Leila’s nod was slow. “I had to trust her. I felt I had no choice. I had to get to Bridget if at all possible. The first place was already abandoned, but I tracked her to the next location used and was able to get her out. I needed a safe place to stash her while I went back for Gracie. Luther was the only one I could think of who might help us. Bridget needed care. She has no filters, and the assault on her brain is horrific. It feels to me as if she has a massive brain injury.”
“Whitney removing Bridget’s filters makes no sense. Whitney saw the results in his first unit of GhostWalkers. Brain bleeds. Seizures. Continuing to remove filters and experiment in that direction is an abomination. If you make a mistake, you do your best to rectify it, not double down and ruin the lives of other human beings,” Diego declared. As far as he was concerned, Whitney was a sadist, especially when it came to women. Whitney didn’t consider the things he did to them torture, but that was exactly what it was.
“The fact that the government protects him is mind-boggling,” Leila agreed. “At least I was given a choice. No one just experimented on me. I was talked to several times by the head of the lab, and I could have turned them down.”
Diego wasn’t as certain as Leila. The experiments came under the heading of top secret. Few knew of the lab and the soldiers coming out of it. He hadn’t even known, and he was a GhostWalker. Whitney piggybacked on the experiments done to the volunteer soldiers. If information had been disclosed to Leila, especially when she was a child, they would have leaned on her, broken her down psychologically, to get her to comply. Diego had been around those experimenting on the soldiers and women, and their fanaticism outweighed their morals. Betrayal and treachery were the norms.
“Why did you want to be enhanced?”
“I was shown footage of what the soldiers could do. Footage of Luther. I really wanted to meet him. My grandmother had talked about Luther often. I knew she regretted the things she’d said to him, but she couldn’t find him to make things right. My father had tried while my grandmother was alive. I wanted to be able to do that for her and my father. I also thought if I could be as fast and as strong as the soldiers, I would have a better chance of getting Bridget back.”
“That makes sense,” Diego agreed. “I was given the same rhetoric, and they convinced me to sign up. I can’t very well fault a child for choosing enhanced physical strength. I was choosing enhanced psychic talent.” He flashed her a grin because sharing with her made all the problems easier. “Guess we both got screwed.”
“Maybe.” She rubbed her palm along his thigh. “And maybe they screwed themselves. Most of their soldiers implode, like Leon and his friends.”
“And the ones taking you up the mountain to the site where they were going to land a helicopter.” He knew the exact location of the only clearing available to set a helicopter down safely up the mountain. It was a good distance above their cabin. Rubin had used it on many occasions to practice diverting lightning strikes. “Whitney’s supersoldiers are worse. And they never last long. Pumped up the way Whitney makes them, their bodies give out fast.”
Leila tilted her head to look up at him. Her cheek rubbed against his shoulder. “If something happens to me, will you find Gracie and protect her? I need you to do that for me. I know what I’m asking, but it’s important to me to know she’s in safe hands.”
His first reaction was to protest. To tell her everything would be fine and she would be the one to get her daughter back, but he knew the real world wasn’t always accommodating. Things couldchange in seconds. It had for him already. He had come home to die, and yet dying was the furthest thing from his mind. He’d felt more alive in the last few days than he ever had.
“I give you my word, Leila.” He rubbed his chin on top of her head. “I’d like you to make up your mind that you’re going to live through this. No other outcome is acceptable.” He turned fully to her and captured her face between his palms. “Do you hear me? No other outcome is acceptable.”
Her green eyes searched his for what seemed an eternity. A slow smile curved her soft mouth. He found himself wanting to kiss her.
“I hear you. I want you to hear me. Your life is important. It is to me and, I’m certain, to a number of others. It isn’t just your talents that make you worthwhile; it’s who you are fundamentally. I want you to come back to me as soon as we’re in the clear.”
He brushed his lips over hers because the temptation was too much to resist. “I keep my promises, Leila. I don’t make that many, but the ones I do make, even to myself, I consider that my bond. I’ll come back for you. We’ll get Gracie together. And then we’ll find Bridget if Luther wasn’t able to get to her before they took off with her.”
“The tracking device. You shot me with one; you must have shot her as well.”
“I did. A highly intelligent teammate of mine developed it, making it impossible to find in the body. Those who took her won’t have a clue we have a way of finding her. As far as they know, only you and Luther were there. The others don’t know about me. Even if they did, they wouldn’t know who I am. Even then, if they realized who I am, it would never occur to them I would have such a sophisticated tracking device on me when I was simply coming home.”
“Whoever invented your tracking device needs a better way to deliver it. It hurt worse than a bug bite and bled.”
“You were stoic as hell,” Diego pointed out. She had glared at him. Even then, in the middle of a firefight, she made him want to laugh. Now they were sitting in a makeshift den created out of dirt, branches and forest floor debris. She was severely injured, and they were being hunted by soldiers. None of that seemed to matter. She made him feel alive and happy. She made him want to laugh despite the grim situation. For him, she was the perfect woman, one who would stand at his side and cope with everything that came their way. Most importantly, she would love their children and stand in front of them.
“I didn’t feel stoic,” she said. “I was very, very angry. If I could have risked a shot at you, just to shave a little flesh off your arm, I probably would have done it. Luther warned me you were going to shoot a dart at me. I told him absolutely not.”
He couldn’t help the grin. “Yeah. I saw that little exchange. I took the shot just in case Luther decided to warn me off.”
Her green eyes went cool, but there was a hint of laughter in them. “You’re a little on the ruthless side, aren’t you?”
He raised an eyebrow. “A little? Woman. That’s insulting.”
Her laughter melted something hard and stony inside him. He wasn’t sure how she managed, but she turned the worst of conditions into fun. Women threw themselves at him. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been with women, but he didn’t enjoy their company. He could have spent a lifetime in Leila’s company. She was just…easy to be with.
“Most men would think it was insulting if I called them ruthless. It isn’t a compliment.”
His grin widened and she reacted, tracing one of the indentations around his mouth with the pad of her finger.
“It is a compliment,” he insisted.
“You have dimples.”
He did his best to scowl at her. “I don’t. Dimples aren’t manly, Warrior Woman, and just being ruthless proves I’m all man.”
She rolled her eyes and burst out laughing again. “Stop. It hurts when I laugh.”
