Love and Wargames: A Bad Boy Hacker Romance (19 page)

“We know what we’re doing, Box,” she assures me.

I nod, losing any drive I have to argue with it but the black tar taking hold of my gut remains.

***

I balance my laptop in the sand and scan the radar for something — anything — that could be a potential threat. Fox lies prone next to me with one eye pressed against his scope.

“I see two inside,” he mutters into the radio. “They’re sitting at a table — looks like they’re waiting on something.”

“Copy that,”
Rhys whispers back.

I pick up the binoculars and squint through them, flicking on the night vision to get a better view of the black warehouse in the distance. Caleb jumped at the chance to join Rhys, West, and Rogers in surrounding the warehouse and I’ve been a fucking wreck ever since. Even her quippy
shut up and stay here
wasn’t enough to calm me down. I see her now, her petite figure standing out among the tall, muscled forms of the others. I didn’t hurl before we came out here but I sure as hell might now.

“Hey, Boxcar.”

I jolt slightly at Fox’s voice. “What?”

“Don’t give up.”

“On what?”

“On
her
,” he says, still focusing through his scope.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He peeks out at me for a short moment, his brown eyes calling bullshit. “Take it from me, man. There aren’t a lot things I believe in anymore… but I believe in you guys.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because what’s the fucking point otherwise? The world binds us to certain people. Most are bad, but some are pretty good. I highly doubt the two of you just stumbled on each other out of coincidence but if you did — you can’t waste it.” He pauses. “Not like I did.”

I stare ahead into the black desert. “You make it sound easy.”

“Don’t make it difficult. She’ll do that enough for both of you.”

“That’s probably true.”

Fox clicks on his radio. “Fall back, Sergeant. They hear you.”

I raise the binoculars as panic strains my chest. Two blurry figures pass by the warehouse windows from the inside, one larger and balder than the other and my blood runs cold. “It’s them…” I search for Caleb but I’ve lost her. Rhys and West stand around the front side, pressed hard against the wall to avoid detection but I can’t find Caleb or Rogers anywhere. “Where is she?”

“She went around the back,” Fox answers, readying his radio again. “Caleb, they’re heading in your direction. Get out of sight now—”

A single bullet fires and my hands jerk so hard, I drop the binoculars.

“Fox—”
Caleb’s voice cuts off and my heart stops.

“Man down,”
Rhys says. “
Fitzpatrick, we’re going in. If you get a shot, take it.”

“Who’s down?” I ask, grabbing the binoculars again. I force my grip and I try to look through them. “Fox,
who’s down
?!”

“I don’t know. I can’t see.”

Another wave of gunshots spill out, flooding the air with a popping echo. I freeze in the sand, ready to bury my head in it but I can’t stop staring at the warehouse.

Caleb
. She’s in there and I can’t do a fucking thing from back here.

I push up and I start running.

“Boxcar,
stop
!”

I ignore Fox’s warning, forcing one foot in front of the other. Regret builds with each step but I swallow it down between heaving breaths. The warehouse draws closer every second but each one that passes could mean a bullet through Caleb’s perfect green eyes.

Finally, I charge through the front door and my nose twitches with the scent of blood.

Rhys. West. Rogers. Each of them lie on the floor, face down and still, with a pool of red flowing out of their heads. I slink back, feeling a wave of nausea plague my gut.

“Holy shit!”
A giant hand slaps against my shoulder and it pulls me forward. His voice echoes in my memories, that same barking drawl that bossed me around for days. “It’s
you
!”

I look up into the hard, black eyes of the bald man and cringe. For a second, I wonder if it’s a good thing that he looks happy to see me but then I realize that it just means he gets to tie up a potential loose end.

“Boxcar…”

Caleb’s whimper draws my attention to the table. She sits in the chair with her fingers weaved together behind her head and for a moment, I breathe easier. Then I notice the bearded man with his gun pressed against her head and it all melts away.

“Please don’t hurt her,” I beg.

The bald man pulls me to the table and forces me down into the chair beside her. She stares back at me with a blood-splattered face, her eyes drifting behind my head as I feel the hard, metal tip of a gun push against my skull.

“The Boss will be delighted to know we found you,” the bald man says. He pulls back the hammer beside my ear and I flinch. “Don’t worry about the lady. We won’t kill her…
yet.
”

The bearded man’s laughter cuts short and his body crumbles to the floor behind Caleb’s chair.

“What the fuck—”

More blood strikes Caleb’s face and I spin around in time to see the bald man’s eyes roll back into his head before he joins his friend on the floor. My jaw drops as I see the dark red dots in the center of each of their foreheads.

Fox fucking Fitzpatrick
.

I heave a nauseous breath, full of happy relief, and turn to look at Caleb as her palm crashes into my face.
“Ow!”
Pain shoots through my cheek, firing down my neck as she climbs to her feet. “What—!”

“What the hell were you thinking?!”
she shouts. “Running in here like that. Are you insane?”

I stand up and she shoves me backward. “I did it to help you!”

“This isn’t a game, Boxcar!” She pushes me again and I grab her wrists as my back touches the wall. “You could have been killed but you still ran in here…”

“Of course, I did.”

“Why?!”

There’s a million different things I could say to answer her but there’s only one thing I want to do that will tell her everything. I hold her face, smearing the blood on her cheeks, and crush my lips against hers with a firm kiss. Her resolve shifts in my direction and she kisses me back, gripping my waist to push me against the wall.

We break away, each of us taking deep breaths to calm ourselves as our lips brush together. My fingers tingle from the heat rising off her face, blending with mine.

“I’d do it again,” I whisper, laying my forehead against hers.

She looks back at me with more fear in her eyes than I’ve ever seen. They close and she shakes her head as she turns away from me. The door opens and her hands drop to her sides.

Fox steps in and his eyes fall to the floor. He exhales at the display of red-covered bodies. “You guys okay?”

“Yeah,” Caleb says quickly.

He looks at me, sensing the tension between us and I nod in agreement.

I lean back against the wall again as blood’s stench raids my senses. It brings me back to that moment in the warehouse when I watched these same men murder two other innocents before pointing their guns at me. That same metallic smell. I’d be covered with it already if it weren’t for Caleb and Fox. It’s best not to think about it, I suppose. I’m still here. I’m still breathing.

And so is she.

“We’ll take our men back with us,” Caleb says, gesturing at Fox to help her. “Grab his legs.”

He lays his gun down and walks over to Rhys’ corpse. Caleb scoops her hands beneath his shoulders and the two of them raise him off the floor as if he weighed nothing at all — as if he wasn’t living and breathing just five minutes ago. I bet he’s even still warm.

This is all my fault.

“Boxcar.”

Fox lays a hand on my shoulder and I blink out of it, realizing that they’ve already carried Rhys and West outside into the jeep.

“Yeah?” I ask.

“You in there?”

I clear my throat and exhale the stench out of my lungs. “Yeah.”

“I need you to look around,” he tells me. “See if you can find anything that’ll tell us what they were doing out here. Can you do that?”

I nod. “Yeah.” He drops his hand and steps away. “Fox… I’m sorry.” I look to the floor at our dead enemies and the pool of blood flowing beneath each of them — struck down by Fox’s bullets. “That… can’t be easy.”

Fox looks at their bodies. “It never is,” he says, “but you two are still here. That’s something.”

There’s a slight tremble in his tone but it’s not enough to bleed into his optimism. Honestly, I’m not sure how he’s managed not to break, given everything he’s been through. I push off the wall, clinging to what remains of strength inside of me and I get to work while Fox and Caleb gather Rogers off the floor.

There’s not much to look through. Not even a document or a note. A computer would be nice. Whatever they were doing out here, they made damn sure they weren’t going to leave a trail.

I pause above their bodies. The obvious place to look would be their pockets but the idea of rummaging through a dead man’s clothing gives me the chills. Still, I fight through the feeling and kneel down to check them.

Over a dozen pockets between them and not one damn wallet. No identification. No notepad. Nothing. I sit back in disappointment, ready to abandon them completely, but a bit of ink catches my eye just above the bald man’s navel.

I reach out and raise his shirt a little higher, revealing the coiling tail of a cobra etched into his skin. Thin, black eyes stare back at me from between his pecs and I cringe at how much this tattoo must have hurt to get.

I stand up as a memory flicks on in my brain, fueled by a deja vu I can’t pin down. This
snake
. I’ve seen it before but not inked into someone’s skin. It was…

My memories flash back to that night in Paris. I sat at Marilyn Black’s table with a cup of cold tea in front of me while she drilled me with questions. She wore a silver pendant around her neck and I never thought a second thing of it until just now.

It was a cobra. Just like this tattoo.

I step over to the bearded man and pull up his shirt, too.

The same black eyes stare back at me from his abs.

“Box, it’s time to go,” Fox says from the doorway.

“What about them?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Leave them.”

I hesitate but I force myself to stand up and follow Fox outside into the jeep. My curiosity is stronger than ever now. Matching tattoos are usually reserved for two groups of people: drunk college girls and criminal organizations. There can’t be too many that use this cobra to mark their members.

An SUV is already parked by the command tent by the time we reach camp. Caleb called ahead to give them a head’s up but there’s no way the upper command could have sent someone out to replace Rhys so quickly.

The three of us step inside the command tent to find a tall man standing at the head of the table with at least five other mystery men lingering behind him, all of them wearing recently pressed BDUs. Frowning faces all around with the exception to the tall man. He grins wide as he sees us, the edges of his wrinkled smile hidden beneath a brown and silver mustache.

“You must be Fitzpatrick!” he says, zooming in on Fox. He steps around the table and thrusts his hand forward, snatching up Fox’s before he can even react.

“Yes, sir…”

“From what I hear, you’re quite the shot. I look forward to working with you,” he says with wide eyes. Fox nods and he scan the rest of the new men seated around. “I’m Sergeant Paxton. I’m taking over this camp starting now and you’ll be joining my squad. Welcome aboard.” Fox opens his mouth to argue but Paxton talks over him, pointing a hard finger at Caleb. “Fawn, right?” he asks, spinning back to a stack of paperwork. He slides a file out and opens it, smiling. “
Caleb
?”

“Yes, sir,” she says.

“You’re going home in the morning.”

Caleb goes stiff. “Sir—”

“I understand the mix-up but you’re not allowed out here — should have been shipped back the second your boot hit the ground.”

“Sir, I’m a valuable member of this team—”

“Not anymore.”

“I ask you to reconsider, sir.”

“And I ask
you
to know your place.”

She falls silent, crushed and vulnerable, and it pisses me off.

“Sir—” Fox steps forward. “I can vouch for Fawn. She has a right to be here.”

“The decision has already been made. And
you
.” Paxton shifts over to me and stares down with black eyes. “Who the hell are you?”

I throw on my best, shit-eating grin. “I’m Boxcar.”

His lips twitch.
“Boxcar?”

“Yep.”

“And just what do you do here,
Boxcar
?”

I look at Caleb. Her head is down, her eyes just barely open to hide her sadness. This fucking guy. “I’m a civilian intelligence freelancer,” I answer.

He laughs hard. “What the hell is that?”

“I monitor security.”

“Is that all?” he scoffs.

“Nope. I also run and maintain the satellite system surrounding this camp for twenty miles, which means nothing drifts in and out of that radius without me knowing about it — including the very SUV that transported you and your men here tonight.”

“Is that right?”

“You entered that radius at about seven-fifteen,” I point out. “Made it here in record time.”

“Well, the loss of a leader like Rhys hits an operation like this fairly hard,” he says. “I came out here the second I heard from camp.”

“Except that Caleb didn’t make that call until seven-
eighteen
.” His amusement drains from his wrinkled face. “You were already on your way here by then, meaning you heard Rhys was dead from someone else. Now,
who
could that have been?”

Paxton blinks once and leans in closer, using every inch he has on me to his intimidating advantage. “You’re out of here,” he whispers. “I don’t need
civilian intelligence freelancers
clogging up my camp.”

“Or monitoring your calls, right?” I smirk.