Own (Command Force Alpha #1) (2 page)

But for Evan to show up, the shit must’ve hit the fan. And spewed
everywhere
. Her stomach was a flipping, sinking knot that lodged somewhere around her toes.
“What’s wrong?”

“Your father’s in the hospital.”

Her initial dizziness at seeing Evan again was nothing compared to how the room spun with those five simple words. They were the second worst words she could think of. The others had to do with… God, with him never coming home.

“How bad?” she managed at last.

“Gut shot.”

“Jesus.”

He’d never pulled punches. No one who worked for the legendary Colonel Nicky Stafford ever did.

She gripped the grimy coat hook and squeezed, but it wasn’t a powerful enough bite of pain to blunt her churning fear. “Details. Now.”

“Here? I don’t think so.” His assessing gaze took in the lay of the dim, exhausted pool hall with a single sweep. All that training. All that skill.

Staring up at Evan, she set her jaw and swallowed her heart.
Shove it back where it belongs. Get the job done.
Some lessons were too strongly ingrained to forget, too necessary to ignore. “You’re taking me to see him.”

“No,” Evan said, with what remained of his father’s son-of-a-rich-man accent. She knew better. “I have orders. I’m taking you somewhere safe as a precaution. You pull any shit with me, Kat, and we’re going to have a serious problem.”

“You’ve laid serious problems on me before and I’ve come out just fine.” The hitch in her voice was unwelcome, but what could she do? She pushed out of the bar, onto the street, looking for Evan’s car. It’d be a nice vehicle, yet anonymous. She knew how Command Force Alpha worked. “I need to get the hell away from you.”

The last rays of sun set his eyes alight, but so did a cold, familiar fury that contradicted the fading fall day. “Look, Kat, this is a just-in-case situation unless you make it a problem. I’ll find you if you run. Satellites, CCTV surveillance, credit card purchases, cell phone reception, calls to your friends. You might as well have drawn me a map to this bar.”

“I know how to lay low.”

“Not so well that I can’t track you down. You won’t like it when I do.”

“This is my
father
we’re talking about.”

He grabbed both wrists and spun her fast. Her feet tangled. One ballet slipper fell away. The pool cue clattered when it hit the ground along with her purse. She smashed against the exterior wall of the bar. Her breath left in a whoosh. Her next inhalation was filled with the mind-bending scent of Evan Sommers. “Do you want the facts again? The colonel shot. Security measures to be followed. Are those sentences short enough for you to pay attention for one blasted second?”

“Short and curt. You to a tee.” She wiggled her wrists, which weren’t going anywhere. He held both. She was enveloped by him. Surrounded by him. If she tried to twist free, she’d only wind up with nasty abrasions. “That doesn’t change a thing.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” he said, giving her shoulders a firm shake. “It’s protocol to take precautions. We don’t know what’s going on, and that sucks like fucking hell. The colonel’s under armed guard. And who do you think he trusted to keep you safe?”

“Don’t touch me. You don’t have the right anymore, got it?”

“Your skin is clammy and your pulse is through the roof. You’re in shock.”

She used a shaky palm to rub the sweat from her brow. “How bad is it, Evan? Dad?”

He looked away, which made her stomach plummet again. He was a judge delivering a sentence just short of the chair. “It took more than seven hours to get to an extraction outpost outside Berlin.”

“And Dad with a gut shot the whole time.” In part to keep the screams at bay, she began reciting what she knew. Hers hadn’t been an average childhood, and facts…helped. Facts were the best she could do when she wasn’t allowed to know anything else. “Depending on the weapon and ammunition, possible irreparable organ damage. A prolonged period of bleeding, sometimes heavy. But a wound that can take days to become fatal. Lots of pain. He was in misery, wasn’t he?”

Evan nodded grimly. “No gunshot is ever fun.”

“You
have
to take me to him.” Kat was grateful for the wall at her back. She was swimming in a vicious nightmare. “I’d rather see him on a ventilator, so long as I get to see him alive.” Needing to take her fear out on something—some
body
—she smacked his chest. “And you’re keeping me from him. You’re a fucking bastard.”

He stepped back far enough to make Katsu think she’d actually moved him, but no, the distance he gave her was completely voluntary. He was quick, canny, lethal. With no more than a few feet between them, she was still caged in.

“I’d been ready to stay with him at the hospital. For the duration. But I’d already made him a promise. I’d find you and make sure the danger didn’t spread to you. So tell me. What do you think is keeping him hanging on right now? What’s giving him peace of mind to fight this battle? Because it
is
a battle. He can’t split his focus worrying about you too. Tell me I’m wrong, Katsu.”

The fight drained out of her, just as she imagined the blood must’ve drained out of her father. She’d lost her mom at age ten. She couldn’t lose Dad too.

That wasn’t all of it. Evan, the man she’d once believed she loved, didn’t give a damn about her emotions. She wondered if his younger self would’ve handled this moment with more tenderness, perhaps taking her in his arms and whispering reassuring words.

Fantasy. Figments. That wasn’t Evan Sommers anymore—if it had ever been.

“This is my
father
we’re talking about.” Her words were strained. “He may be Colonel Nicholas Stafford to you, but to me he’s just Dad. He’s the only person in the world who hugs me. He’s the big tough soldier who taught me Krav Maga, then used a library book to learn how to braid my hair after Mom died.” Her voice cracked. She closed her eyes against Evan’s penetrating gaze. “I need to see him.”

“Katsu…” Her name was a whisper of air against her cheek.

“Besides, I know how you guys work. There’ll be fifty men ringing his room—no, wait. Probably only three. They’ll be three operatives who can take down a regiment by themselves. Tell me where I’ll be safer, other than CFA’s HQ in Southie?”

Evan glared. A muscle popped in the side of his jaw, and the tendons of his neck clenched. “You’ve always been a giant pain in my ass, Kat. You’re not even supposed to know that much about our operation.”

“But I do. Get over it.”

“If I take you to visit the colonel, you’ll do what I say afterward. You’re going to need a safe place to stay.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

“Katsu Stafford.”

She shivered. He’d woven a cocoon around her. Every sense was permeated by him. The cadence of his voice was especially persuasive. He’d always had that power—part South Boston thug, part high-society playboy.

He hadn’t looked away. “Are we in agreement?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied sarcastically.

If this was the prelude to a rerun from four years ago, when they’d been dumb and fun-loving and thought summer would last forever, she might be able to enjoy it all over again—shitty ending and all.

But this was different. They were both different. He’d walked back into her life only to bring chaos home.

Chapter Two

Once Evan loaded them in the Lexus provided by Command Force Alpha, Katsu fastened her seat belt and crossed her arms. He’d gathered her scattered belongings, but she wasn’t particularly grateful. “So, which safe house will we plant down in? Last count, there were fourteen within a twelve-mile radius. I want the one on Youngman Street. The towels are nice.”

“Towels? How the hell would you know something like that?”

“Dad kept a lot from me, but not the addresses of places where I could hide if I needed to. He showed me all of them.”

“And you’d base your decision on
towels
?”

“I’m trying to cooperate, in hopes it’ll satisfy your caveman need to hold me prisoner.”

“We’re not going to a safe house. You made that assumption.” He gunned the engine. “This is a precaution, so a safe house isn’t necessary. We’ll be staying at my house.”

“Even more caveman. I should’ve known my choices wouldn’t matter. Though…” She slumped into her seat and closed her eyes against the burst of a headache. “Now you get to think about me wearing nothing but a towel.”

Yeah, that’s what Evan was thinking about. Katsu in a towel. Katsu laughing when he tickled her. Katsu moaning and arching as she came.

Old, old memories were a welcome distraction, as they had been for four years.

Everyone thought Spec Ops guys and their kick-ass female comrades were on the go all the time. Machine guns. Night scopes. Helicopter raids and dramatic rescues. CFA did that, used those things—but a lot of their job was waiting, either at home or in the field. For any operation, planning was everything. Planning meant timing. And sometimes time just…slowed. Way too often for his peace of mind, Evan filled those slow moments with memories of his six weeks as Katsu’s lover.

It never should have happened. It never should have ended.

The drive to Massachusetts General on the outskirts of Harvard’s medical campus wasn’t entirely eased by Katsu, though. She was a potent force beside him, thrumming with hostile energy and waves of fear. She hid it well. Always had. Her anger, on the other hand, was a brutal weapon. To grow up Nicky Stafford’s only child had probably made that combination inevitable. Hide the fear and ride the anger. Evan knew the routine. He’d done the same thing. Survival in his business meant some pretty fucked-up head gymnastics.

Right now he was dwelling on failure and trying hard as hell not to. FUBAR missions happened. They just did. The only reason to revisit them was to do post-mortems. Figuring out what went wrong would increase the safety and efficiency of future assignments. Piecing together what information they
had
gathered would point them to what that next assignment entailed.

This was harder to push away from. Distance was impossible.

He and his fellow agents had known the mission would be a risky but key exchange. They’d camped out in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, to make sure everything went smoothly. Instead, the colonel had been shot by an expert assassin, perhaps beyond recovery. To make matters thornier, Andrej Maysenia, their only inside link to an arms cartel run by the Bokun family, was dead.

As was Laurie Madigan.

Lawrence Madigan, one of the initial operatives in Command Force Alpha, had successfully charmed his way into the Bokun family, in deep cover for ten weeks, before failing to make his scheduled check-in. He had been MIA ever since—almost nine months. Evan and various CFA teams from around the globe had assembled in the former Eastern Bloc to turn the place inside out.

Few leads.

Little luck.

Andrej Maysenia had been their last, best lead, ready to trade in proof of Laurie’s fate for a six-month cessation of CFA’s operations in the region. Just before he was gunned down, he’d handed over a fifty-gallon barrel filled with partially charred human remains. One of the body’s few discernable marks had been a service tattoo that commemorated the days when Laurie had been SAS Captain Lawrence Madigan.

The worst-case scenario was most likely heartbreaking fact.

With the colonel shot, and no telling how many more assassins in wait, Evan considered it a damn miracle the team had been able to grab their leader and the barrel before getting the hell out of Minsk.

He didn’t want to believe the burnt, warped body they’d retrieved was that of his friend. And he hated that the colonel had taken a bullet to retrieve the grim proof from some ambitious two-bit cartel in an economic backwater. Those thoughts were enough to pinch Evan’s veins, like twisting the water out of a rag.

But the risks they took made Command Force Alpha what it was. Crawling quietly under the radar of almost every intelligence agency in the world, they handled what no one else dared. They assessed threats that weren’t yet threats. In a way, the scraps they collected were a means of predicting the future—which didn’t go down well with military types and politicians like Evan’s father, a respected senator. When small-time operations such as the Bokuns kept their dealings relatively local, tame and candid, few cared.

CFA, however, cared very much when little cartels and mini mafias began to get ambitious, to the point of threatening international security. It was a tricky line to walk—the espionage equivalent of reading tea leaves in the hopes of dismantling the next menace before it could get off the ground.

That made the fuckup in Minsk more disturbing. They’d missed something. Something vital. The Bokun family primarily peddled arms on a small scale. They couldn’t afford to have CFA silently hunting them down, one by one—for information and retaliation. Why take such a huge risk?

Now the risk could follow the colonel home to Boston. Whoever had ambushed them in Minsk could possibly know his identity, which would make Nicholas Stafford the first CFA agent to be identified by any foreign syndicate. Many knew of and feared Command Force Alpha, but until now, the anonymity of its agents had been closely guarded.

People would kill for that information. That meant protecting Katsu was vital. If families like the Bokuns knew the man they shot had a daughter to be used as blackmail or bait…