Reclaimed (Hostage Rescue Team Series Book 10) (12 page)

Feeling like he had a two-thousand-pound weight on his shoulders, he headed upstairs to their room. As he suspected, she was in there, the door closed. At least this time she hadn’t locked it. It drove him nuts when she shut him out, made him frantic to reach her, do
something
to make it all better. Or at least stop her from pulling out of his reach.

He eased the door open to find her sleeping, curled away from him on her side of the bed. His heart squeezed. He hated seeing her so sad, so lifeless. She’d always been so strong, so vibrant.

Careful not to wake her, he stripped and slid in behind her, carefully curling his body around hers.

He knew the second she woke. She hitched in a breath, and he realized there were tears on her cheeks.
Ah, baby…

“Come here,” he murmured, aching for her. What could he do to make her less sad? What could he say to help her heal again?

He reached for her as she rolled toward him, wrapped her up tight in his arms. She laid there, pliant, not making a sound as her tears dried. Her pain pierced him, made him feel helpless.

Not knowing what to say, he simply held her and stroked her hair, her bare back, letting his fingertips drift over her soft skin. He kissed her forehead, down her nose to her cheeks, kissing the tears away. His lips brushed the corner of her mouth, testing, asking. If she’d just meet him partway…

She went completely rigid in his embrace. Stiff as an iron rod, as though she couldn’t bear his touch. A second later she shoved a hand against his chest, physically distancing herself from him, then scurried a foot away and rolled over, giving him her back.

Shutting him out physically as well as emotionally.

The rejection was the equivalent of a sucker punch to the face. A sharp pain lanced through his chest, momentarily making his heart and lungs seize.

Adam lay there frozen in the darkness for a few moments, too stunned to move. But when she didn’t say anything or make any move to reach out to him, he got the message.

She didn’t want him there. Didn’t want him fucking
near
her, let alone touching her.

And he couldn’t take it.

Rolling from the bed, he dragged his clothes on and left, closing the door behind him.

****

Present Day

Summer woke from a light doze when her stomach rumbled angrily. She was past hungry, famished to the point that she actually felt sick.

Since she’d been locked up here they’d given her nothing but some water and a piece of flatbread. Maybe because they didn’t see the point in wasting their precious food supply on a sacrificial lamb who wouldn’t be alive much longer.

She swallowed hard at the thought and shifted her shoulders in an attempt to ease the stiffness in the joints. Her wrists and ankles were raw from where the plastic flex cuffs had rubbed away the skin in some spots.

Two of her captors had released her bindings only long enough for her to relieve herself, while under guard, in a pit someone had dug behind the building she’d been housed in.

She’d only had a minute each time to take in her surroundings while she did her business before the guards had ordered her out from behind the blanket serving as a kind of privacy screen and put the hood back on her. The small village they were in seemed to be perched on a hilltop. She’d seen five small dwellings in her vicinity but nothing else to help orient her.

With the guards keeping close tabs on her, there had been no further opportunity to look for or try to communicate with Jim or Mark. She didn’t even know whether they were both okay.

Rapid footsteps approached and her growling stomach shrank into a hard ball beneath her ribs.

It was time. Hadad must have finally finished whatever meetings he’d been in. He had sent for her and he’d be expecting her to unlock her laptop for him.

The cell door squealed open. A rough hand seized her upper arm and hauled her to her feet. She stumbled, her balance hampered by the plastic ties around her ankles.

Her guard cut them loose then he began towing her out of the cell, shoving her head down as they passed beneath the low, narrow opening. She hurried to keep up with his long strides, every part of her wanting to dig in her heels and fight.

But that would not only be useless, it would be stupid. And it might get Jim or Mark hurt or killed.

He dragged her across an open space and into another building.

“Take off the hood,” she heard Hadad command in Arabic.

She blinked when it was pulled over her head. Hadad stood behind a desk with her open laptop on it. And Jim and Mark were both seated on the floor next to the wall to her left.

They stared up at her with identical tight expressions. Jim had a split lip and a black eye and Mark looked nearly gray in the light from the single lantern hanging from the wall above them.

Hadad turned her laptop around so that the screen faced her and stood tall, folding his arms across his chest. “Your password.”

There was no mistaking why he’d brought her coworkers in here for this. If she didn’t comply, he’d beat or maybe kill them right in front of her. And she knew his reputation well enough to realize that he would be ruthless unless he got what he wanted.

She shot a furtive glance at Jim. He knew exactly what kind of sensitive intel she had on her laptop. Not everything, not the Top Security files, but enough that it could help Hadad’s network, and hinder U.S. and allied forces’ efforts to curtail them. Jim stared back at her, his expression giving away nothing.

If she did this, lives would be put in danger, maybe even Adam’s. She thought of how worried he must be right now, waiting for word on whether she was alive or not. He’d be searching for her, planning some kind of rescue op with the other intelligence personnel.

For just a moment, a desperate plan formed in her mind. Without an Internet connection she’d never be able to send a message to anyone.

But if she was fast enough, maybe she could access the most sensitive files and delete them without Hadad noticing. She could make it look like she was accessing something for him, quickly erase a few files without drawing attention to it. They’d still be buried on here somewhere but maybe she could hide them deep enough that they wouldn’t be able to find them.

Maybe.

“The password,” Hadad growled. “Now.”

When she hesitated he signaled to one of the guards, who immediately pulled a wicked-looking blade from his belt and stalked toward Jim.

“No!” she cried, fingers reaching for the keyboard. She told the password to him as she typed it in, waited until her desktop loaded. “There, it’s done.” She flipped it around for him to see.

“Show me the files on it.”

Averting her eyes to hide her intent, she turned it toward her and searched up a folder containing some of the more sensitive intel. Moving fast, she pulled up a less critical one and opened it.

But when she had the opportunity to delete it, she hesitated. Hadad was watching her too closely. If he saw her or suspected what she was doing…she didn’t even want to think about the consequences.

He peered at the screen, seemed to be reading the contents of the first document she’d opened. About suspected ATB strength and movement along the Syrian border with Jordan.

Her heart drummed in her ears. She stood there without moving, cold sweat gathering beneath her arms as she waited for his reaction.

His radio beeped. Without taking his eyes from the screen he answered it in Arabic. A man warned him that a reward had been offered for information leading to their location. The Americans and Jordanians were looking for them, might have a drone or two searching right now.

Summer kept her gaze on the floor, listening to every word. She didn’t catch all of them, but enough to know the pressure was on. Her heart thudded harder, this time with a renewed burst of hope.

Suddenly Hadad snapped the laptop shut, the sound overly loud in the enclosed space. He stared at her for a long moment, then jerked his chin toward her and the others, his jaw tight. “Get them out of here,” he growled to his men.

He was going to move them again.

No!
The thought reverberated in her skull. If people were out looking for them and there might be drones in the area, moving again would reduce the chance of being found.

One of the guards grabbed her arms and secured her hands behind her while others seized Mark and Jim. Even though she knew there was no hope of escape, she couldn’t just stand there, docile as a lamb while they took them to a new hiding location.

She flung her head back in an attempt to avoid the hood the guard tried to put on her, then lashed out with a foot to kick him in the knee. He hissed in a breath then seized her chin in one hand and squeezed, his bushy black eyebrows knitted together in a fierce frown.

Fuck you
, Summer told him silently, glaring right back, and sunk her teeth into his hand. He cursed and jerked his hand away, then backhanded her.

The blow caught her across the face, stunning her. She stumbled backward, crashing into the wall.

“Hurry,” Hadad snapped. “Move them
now
.”

Two more guards converged on her. She tensed and ducked her head, bracing for the beating she was sure was coming. But they only plunged the hood back over her head, secured her ankles and carried her outside.

She could hear engines already running. Rough ones, as though the trucks were old.

Again her captors flung her into the back of one. She hit the metal bed with a bone-jarring thud, her right hip and shoulder taking the brunt of the impact.

Summer gritted her teeth, a pained groan slipping out as she tried to roll over. Heavy blankets were piled on her, then the tarp was secured on top. Within seconds the truck was moving, taking her out of the village.

She lay pinned in place, despair and hopelessness a crushing weight on her chest.

If they smuggled her across the border and into Syria, chances were she’d never get out alive.

Ten months ago

Summer didn’t bother moving when she heard the sound of Adam unlocking the back door. She lay curled up on her side in their bed—well, her bed now, since he’d moved into the spare room a few weeks ago—in the darkness, and waited.

He didn’t call out her name. He knew she was home because he would have seen her car parked in the garage on his way in.

When she heard his footsteps coming up the carpeted stairway, rather than excitement tingling in her gut, there was only a heavy foreboding.

His hushed footfalls came to the door and stopped. The door creaked slightly as he opened it. He didn’t come in, just stood there backlit by the sunlight streaming through the windows at the front of the house and stared at her a moment. Well, what he could see of her huddled under the blankets with all the blinds drawn in the room.

“It’s two in the afternoon,” he said, his tone loaded with a disapproval that made her feel even worse.

She shoved back the annoyance. She knew exactly what time it was. And she didn’t want to have this fight again so she didn’t bother answering.

Adam expelled a sigh and folded his arms across his chest. “This is the fourth time in two weeks.”

The fourth time in two weeks she’d left work in the middle of the day and come home to lie in bed in the dark. Alone. Ever since this latest miscarriage had sent her careening back into the tailspin she’d struggled so hard to pull out of after the stillbirth.

This time she wasn’t sure if she’d make it.

She fought the urge to roll her eyes at her husband. Like she needed to be reminded of that? She was more than fucking aware of how much work she’d missed. Her boss was growing increasingly annoyed with it too. His fading support didn’t hurt as much as Adam’s though.

When she didn’t respond she could literally feel the poisonous silence spread between them. Normally the building tension would eventually push her sadness into anger, which was a relief in a way, but lately rather than arguing she’d just begun retreating farther into herself instead.

The release of yelling and fighting felt good in the moment, but it always made things worse in the end and she’d crash even harder. So, better not to say anything at all.

Adam stood there for a full three minutes, staring at her. Waiting for her to say something, or maybe hoping she’d spring out of bed and “get over it already”, she wasn’t sure. She could feel the weight of his judgment, the heavy pressure of his frustration pressing down on her. And she was already so deep beneath the surface, she was afraid that one day she may never come up for air again.

It was clear he would never understand how badly she was hurting inside. That he didn’t get it.

So many times they’d fought about it. She’d tried over and over to explain how badly the stillbirth and latest miscarriage had affected her. But it didn’t matter how many times she’d talked to him about it, tried to explain her side of things.

Bottom line: He hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen what she’d gone through. He hadn’t held little A.J.

None of that was his fault; she knew he’d gotten to her as fast as possible. But she couldn’t forgive him for this.

He had no patience for what the counselor had warned them would be a two steps forward, one step back kind of recovery. Maybe because hers was more like a one step forward, one step back cycle of endless suffering.

Just when she felt like she might finally be making progress, it hit her all over again. The guilt and loss.

She wasn’t the kind of person to make excuses or curl up in a ball when things got hard. But this had crippled her emotionally. Nothing had worked. Not even the meds she’d finally agreed to try to help balance her brain chemistry.

Some days she functioned at an almost normal level and others were like this, when the crushing sadness hit her like a brick wall and she had to leave work. Sometimes it took two or three days for her to be able to drag herself out of bed and go to the office.