Chapter 14

Chapter

Fourteen

April 18 th

3:47 P.M.

"Uh, Axe, I think we have a problem."

At Tank's words, Axe looked up from the phone they'd stolen from the driver which he was using to fire off texts to Eagle about the situation. "What's wrong?" he asked.

Tank merely nodded his head toward where Beth was resting. Even in the split second it took to turn his head, a million thoughts flew through his mind. Had Beth been injured and he hadn't realized it? Had they been found and someone was holding a gun on his wife?

What he wasn't expecting to find was the spot he'd last seen Beth empty.

She was gone.

"Someone grab her?" Rock asked.

They were sure the van they were being transported in would be tracked, and they were prepared for an attack, although Axe was hoping it didn't happen until after Prey sent in reinforcements. The last thing he wanted was his wife in danger again .

Ever again.

But he didn't think that Baranov's men had tracked them already. He had a pretty good idea why Beth wasn't where he'd left her, and it wasn't because she had been taken against her will.

Sighing, he rubbed at his temples, his heart aching for his wife's pain but also furious with her for bailing on him no matter the reason. Cutting her slack only because he knew she was traumatized and not thinking clearly, but when he found her, he was going to make damn sure Beth knew she was never to attempt to handle anything like this on her own again.

"Should I call Eagle back? Tell him we need a search and rescue team?" Scorpion asked.

"No," he said simply. "I don't think Beth was taken against her will."

"Then where is she?" Panther asked, clearly confused.

"My sweet, silly wife has apparently decided she's more trouble than she's worth," Axe replied.

"That's crazy. Beth can't possibly believe we wouldn't do whatever it took to keep her safe," Rock said.

"Exactly. I think that's the problem. She knows we'll do anything to keep her safe, and she also knows you all have families waiting for you at home," he explained.

"So, you going to go find and talk some sense into our girl?" Tank asked.

"That's the plan. I'll find Beth, you guys stay here in case Butcher and his goons show up. Try to keep one alive. We know where one of the facilities is, but we need to find at least two others if we want to end this once and for all," Axe said. And that was exactly what he had planned.

Leaving the guys to handle things, he took off into the woods. It wasn't hard to follow Beth's trail. If she was trying to hide where she was going, she was doing a terrible job of it. She may as well have posted big signs with blinking lights and arrows.

Was she leaving behind a trail because she was too mentally and physically exhausted to do anything about it? Or was it because she really wanted him to follow after her ?

Axe knew the last thing Beth truly wanted was to be alone. Fear was motivating and controlling her. He knew his wife, and he would bet anything that, at the moment, the only thing she was thinking about was sitting in that tree and hearing a man from her nightmares threaten to kill the people she loved unless she handed herself over to him.

But running wasn't the answer.

It was, in fact, only putting all of them in more danger.

As if they were really going to just let Beth go off alone when they knew that Baranov was after all of them. If she was thinking clearly, she would know that he was going to go after her, but that weakened his team because now they weren't six strong, they were five and one.

The problem was, Beth wasn't thinking clearly right now.

A problem he was going to fix as soon as he caught up to her.

Exhausted as she was, she hadn't made fast progress, and she couldn't have been gone all that long before Tank noticed she was no longer by the tree where they'd left her. Maybe thirty minutes after realizing she was gone, he heard the sounds of her labored breathing and stumbling steps.

Scanning the area first to make sure she wasn't being followed, Axe then circled around so he was in front of her, and propped a shoulder against a tree, waiting for her to notice him.

Because of her exhaustion, she was practically on him before realizing he was there.

A squeal fell from her lips before she obviously realized it was him.

Anger that she would run from him, that she thought he would let her run from him, made his voice harsher than it should have been. "Fancy meeting you out here."

"I … umm … what are you …? How did you …?"

"What are you doing out here?" he demanded.

"I … I had to …"

"Had to what?" It came out like a snarl, but Beth wasn't the only one teetering on the edge here. He'd been forced to sit there and watch his wife be manhandled, watched her afraid for her life and the lives of those she loved, and had her far too close to danger. "What exactly was your plan, Beth?"

Tears shimmered in her eyes, and she took a step back at the ruthlessness in his tone. Axe knew he should calm down and attempt to soothe her fears rather than yell at her for reacting badly, but there was no way in hell he was letting his wife think that her running was the right answer.

A year.

That was how much time they had lost together because he had sat back, not spoken up, and not told his wife how much she meant to him. Beth was the one who had been traumatized, she had been the one with amnesia, the distance that had grown between them was on him, not her.

"Where were you going? How were you going to defend yourself if you were caught? Where were you going to stay? How were you going to support yourself? How were you going to buy food, or get a job, or find a house? What were you going to do when Baranov found you and dragged you back to his hellhole?"

Tears streamed down Beth's cheeks as his voice grew louder with each word, and just like that, his anger was gone. Reaching for her, Axe grabbed her and yanked her up against him.

"Don't you ever do that to me again. Together. We deal with things together. Not apart."

"Together," Beth echoed. "I'm sorry, Axel. I just couldn't let anyone else get hurt because of me. I couldn't stand the thought of you or one of those guys getting killed. It would have been all my fault."

"Wrong. It would have been Baranov's fault and no one else's. Did you really think we would stop hunting him just because you weren't there?"

"I … wasn't thinking. I just … panicked," Beth admitted.

"Panicking is fine, understandable, but you don't leave me ever again. Hear me?" he demanded, gripping her face and forcing her to look at him.

"I hear you," she whispered. "I'm sorry."

Lifting her off the ground, Beth immediately wrapped her legs around his hips as he crushed his mouth to hers. "Damn, don't be sorry, wisp. I know you've been through hell, I just can't … won't … lose you again. Not to anything. Not even to you and your misguided sense of right and wrong. I love you, Beth. More than anything. "

"I love you, too."

Before the other night, Axe would never even have considered sex with Beth anywhere but in a bed where he could take his time and make love to her body. But right now, the tension crackling between them was too much for him to handle. From the desire burning in Beth's eyes, he knew he wasn't alone in wanting to do something about it.

"Hold onto me, wisp. This is going to be hard and fast."

Once her hands were gripping his shoulders, he backed her up against a tree, his hands making quick work of shoving both his pants and hers out of the way. Kissing her like she was his everything, because she was, he stroked her bud and dipped a finger into her tight, wet heat, preparing her for him.

When she began to moan, her hips thrusting against his finger, he withdrew and lined up, thrusting inside her in one smooth move.

Like he'd promised, this wasn't sweet and slow, it was hard and fast. Beth held on as he pumped into her with every ounce of desperation he'd felt when she'd been in danger, with every drop of love he felt for this woman who consumed him and completed him. His fingers worked her bud as he thrust into her, and seconds later she came around him, sending him hurtling into a powerful orgasm.

As they both rode that high, they clung to one another. Life hadn't been kind to Beth, but she was his now, to love, to protect, and Baranov wasn't going to take her away from him.

April 18 th

4:30 P.M.

"Did we really just do that?" Beth asked, unable to truly believe that she'd just had sex out in the open in the middle of a forest.

Not just sex.

Great sex.

Maybe not the best sex of her life—that unequivocally had to be the first time Axel had ever made love to her and she learned what being intimate with a man was supposed to be like—but it was definitely in the top five.

Because this sex had been all about freedom.

Freedom from Baranov and his men, freedom from fear, freedom from the past. Freedom.

It was a wonderful, heady feeling, and Beth felt like she could take on the whole world and win. Not because sex or freedom gave her any particular power, it was because she and Axel were there together. And together it felt like there was nothing they couldn't do.

"Yeah, wisp, we did," Axel replied, amusement in his voice.

He was still inside her and she wanted to keep him there forever. Wanted to hold onto this feeling forever because it was just so wonderful. There was nothing in the world like knowing without a shadow of a doubt that you weren't alone.

If you'd never really experienced true loneliness, you couldn't quite understand what it felt like. Of course, Beth believed everybody had probably felt alone at least at one point in their life, but there was a difference between feeling it and actually being completely alone. Being alone had been her life before Axel and his team saved her. It had become normal, it just … was. She didn't even know that anything else existed.

Running had been stupid.

A kneejerk reaction to her fear over what could so easily have happened. If they had been taken into the facility they'd been tracking when they'd been shot at, then they likely wouldn't have been able to escape. Just because she'd slipped away a year ago didn't mean that she could do it again. Or that seven of them could have escaped undetected. If they had been split up, or if there had been more guards in the back of the van, or if the guys hadn't been able to get free of their bonds, or any number of other things had been different, the outcome could have been as well.

Living with the guilt of knowing she had gotten her family killed would have been too much for her. There would have been no way she could ever have returned to the compound without Axel and the guys and face the women left behind.

But she should have had more faith in her family .

Together, they would take down their enemy, and then they would finally be free for real. Free forever.

"I'm sorry for running," she said again.

One arm supported her weight, his other hand lifted to cup her cheek. "I get it, Beth, I do. You were in shock and you panicked. I just need you to promise me you won't ever run from me again. Not for any reason. Not even if you think you're doing me a favor because I can assure you that you are not."

"I promise," she readily agreed. She didn't want to run from Axel, she'd done enough running this last year even if it was figurative rather than literal running. By now, she should have learned that running didn't solve anything. Running only made things worse.

A soft kiss feathered across her lips, and then Axel pulled out of her and gently set her down on her feet, righting her pants before he did his own. His touch was so soft, so tender, and Beth found tears pricking the backs of her eyes. She was lucky to have walked through the fire and come out the other end to a beautiful shower of rain. One that slowly soothed each burned part of her soul until she was healed and whole again.

"Much as I want to take you somewhere I can hold you, make love to you, be with you, I better get you back to my team. We're going to send you and the others into the city to stay in Prey's offices, and then the guys and I are going hunting," Axel told her as he reached for her hand and entwined their fingers.

Every fiber of her being wanted to rebel against that statement. She didn't want to go and hide away and allow her husband to go off into battle. But she fought against her instinct to beg him not to leave her.

This was something Axel needed to do, she got that, understood it, too.

While he hadn't known her when she was a child or when she had been sold to Baranov, so there was nothing he could have done to save her then, she knew he blamed himself for her second abduction. Just because she often went into town on her own, just because he'd done everything humanly possible to find her, and if he could have, he would have done whatever it took to bring her home, he blamed himself. He'd felt impotent when she was missing, and just as impotent when she returned with amnesia.

He needed to do this.

He needed to be the one to bring down Baranov and end the threat hanging over all their heads.

He needed to do something this time and not just sit around.

So, she didn't argue, didn't beg or plead, just rested her head against his shoulder and whispered, "Be safe, okay? I need you. I love you."

"I'm not letting him steal our future, wisp."

There was so much confidence in Axel's voice that a little of her fear dimmed. "Is Prey sending in another team?" It would dim more of her fear if she knew it wasn't just going to be Bravo Team against the whole might of Baranov's army.

"Not just one team," Axel replied. "Alpha Team and Delta Team. Charlie Team is out on something personal to them, otherwise, they'd be there, too. I think Eagle has called in some favors and got some SEAL teams on standby as well in case Baranov tries to flee the country. He also has Artemis Team and Fox and the guys on their way over here, too. Trust me, Baranov has no idea he's about to face the wrath of all of Prey Security. I think Eagle, Max, Falcon, Sparrow and Ethan, Hawk, and Isaac are all gearing up and coming, too. You might not have had a family worth anything in the past, wisp, but now you have an entire army at your back."

Those tears stinging her eyes earlier now began to run freely down her cheeks. "They're all doing that for me?" While she knew it wasn't for her specifically, Beth wasn't vain enough to think she was more important than bringing down an internationally wanted trafficker, she was still overwhelmed to know Prey was going all out to bring down her personal bogeyman.

Stopping, Axel turned her to face him, bending his knees so they were eye to eye. "Of course, Beth. All of Prey is your family, not just Bravo Team. Every single person there cares about bringing Baranov down not just because of who he is and how many innocent people he's hurt, but because you are one of those people."

Warmth spread through her. "But still, I mean Eagle coming out of retirement to be involved, that's … wow." She'd met Eagle a few times, th e man was the epitome of confidence. He was used to getting his own way, he didn't waste time doubting himself, and he went after what he wanted with a single-minded focus. Eagle was intimidating, but it was also clear when you were with him that he cared about every single person associated with his company. The billionaire might have created Prey after an injury ended his SEAL career, but he wasn't some remote boss, he was involved in every aspect of his business and the lives of the people who worked for him.

"Eagle told me he wouldn't miss out on this for anything. I think he's been looking for an excuse to get out of the office for a while and this is it."

Beth chuckled, and it felt so good to know she wasn't facing this monster alone. She'd done her part and led Axel and Bravo Team to one of Baranov's facilities, and now it was time for her to take a step back and know that her family was picking up the baton and fighting the fight for her.

An odd feeling for someone who had learned to fight on her own before she was old enough to talk, but she wasn't alone anymore. She had a whole big, tough, compassionate family of warriors who would use every weapon in their arsenal to end Leonid Baranov's reign of terror and finally set her free.

"I'm a lucky woman," she said softly, feeling that down to her bones.

Before Axel could respond, the sound of a car engine drew their attention. A vehicle appeared through the trees, and any hope that it hadn't spotted them went out the window when the SUV slowed, and a window lowered, the barrel of a gun appearing through it.