Chapter Twenty-Five
The airlock hissed open. Jean-Luc and Marcus swung through, weapons aimed.
Empty. The corridor. The entire patient ward. They cleared the warm zone in a matter of seconds.
Rather than relax him, the emptiness only ramped up Jean-Luc’s nerves. Ebiere should have been here. “This isn’t right. Where are the survivors?”
“My gut says we’re walking into a trap,” Marcus said.
“Mine too, but we can’t leave that little girl.”
“Aw, shit.” Marcus let out a breath that hissed through his mask. He motioned to the next airlock—the one that led into the hot zone. “Let’s do it. You go right, I go left.”
“Don’t touch anything.” Jean-Luc hit the button and the door opened with a pop that was more felt than heard. Air rushed past them to fill the void of the opening door. Negative pressure to keep the infection in.
They were entering the virus’s playing field now, and his stomach twisted into knots. He didn’t want to go back in there. Claire would give him an earful if she found out, but they couldn’t leave without making sure Ebiere wasn’t hiding in there.
He stepped through the door into the familiar smell of blood, sickness, and death. He swallowed convulsively to keep from gagging on the stench.
The militants were gone. All that was left were the dead. All of them headshots.
“God,” Marcus breathed and lowered his weapon. “They killed everyone.”
Jean-Luc turned away. He’d spotted Ebiere’s tiny body on one of the cots and couldn’t—just couldn’t. “The Egbesu Fighters didn’t come to rescue anybody.” His voice came out raw, raspy behind his mask.
“Then why are they here?”
Realization struck like lightning, bright and painful in its clarity. This attack had the stink of Defion all over it. They had sent the militants in as cannon fodder to distract from the real target—
“Claire!”
…
“You think you’ve won, but you haven’t. I’m not giving you anything.”
Mercedes ignored the doctor’s icy words as she tied the woman’s hands together. She straightened and scanned the shore.
Where was Sebastian? He should’ve been waiting at the boat. He’d known the plan had never been to trust the Egbesu Fighters with Dr. Oliver’s capture. They’d been merely the distraction needed to safely flush her out. Seb was supposed to have kept the boat running so they could escape before the militants realized they’d been played…
But things had gone to shit right from the beginning. Goody Igwe went in with his own plans. When she’d hired him and his men, she hadn’t counted on him wanting revenge more than the money. That was the problem with hiring locals, but in this case, she’d had little other choice.
Flames sparked to life around the camp, tents going up in bonfires as Goody and his boys got that revenge.
And where the hell was Seb?
Dr. Oliver made a small sound of dismay. Mercedes turned to find her staring at the flames, pain etched in every line of her face. She might have been crying, but it was hard to tell with the steady drizzle of rain.
The doctor noticed her watching and straightened her shoulders. She met Mercedes’s stare with the fire reflecting in her own. “If you killed him, I swear you will never get anything from me. Ever. I’ll die first.”
A chill rattled down Mercedes’s spine. She had a feeling the doctor wasn’t being dramatic. The woman looked half crazed sitting there in the rain with the fires casting shadows across her dirty face.
She turned away again. It didn’t matter. What happened once she handed Dr. Oliver over was none of her concern. She’d wash her hands of this job and then maybe take some downtime to figure things out with Seb. She had to talk him out of his lunatic idea to leave Defion.
What if he already left? a small, nagging voice asked in the back of her mind. What if he just said “fuck it” and took off, leaving her here with a bunch of pissed off militants and a hostage? If he had, she wouldn’t be surprised. Men always entered her life with one foot already out the door. What made Sebastian any different?
Except, he was.
Two figures broke away from the flickering shadows around the camp, and her heart kicked. Those two were not militants. They moved like trained soldiers. They had to be HORNET. Marcus Deangelo and one of his teammates.
Dr. Oliver drew in a sharp breath and Mercedes realized what she planned to do a heartbeat too late. She lunged, but not before the doctor got out a shriek that drew HORNET’s attention. They turned toward the sound and started running, shouting orders to release the doctor.
Fuck. She left Dr. Oliver to scream her pretty little head off and grabbed for the ropes to untie the boat. Time to get gone. She couldn’t wait for Sebastian any longer, and although her heart wrenched at the thought of leaving him, she had no choice.
The two didn’t fire, and she didn’t expect them to. They wouldn’t risk hitting Dr. Oliver. So the sharp pop of a shot made her heart stutter. For a moment, she wondered if she’d been hit and her body just hadn’t processed it yet, but no pain came. She looked up to see the soldiers no longer running toward the boat. They’d taken cover and returned fire in the direction of the trees lining the riverbank to her right.
Sebastian.
Her heart caught on its next beat and she almost screamed his name, but bit her tongue before letting anything more than a pathetic whimper of sound slip out.
Dr. Oliver stared at her with clinical eyes, and some of the iciness melted away. “You have someone you love out there, too.”
Mercedes wasn’t going to glorify that question with a response. “Shut up.”
“This is ridiculous! Is the money Bioteric offering for me really worth losing that person?”
HORNET had broken cover and now peppered Sebastian’s position with bullets. Seb had stopped returning fire.
Was he injured? Or worse?
A cold sweat dripped down Mercedes’s spine and her breath sawed in and out of her lungs as her heart tried to jackhammer out of her chest. Her hands shook so hard, she dropped the rope. She didn’t recognize the foreign sensation at first—panic. She was panicking.
No. She couldn’t lose Seb. Not like this.
“Hey, assholes!” she shouted during a lull in the firing and grabbed the doctor’s arm to haul her to her feet. The two men turned. “You want Dr. Oliver back?” She shoved her overboard. “Go fish.”
One of the men—big blond guy, had to be Jean-Luc Cavalier, HORNET’s linguist—immediately dropped everything and dove into the water. The other man—Marcus Deangelo—turned his weapon away from Seb’s position to provide cover for the water rescue. While they were distracted, Mercedes gunned the boat along the shore toward her lover.
“Sebastian!”
He limped out of the cover of the trees. Both his leg and arm were bleeding. He dove into the boat, landing hard on his side at her feet.
She swore at him as she sped up river, out of range of HORNET’s bullets. “What were you thinking?”
He groaned. “You had your mission. I had mine.”
“And now we both have nothing!” It wasn’t completely true. She had Dr. Oliver’s research, but that hadn’t been the mission and she shivered at the thought of reporting only a half success.
“It doesn’t matter.” He rolled over to his back and shielded his eyes from the rain with one arm. “Deangelo is a tough bastard to kill and I admire him for it. I’m done trying. Defion can get someone else for the job. I’m out. Are you coming with me or not?”