Chapter 7

Chapter

Seven

February 16th

4:44 A.M.

Please be right.

How many times had that thought run through his head in the last couple of hours?

So many times that Panther had lost count.

There had been times before when he'd gone on a mission to rescue someone important to one of his teammates. They'd rescued Tillie from a crime boss, Ariel from a human trafficker, Jessica from a cult leader, and Stephanie from a terrorist militia. Each one of those times he'd felt the pressure. There was always pressure, but when someone was important to a member of what you considered your family, it was that much stronger. And Bravo Team was his family. They'd cared about him more than his parents who had shuffled him back and forth between their homes, then started new families and left him out in the cold.

But this was so very different.

This was about a little girl who might very well hold the key to his future in her small hands.

Quite simply, he couldn't fail.

If he didn"t bring Elle's daughter home to her, he was terrified he was going to have to stand by and watch as she wasted away into nothingness.

She was so very strong, but everyone reached their limit sooner or later. What happened when Elle reached hers?

"She called you Rafe," Tank said as they pulled up outside a seemingly innocuous-looking middle-class house in a nice suburb.

"Doesn't mean what you think it does," Panther repeated the same words he'd used when Elle had called him by his name back at his cabin. A part of him wanted it to mean something, but a bigger part knew that for the foreseeable future, Elle's focus was on her child—as it should be—and not on a potential new relationship.

"It always means the same thing," Rock said, twisting from the passenger seat to look back at him.

"Her daughter is missing," he reminded them. None of them were parents, but they were close to his son. He knew they would be hurting almost as much as he would be if anything happened to Andy, so they could all empathize with Elle.

"Doesn't mean feelings can"t take hold. Trust me, it's in the darkest moments when you need light the most," Trick spoke softly, making his words feel all the more powerful. If anyone knew about light in the dark, it was Trick. It was only a couple of weeks ago that he had been kidnapped by a militia based in Liberia who wanted answers that only a few people could give. It was how he'd met Stephanie, and Panther knew that neither of the couple were even remotely close to being okay after their ordeal.

But they had each other.

Clung to each other.

And somehow, that seemed to make them both okay even when they weren"t.

"Right now, I just want to focus on finding Ruthie," he said, unable, maybe even unwilling, to let himself think of anything beyond that.

"Then let's get in there and pray we find that sweet little girl," Scorpion announced with a ferocity that gave Panther pause.

Of all of his teammates, he would have guessed that Scorpion and Jessica would be the last to have kids. Given how Jessica had grown up, the immense responsibility placed on her shoulders at such a young age, and that she was finally able to start prioritizing herself thanks to Scorpion's help, he knew she wasn't ready to start a family any time soon. Yet there was something in the man's voice that hinted otherwise.

"Dude, is Jessica pregnant?" he asked, making everyone freeze, and four sets of eyes fly to him then bounce quickly to Scorpion.

Dropping his head, Scorpion raked his fingers through his hair, then looked up at him. His gaze was desolate. "She's been feeling off for weeks. She was trying to hide it because it was Christmas, then New Year, everything with Beth, and then with Trick and Steph. I made her go to the doctor. She's eleven weeks pregnant." Scorpion paused and swallowed audibly. "When she was undercover, Genesis tried artificially inseminating her. She was on birth control, but obviously it failed. There's a chance the baby is his and not mine."

"Whoa," Tank muttered.

"I"m sorry, man." Rock clapped a hand on Scorpion's shoulder.

"Are you doing a DNA test?" Panther asked.

"Yeah, you can get it done from seven weeks, and she's almost twelve. We did the test yesterday, just waiting on the results," Scorpion replied.

"You should be home with her," Panther said. If he'd known, he would have insisted. The man they were looking at wasn't trained like they were, he wasn't expecting this to be difficult. If Ruthie was in that house they'd get her out and home to her mom.

"I wanted to, but Jessica insisted I come. She said she's going to be a mom, and if it were her baby who had been taken, she would want everyone there trying to find her," Scorpion explained.

"You're going to be a parent, too, that baby's father even if it's not biologically yours," Panther reminded his friend. "Genesis is dead, and even if he wasn't, he wouldn't be playing the role of daddy to that baby. You and Jessica are in love, you want to spend your lives together, DNA or not, that baby is yours, too."

"I know, man, I know," Scorpion said. "I'm going to love that baby with everything I have to give and then some. But Jess is freaked, and I don't know what she"s going to do if it turns out I"m not the biological father. She said she'll keep the baby no matter what, but I don't know what it means for us. She's used to doing things alone, and I"m terrified she's going to decide it will be too much for me to have to raise another man's child and decide for the both of us to end things. It's not what I want, but I don't know how I"m going to convince her of that."

His friend looked so desperate, but Panther didn"t know what to say to make things better. Truth was, Jessica was only just learning what it was like to have a team at her back, she could very easily slip back into old patterns and decide she had to handle this herself.

"One problem at a time, yeah, man?" Rock said. "First, wait to see what the DNA tests say and then you can go from there."

"I"m trying," Scorpion said. "I wanted to ask Eagle to pull strings and get a rush on the DNA results, but Jessica didn"t want to. She's scared. I know she is. I just don't want her to push me away. I"m there for her. Through anything."

"Deep down she knows that," Axe said, speaking up for the first time. "You have to believe that love can overcome anything."

With that parting thought echoing in all of their heads, spoken by a man who had more reason than all of them put together to believe that, in the end, love would always win out, he and his team approached the house.

It was a two-storey brick with a neatly kept front lawn. From what they knew of Jimmy Hillier, the man was forty, single, had a good reputation as a website designer and manager. He ran his own small business with two other people working for him, had never been married, had no children, but had a criminal history dating back to his teens.

Stalking.

Four cases that Panther had been able to find including one that had led to an attempted kidnapping. Since stalking could be hard to prove, three of the cases had never gone anywhere. The fourth one Jimmy had taken a deal, get counseling and no jail time would be served. That had been back when he was in his early twenties, and there had been no more stalking charges against him since.

Didn"t mean he had stopped though, just meant he'd gotten older and wiser.

Despite the security system set up, it took Panther mere moments to hack his way through it, and then they stepped inside Jimmy's home.

Cold.

The house was freezing, and in that moment Panther felt his heart drop.

Ruthie wasn't here. No one had been here in days at the least, possibly even weeks.

Had he been wrong?

Was Jimmy Hillier not the kidnapper?

Doubt and a crushing sense of failure filled him, but then someone flicked on the lights, and he knew he had his man.

Everywhere in the house there were pictures of Elle and her daughter. Not just ones he'd printed himself and stuck all over his walls like an obsessed madman. No, these were all framed and hanging on walls or sitting on furniture just like someone would display their family photos.

Which made it that much worse.

Jimmy Hillier had already decided that Elle and Ruthie were going to be his, nothing was going to make him stop until he had both of them in his clutches.

February 16th

5:57 A.M.

They'd been gone for hours.

It meant bad news.

Elle was positive it did.

If Rafe had found her daughter, the first thing he would have done was call her to let her know her baby was safe and he was bringing her home.

At least if he'd found Ruthie alive.

If he'd found her dead then … she was sure he would want to break that news in person.

Not that it would make any difference. Ruthie was all she had, neither her parents nor Ruthie's father would be all that broken up about the seven-year-old's death. More acquaintances than real friends, and no friends that she would call to come and be with her if she got the most devastating news of her life. It didn"t matter where, when, or how she received the news it would still shatter her.

Call. Please call.

But her phone remained stubbornly silent.

Mocking her.

Taunting her.

As badly as she had wanted to insist that she go with Rafe and his team in case the intel he had found was correct and he'd found her daughter, she wouldn't do anything to jeopardize Ruthie's safety, and her being there, being a distraction and a liability, would do just that. Besides, Rafe had asked her to watch Andy for him, and knowing that he trusted her to look after his son when he wasn't here, even knowing she had failed her own daughter who had been snatched right out from under her nose, meant more to her than she could express.

So she was there, in his living room, pacing up and down like a caged tiger just waiting for something to pounce on.

Preferably her daughter.

Playing out how their reunion would go was something Elle had done hundreds of times over the last month. Ruthie would fly into her arms, and she'd hold her daughter tight while they both cried. She'd tell her little unicorn girl how much she loved her and how sorry she was for failing her, and Ruthie would tell her that she loved her. Whatever Ruthie wanted she would get, toys, food, clothes, or shoes, it didn"t matter. Anything her baby wanted she deserved for surviving hell.

But no matter how many times she imagined it, there was always the thought niggling at the back of her mind that their reunion could be so very different.

A morgue, a small body under a white sheet, her child's lifeless body, planning a funeral, a little white coffin, and a gravestone.

That couldn't be their future.

It couldn't.

When someone knocked at the door, Elle about had a heart attack. Absolutely positive that it was Rafe about to deliver the news that Ruthie was already dead, already gone. For a month she had lived in fear of that knock. Of that news. Of the reality it was too late to save her baby girl.

It wasn't until she remembered that Rafe would have no need to knock at his own door that she relaxed enough to check the camera feed. Before he left, Rafe had set up her phone with access to the cameras surrounding the Bravo Team compound. When she brought up the feed, she saw five women standing on the cabin's porch. Four stood together, one a little bit apart, and since she knew that access to the remote compound was limited she assumed they had to be the other Bravo team member's wives, fiancées, and girlfriends.

What were they doing here?

Had Rafe and his team contacted them and asked them to come and break the news thinking it would be better coming from women?

It wouldn't.

If Ruthie was gone, she wanted to hear it from Rafe. He understood, he was a parent, and she trusted him.

By the time she had stumbled over to the door, unlocked it, and flung it open, Elle was visibly shaking. Enough that all five sets of eyes immediately filled with concern.

"Is Ruthie dead?" she blurted out, modifying the volume of her voice only because the last thing she wanted to do was wake up Andy with hysterical shrieking.

"Oh no, honey. I"m sorry, we didn"t mean to scare you," a tiny, blonde, pixie of a woman said as she stepped forward, immediately wrapping her in a hug.

"Told you we should have called first," a woman with golden blonde hair said. "I"m Jessica, that's Tillie," she pointed to the other blonde. "Ariel, Stephanie, and Beth," she added as she pointed in order to a woman with long, jet black hair, one with wild curls and healing wounds on her face and a bandage on her left hand, and the woman who kept herself slightly apart from the others. "We just thought since we were all sitting around being miserable, and you were sitting around being miserable, we may as well be miserable altogether."

"We haven't heard from the guys though," Ariel reiterated as Elle stepped back to allow them all to enter.

"Sorry, I should have known that. It's just, they've been gone for a couple of hours and I thought I would have heard from Rafe by now," she said, closing the door behind the women and relocking it. When she turned around, she froze when she saw all five pairs of eyes staring at her with a mixture of shock and curiosity. "What?"

"You called him Rafe," Tillie said like that explained everything.

Only to her it explained nothing. The other guys on Rafe's team had commented on that too, so it obviously had some significance, although whatever that was was completely lost on her. "I don't get it," she said.

"I didn"t either. And no one bothered explaining it to me until way later," Stephanie said sympathetically.

"The guys only ever use their nicknames," Jessica explained.

"He told me his name and didn"t seem to mind if I used it," she said, feeling defensive now. Maybe because she knew she was overstepping by hanging around Rafe's house and spending so much time with his son. The last thing she wanted him to think was that she was somehow trying to use his little boy as a substitute for her child.

"That's not it," Tillie said. "The guys use their nicknames with everyone. Except their women."

"I-I'm not R-Rafe's w-woman," she stammered. Was that the vibe she was giving off? That she was trying to use her daughter's abduction to get a man? Elle was absolutely mortified.

"No one is implying you think you are," Ariel soothed, obviously sensing Elle's distress. "It's just how these guys work. If Panther is letting you call him Rafe, then he likes you."

"Oh," she mumbled, not sure what else to say. Not sure what to feel. Needing a distraction, she took the empty armchair by the fireplace. "I know why I"m miserable, but why are you guys all up this early in the morning and miserable, too?"

All eyes turned to Jessica, who placed a hand on her stomach, her expression troubled. "I just found out I'm pregnant."

And that was bad news?

Elle had been thrilled when she discovered she was going to have a baby. Finally, she could have someone who would love her properly, the way she craved. Deep down she already knew she didn"t share that kind of love with her husband. Since she didn"t want to insult Jessica by implying she should love her child when there was obviously something else she wasn't aware of going on, she simply waited for more information.

"Jess was undercover in a cult, that's how she met Scorpion," Tillie explained. "Because she cares more about others than herself, she didn"t stop herself from being artificially inseminated. She was on birth control, but it obviously failed, and now she doesn't know if it's a crazy cult leader or the man she loves who fathered her baby."

How awful. "I"m so sorry," Elle said, an ache of sympathy forming in her chest.

"I"m keeping the baby, but if it's not Mason's how can I ask him to raise it with me? What if he can't love him or her? I love Mason, and I already love this baby regardless of who the father is, but I don't know what to do," Jessica said, tears shimmering in her greeny blue eyes.

"You trust his love," Elle said automatically, causing the others to gape in surprise.

"How do you know he loves me enough to raise another man's baby?" Jessica asked, but the question wasn't defensive or angry, it bordered on desperate.

"Because you"re here, because he stayed. He knows the baby might not be his, but he didn"t tell you to leave, he wants you with him. If the baby isn't biologically his, he'll love it anyway because it's yours, and that makes it his, too. My ex didn"t even stay for a child that was his because he didn"t love me, didn"t love our daughter, but Scorpion wants you close because you're his and he knows it. You and that little baby growing inside you." Elle might not know these people, but she was one hundred percent certain what she'd just said was the truth.

Before anyone could comment on her speech, the cabin door was opened again.

Elle flew to her feet, hope and fear warring inside her.

Six.

Six men walked inside.

No little girl.

No!

Her legs buckled, but even though he was across the room, Rafe suddenly closed the distance between them and caught her before she dropped into the chair she'd just vacated, pressing her tightly against his hard chest.

"I"m sorry, Elle," he whispered into her hair.

Those words shattered her world, her very existence.