Blindsided, page 3
part #1 of Book Two Series
She didn’t need anyone, especially a man who’d abandoned her—no matter his reason.
And yet…still, she felt it.
Felt him.
When what she wanted was to feel nothing.
No anger, no pain. No grief or fear or—worst of all—need. But she had a feeling that was too much to ask. Too much to hope that—
Thump.
She froze. Turned to look at her front door.
Thump, thump.
Someone was trying to get in.
Thump, thump, thump!
The door shuddered in its frame; the cheap wood splintered. Dust fell from the ceiling.
Crack!
She was already moving when the black-gloved fist broke through.
Four
Ruby Jones wasn’t an easy girl to find.
Almost as if she didn’t want to be found.
Which wasn’t how Rafe remembered her. Ruby had been…brash. Brave—much braver than him—a trait he’d both admired and resented. Ruby hadn’t cared what the world thought; Ruby had simply lived.
With joy and laughter and a fierce, unflinching belief in herself, in life, he’d never understood—another thing he’d both admired and resented. Because Ruby hadn’t had it any better than him. A shit mother; a sadist brother, both of them abusive dicks. A life filled with constant, unrelenting danger; a place where disaster lingered on every corner. Schools where the teachers were afraid of the students, and the streets were lined with gangbangers and dealers. A place where war never ended, and everywhere you looked, there was evidence that you didn’t matter. That nothing did.
Rafe had despised it. The noise, and the stink, and the tension that never ebbed. The awareness that turned him from human to animal, so painfully alert it had become a sickness, inescapable and pervasive.
If Cheyenne Elias—the woman his mother had named as his guardian, the only decent thing she’d ever done—had never come for him, Rafe had no doubt he would be dead.
Or worse.
But Cheyenne had appeared and upended his world. She’d taken him home to Wyoming, and in the high mountain wilderness, he’d finally discovered some semblance of peace.
And then he’d joined the service and found himself surrounded by sand and blood and death, more endless war, and that awareness had returned, sharper, deeper, and no longer afraid.
Just hungry.
When he was young, he hadn’t fought back. He’d been too small, too weak. Stealth and avoidance had been his only weapons, and what the bullies hadn’t stolen from him, his mother had. It’d been everything he could do just to defend himself.
To survive.
But in the sand, he’d found himself. And if he hadn’t liked what he found, he had made his peace with it, understanding that the animal had somehow turned from prey into predator, and if that meant not just surviving, but thriving, Rafe was okay with that.
No longer did he run from. Now he ran to.
He was okay with that, too.
985 Rosemont, apartment 367.
He stared up at the unremarkable brick-faced apartment building.
The IRS knew where to find everyone. His contact there had more credible intelligence than anyone at the Agency, which was a damn good thing because outside of her tax returns, Ruby Jones didn’t exist. No email, no social media, no profile on Instagram or LinkedIn. Other than a post office box, there was no record of her anywhere.
According to her tax returns, Ruby lived here, in this cheap but well-kept building on the south side. She was employed by Nethercott Industries—which he assumed was the messaging service—and—even more surprisingly—by South Shore Emergency Services, one of the city’s search, rescue, and ambulance providers.
The wind lifted, sharp and cold around him. Brisk and filled with the familiar scent of Lake Michigan. Again, memory stirred.
He turned it aside and headed for the apartment building.
The street was quiet, filled with mid-grade cars and beat up minivans. He scoured his surroundings and saw nothing to set off his internal alarms. But he was aware, his sixth sense on high alert, silent and still. Waiting in expectation.
Maybe because he might be about to walk into an ambush.
But probably because of her.
An ambush, he thought, would be preferable.
Because the frenetic, impatient energy inside of him hadn’t waned. If anything, the anticipation that rode him was growing, as gleeful as a kid on Christmas morning.
A foreign and infuriating and utterly intoxicating sensation.
The interior of the building was cool and damp. Rain began to patter on the windows as he climbed up the stairs; faint sounds echoed around him. Laughter, music. The murmur of a TV. The lights of the city grew brighter as he climbed, shimmering gold against the rain that slid down the windowpanes. As he climbed, his heartbeat grew heavier. Faster.
And not because of the stairs.
Goddamn it.
He didn’t want the unnerving prickle along his spine; the growing rush of his blood; the odd pulse in his belly. He didn’t want to remember how she smelled or sounded. How soft and round and strong she’d been beneath him.
The woman who’d become of the girl and all that came with her.
I missed you.
“Christ,” he muttered and stepped into an empty hallway that was narrow and dim, and stank of cigarette smoke and mildew. He was halfway down it when he heard a sound that stopped him in his tracks.
Crack!
And every part of him understood instantly.
He began to run, visions of Jack’s broken body bleeding into his head. Around a corner, down another long hall, another crack!, and then he saw them, those two bastards in their long, flowing trench coats, Matrix wanna-be assholes. Slamming their way through a door and disappearing inside, followed by a grunt, a thud, and then he was there, hurtling through the door—
“…sons of bitches!” Ruby barked from where she stood in the middle of the tiny, one-room studio apartment, a big, heavy, cast-iron skillet in hand. One of the men lay crumpled in a ball on the linoleum at her feet; the other was circling her warily, gun in hand.
“Put it down,” he ordered.
“Make me,” she invited, and rather than retreat, she lunged at him, swinging the pan backhanded, as though it was a tennis racket. It slammed into the man’s chest; he flew backward, hit a narrow wooden end table, and crashed through it to the floor. His weapon skittered across the floor.
She and Rafe both dove for it.
“Friends of yours?” she snarled when she saw him, a heartbeat before they crashed into each other. Her lip was bleeding, and her hair was a mess of unruly ebony curls, and her eyes were burning like dark amber fire.
She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
“No,” he told her.
“Right,” she muttered and shoved him aside, swiping up the gun in the same motion.
The man who’d smashed through the table stirred, and she turned and hit him with the frying pan that she still held, an abbreviated but powerful blow to the side of his head that knocked him cold.
Efficient and unflinching in the face of violence.
He shouldn’t be surprised, Rafe thought. But he was.
“They want the message,” he said, watching as she dropped the pan and removed the chambered round and the clip from the gun. Then she dismantled the weapon entirely and tossed the pieces to the floor.
“Goddamn guns,” she growled.
The man sprawled in the middle of the kitchen floor suddenly groaned and rolled over. A welt the size of New Jersey was spreading across his forehead; flakes of cast iron decorated his cheeks.
“You did this,” Ruby said and turned to pin Rafe with a cold stare.
Honed words and hard eyes in armor made of stone. Nothing like the girl he remembered.
Which only made him angrier. None of this should even fucking be. Not any of it.
Not her. Not him, here, with her. None of it.
Shit!
“The message,” he said again. “Do you still have it?”
Her head tilted; her eyes glittered. “I burned it.”
“You burned it?”
“Protocol,” she retorted succinctly.
He stared at her for a long, silent moment, memory whispering through him. Then, “Did you look at it?”
She only blinked at him, silent. But her eyes were on fire, and her mouth was set in a stubborn line he recognized—there you are—and that energy pulsed wildly within him.
“You did,” he said softly. Adrenaline speared through his veins. “Didn’t you?”
“Go home,” she retorted coldly. “And take these assholes with you.”
She turned away, but Rafe didn’t move.
She’d looked at the message.
“Ruby,” he murmured.
“Oh, don’t even,” she scoffed. She strode over to the man with New Jersey on his face and kicked him in the ribs. Hard. “Get up, you sorry piece of shit. Messenger Protocol, Article Seven, Section Three, paragraph four point five: if the Message cannot be delivered, it must be destroyed.”
The man’s hand darted out, wrapped her ankle, and yanked her to the floor. A squeal escaped her, and Rafe took a step forward, but a sharp, hard punch into his left kidney from behind nearly brought him to his knees. He ducked and turned and slammed his fist into his attacker’s throat. The man sucked in a sharp breath and stumbled backward, and Rafe caught his narrow black tie and pulled him in for another hit, harder because it felt good to hit someone.
The man’s nose ruptured, broken. He swung wildly, landing nothing. Rafe smiled grimly and hit him again, felt the man’s jaw pop against his knuckles. Broken, too. Satisfaction flared through him. Maybe just a few more—
“Piss off!” Ruby snarled.
And he dropped the man he’d been holding prisoner to his blows and moved toward New Jersey, who had Ruby on the floor, who was climbing on top of her, his hands closing around her throat. Excitement made his eyes shine. A deep, rough, hungry sound escaped him, and white-hot rage pressed painfully against Rafe’s skin.
Snap him like a fucking twig.
The rage turned cold, an instant, irrevocable flash freeze that splintered his control. Ice slid through his veins; deep within him, the hunger he rarely fed woke. The heat of battle faded, morphing into the chilled certainty of death, and when Ruby’s gaze clashed with his, her eyes widened, and he knew she saw it.
“No,” she said.
But Rafe didn’t respond. Instead, he locked onto his target. His heartbeat eased, his breathing grew deep and steady and even. Every cell settled; his nerves turned fluid, as still and smooth as a glassy lake.
Ready.
“Goddamn it,” Ruby growled.
She reared up and slammed her head into the man’s nose, which immediately burst like a popped balloon. He swore and his grip on her neck faltered, and she punched him in the chest, hard enough to crack bone. He was sliding sideways off of her, gasping for breath when Rafe reached for him.
“I said no.” Ruby slapped his hand away.
Rafe looked at her without blinking.
“Who the hell did you become?” She shook her head and pushed to her feet. She looked for a long, silent moment at the man who lay crumpled and wheezing on her kitchen floor, his nose a bloody mess, his body shuddering in an effort to draw breath.
Rafe also stared down at the man, deeply unsatisfied.
“Knock it off,” she said and punched him in the arm.
He turned to look at her.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she told him. “I’ll knock you into next week.”
The words pierced the cold stillness that gripped him.
I’ll knock you into next week, boy. You know I will.
A threat favored by his mother.
“Don’t,” he told her softly.
“Oh, get over yourself.” Ruby snorted and stomped past him. “Jackass. This is your fault.”
Rafe’s hands clenched at his sides, and he realized it was to stop them from reaching for her. Because he wanted to touch her. To pull her into his arms and hold her there, if only for a brief moment.
That’s what people who hadn’t seen each other in a long time did, didn’t they?
People who cared for one another. People who—
Men running down the hall toward them.
His hand snapped out and wrapped around Ruby’s arm, supple and strong and so warm a streak of something he dared not name tore through him.
“We have to go,” he said.
Another snort. “Yes, please, go.”
But she was stuck with him now. She’d seen the message, he knew it just by looking at her, so she would remember.
Ruby always remembered. It was her secret skill, her superpower. A trait he’d tested over and over when they were kids, fascinated by the idea that she could somehow remember everything.
“More are coming,” he said, his hold tightening.
Her t-shirt was old and worn; her jeans equally so. She needed shoes and a coat.
They had to go.
“Fuck,” she said violently because Ruby was no dummy.
She understood that everything had just changed. That the men coming for her wouldn’t leave simply because she quoted Messenger protocol and claimed the message had been destroyed. That she’d become their mark, and there was no coming back from that.
At least, not here, and not now.
“Shit,” she added. But she didn’t move. Her dark, glinting amber eyes found his, and his grip tightened. “What is it?”
He didn’t pretend to not understand.
The plan had been to get the message and get out. The less she knew, the better. But the plan had just slid down the crapper.
“A weapons manufacturing plant,” he said, holding that hard, shuttered gaze.
She stared at him, and for a moment, he caught a glimpse of the girl he’d once known. Just a brief flash, like a dream upon waking, that moment before it slipped away. And then she looked at her broken door and shook her head, and when she glanced back at him, the girl was gone.
In her place was the woman, calm, collected, in control. Cold and opaque and strange; someone he didn’t know at all.
A realization that aggravated the hell out of him.
And he knew it wasn’t only her life that had changed.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Five
Rafe drove a beat-up green Toyota with black wall tires and a broken glove compartment. The seats were worn, the carpet stained, and the passenger side seatbelt wouldn’t snap into place.
“Great getaway car,” Ruby muttered. She gave up on the seatbelt and pulled her go-bag into her lap. “I could run faster.”
Rafe said nothing, his features hard, his eerie, bi-colored gaze flat. The chilled austerity that had washed over him in her apartment—when he’d stared at the asshole on top of her as though wondering how much blood might be inside him—had faded, but Ruby could still see it. He might cloak himself in civility, but that hungry predator was large and in charge. He’d been a hairsbreadth from setting it loose; only her words had stopped him.
Don’t look at me like that. I’ll knock you into next week.
A deliberate choice on her part. She remembered all too well the cold promise in his mother’s favorite threat.
Clearly, he remembered, too.
“Where are we going?” she demanded, peering through the thick rain. They had hit the freeway and were hauling ass north, out of the city, the Toyota shimmying with every puddle they hit. “Rafe.”
He drove with a single-minded focus. “Who sent you?”
The tone of his voice made the fine hair at her nape bristle. Which only made her angry.
And she was plenty pissed off enough, thank you very much.
“I told you,” she replied coldly. “Fate.”
He shot her a look so dark, her hands tightened on her bag. “There’s no such thing as a coincidence."
She said nothing.
“Ruby.”
The sound of her name rasped in that harsh voice made the deepest part of her hurt. Because some crazy part of her responded as though he was still that boy, and she was still that girl. When that was the last thing they were.
Strangers.
They were strangers. And the man sitting beside her was as far from the Rafe she’d known as the moon.
“If this is a conspiracy, then I’m as much a victim as you,” she told him shortly. “My life is now forfeit.”
Her jobs, her home. Her security.
Gone.
Because of him.
“And you just happened to have a go-bag packed for the occasion?” he demanded. “Convenient.”
Rage bubbled in her blood. “Stop the car.”
“No.”
Her hand wrapped around the door handle and lifted it. The door opened; rain slapped her skin, and the wind threatened to tear the door from her grip.
“Shut the fucking door,” he snarled.
“Stop the fucking car,” she snarled back.
He slammed on the brakes. The Toyota lurched to a hard stop on the side of the road; horns blared as the cars behind them blew past.
Ruby pushed the door open, furious, only to have Rafe wrap a hand in her denim coat and jerk her to a teeth-snapping halt.
“Don’t,” he said, his voice so cold a piercing chill froze the breath in her lungs.
Who the hell did you become?
Because this glacial, self-contained, dangerous man bore no resemblance to the boy she’d known.
Loved.
“I’m sorry,” he said but didn’t sound sorry at all.
“Screw you,” she retorted and pulled against his hold. Which only tightened.
“I can’t let you go,” he said. “I need you.”
Something inside of her squeezed hard at those words. She turned her head and met that glittering dual-colored gaze. “I don’t care what you need—or what you believe. Let me go right goddamn now, or I will tase your stupid ass again.”
