes later, I hear his voice, thick with an accent I can’t place.

“Come. The house must be searched thoroughly.”
Oh no, they’d surely find me then
. I grip the gun tighter, listening for a response, but there is none. He must be using a phone. “I will leave the doors open. Tell Stan to meet me at the safe house.”

I listen hard, willing my heart to stop beating so loudly in my ears. More footsteps. Then the sound of the front door opening and closing shatters the silence.

Some instinct tells me to wait, even as every muscle in my body begs me to crawl out from beneath the bed, to run downstairs and find my mother. But I force myself to be still. Just not for too long. I don’t know how long it will take the search team to arrive.

It’s another game she taught me. The patience game. “When you feel as if you will scream from wanting to do something so badly, count to one hundred. Then, count to one hundred again. And again, until it feels right to move.”

After I count to one hundred five times, I decide it’s relatively safe to leave the bedroom. I creep down the stairs, the gun in front of me, still unsure of the emptiness of the house. At the bottom of the stairs, a pair of feet sweep all thoughts of caution away.

“Mom!” I stumble down the rest of the stairs.

Lying at the bottom, half in and half out of the hallway, her eyes stare blankly at the ceiling, her face a mask of agony.

“Oh, Mom.” Tears blur my vision as I look around, frantic, unsure what to do. Should I call 911 for an ambulance? The police?

Do not trust anyone, Mia.

I shiver as those words whisper through my mind.

No. I can’t call any of them. The crazy things she told me before her murder are true. It is murder, but the police or paramedics can’t do anything for her now. I stroke her forehead, brushing back her gray-streaked brown hair, and close her lovely gray eyes for the last time.

“I love you,” I whisper, pressing my lips against her smooth cheek. “Always. Forever. To the moon and around all the stars and back.” It’s what she used to tell me when I was little.

On shaky legs, I stand, unsure of what I should do next. Then I remember. The envelope! It’s still in my purse, and the key is still hidden in the freezer, unless the bad guy found it already. She’d had one dying wish: for me to get to her safe deposit box and follow her instructions. I have to try.

I run back upstairs and grab my purse from under the bed. I click on the safety and shove the gun inside. Hurrying downstairs, I run to the kitchen and search the freezer. Sure enough, an ice tray in the back holds a cube containing a small key. I wrap it in a dishtowel and slip it into my jacket pocket. I step gingerly around my mom’s body, tears blurring the sight of her, and stop with a jolt at the broken front door. Instead, I backtrack, pausing only to peek out the shades before simply walking out the back door and across the grass.

I fight to keep my footsteps even and casual, as if I’m out for a stroll on a beautiful day. I round the corner and walk back to Mom’s street, several houses down. Everything looks normal.

Normal.

Will anything ever be normal again?

Chapter 3 – Jax

“Promise me you’ll find love again.”

Her words come to me today as clearly as they did the moment she spoke them. Weak, breathless, but determined. My wife, Laura, had always been determined.

Even now, I can almost feel the weight of her hand in mine, so light. I’d held that hand so many times. In the end, the last of the strength there had withered. Become fragile. The bones and blue veins visible through delicate skin. I remember every detail as the moments left slipped away from me.

She fought the battle for so long and so hard.

In all my years of training and battle, I’d never seen anyone fight as bravely as she did. Shaving her own head before the chemo took care of it for her. Walking down a crowded street with an oxygen tank strapped to her back. Determined to live life on her terms until it was taken from her.

She could only fight so much before the cancer took over. But she drained every drop out of her life; that much she managed.

She laid motionless, the only sounds in the room the beeping monitors and her labored breathing. It was torture, sitting by her bed, listening to her struggle to inhale and exhale blessed oxygen from her lungs. The one thing no one ever tells the loved ones of cancer patients is how much you want the struggle to finally end. How it rips you apart inside to watch the person you adore dying in pain and delirium.

She hadn’t spoken a clear, rational word in days; lost somewhere else, far away, where there was no pain. Her eyes were glassy, unable to focus on anything for very long. There was no way of knowing if she really saw me, or if she was looking right through me to another realm waiting to embrace her.

I stayed with her twenty-four hours a day, sleeping on a cot by her bed when my eyes refused to stay open. There was no way I’d miss out on a minute with her, now that our minutes had grown so few. I remember the nurses begging me to eat, to sleep. I’d lost weight, they told me. I knew I had, the rational part of my brain knew that my belt had to be cinched tighter than usual, but taking care of myself seemed so meaningless. So what if I lost weight? I could put it back on. My wife never would.

On that last day she seemed more clear than she had in a long time. I didn’t know if that was a blessing or a curse. At least she had seemed happy while lost in her delirium. But in her final hours, she was present, aware. The same old Laura in a tattered shell.

“Promise me you’ll find love again.” Nothing more. Except for a long ragged breath followed by a slow exhale.

“I’ll never love anyone like I love you,” I tell her now, sitting by her grave. Tears blur the flowers in my lap. I keep my head down, not wanting anyone to see.

“I miss you so much,” I whisper. “Every day I see something interesting and I think,
Laura would love that
. I can’t wait to get home and tell you about it. Then I remember. How is it that I keep forgetting? How can I forget you’re gone? I think I just don’t want to remember. If I remembered all the time, it would kill me.”

I had wanted to die too, wanted more than anything else to go with her. It had taken my best friend to shake me out of my stupor, slapping me around and reminding me that Laura would hate to see me that way, broken and weeping. I came around and decided to try to live.

But the love thing? I can’t do that.

Sitting by her grave, I remember the night we met. Back then, I sure as hell hadn’t had the time to date, and I didn’t exactly have a social life that allowed for chance meetings. The Rangers had been my life up to that point, but I’d just left the Army to join the CIA. I hadn’t been in my new role more than a couple weeks when my new friends had convinced me to join them at a Halloween party. I hated the idea, but as the new kid on the block, I went along to appease them.

And there she was. Dressed as an angel. Even then I knew how corny it was, thinking to myself that she really did look like an angel, with her perfect golden curls and radiant smile. All the other women at the bar were dressed as slutty-this and slutty-that, and there she was, wings and all. I married her a year later.

“I knew how special you were right then and there,” I whisper, staring at the headstone, her name and the dates of her birth and death carved into the granite. “I fell in love with you that very night, and I told the guys that I was going to marry you. They all thought I was drunk. Maybe I was. But that didn’t change anything.”

I remember how she had loved Christmas. I used to call her my Christmas Angel, and I’d sit back in wonder as she transformed our little apartment into a wonderland; later, our little house, and after we outgrew it, our larger house. She loved nothing more than entertaining our friends and family, and put out a spread that Martha Stewart would have swooned over. A fully decorated tree went up in every room of the house … including a small one in the powder room.

I finally managed to put up a small tree this year. Baby steps.

But I still hadn’t resigned from the job that terrified her so much.

She was so scared of my role in the CIA, having watched too many movies, I’m guessing. And I promised her before she died I’d leave it. But after she was gone, I couldn’t find it in myself to have another enormous change in my life. I’ve thought about it many times, but maybe my buddy was right, that I had a death wish. It didn’t feel that way, not really. But maybe subconsciously, he was right. Maybe I volunteered for the shittiest, most violent assignments for a reason other than the adrenaline rush and the desire to take the bad guy down.

Did I tell you I found one of the gifts you hid for me?” I ask her headstone. “It was in the rafters, under the roof. You were always doing that, hiding gifts and forgetting where you left them. Or maybe you got sick and didn’t get around to making it back up there. I don’t know. But it was still ticking, can you believe it?” I hold up my wrist, the watch she bought for me gleaming there. I’d wept like a baby when I found it. Sometimes a moment like that comes around and threatens to crush my heart.

“You had good taste,” I tell her. “I mean, you married me, right?” I laugh, the sound carried away by the breeze. I vaguely wonder what the men I served with would think if they heard me talking to a headstone, laughing at nothing but air.

“I know you wanted me to love somebody else,” I whisper. “But that’s so easy to say when you’re not the one who’s left behind. How could anyone else compare to you? You’re everything, still. You always will be. You’ve been gone for two years, but it feels like yesterday … then again, sometimes it feels like forever.”

Thinking back to all the long nights since her death, I shudder to think of all the ones to come. She always hogged the blankets. It used to irritate the hell out of me. I would wake up, shivering, in the middle of the night, and look over to find her wrapped in a cocoon. Finally, we had to use separate blankets, and even then she would sometimes take mine. I had no idea how she managed it.

The first cold night after she died, I was left with the blankets all to myself. That was when it hit me the hardest, when I realized she was never coming back. I would have given anything to wake up shivering, if it meant she was beside me again. It had gotten easier to sleep alone since then, but not much. A bed can seem very big when you’re in it alone, especially when it isn’t supposed to be that way.

“You know it’s your fault, right?” I tease her. “That I can’t give my heart to anybody else? It wouldn’t be fair to another woman to know I’d rather be with you.” The wind picks up, blowing my dark hair into my eyes. It’s almost like she’s blowing my words back in my face, making me eat them. I shrug, and semi-grin at the headstone. “Sorry, love, I know you don’t agree, but that’s just how it is. You’re still everywhere inside me. I don’t want you to leave. I don’t want to make room for another person. It would be like losing you all over again.”

By habit, my fingers go to my ring finger, where my wedding ring is supposed to be. I’m still mad at her about that. A little bit, at least. She’d made me promise that I’d bury her wearing my ring, and I did so. Nothing had been so hard as when I’d taken it off and placed it on her cold thumb.

It didn’t take me long to figure out her true reasons for doing that. She knew. She absolutely knew that I’d never take it off, meet someone new, if she left it on this side of the grave.

Standing, I place the flowers in front of the headstone. Stepping back, I take one last look. “I love you, sweetheart. Happy Birthday.”

Walking away from the gravesite, I knuckle away the tears that threaten to spill from my eyes. My back pocket buzzes and I grab my phone before sliding behind the wheel of my Land Rover. It’s my boss, John Stephens.

“Hathaway speaking,” I say into the phone, clearing my throat of the grief still sticking there. “What can I do for you?”

“Your tracker has your location pinned at the west side of town,” my boss’ gruff voice snaps me back into real life. “We’ve just received a contract. Ready for your next assignment?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll be receiving coordinates for a bank within five miles of your current location as well as to the Sacramento Court House.”

“I’m very familiar with that area, sir. What are my procedures?”

“As we speak, Judge William Steadman is signing a warrant for us to seize the contents of a safe deposit box. An employee by the name of Russell Lunden will be expecting you and will drill the box. Your assignment is to deliver the warrant, confiscate the contents, and deliver them to the D.C. office by eighteen hundred hours. You’ll receive travel confirmation shortly.”

As he speaks, my phone buzzes several times in my hand. I glance at the messages and confirm receipt.

“Jax?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Time is essential. We aren’t the only operation interested in those contents.”

“Understood, sir. See you at eighteen hundred.”

The line goes dead and I toss the phone in the console and start the engine.

Bust open a security box. Deliver contents to Washington.

Seems simple enough.

Chapter 4 – Mia

After thirty minutes of driving in midday traffic, I arrive at the bank, glad to have something to focus on other than the memory of my mother’s eyes staring up at the ceiling. Or the way she looked at me before shoving me under the bed.

There is no time to indulge in pain and confusion when I’m too busy fulfilling her last wish — one which she said would have terrible consequences if left unfulfilled. The one she died to protect. Died. I still can’t believe my mother is dead.

Gripping the steering wheel, I scream as loud as I can, roaring some of my anguish out with the sound. It feels so good to have that release, so I scream again. Then I make myself stop when it begins to border on the hysterical. How did life get so crazy so quickly?