Enemy Mine (6 page)

“Fivish.”

“I want to pick his brain on this. If this is something vampire we’re dealing with, I want him in on it.” Godfather turned to Nikko. “I want you to head down to medical and have the doc draw blood.” He looked at the group at large. “I’ve got some work to do on Guerrero. We’ll reconvene here and figure out how the hell we’re going to locate and retrieve that cask.”

“Are you insinuating Selena is a vampire?” Nikko cautiously asked, knowing she was anything but. “It was daylight when she showed up.” He turned to Cassidy. “Wouldn’t she have fried if she were a vampire?”

Cassidy smiled grimly. “You’ve seen what happens to a vampire in the sunlight.”

“Exactly. She’s not a vampire. I’d know, and there is no way I would have fu—” He cut the word off before he said it. But he would have known all those years ago if she was—different. Wouldn’t he?

“What’s your problem with vampires, Cruz?” Cassidy demanded, thrusting herself into his space.

“They’re dead, for Christ’s sake!”

“Don’t knock Marcus for what he had no control over. He’s a good man and saved your ass in Cairo less than a month ago.” Cassidy stalked off toward the opposite side of the room. “Asshole,” she murmured under her breath.

Stone and Dante laughed. Satch shook his head.

Nikko wanted to tell them all to get screwed. Sorry if he wasn’t right with the whole having a relationship with a vampire thing.

“Let’s take a break, boys and girls,” Godfather said. “Cruz, I’ll let the doc know you’re on your way down. I want everyone to report back here at sixteen hundred. And leave your attitudes outside.”

Nikko wanted to apologize to Cassidy, not for his feelings, but for baiting her, but she exited the room before he had the chance. Damn females. He was glad they only served one purpose to him. Easy come, easy go.

CHAPTER FIVE

N
ikko had been sitting in the darkened war room for almost two hours trying to sort fact from fiction. Fact: He’d been shot in the thigh and arm. Then blown to hell by an RPG. Yet he was still alive.

Fact: He was superhero strong, with heightened senses. Hell, he had just stunned the doctor by making a pretzel out of a pair of stainless steel scissors and reading the bottom of the eye chart from one hundred feet.

Fact: He
believed
he’d seen Selena somewhere in between getting blown to Hell and coming to in Kyrgyzstan.

Only seeing Selena was the fiction part of all this, too. Because Selena was dead. He’d killed her. It haunted him every day.

None of the facts added up, yet he could not quite convince himself of the fiction either. Where the hell did that leave him?

Scared shitless that he might be turning into a vampire. The doc was trying to rule that out right now.

Vials of blood had been drawn. He had pissed in three different cups. At the doctor’s insistence, he’d had every inch of his body x-rayed, as well as a full-body MRI. Not a part of him inside or out hadn’t been pricked, prodded, tested, or palpated.

But he didn’t need the test results to know he was healthy. He didn’t need test results to tell him he was getting stronger by the hour. Or that he felt his ice-cold control slipping. Or—God help him—that he wanted Selena alive. That he wanted to see her again. Feel her. Smell her.

He swiped his hand across his face and cursed. Selena was
dead
. He’d imagined her, that’s all. Why he would have imagined her while he lay dying, he didn’t want to think about.

But he had no choice but to think about the changes he’d undergone. His money, and his hopes, was on some superhuman serum the Russians had concocted. He’d just been a handy guinea pig.

Well, fuck you very much, it worked. Every part of him including his damn libido was heightened. He was walking around with a hard-on a sixteen-year-old would envy. And damn if every time he thought of Selena, it didn’t get more of a rise out of him.

The door opened, and his team, followed by a stoic Godfather, walked in and settled around the table. Nikko sat up. “It appears, Cruz, we have a problem,” Godfather softly said as he brought up the storyboard. “You weren’t hallucinating, and thankfully you’ve gotten much better at killing in the last few years. Because your first attempt sucked.”

Immediately, the image of Selena Guerrero popped up all around them. She looked just as she had all those years ago. A little older but, if possible, more beautiful.

Soft wolf whistles filled the quiet.

“Holy Hell, Cruz,” Stone said, “she’s a knockout.”

Nikko’s stomach dropped to the floor. Emotions he’d long ago buried surfaced. Good ones, bad ones. Vicious, murderous ones.

“Selena Guerrero is alive and well,” Godfather said. “And—” He tapped the touch screen. The zoomed-in satellite image of the motorcyclist trailing the convoy popped up. He tapped the screen again, and Nikko watched in amazement as the pixels resolved into a face.

Those eyes
—God help him.

Godfather superimposed the motorcyclist’s eyes over a current image of Selena. Stunned, Nikko could not deny the obvious. She
was
alive! He hadn’t imagined seeing her. His longing rose up to meet his hatred. He sat forward as emotions he had forced from his heart reared up in a wild, dizzying crescendo. It couldn’t be true!

Another picture popped up. This one of her strolling on the beach in a hot-pink bikini the size of a postage stamp with some linebacker-size goon walking beside her. Speechless, Nikko stared at her image. Long, silky black hair he could still feel beneath his fingertips waved in a breeze. Expressive black eyes with just a hint of a feline slant looked straight at him. His gaze dropped to her full, pouty lips.

God, he had loved kissing those lips. For hours, they would lie tangled in each other’s limbs on the beach and just kiss.

He scowled hard. But she wasn’t the same woman he had loved. The light that had shone in her eyes was gone. Now they were haunted and bitter. Her womanly curves were still prominent, more so since it looked as if she had lost some weight. But she was also leaner, more muscular.

She’d be even more dangerous now. Harder to kill. There was no doubt in his heart, he was going after her. And as Godfather had said, he was a whole lot better at killing now.

Nikko dragged his eyes from the screen and looked up at Godfather. “Where is she?”

“Miami.” He tapped the touch pad and another round of photos flashed up on the screens. They were of Miami’s Gold Coast. “She owns a club in South Beach called Lost Souls. High-end, frequented by high-end-criminal types.”

“What the hell is she doing in Florida? Is she so arrogant to think she can walk around and no one would notice that I was sentenced to death for killing her?” Nikko shook his head, not understanding anything. Why had she saved him?

“She keeps a very low profile and goes by de la Roja now. There isn’t much intel on her. What I have I got from running a photo-comparison search of her autopsy photo. The feds have been surveilling several Cuban cartel members in Miami. She’s popped up in a few of the surveillance photos. I couldn’t find anything on her connection to Balderama. But that doesn’t mean I won’t. What concerns me is the fact that a man like Balderama went to such lengths to make it look like she was dead, and then she shows up in our hunting grounds halfway across the world. Why was she there? Does she work for Balderama, or is she working for a cartel? But more important, was she there for the same reasons we were?” Godfather looked at Nikko, who had still not digested that his ex-lover was alive. “I find the fact that she was on-site at the same time as you more than coincidental.”

Nikko jerked his head back and looked at his commander. “Are you insinuating I had something to do with her presence there?”

“Calm the Hell down, Cruz. Of course not. We were compromised in Kyrgyzstan. Then in an elaborate sleight of hand, we lost our target, and now this connection between you and de la Roja. It just doesn’t add up. I want to know why she saved your sorry ass after your attempt to kill her. I want to know her intentions and just how much she knows about you and L.O.S.T. I want to know why she was after the cask of enriched uranium, and if she has it—and for whom.”

“I want to know what she injected you with,” Cassidy said.

“I want the same answers,” Nikko said. L.O.S.T. being compromised aside, it didn’t matter to him that Selena had saved his life. She had ripped out his heart and soul when she killed their daughter. He had died as much that day as his daughter had.

He sat back in his chair, his mind racing with conflicting thoughts and emotions. All these years he’d hated himself for what he had done to Selena. He had loved her completely. That she’d ripped his heart out did not change that he had murdered her in cold blood. Or so he’d thought. The grief and the self-loathing had eaten away at him. He had done nothing more than walk through the motions of life these last eight years. He ate, he drank, he slept, he worked. Sex was a release, nothing more. He had not lived. He had existed. Now everything was different. He looked up at the screens, and something deep and dark inside him lit up. Selena’s smoldering sensuality reached out from beyond the grave and grabbed him.

The door buzzed. They all looked up at the monitor to the right and saw Dr. Soto standing outside. Godfather buzzed him in.

Dr. Soto glanced at Nikko before he looked at Godfather. He handed a flash drive to Godfather, who said, “Tell us in laymen’s terms what’s going on with Cruz.”

The doctor cleared his throat and looked at Nikko again, then at Cassidy, then back to Godfather. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen blood work come back like his.”

“Like what?” Nikko demanded, coming forward in his chair. “Am I infected with something?”

“I don’t know. Everything came back normal except your blood. It has compositions that I can’t identify. I took draws each hour. The compositions doubled in each subsequent draw, as if building, not dissipating.” Dr. Soto looked at Cassidy. “Cassidy has several of the same properties in her blood. But Cruz’s has traces of others I can’t even begin to guess at. I’m working on it though.”

Holy shit
.

“Your research will stay here on the compound, Doctor,” Godfather directed. “Anything you need that you don’t have here can be brought to you.”

“But I can’t—”

“The samples stay here,” Godfather firmly said.

The doctor nodded. “Of course.”

The door buzzed again. Cross on the video monitor.

Marcus Cross. Vampire or not, he was one hell of an intimidating bastard. And Cassidy’s lover. Nikko swiped his hand across his chin. It was all still so damn surreal. During Cassidy’s first mission, she’d told the team Cross was a vampire. They’d laughed her into the next state, then pleaded with Godfather to pull her. He’d refused. And it was a damn good thing. Cross proved to be not only a vampire but a damn good one with a human Special Ops background. The son of a bitch had nearly single-handedly saved the US of A from eternal damnation. As time passed, Nikko’s initial apprehension had grown into a grudging respect. That didn’t mean he was okay with the vampire thing. Even if Cassidy was. It was her life, and she seemed happy. So who was he to judge?

Godfather buzzed Cross in.

He glided into the room as if he were on a conveyor belt. Just as Nikko had earlier.

Cassidy nonchalantly nodded, but Nikko smelled her excitement. Cross was a little more cordial, grinning at Cassidy and showing sharp incisors. Stone crossed his arms over his chest, while Satch and Dante nodded their hellos. Dr. Soto did not utter a word. Godfather extended his hand. Cross took it.

“Thank you for coming in, Marcus. We seem to be out of our element here and could use your help.”

Cross nodded as he proceeded into the room. Nikko caught the vampire’s surprised stare. Cross’s nostrils flared and his eyes narrowed as their gazes clashed. So, Cross detected Nikko’s change. And apparently didn’t like it. Nikko sat forward, feeling a sudden rush of power coupled with the insatiable urge to fight. Cross felt it, too. Nikko glanced around the room at his team. They sat silent but expectant, picking up on the tension. Cross strode past Nikko and took the seat next to Cassidy, casually draping his arm along the back of her chair, then looked pointedly at the doctor. Godfather quietly escorted the doc out of the room, saying he would be in touch.

Nikko let out a long, slow breath, wrangling with his potent urge to fight the vampire. Was it because he had the same blood?

Ignoring Nikko, Cross looked up at the images of Selena and narrowed his eyes, but did not say a word.

“Do you know her?” Godfather asked, dispelling some of the tension.

Cross nodded. “I’ve seen her in the company of one or two vampires.”

Nikko’s blood ran cold. “Who?”

“She runs with the Miami underworld boss, Joran Cadiz.”

“How is that possible?” Cassidy asked. “I thought you guys had a handle on that kind of stuff.”

Cross shook his head and said, “As in your world you have those who don’t follow protocol, we have ours. Cadiz is one of them. He does just enough to look respectable, but he’s got his own game. He’s formidable and has the backing of many powerful vampires, as well as a host of human unsavories.”

Nikko shook his head. Selena was human, not some damn bloodsucker. Rather, she had
been
human. He’d bet his life on it. Now? Fuck, now she could be anything. Maybe she’d been brought back from the grave by a vampire?

“How unsavory and who are they?” Nikko demanded. His shock aside, the only way he was going to get answers was by finding Selena, and that meant tracking her down. Starting with the undead she hung out with.

“There is proprietary information I am not at liberty to discuss. What Cadiz is and does falls under that umbrella.”

Nikko stood and turned to face Cross, who postured in response. Anger washed off Nikko in waves; he struggled for control. “I’m sure your vampire code of ethics doesn’t include allowing vampires or whatever the hell he is to threaten national security.”

“Sit down, Cruz,” Cross said levelly.

“Give us the information,” Nikko bit off, stepping closer.

In the blink of an eye, Cross stood. As he did, he shoved his hand, palm open, straight at Nikko, who went flying toward the wall. Just as he was about to smash into one of the flat screens, he slowed to a stop and settled gently on his feet. Incredulous, Nikko looked at everyone in the room. Then to Cross for answers. “How’d I do that?”

Cross smirked and sat down next to Cassidy, who had not flinched. He dropped his arm across the back of her chair again and said, “You thought it. Now, before we proceed on the other matter, tell me what happened so I can identify what got you.”

Nikko nodded, not sure if he really wanted to know. He sat down in a chair away from his team, then slowly and precisely explained to Cross what had happened in Kyrgyzstan.