Shatter (6 page)

“Okay,” he asked, staring at the pile he’d created. “What else?”

When he got no response, he turned and found Halina asleep on the sofa.

“Perfect,” Mitch muttered.

 

H
alina wobbled on the edge of an uncomfortable sleep. Everything hurt, especially her head. She curled closer to Dex for warmth.

“Time to go,
printcessa
.”

The deep, sexy male voice and his use of the Russian term made a memory of joy stream through Halina’s chest. A shake of her shoulder interrupted the sensation and instantly soured her mood.

“Halina, just let go of Dex so I can pick you up.”

That voice and Dex’s whine wiped away remnants of sleep and dragged Halina into reality. All those complex emotions she’d been fighting before she’d fallen asleep filled her up again.

She opened her eyes. “What?”

“Car’s packed. We need to get on the road.”

Dex jumped to the floor and Halina sat up slowly, holding her head against the pain. Get on the road. With Mitch. No. So not happening.

“I don’t know what I said before, but I’m not going anywhere with you. We have two cars. You take one. I have to figure out . . .” Shit, she didn’t have the brainpower or the energy to figure out anything right now. She only knew she needed to put miles between herself and Mitch. “Another plan.”

Mitch dropped into a crouch, hands tight on her thighs. He gazed at her with hard green eyes of glass. “You must have forgotten while you were sleeping, but there is no other plan. We’re staying together until I get to the bottom of how you fit into this mess. And you’re going to help make it right, Halina. We’re not splitting up anytime soon.”

Anger punched out in front of the emotional pack. She dropped her hand from her head and stood. “You must have forgotten that you led those people to me after seven years of successful hiding. I now have to go back into hiding, which is a whole lot harder than it sounds. Take my car back to the house and get your rental. After that, I don’t give a shit where you go. Or what you do. Just stay the hell away from me.”

She turned past him for the BMW, gritting her teeth as her head threatened to throb right off her neck. Mitch grabbed her arm from behind. Without thought, Halina turned and stepped back, pulling Mitch toward her. She twisted her hand, grabbed his wrist, and rolled her opposite forearm over his elbow joint, pushing him to the floor with a continuous turn of her body. But she didn’t have the strength to hold him there when he fought the position.

He was fast and strong and the pain in her head made her vision blur. He twisted out from under her grasp, and yanked her down on top of him, slamming her against his body. Her head swam and everything in the storage unit tilted on a diagonal.

“Enough,” he growled in her ear, his breath hot on her cheek. “
Enough,
Halina. Dammit. You have a
head injury
for God’s sake, and I’m sick of getting ambushed. Knock it off.”

“I won’t stop.” She sounded pathetic, panting, weak, trapped against a man nearly twice her size. He pushed her back, stood, and picked her up all so fast her brain banged against her skull and she squeezed her eyes, moaning. He lowered her into the passenger’s seat, but she put her hand on the door to hold it open. “And I’m
not
going with you.”

She gave the door a good shove, but it barely moved. With a growl, Mitch dropped to a crouch and gripped both her hands in his. “Let me make this very clear—for the last time. You are going with me. And, this time,
printcessa,
you’ll leave me when
I
decide to let you go.”

She pulled at his grip, but got nowhere. Mitch clenched both her wrists in one big hand and reached into his back pocket. He tossed something onto her lap—the two fake IDs she stored here. Passports, drivers’ licenses, credit cards, both in neat little wallets.

“If you leave before I say you can leave,” he said, his voice low and calm, but loaded with an underlying intensity that made Halina’s limbs tingle with ice, “those identities and every other one you’ve used will be tagged with every law enforcement entity across the country. Across the world if necessary. You won’t get through an airport, a train station, a bus station, so you can forget about running . . . anywhere.”

She swallowed and looked up, searching for a sliver of the man she’d given up any chance at a normal life for. But his gaze was hard. Resolute. Remote.

Even though he believed Schaeffer’s men would kill her like they’d killed Rostov and Gorin when they found her, he still threatened to expose her to law enforcement, virtually guaranteeing Schaeffer’s discovery of her whereabouts. And by the look in his eye, given the lengths he’d gone to this far, considering Alyssa’s safety was involved . . .

In essence, the man she’d sacrificed everything to save was now
taking
everything she’d rebuilt and deliberately putting her life at risk. The skin of Halina’s face chilled as the blood drained. Her throat squeezed hard. She still couldn’t quite believe what he was doing.

“You’re blackmailing me?” she whispered. “With
my life
?”

“I’m doing what I have to do. You’re forcing me to put unnecessary pressure on you.”

She turned away, facing the windshield. Tears burned her eyes as she crossed her arms. “How fucking ironic is this?”

Mitch drove south on the freeway and Halina seethed in silence. She didn’t ask where he was headed, because she didn’t want to start a conversation and because it didn’t matter since she had no other plan. But once they’d been driving for ten minutes, Mitch glanced over at her.

“Since I know getting you to talk when you’re angry is like bending cement,” he said, “I’ll bring you up to speed on the events of the last seven years, at least those that I know concern us—”

“You,” she said. “Concern
you
.”

“Let me start by telling you that I recognize your . . . powers, gifts, paranormal abilities. Whatever you want to call them. And I also know they were brought on by your work at DARPA.”

Her mouth dropped open. It happened before she could hold back the reaction. She covered with a forced laugh. “The caliber of your paralegals has taken a severe drop. You might want to rethink your research strategies.”

Sweat popped up on her spine and between her breasts. If he knew that, he was too close to knowing too much. And she was going to have a much harder time getting away from him than she’d thought.

“I recognize the signs of your power,” he said, ignoring her comment, “because the members of the firefighting team I was telling you about all have powers. They have powers because your chemicals from DARPA—”

“They weren’t
my
chemicals.”

“—were stored secretly in a warehouse that caught fire and blew them all to hell.”

Halina didn’t catch her gasp before it slipped out. The rasp sounded loud in the dark car. She closed her eyes, her stomach clenching around a hard ball of dread.

She’d known the risk of holding back the information that would have exposed Schaeffer. Known it would leave him out there with the possibility of harming others. But at that time, she’d been choosing between the possibility of strangers being harmed and the absolute reality of Mitch being killed.

“Is that how you found me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said simply, no elaboration before going on. “Every member suffered critical injuries. One firefighter was killed.”

Halina kept her gaze locked out the window, but saw nothing shining in the headlights. She steeled her stomach muscles against the blows and clenched her teeth.

“They healed with miraculous speed and developed paranormal abilities like yours afterward. So, don’t try to tell me you don’t have powers. Don’t try to tell me you didn’t work with those chemicals.”

Halina said nothing even though a million questions now battered her throbbing brain.

“To keep a long story semi-short,” he said, “since then, efforts by the team to uncover what really happened at the warehouse and what they’d been exposed to and why the chemicals were there caused Schaeffer to unleash a shit storm of roadblocks.

“They’ve been followed and watched every day since. They’ve been threatened. One member was falsely imprisoned for murder. Another was held in a lab and used as an experiment for years. Two others were poisoned and nearly died. Another had family kidnapped and his wife killed—”

Oh my God.
She couldn’t take it anymore. “What’s your point?”

He didn’t immediately speak. “You don’t sound shocked, Halina. I expected . . . I don’t know, maybe a little more horror on your part.”

“I know what kind of man Schaeffer is.”

“And you didn’t think anyone else needed to know about it?”

The judgment in his voice sliced into the open wounds created by his information. She lowered her voice when she repeated, “I
know
what kind of man Schaeffer is.”

Mitch let out a breath before continuing. “We’ve spent the last year tracing the chemicals the team was exposed to back to DoD. To DARPA, specifically. To Rostov and Gorin. To the same project you worked on with them—the elite soldier of the future.”

“That
wasn’t
my project.” She turned on him, glaring. “I am—was—a genetic scientist.”

“A genetic scientist using the chemicals—”

“
No
. I was
not
using the chemicals.” Frustration boiled over.

“What’s the bottom line here, Mitch? What
exactly
do you want from me?”

“There is no exactly, Halina.” He met her gaze a long moment before returning his eyes to the road. His jaw muscle flexed beneath a cheek heavy with stubble. “We need every scrap of evidence you can give us. We need to know everything you know. And I want to know how you implicated me in this. I want to know how it is that six years after our relationship ended, my family, my friends, and I are tangled up to our eyeballs with Schaeffer.”

Halina’s mind flicked to Alyssa and the skin below her left eye twitched. She still missed Mitch’s sister. She was the kind of woman Halina would have remained friends with for life had this situation not separated them. And even though they’d only been close for several months while she and Mitch were dating, they’d still manage to develop a tight bond. Similar to the way Halina and Mitch had grown so close, so fast.

Halina had always believed that keeping Mitch safe extended in many ways to keeping Alyssa safe. The twins were so close. She’d always known one would be lost if something happened to the other.

The thought reinforced her determination.

“I don’t understand how you think I can help you.” She started ticking off her fingers. “I didn’t work on the project. I didn’t know about the project. I can only reproduce my research if given at least six months and a state-of-the-art lab. Everything within DARPA is confidential. Even if I did tell you something, there would be no way to back it up. I could confess that the DoD knows Russia is secretly inhabited with aliens and there would be no way to prove it.”

Mitch flicked his wrist carelessly. “Everyone already knows about Russia.”

She made a supremely frustrated noise in her throat. “God, you make me want to
strangle
you.”

“I always did resort to the strangest things just to get your hands on me.”

“Mitch! Dammit.”

She turned away from him, angry with herself for letting him piss her off. Angry with him for using his humor to infuriate her. She searched for something she could tell him, give him, to satisfy his need for information without exposing too much, tipping him off to what she really knew. Her mind skipped and jumped and ricocheted. When she couldn’t, she decided on diversion instead.

“How is Alyssa involved in this?”

“She’s married to one of the firefighters, which is how I got involved and why I stayed involved. Now they’re all more like brothers and sisters than friends, because, you know, you pick your friends. Brothers and sisters are forced on you, whether you like them or not. And this group . . . definitely forced on me.”

A huff of laughter slipped out, but Halina didn’t feel the humor his joke would have normally produced. She couldn’t feel anything but the smothering guilt. And self-hatred for not being able to do more. Not being able to make it all go away.

 

Mitch raked his free hand through his hair, pulling his nails along his scalp to keep him awake as he drove. Halina had drifted off and he’d let her. He wasn’t sure if she was truly as confused as she seemed, if her head wound was creating that confusion or if she was just a good actress.

He’d have to find a place to stop soon or he’d fall asleep at the wheel. Alyssa’s house was still one hell of a long drive. They couldn’t take a commercial flight now, but he could charter a jet. . .

Oh, hell, he should have thought about that earlier. Though, he cringed thinking about the fight Halina would give him when he tried to put her on a private jet. He definitely needed sleep before he faced that.

He picked up his phone to search for the nearest hotel and it vibrated in his hand. The screen read PITA X, short for Pain In The Ass, Extraordinaire, which meant it was Kai calling him back.

Since Halina was still dozing, he put the phone to his ear instead of taking it on the speaker. “Hey,” he answered. “Tell me something that will keep me awake so I don’t drive myself into a post.”

Kai started singing “Rock-a-bye Baby.”

“Hilarious.”

“Especially at three a.m., right?” Kai’s voice made the smile cutting across his face visible even across seven hundred miles and a cell phone connection.