CHAPTER THIRTY
It was sundown. Equipped with weapons he’d retrieved from the trunk of the Mustang, Sterling materialized in the alley behind Mohawk’s apartment. Off Maryland Street, behind the Tropicana, it was the kind of place where grunge and window bars counted as decor. A nondescript black vehicle sat a few feet away—a police surveillance car, if Sterling ever saw one. Empty.
“Damn,” he mumbled. He didn’t want Eddie and his men inside until…he eyed the Dumpster, a few feet away, held his breath, and inched closer. Then cursed again. The only good thing about the man inside with a bullet between his eyes was that he wasn’t Eddie.
Sterling glanced down the alley, noting a few pedestrians wandering nearby, and reluctantly left his weapons harnessed beneath the fatigue jacket he’d grabbed for discretion. His gut clenched with the idea that Eddie might be in another dark corner with a matching bullet in his brain. He shouldn’t have let him come alone.
He faded into the wind and reappeared at the edge of the alley, scanning the front of the building, trying to find Eddie, flipping open his phone to dial even as he inspected the rows of cars lining a poorly lit street under a rapidly darkening sky. Eddie’s equally nondescript Buick sat near the corner. Empty. He dialed Eddie, walking toward the back of the building again, prepared to enter the building.
Eddie answered on the first ring. Relief washed over him in a gruff demand. “Where the hell are you?”
“It’s been a long time, Sterling.”
Sterling stopped dead in his tracks at the sound of Tad’s voice. “Where’s Eddie?”
“Eddie and I are waiting for you upstairs,” he said. “Me, him, the two Clanners you already met, and a very nice lady from down the hall who tells me she has twin baby girls at home. We’re sitting here waiting for you to bring Rebecca Burns to me. I know she’s in the city. You have fifteen minutes to get her here before the first of my guests dies.”
“What are you going to do when you get her, Tad?” he asked. “Besides hit the pavement like the dumb lump you are?”
“Kill her long before she gets close enough to affect me,” he said dryly. “Now who’s the dumb lump? Whatever the hell that is. Go get her.” His voice softened to a taunt. “I’ll be easy on you though. First I’ll kill the one Eddie tells me you call ‘Mohawk.’ You like him the least. But after that, I’ll have to kill the woman.” He hung up.
Sterling had an instant of contemplation, no more. Tad expected him to negotiate. If he were Caleb, he would, but he wasn’t Caleb. He was Sterling. And what he lacked in GTECH mojo, he made up for in actions. Discretion no longer on his mind, Sterling drew two Glocks and checked his ammo, counting fire escapes as he did, when suddenly Damion materialized in front of him.
“Becca told me what’s going down,” he said. “I’ve got men on all corners of the building.”
Sterling grimaced at Damion’s presence, though he wasn’t about to dismiss backup. “Tad and four hostages. A dead cop in the trash can.”
“Any idea what the end game is?”
“Tad intends to shoot a hostage in roughly eight minutes if I don’t hand over Becca.”
Damion cursed. “Any idea if Tad’s alone?”
“None,” Sterling said. “He’s a showboater, but he’s also quick to let someone else take a bullet in his place.”
Damion hit the mike in his ear. “Talk to me.” He listened and then looked at Sterling. “Nothing. No sign of trouble.”
“I’ll go in the back and take out Tad,” Sterling said. “You come in the front and grab the hostages. The woman first.”
Damion drew his weapons and smiled. “Always the women first.” A double meaning. “We good, man?”
“Surprisingly yes,” Sterling said. Working with Damion, well…worked. “This is where you normally tell me to wait and think things through.”
“And you tell me to kiss your ass, and we go for it anyway,” Damion said. “In light of the ticking clock…I’m trusting you on this one.”
Sterling didn’t miss the meaning, nor did his confidence waver. This was his zone, the place where far more times than not, his instincts were right. This was what he did—he acted. Never questioned.
Sterling checked his watch. Damion did the same. “Three minutes to go.” They exchanged a nod, and both faded into the wind.
Sterling reappeared in a damn precarious position on the concrete ledge next to the metal stairwell. But soundlessness came with a price.
He eased around and glanced in through the curtain. Mohawk and his pal cowered against the wall, hands tied in front of them. Check. Woman crying, also with hands tied, pressing herself into a corner as if she wanted to melt into the wall. Check.
Where the hell was Eddie? Damn it. For all he knew he was in a Dumpster, and Tad had his phone. He should have demanded to talk to him.
Sterling eased back against the wall and checked his watch. Thirty seconds, and he didn’t have a visual on Tad.
That was when Green Hornets started flying, one splintering painfully into his arm, another too damn close to his head.
“So much for backup, covering my ass,” he mumbled, jumping onto the fire escape and none too silently. If the shooter hadn’t already told Tad he was there, he’d just done it himself. Bullets splattered the steel stairwell.
There were shouts from inside the complex then, immediately after, the yell of a man falling off a nearby building. Backup. Late, but check.
Inside the apartment, the door burst opened. Sterling rotated around to find Eddie, not Damion, in the doorway. Sterling pounded on the window, and Eddie rushed over, gun in hand, and let him in.
“Where’s Tad?” he asked, as Eddie rushed to the woman to untie her and then yelled for her to leave. “Go!”
“You mean the brawny asshole who held us at gunpoint?” he said. “He’s fighting with some guy on the stairwell.” He eyed the woman. “Go to your apartment, and lock the door.”
That was all Sterling had to hear. He was through the door in a run, taking the narrow hallway to bring the stairs into focus. Damion was almost at the top, dragging himself up the railing, bleeding like a stuck pig from his side and right leg, still hanging onto his own weapons.
“Where’s Tad?” Sterling asked, as Casar ran up the stairs to help Damion.
“Your way,” he groaned. “He headed me off at the stairs and took off toward the apartment.”
Sterling turned away, guns ready to fire as he rounded the apartment door. The window stood open. Eddie was nowhere to be found. The two Clanners were still tied up, bullets through their heads. The woman was gone.
Weapons ready, Sterling rushed to the window and saw nothing then turned back to the room and narrowed his gaze on the closet. He yanked it open. Stunned, he found Eddie crumpled on the floor in a pool of blood, hands tied in front of him, which meant that the Eddie who’d let him in that window…
“Sonofabitch.”
Sterling kneeled beside Eddie and checked for a pulse. It was faint, but he found one. There was no way Eddie could be in this closet, hands tied, with that amount of blood loss when he’d been standing in the middle of that room only minutes before. The time equation didn’t work. What the hell was going on?
While Eddie was in surgery, Sterling sat in the hospital in the middle of the stench of blood and death, hating every minute. If this was what had surrounded Becca every second of every day in that German treatment center, he wondered how she’d survived as long as she had. He wondered how he was going to deal with the doctor coming out of those steel, double doors at the end of the hall, telling him Eddie was dead, knowing it was because he’d fucked up and let him go into that apartment alone. Or how he was going to deal with it when Becca crashed, and ICE would no longer bring her back.
For three hours he tormented himself, until Caleb arrived and claimed the chair next to him.
“Any news?”
“None,” Sterling said, running his hand over what would soon be a full day’s beard growth. “Damion?”
“Sleeping it off,” Caleb said. “His wounds weren’t serious. He’ll be fine in a few hours. Becca’s worried. She says she’s been calling your cell, and you won’t answer.”
“I can’t talk to her right now,” he said, pushing to his feet and walking to the wall across from the seats to lean against it. “I knew it was a setup tonight, and I let Eddie go in there.”
“He’s a cop, Sterling,” Caleb said. “He’s trained to do a job and do it well. He made his own choices.”
“He can’t make the right choices when he doesn’t know what he’s dealing with,” Sterling said. “I didn’t warn him. I thought I could get Becca to safety and return to him in time. But the one thing in my mind was my need to save Becca.”
“Becca is more than someone you care about,” he said. “She’s a weapon we can’t allow to land in the wrong hands. I would have done the same thing.”
“But not for the same reasons I did,” he said. “The idea of something happening to Becca was unbearable to me. It skewed my judgment. And now Eddie is in that operating room clinging to life, a sick mother at home with no one to take care of her.”
“Eddie might still be in that closet, lying there dead, if you hadn’t acted when you did,” Caleb argued. “I would have negotiated. I would have been wrong.”
Sterling cut his gaze, staring down the narrow hallway before turning back to Caleb.
He laughed bitterly, a choked sound even to his own ears. “I wanted to be Becca’s Lifebond. I wanted to save her. I realized tonight that I’m not Michael. I can’t go into combat and worry that if I die my Lifebond dies. When I hesitate, when I stop and think rather than act, people die. She will die.” He inhaled a heavy breath. “The GTECH serum—”
“Sterling,” Caleb said, cutting him off. “We need to talk about Becca, but now isn’t the time or place.”
A doctor came through the doors wearing scrubs and a mask pulled away from his face, hanging at his neck. Sterling and Caleb rushed to meet him. So did several guys from the Vegas Police Department. There was no family.
“He’s stable but in a coma,” the doctor said. “We are in wait-and-see mode. The next twenty-four hours will be critical.” A few questions were thrown out, and visitors were rejected.
Caleb settled his hand on Sterling’s shoulder. “Go to Becca,” he said. “The rest will wait until tomorrow.”
Sterling turned to Caleb. “I’ve asked myself over and over as I sat here—how did Eddie get into that closet so quickly? I’m telling you Caleb, I was in the hallway all of sixty seconds. It wasn’t possible.”
“What are you saying?”
“I keep thinking about what Becca said about the memories Damion and I have from her abduction. She said everything wasn’t as it seemed. I thought I saw Damion when I handed over Becca.”
“Thought?” Caleb said, quirking a brow.
Sterling ran his hand over his jaw. “I don’t know, Caleb. Back in that apartment, I saw and even talked to Eddie, yet he was in the closet. He couldn’t have been in two places at once. I’ve been wondering if I was drugged back at Becca’s house. Maybe there had been something in the smoke. But this time, this time I was clean as a whistle. There’s something more going on here.”
“Maybe Eddie will give us some insights.”
“If he wakes up,” Sterling said grimly. He reached into his pocket and dug out the data stick. “Marcus gave me pictures and personal information on an ICE dealer who sounds an awful lot like Madame.” He grimaced. “This is tread-carefully territory. He likely sold us out to Tad today. I was with him. He saw Becca. Suddenly, Tad was all up my ass?”
“Or he was followed,” Caleb suggested. “He was handing over information on Adam’s dealers.”
“I don’t know,” Sterling said, skeptical. “I got a weird vibe off Marcus today. Everything about today, including him, stinks.”
Caleb took the data stick. “I’ll run down this woman and set up extra surveillance on Marcus. It’s been a hell of a night. Go see your woman, and get some rest.”
But Sterling couldn’t go to Becca. Not yet. Not until he made one gut-wrenching stop. He had to go see Eddie’s mother.
Despite it being 3:00 a.m., Becca was sitting on the bed with her laptop in front of her, fully dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, trying to focus on the research she and Kelly were exchanging by email. Impossible—considering she was a total mess, waiting to hear from Sterling, torn up about him not returning her calls. And going nuts over the necessity of hiding from Dorian, locked away like a prisoner.
Nevertheless, Caleb had kept her up to date, though it didn’t stop the knots in her stomach over the “why” of Sterling’s silence.
She should have told him about the Lifebond mark. And she would have in that tavern earlier in the evening had Eddie not shown up when he did.
But Michael knew about the bond; Caleb and Kelly too. Someone may have told Sterling, may have taken her chance to explain it to him her way to make him understand why she’d concealed their bond.
She was ready to say, to heck with waiting, and sneak out to the hospital, when the front door creaked open. Becca quickly set aside her computer and started for the door, eager to see Sterling, to touch him and know he was okay.
Before she made it halfway across the room, he appeared in the bedroom entrance, looking battered and exhausted. His hands rested on the door frame. Blood streaked the faded blue of his right leg, his black T-shirt matted with a dark spot she assumed to be more blood. Eddie’s blood, she thought.
“Eddie is…” His voice trailed off.
“In intensive care,” she said, rushing forward. “I know.” She wrapped her arms around him, never wanting to let go. Pressing her cheek to his heart, she reveled at the steady beat beneath her ear.
For a moment, he didn’t touch her, didn’t move as fear spiked inside her. He hadn’t taken her calls. He wasn’t touching her.
Then suddenly, he relaxed into her, his arms closing around her a moment before he buried his face in her hair. She still had the chance to tell him everything, to explain, before her silence created a barrier she wouldn’t be able to permeate.
“I went to see his mother,” he said, his voice hoarse.
She tilted her chin up, resting her hand on his chest. “How bad was it?”
“Had her nurse not sedated her, she’d probably be at the hospital as a patient, like her son.”
“You did a good thing going there tonight. When Eddie wakes up—and he will, Sterling—he’s going to appreciate what you did.”
“Almost getting him killed?” he asked, a self-condemning bite to his words.
“You saved his life,” she said, pushing to her toes and kissing him. “And don’t tell me you didn’t. Caleb already told me what happened.” She took his hand. “You need a hot shower and rest.”
He followed, his eyes heavy with an exhaustion she could tell reached beyond the physical. She turned on the water to heat and helped him undress. She would have stepped away, but he tugged her close.
“I need you, Becca. Join me.” He trailed his fingers tenderly over her face and slid through a strand of her hair. “Please.”
He needed her. Those words filled her in ways she fully intended to ensure he knew. “I need you too,” she whispered, but a hint of discomfiture slid through her at the truth behind the words. She needed him to live on a literal level. How did she make sure he knew their connection was more to her?
Becca undressed quickly, eager to remove the barriers between them, starting with their clothes. They stepped under the hot stream of water, melting into it, and each other.
“Becca,” he whispered, her name on his tongue, speaking a thousand unspoken words. Pain. Longing. Need. Blame.
She had to tell him about the mark. “Sterling—”
He kissed her, a long, drugging kiss that stole her breath and reached into her soul. A kiss that became her breath…became his. He devoured her with that kiss and the next…and the next, until he was devouring more than her mouth. He was devouring her body, touching her, licking her, nipping at her neck, her shoulder. Pressing her against the shower wall, he lifted her, one hand around her backside, the other braced on the wall beside her head.
All the turbulence she’d seen in his eyes, she felt in him now. His eyes met hers and held as he pressed inside her, filled her, stretched her.
Something wild snapped between them. Wild in a way Becca had never experienced in her life. She arched her hips and reached for more, bucked her hips as he pumped into her. Still it wasn’t enough. There was no inhibition, no thinking. There was only need. Need she was willing to beg to have fulfilled.
“Sterling, I need…”
His mouth covered hers, his tongue sucking hers, licking and tasting. “I know,” he murmured. “I need too.” He maneuvered her around, away from the wall. “Grab hold.”
Becca reached for the shower railing and tightened her legs around his hips, squeezed his cock tighter, deeper. He leaned in, licking the water from her nipples and suckling, and then pumping with his hips. Becca cried out with the pure pleasure of it, the pressure of his mouth on her nipple, darts of pleasure spreading through her. She called out his name, lost everything but him inside her, suckling her nipple and thrusting against her until she could take no more. In the same instant, she could not get enough. Becca exploded in a fierce rush of multicolored bliss, exploded with spasms that grabbed his cock and pulled him deeper. He moaned, low and guttural, and then tugged her hard against his hips.
They collapsed together, him holding her, her arms leaving the bar to wrap around his neck. “Is it me?” he asked. “Or is the water freaking freezing?”
“It’s cold,” she said, a shiver chasing a path along her spine. “Okay. It’s freaking freezing.”
He carried her out of the shower and set her down, snatching a couple towels from the cabinet. Becca began drying off, facing the mirror, when suddenly Sterling was behind her, brushing her hair aside and staring at her neck. Becca’s heart accelerated, and the towel fell to the floor as she grabbed the counter to steady her suddenly weak knees. This was not how this was supposed to happen.
“Sterling,” she whispered. Her gaze lifted to the mirror to meet his, and the minute they connected there, she knew it had been a mistake. He could see the guilt in her eyes.
“You knew,” he accused. “You knew, and you didn’t tell me.”
She heard the sense of betrayal in his voice and whirled around to face him. “I can explain.”
“Everything isn’t as it seems,” he said, repeating her words. A coincidence that wasn’t fate at all—it was planned. “What kind of game are you playing, Becca?”