“The sea barriers are near the biodome, andthoseare under the water.”
“Stop arguing. Deal with possibly sinking island later. Go below now,” Alexei ordered, yanking on Sean’s hand. “Need to see if Bennett onboard.”
“I have a feeling we picked the wrong place to be,” Sean muttered, giving in to his husband.
Sean felt a little like they’d taken the bait, and he hated that feeling. He knew they had limited personnel to cover the island, that both their teams couldn’t be deployed, and they were operating on limited intelligence in the face of government pushback. It still rankled that they hadn’t succeeded in finding and detaining Bennett.
Below decks, the yacht was richly decorated, but clearing the space confirmed there was no one else on the yacht.
Bennett had never been on board.
“Fuck,” Liam said in an aggravated voice.
Alexei turned to look at Sean. “We should—”
Whatever he was going to say, it got swallowed by the explosion that engulfed the yacht, the world turning to fire. Metal and glass cut through the fire and smoke, some of it slicing through their phased forms.
The roar of the explosion made Sean’s ears pop, and he reflexively tightened his grip on the other two, glad he’d made them stay close. Sean’s heart pounded in his chest, and he struggled to catch his breath. Being phased didn’t mean they could breathe through all the smoke, and the explosion had been sudden enough he hadn’t been able to get a deep breath.
Sean altered his phase field as light as it would go, enabling them to float upward and try to get clear of the burning remnants of the yacht. The fire moved around them, pushed aside by Alexei’s pyrokinesis as he helped clear the way. There wasn’t a strong enough wind to move the smoke, and it took a minute for Sean to find a way out of it.
He sucked in a heavy breath once they got clear, trying to cough out what smoke he’d already inadvertently inhaled. Liam and Alexei sounded better, but they’d had far more training than Sean had in terms of training their bodies for the stress of the field.
The sound of a jet reached Sean’s ears, and he craned his head around to look over his shoulder. Squinting through a smoky haze, Sean watched as a second jet flew away from the island and exited through the hole that had been blown in the biodome—most likely taking Bennett with it.
Sean ground his teeth before looking down past his dangling feet at the burning remains of the half-sunken yacht in the small harbor. “Let’s meet up with the ground crew.”
This hadn’t originally been their mission, but it still felt like a failure.
* * *
“This is nothow I wanted your honeymoon to go,” Jamie said through a secured and encrypted uplink. The familiar view of his penthouse that overlooked the Potomac River back in Washington, D.C., was behind him rather than a hotel room for once.
“You think we happy?” Alexei said, the scowl on his face having been there since they touched down on the beach a couple hours ago. Sean absently rubbed his thumb over the back of Alexei’s hand in an attempt to soothe him.
Jamie’s clear blue eyes didn’t blink as he gazed at where they sat in the middle of the chaos which had taken over the MI6 suite of rooms. “I understand Fortuna-sur-mer is calling in an emergency construction crew to deal with the breach of the biodome.”
“Among other things,” Sean said.
Due to their recall back into the field, they needed to submit an after-action report to the MDF that would be shared with the UMG since this had turned into an unexpected joint mission. They’d been so close in getting Bennett. Security feeds had revealed he’d been at the resort and had been picked up from the rooftop of a building halfway across the island. The people on the yacht had been a distraction, one they’d fallen for.
But it hadn’t been a complete loss; Sean needed to remember that. The men from the gambling room had been taken into custody, as had a dozen more they’d managed to track down after the explosion at the harbor. At least two were high enough up in their respective criminal enterprises that the UMG might get some decent intelligence out of them.
Sean wasn’t responsible for what came after this mission though. Neither was Alexei. They’d allowed themselves to be roped in because of the target, and because Liam had asked. Whatever came of interrogating the prisoners wouldn’t be their problem.
“I offered to pay for some additional time on their honeymoon,” Liam said as he walked up.
Jamie’s attention shifted to Liam. “Ihadpaid for their honeymoon.”
Liam shrugged and dropped down onto the other couch, stretching out his legs with a tired sigh. “The resort has a bottleneck of people wanting to leave, the owners are vastly displeased about what transpired without their permission—
“Not need permission to hunt terrorists,” Alexei muttered.
“—and having Sean and Alexei stay here for the duration of their honeymoon is not an option. I suggest we send them elsewhere and split the cost.”
Jamie sighed before looking at them again. “How does Monaco sound?”
Alexei barely perked up at the suggestion of the principality known for their gambling, high-speed races, and decadence. That’s how Sean knew his husband was in a bad mood.
