Chapter 9

Veni stared at Reid in disbelief, the vestiges of sleep falling away from her brain. Bolting to her feet, she threw herself into his arms, tears pouring down her cheeks. When she saw another man behind him, she stiffened.

Reid held her tightly against himself and whispered, “It’s okay. He’s with me. This is Anders.”

She shuddered and nodded, then looking over at Anders, she mouthed, Thank you.

He just nodded in return.

Reid studied her and asked, “Have you been drugged? Are you okay? Ambulatory? Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” she whispered, “but I don’t know for how long.”

“We get that,” he replied. “We haven’t found your guards, although we think we know what room they’re in, and we did find your mother.”

Her eyes lit with hope. “Really?”

“Come on. We have to get you out of here.”

Moving silently, they headed back to the room where her mother was, with the door still unlocked. Anders went in and scooped up the older woman and carried her out so that Veni could see.

Tears in her eyes, Veni gently stroked her mother’s face. “Is she okay?” she whispered.

“I hope so,” Reid said, “but we must get you both out of here, and we need to do it now.”

She nodded, and with Veni holding Reid’s hand, they slipped past the guardroom, where they heard the TV still going.

Farther down the hallway, just as they headed toward the main area where the exit and the loading dock stairs were, a shout came from behind them. Reid looked back at Anders, with a grim expression.

Anders nodded. “Now it’s a free-for-all time, and we have to move it. We’ve lost that element of surprise.” With Anders still carrying Veni’s mom, he picked up the pace in a fast run, racing for the stairs. Holding hands, Reid and Veni raced up behind them. She knew that, if they got caught, there was no hope for any of them. She quickly dismissed that thought and wouldn’t even consider that right now, not when their rescue was so close at hand.

She didn’t even know how Reid had found her, but the fact that he was here meant a lot to her. As they ran outside, nobody was there to greet them. Stumbling, Veni followed Reid around the back of the building, and she felt herself tiring. The moment she felt that lag, energy poured into her system. In surprise, she watched her feet just pick up on their own accord, racing faster and faster. They came to a fence and a locked gate, but they quickly had it open and were out on the other side right where their vehicle was parked. She collapsed in the middle of the back seat with Reid to her right and her mom to her left, as Anders popped into the driver’s seat. They ripped out of that parking lot, just ahead of a barrage of bullets flying in their direction. Several pinged off the vehicle, but they were too far away to do any damage. Reid, in the back seat with her, turned and opened his arms. She crawled into them and burst into tears.

“It’s okay, we made it out,” Reid murmured.

“We’re out, but they’ll be after us like crazy now.”

“Yeah, but they were before too,” Anders noted comfortably. “I’m an old hand at this, so I won’t say we’re out of the woods because we definitely aren’t, but you’re in a hell of a lot better position now than you were merely minutes ago.”

She smiled at Anders gratefully and, from the circle of Reid’s arms, whispered, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Anders eyed her in the rearview mirror and gave her a chin lift. Reid just nodded and squeezed her tight.

She smiled and looked back up at him, then grabbed him by the cheeks and gave him a big kiss. “You were right. I’ll admit it,” she shared. “I should have developed these skills a long time ago.”

“You should have,” he agreed, with a gentle smile, holding her close. “It would have been a hell of a lot easier to find you.”

She sighed. “Whoever would have thought that this would be something I would get into?”

“At least now you’re out of it.”

“Maybe,” she murmured. “However, I’ll never sleep again, not without those nightmares cracking through my brain, telling me that I’m in danger.”

“PTSD is a real thing,” he acknowledged. “And, until you can get past it, honor the nightmares,” he suggested. “Right now we’re definitely not out of danger, and we need to ditch this vehicle, find another, and keep on moving.” At that, he looked over at Anders, one eyebrow raised.

With a nod, Anders stated, “We need air support. While you get on that, I’ll find a shopping mall and maybe hot-wire another vehicle we can transfer to. Then we’re out of here.”

Veni listened to the men on their phones, as she crawled closer to her mother to wrap her up in a hug. “It’s okay, Mom,” she whispered. “We’re out. You’re safe.”

But her mom remained in a deeply drugged state.

Veni gently pulled the hair off her mother’s face and held her mom close, the tears rolling down Veni’s cheeks. After everything they’d gone through, here was a rescue from a corner she hadn’t even begun to think was possible. Yet somehow Reid had pulled it off. She was indebted to this man, not that he would likely give a crap, but, for her, it mattered that he had stepped up and showed up, for her and her mom. It mattered a lot.

He’d done so much in this little time span to make her realize how much value all these special gifts could be, something that she hadn’t even contemplated way back when. And she was so grateful that Reid had listened to what his abilities were and had chosen to develop them. Holding her mother in her arms, while the men barked orders into their phones, Veni finally allowed herself to have that little bit of hope that they would get out of this. Hope had been a whole lot harder to muster when this day first began.

*

Just as thefoursome pulled out onto a main highway, hoping to find a mall to change cars in, a vehicle careened closer behind them.

“Hold on,” Anders cried out, as he took a hard left and then a series of sharp corners, as he tried to get rid of their tail. “We definitely have to dump this vehicle now,” he snapped. “We’re just coming up on a parking lot, but it’s not as optimal as I would have wanted.”

He pulled into the back of the parking lot, parked between two bigger vehicles, and dashed away. Meanwhile, Reid lifted Veni’s mother in his arms, and, with Veni beside him, he looked around to find Anders, just as he drove toward them in another vehicle. They hopped in, and he drove out of the lot the same way they had come in.

“Mission one accomplished,” Reid noted. “Now get us to an airport, and maybe we can get a flight out of here and fast.” Reid’s phone buzzed. He quickly gave Anders directions and then more directions, and, by the time, they pulled into a small private airstrip, a plane was warming up on the tarmac. With all four of them on board, the plane quickly took to the air, just as they saw other vehicles pulling into the airstrip beside them.

Reid looked down and muttered, “Uh-oh, bet they’re a little pissed off.”

“Yeah well, they can be pissed off all they want,” Veni exclaimed. “They made my life and my mother’s life a living hell, and I won’t forgive them for that for a long time.”

He smiled. “Don’t really think they’ll care, sweetheart.”

She smiled up at him. “No,” she agreed, tears in her eyes. “They won’t, but we do.” She looked over at her mother. “I hope she’s okay. That drugged sleep for this long is so disconcerting.”

“It is, particularly when we don’t know what she’s been given,” Reid added. “Yet I would imagine they were fairly careful, with drug selection and dosages, since they didn’t want to hurt either of you. The work you guys are doing is pretty impressive, and that makes you very valuable. Both of you.”

“Valuable, and yet dangerous.”

“Did the Russians really know what you could do?” Anders asked, from his window seat on the airplane.

She nodded. “My mom was reporting to them, and she was of the opinion that they would care in a good way.”

“Ah.” Anders shook his head. “So is she still that innocent?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t want to leave for the longest time. Not until they started pressuring me more and more into working for them, whether I wanted to or not,” she shared. “That’s when I persuaded her to make this happen.”

“We’ve already contacted MI6, but this plane itself won’t take us all that far,” Reid told everyone, “not to mention we don’t have any cleared flight plans for getting into any of the major airports.”

It was obvious from the look on Veni’s face that she didn’t quite understand.

He explained in a grim tone, “In other words, we’re not out of danger.”

She nodded. “Until we’re safely back in England, I can’t imagine that will be anything I can count on for a while.”

“No, it won’t be,” Reid confirmed, “but we’re getting there.”

She smiled. “Thank you again for the rescue.”

“We’ve got this,” he said, with a chuckle. “We will get you out of here.”

“I know you will,” she declared. “I never doubted that, once we connected. The fact that we could even connect is what kept me sane in there.”

“I was trying to send you messages the whole time,” Reid told her, “but I never heard a response.”

“I was trying to send you messages,” she said, “because you’re the only one I knew who could connect with me, no matter the obstacles of distance or building construction, as you were the only one who was available and who has connected with me in the past.”

He chuckled. “That’s one of the reasons I was trying so hard because we did have that pathway from before. I’m sure Terk would have something to say about that.”

“Terk?” she repeated.

Reid smiled at her. “Somebody who can do what we do but on steroids.”

Her gaze widened. “Wow.… See? If I had met people who could do what we did, and I saw a purpose for it,” she clarified, “it would have completely changed everything in my world.”

“So what made you change now?”

She winced. “I transmit, but I hadn’t been good at receiving, as you very well know. However, on a lark one day, I was transmitting energy to some cells in the lab—just wondering if anything was in there to communicate with, you know? I wasn’t really… I wasn’t planning on anything happening. This wasn’t a verified scientific experiment or anything.” She shook her head. “But lo and behold I found that my actions affected the way the cells reacted, and I showed my mom the results. She got super excited because, of course, then we could affect the way the cells grew and divided, depending on how much energy I could give them. Different energy had different results, and we were playing with that a bit—but then she told people.” Veni winced.

“Right, not a good idea.”

“Yeah, and that completely changed everything. All the government bosses raced to the lab to figure it out and to see what we could do, and I was put on the spot to do it more vigorously. At that time I wasn’t even thinking about trying to keep it quiet, so yeah I showed them. Big mistake.”

“Yeah, you’re not kidding.” Reid eyed her strangely. “Remember the first rule? We don’t tell anybody, especially people without our gifts.”

“Yeah, well, nobody ever claimed that I was brilliant,” she muttered.

He burst out laughing. “As I remember, you were always very brilliant,” he stated, “and that was another reason why we needed to keep everything quiet.”

She shook her head at that. “You were the brilliant one. I was the idiot. I’m the one who decided this stuff was not for me.”

“Then you started using your gifts again, but in a lab at that. That’s the part I don’t get. I mean, it was fun and all to put it to the test but not in a monitored situation like that. What were you thinking?”

“Because it was for my mother, I didn’t even question it,” she replied. “I hadn’t really played with any of this stuff since you left,” she muttered. “I didn’t know anybody I could even talk to about it. So what was I supposed to do? I didn’t… I didn’t think,” she muttered, almost in tears. “I’m not so na?ve about it now.”

“Of course not,” he declared. “That kind of thing is one of those life-altering events.”

“It absolutely is,” she murmured. “My mother was ecstatic because it meant she could do more with her research. Yet when I told her that I wasn’t sure it was something I wanted to really focus on long-term, she wasn’t happy at all.”

“If you wanted to do that, you would have gone into the sciences yourself because you loved it. However, as I recall, that wasn’t where your interests were.”

“Not at all,” she replied. “My life is really about writing. I wanted to write books,” she admitted, with a laugh. “Yet I never got anywhere on that either.”

“Sometimes you have to live a little before you can write a lot,” he suggested, with a smile. “So don’t put that out to pasture yet.”

“I’m not,” she said. “Right now I definitely feel that I have a lot more to experience and a lot more to write about, but it’ll take a while to find my new normal. This was pretty painful stuff.”

“It was,” he agreed, giving her a big hug again. “But hold that thought, as we’re getting there.”

“We’re on a plane, heading somewhere other than where I was being held captive,” she noted. “I’ll take all of that as progress.” She gently kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you.”

The problem was, as he stared at her, his love for her exposed in his gaze, he didn’t want gratitude.

His other problem was, this feeling he’d had for her all these years ago hadn’t gone away.

Those feelings had been asleep, now reawakening, while she was near.