Ransom (Dead Man's Ink Series Book 3) (11 page)

I have a lump in my throat the size of Texas. If I breathe, if I even think about blinking or moving, even a millimeter, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m conflicted, being dragged in so many different directions all at once by my emotions that I can’t decipher what I’m thinking or feeling right now. The pain in his voice upsets me. The fact that he won’t see things my way angers me. And the beauty of his sentiment makes my heart feel swollen and bruised. Almost guilty somehow. How can I be mad at him, or hold his actions against him, when he goes and says something like that?
 

He means every single word. There are no closed doors with him. Those crystal clear blue eyes of his allow me to see directly into his soul, and I know he’s telling the truth.
 

“You can be mad at me all you like. And yes, you can go whenever you like, Sophia. I won’t ever try and stop you from leaving here if that’s what you truly want. But I want you to listen to me, and I want you to really listen to what I’m about to say, okay? Can you do that?”

I feel like being stubborn and denying him his request, but when I look at him I can see how earnestly he’s asking. He’s not trying to be a dick; he’s not trying to make me angry. It’s hard to say no to the man when he’s looking at you the way he’s looking at me right now.

“Fine. Say what you want to say. I’ll listen. Properly, I swear.”

Jamie nods. Spinning his scotch glass around and around on the bar in front of him, he stares at the liquid inside, apparently trying to construct what he wants to tell me in his head before he allows himself to say it out loud. After a long, drawn out minute, his gaze returns to me.
 

“There was an English guy in Afghanistan. He was a member of the Royal Marines but the British government loaned him to us as an informant. He’d been taken prisoner by a group of rebels after his unit’s transport hit and IED and killed everyone but him. For nearly two years the rebels kept him hostage in a cave system, giving him just enough food and water so that he could survive. They would torture him every day. They wanted to know everything he knew. They would pull his fingers and his toenails out one by one. They would pull his teeth out too, whenever he wouldn’t give them information they wanted. This guy, Andrew, he held out for months. He took the pain and the torment, and he let them take his fingernails and his teeth, until the people who were holding him captive realized they weren’t going to get anything out of him.

“Now, that was a really bad position to be in for Andrew. The only reason they were keeping him alive was because he was worth something. If he wasn’t valuable to them alive in any way, he sure as hell would be valuable to them dead. See they don’t just kill people in the shadows. They want the world to see. They gather their friends. They gather the world’s media. They make us watch on television as they force their prisoners to tell lies about their countries, and then they make us watch as they cut off their heads and burn their bodies in cages.
 

“Andrew nearly died that way. They sat him down in front of a camera and they told him what they wanted him to say, otherwise they were going to have their friends in England track down his wife and two small kids, and they were gonna have them murdered in their beds. You always think you won’t cave, that nothing they can do or say to you will make you give in and repeat the hatred they want to spread, but when they threaten your loved ones…” Jamie looks pained. He flinches a little, small creases forming between his eyebrows. “So Andrew sat down and said what they wanted him to say, and they filmed it. The bastards restrained him while they tried to slit his throat from behind, so the camera could see. They almost finished the job. Andrew had a scar that ran from his left ear too his Adam’s apple, but that’s where it stopped. Miraculously one of our units launched an assault on the caves. We had no idea they were holding anyone captive there. We’d had intel that they were using the location as a munitions cache and we wanted to take it out.
 

“So they stormed the place and Andrew only got his throat half cut. He came and worked with Cade and me for a long time. He told us in graphic detail about the shit those guys did to him. The kinds of torture they were capable of. And he told us that it paled in comparison to the atrocities he saw committed by the cartels in Mexico. He cried like a baby when he told us about
that
. He’d gone in as part of a task force to rescue a British government official who had been taken right off the street in Juarez. They’d found this guy and his wife in an open grave under a bridge in the middle of the city. The bodies had been mutilated beyond recognition. When the marines attempted to recover the bodies, they’d realized that both the official and his wife were still alive. They were fucked up and bleeding, missing skin, missing fingers, both of them missing their tongues and their eyes. Their ears. Her breasts had been cut off. His dick. They were just raw pieces of meat, and they’d tossed their bodies into a hole while they were still bleeding.
 

“The
cartels
did that to them. Not even a hardened marine who’d been held captive in the desert and almost died at the hands of some of the most immoral men on this planet could talk about the shit he saw in Mexico without his hands shaking. And
these
are the people we’re dealing with right now, Sophia. This is the type of madness we’re involving ourselves in. Cade and I were deployed. A lot of the other Widow Makers are ex military, too. We’ve all had training. We’ve all been in combat situations. We’ve been to the dark places of this world and we’ve already puked our guts up. We’ve already seen enough to make it difficult to sleep at night.”

He stops talking for a second. Gives me a second to digest. I already know what he’s going to say next, and the gravity of his words really hit home. I grip hold of the counter, leaning into it, tired and terrified as Jamie continues.
 

“And you want to go racing after these guys half cocked, Sophia. What about your upbringing in Seattle as a preacher’s daughter, living with everything you could possibly need, never having to make hard decisions or real sacrifices, qualifies you to face off with these guys when grown ass marines cry like babies at the mere thought of it?”
 

My ex, Matt, used to tell me I was sheltered. He used to tease me about the fact that I wasn’t street smart at all, and it used to drive me crazy. If he had said everything Jamie just said to me back then, I’d have lost my fucking mind. He would have been making fun of me, trying to be hurtful by making me feel silly, but that’s not the case with Jamie. I know he’s not trying to call me spoiled. He’s not trying to mock me, or criticize me for the way I grew up. He’s merely pointing out facts. I
am
the daughter of a preacher from Seattle. I didn’t grow up on the streets. I was taken care of. I was loved. I
didn’t
have to make hard decisions or make any real sacrifices. I was privileged, and I never wanted for anything. I have no military training. I’ve never really fired a gun properly. Not really, under pressure, when it matters. I feel, all of a sudden, very foolish.
 

Jamie’s eyes are grief-filled, his entire body tense with worry. “Tell me you’ll consider that, Sophia. Because I’m fucking worried out of my mind over you, over this whole fucking situation, and I feel like everything is about to spiral out of control.”

His dark hair, normally buzzed close to his head, is a little long at the moment. Jamie runs a hand through it, pulling on it as he leans one elbow against the bar. He really does look like he’s worried out of his mind.
 

I take a second to really think about what I would do in his place, and it dawns on me that I wouldn’t react in any other way. I’ve been so overtaken by my own vim and vinegar, pissed off about my civil rights being infringed upon, that I haven’t seen what this is doing to him. It’s absolutely killing him.
 

I step into him, wrapping my arms around his neck, and I hold onto him as tightly as I can. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I shouldn’t be, but I am. Things would be so much easier for you if you’d never met me. You’d have dealt with Hector a long time ago. He probably wouldn’t have come to New Mexico at all. If I weren’t in your life, everything would be easier.”

Jamie’s arms find their way around my waist, and his lips find their way to the sensitive skin of my neck. He kisses me, and then sighs, leaning his head against mine. “If you weren’t in my life, sugar, I’d only be half a man. I wouldn’t trade knowing you, caring for you, loving you, for anything in the world.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

REBEL

AFGHANISTAN

 
I can smell smoke. I can smell something else on the night’s breeze as well, something heavy and acrid, organic almost, and a knot forms in the pit of my stomach. There are no alarms going off to signal something significant is happening, but I’m gripped with foreboding. Something is fucking going down, I know it is. I prop myself up on one elbow, squinting into the darkness, and Cade is already sitting up in his bed on the other side of the room, a mirror image of me, concern etched deeply into his face.
 

“You smell that?” he whispers.
 

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“You know what it is?”

I shake my head, no, though I have a worrying suspicion that I actually
do
know and I just don’t want to admit it to myself. “Better check it out,” I say.
 

Cade flings his legs out of his cot, shoving his socked feet straight into his polished boots that are sitting next to his bed. I do the same. We’re both already dressed, t-shirts tucked into our pants, ready to rock and roll. In the army you learn pretty fucking quickly that you have to go to sleep fully geared up. Too many times we’ve been called out in the middle of the night and needed to move quickly. Takes too long to wrestle into your clothes when there are people screaming at you and sirens wailing in your goddamn ears.
 

I don’t wake the rest of the unit yet. Since we haven’t officially been called to duty, it would be a mistake to drag everyone out of their cots when we might not be needed. Cade and I are hardly quiet as we exit the tent we’ve called home for the past eighteen months, but the other ten men we bunk with don’t even stir as we head outside into the darkness.
 

Immediately, we see the source of the burning smell. On the far side of the base, a tall column of smoke is rising in a great billowing cloud up toward the sky. The base’s fire trucks are already positioned by the high chain link fence that borders the encampment, and their hoses are jetting arcs of water over the fence onto the small tents and shanti buildings on the other side.
 

Normally we would have been told to move along the Afghan locals who chose to set up camp right next to the base. Too dangerous to have potential insurgents sleeping on our doorstep, maybe building bombs in their shelters, strapping themselves up with C4, ready to make martyrs of themselves, but these people were all old women and children. Put out of their homes by bombings, they had no one to protect them and nowhere else to go. The Colonel decided it was permissible for them to stay alongside the base for a week until troops could be spared to relocate them somewhere safer, away from the open gunfire and the burning cars in the streets. Right now, it doesn’t look like anyone is going to require relocating, though.
 

“Holy shit,” Cade says under his breath. “What the fuck?”

What the fuck is right. There were maybe two hundred people here when we went to sleep, at least seventy tents and make shift shelters pitched up twenty feet away from the fence. Now every single one of those tents and shelters are on fire, and there are women dashing around, jaws hanging open, low wailing coming from their mouths as they try to find their friends and loved ones.
 

“
Fuck
. You think those assholes came down here and set fire to their own people’s tents? Why the fuck would they do that?” Cade covers his mouth with his hand, frowning at the scene unfolding before his eyes.
 

A woman stumbles out from a tent close by, howling in pain. She’s on fire, the long material of her clothing engulfed in flames that lick at her body, rising upward as she runs in the direction of the fire trucks. The guys douse her with water, putting the flames out, but she doesn’t stop howling. It’s the most ungodly, terrible thing I’ve ever heard. I won’t be able to free myself of the sights, sounds, and smells of this night for a very, very long time.

The radio I carry on my hip emits a burst of static, which I barely notice. Cade has to take it off my belt and place it in my hand before I realize that Richter, our platoon leader, is barking out orders to me and I haven’t answered him yet.
 

“—can see your ass from where I’m standing, Squad Leader. Answer your damn radio!”

I hold the radio up to my mouth, still blinking at the fire. At the tents that are on fire. At the
people
that are on fire. “Yes, sir. Sorry, I hear you. Just a little shocked that the base isn’t in full meltdown right now.”

“That’s what they want. They’re up on the hillside. Patrol saw three or four men up on the ridgeline watching through sniper scopes. They want chaos, and we don’t aim on giving it to them. Go wake up your men.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want those fuckers’ heads on sticks, Duke. Go get ‘em for me.”

“Sir, yes, sir. They’ll never see us coming.”

“That’s what I like to hear.”

The radio falls silent, and Cade and I run back to our tent, less dazed now that we have a purpose. I’m whooping and hollering by the time I tug the flap back and duck inside our billet. “All right, assholes, on your feet! On your feet! On your feet! We got work to do.” Ten bleary-eyed men are suddenly sitting upright in their bunks, moving automatically as they reach for their boots and their gear. They don’t gripe or complain. They’re all so used to this that their bodies function instantaneously, performing rote mechanical movements that were drilled into them back in basic training.