Chapter 30

Chapter

Thirty

GRACE

W e were on their plane again. They had gear stowed in the back. The bags they’d offloaded from the car looked a great deal heavier than what we’d come back with, not that anyone told me what was in them.

“This bag,” Voodoo had said, “has your gear in it.” Fortunately, that duffel didn’t look near as large or as heavy as the others.

“I have gear?” That was news to me.

“Yes,” Bones said. “You can go over it later. We’ll finish the brief in the air.” The dismissive notes in his voice irked me. The fact he was the same man who’d held my hand when I panicked on the incoming flight baffled me. The two images clashed so much it made my head hurt.

“Ignore him,” Alphabet suggested. “I intend to. Come on… I’ll sit back here with you.”

He motioned for me to climb in and then Goblin and Alphabet followed. I buckled myself into the seat as Alphabet slid the cross straps into place. Goblin settled right between us. The others filtered in. Bones moved to sit up front with Lunchbox and that let Voodoo sit near us.

“Here,” Voodoo tugged the headset on over my ears and they helped to blunt out the sound of the engine. “Check, check.” His voice crackled briefly but I could hear him easier. “Hang tight.”

Alphabet had his own headset on, as did the guys up front. The chatter from Lunchbox included him talking to whomever ran the local tower. It wasn’t that long before we were taking off.

Seriously, this tiny little plane seemed so insubstantial versus these guys. I wasn’t sure how it stayed in the air with all of them on board. The weight of Goblin’s head on my foot tugged my attention. He vibrated faintly against me. I could imagine him snoring.

The relaxed posture offered some comfort. The “briefing” at breakfast hadn’t told me much.

“We’re at cruising altitude,” Lunchbox said. “We’re going to be pushing it some. But we should reach our destination in five hours, and forty minutes. Weather looks good so far. I’m keeping an eye on a potential storm. I don’t think it will be a problem.”

“Voodoo, SITREP?” Bones sounded less distant and dismissive at the moment.

“Transport will be waiting for us. I’ve got a couple of contacts with the border patrol. I know the best spots to infiltrate and get across the border. We’re looking at another four to six hours in overland transport. Makes for a messier exfil if that becomes a problem.”

“Noted. Alphabet?”

The flow of information was almost like hearing too much and not enough. The words were English, but they might as well have been in a language I didn’t speak for how much of the context I was missing.

“Remote access isn’t going to work. I’ve spent the last twelve hours trying to get the bots to penetrate their network. They are set up too tight to let that happen. Not without a lot of on the ground massaging. Even then, all that might do is trigger an alert on their end. If they box the bots, they can feed us misinformation, and that’s worse than no information.”

“How much time will you need on-site?”

“To be determined.” There was a note of apology in Alphabet’s voice and he shot me a quick smile. “Some jobs are very much a hands-on thing and until I’m in front of it, I don’t know what it is going to take.”

“I guess I can see that,” I said slowly, but I wasn’t really sure I could because I really didn’t know what they did—you know aside from blowing up cars, taking out bad guys, and killing people trying to kill us.

Alphabet’s grin was a brief flash of humor. “Just ask me if there’s something that you want me to go into detail on.”

“Or not,” Bones interrupted the warmth with a cold douse of water. “This is need to know, and she doesn’t.”

I rolled my eyes and folded my arms. “Trust me, I won’t be asking you to explain anything Boney Boy.”

Yes, you caught more flies with honey than with vinegar. I’d be more than happy to douse Bones in one hundred percent pure vinegar. Maybe add some ammonia to it too. I was pretty sure some combo of that created a gas that would probably make him sick.

Voodoo chuckled softly, making no attempt to mask his amusement. Nor did he react when Bones shifted to look back at us. Well, he looked at Voodoo. I was kind of glad he didn’t look at me like that. Head back in the seat, I studied the byplay between all of them, or at least the visible byplay.

I didn’t understand the full dynamic happening here and I was pretty sure that I needed to get some grasp on it.

“What does Boney Boy do for the mission?” The question earned me a lot of silent looks. Alphabet’s lips twitched, but he managed to hold onto his expression. Voodoo didn’t even try, his smirk was almost adorable.

Almost.

“Excuse me?” the man in question said in a chilly manner.

“No, I don’t think I will. Lunchbox is flying us there. Voodoo is getting us equipment and routes. Alphabet is doing something with their electronics and computers. What are you doing besides being a judgmental prick?”

Yep. It was official, I was angry and Bones had volunteered to take the beating for my mood. Even when he gave me a withering look, I didn’t retreat from my question or my statement.

“Currently, I’ll be your babysitter. Pray that doesn’t change too much.”

I snorted. The threat just didn’t land the way he thought it might. I’d been threatened with rape. I had been assaulted. I’d been dragged from one place to another. I’d fucked one man to keep him from beating me. I fucked a second ‘cause I wanted to. At the moment, I was on this plane willingly because it was taking us away from the house in the middle of nowhere.

Even going somewhere near a border was somewhere . If I was somewhere I could escape, then that was worth it. As angry and dismissing as he wanted to be, I would not be intimidated by him or anyone else.

I’d made it this far. I could go the rest of the way with or without the help of the men on this plane. At least three of them seemed interested in taking my side. Or maybe I was drinking the Kool-Aid and they were just interested in keeping me from making trouble.

The idea that you caught more flies with honey and all that worked for them too. I was cooperating, wasn’t I?

“Here,” Alphabet was saying as he passed me a tablet. “I loaded it with some movies, shows, and books. I lifted some ideas from your Amazon wish list and the rest from some social media posts.”

Honestly, I had no idea what I expected him to say but that was not it. “Stalker much?”

His grin was not remotely apologetic. “Sometimes, it’s faster to just go and get the information I need rather than hope someone will tell me in time for me to do something about it.”

When I took the tablet, he let it go. There was a password required to unlock it.

“It’s your middle name.”

“I take it you pulled my birth certificate? Or my Passport?” Yeah, that was definitely creepy.

He winked. “Just let me know if there’s something else you’d rather I load on there. You won’t have access to WiFi, so everything needs to be side loaded.”

Clearly, I wasn’t allowed to use it for anything else. Noted.

“That said, you don’t need to be bored. These jobs can sometimes take longer than any of us like.”

If I was busy, then they wouldn’t need to be as worried about me. Right.

I stared at the screen for a long moment before I began to type in my middle name.

“What’s your middle name, Firecracker?”

I glanced up at Voodoo and raised my eyebrows. “You didn’t also look it up?”

“No, and apparently Alphabet isn’t sharing either.”

“You want a prize, do your own homework,” Alphabet told him, then he winked at me. I wasn’t sure what that wink met and reading men had never been a struggle before. I wasn’t sure it was a struggle now so much as I wasn’t sure what their long term goals were or how it affected anything.

Degas.

My middle name was Degas and it was for one of my mother’s favorite impressionist painters. I’d always been kind of fond of his work, though I suspected it had everything to do with Maman’s stories about the work.

She’d been a French expat settled here. When our brother died at fifteen, we’d only been seven, but Maman’s grief had been ours. We’d done everything we could to look after her, but I really didn’t think she’d ever gotten over his loss.

As promised, the tablet had been loaded with some action movies, romantic comedies, and a couple of thrillers. In addition to the films, there were a couple of full series including Gossip Girl , Wednesday , and Reacher . All shows I’d been meaning to watch forever, but I just hadn’t had the time.

The books were an eclectic mix of romantic suspense, comedies, and erotic thrillers. Yeah, I wasn’t going to comment on those selections. While I absolutely read that genre, they were absolutely not on my wishlist.

I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye, and tilted my head to track Alphabet reaching down to stroke Goblin’s head. The dog had moved to rest his head against Alphabet’s lap while Alphabet worked on the tiniest laptop I’d ever seen.

The longer he petted the dog, the more some of the tension seemed to leech out of his expression. Dog and man both seemed more at ease, though neither shifted from their position.

A light touch against my foot had me shifting my gaze to Voodoo. Ah, I was staring. I gave him a small shrug then winced. He put two fingers on my knee and that snagged my attention. A moment later, he reached over to adjust something on my headset. There was a chirp.

Then he touched his own before he said, “I saw that. Are you hurting again?”

“It’s sore, but it hasn’t stopped being sore. I keep forgetting it’s there and then I do things like shrug. I’ll live.”

“I know you’ll live.” Oh, now he was scolding me. “What I want to make sure is you’re not in pain. Pain is debilitating, Firecracker. You have enough on your plate, you don’t need that too.”

No one else reacted to his words and I flicked a glance around the plane before I looked back at him.

“Different channel,” he answered my unasked question.

Oh.

“Privacy?” With all of them present, that hadn’t seemed like such an issue. Then again, he hadn’t invited anyone inside to help me with my back.

“For the most part. You don’t trust us at the moment.”

No, I really didn’t.

“While we may not be offering you a lot of reasons to trust us, I need you to know you can tell me when you’re hurting or if there’s more pain than there should be. We need to avoid infection primarily and frankly—I don’t want you to suffer if you don’t have to. To do that, however, I need you to tell me when it does hurt.”

As much as I wanted to just dismiss his comments, I studied him instead. Was he being honest? Maybe.

This didn’t seem like something where a lie would serve him better than the truth. They did want me to trust them—maybe. Voodoo had done pretty much everything he said, from arming me, to protecting me, to getting that tracker out of me—not once had he left me alone with the doctor I didn’t know.

Then when I wanted sex, he’d given me that too, without demanding a single thing in return. Men didn’t usually have to be leveraged into sex. The only thing he’d told me he would do and had failed to deliver on was the phone. Somehow, I didn’t think it was his decision. At least not his final decision.

The problem with that was he’d also not contradicted Bones. If he really wanted to, could he? Or was Bones the one they all had to obey? If they did—then why ?

Too many questions, not enough answers.

“I’ll tell you,” I said finally. “It hurt when I shrugged, but not so bad I couldn’t take it. It does feel better today than it did yesterday.”

“If that changes…”

Was I up for making him any promises? “If I need assistance,” I said, splitting the difference. “I’ll tell you.”

His mouth tightened. Not the answer he wanted. I didn’t have it in me to feel bad about his disappointment. Not now.

Movement to my right pulled my attention, and I found Alphabet studying me then Voodoo. There was a beep in my ear and while I could see their lips moving, I didn’t hear whatever the conversation was.

Bones snapped his head back to glare at Voodoo as well.

That was interesting.

Had Voodoo just given me a way to put a wedge between all of them?