Three the Hard Way (3 page)

Wasn’t
that
just great. He’d never thought he’d see this godforsaken cabin again, yet here he was, playing Mountain Man and failing the basics. Didn’t matter that he owned this shithole; two and a half years ago, he’d traded life in the frigid Alaskan wilderness for the sun in Florida, and he hadn’t looked back.

He
never
looked back.

Until now.

But that’s what happened when you’re kidnapped from your bartending job in the Florida Keys by the same evil agency that had tortured and killed your mother. That had been a little over a year ago. Then a couple of months ago, ACRO had torn Itor apart, allowing him to break free of its grip and run like hell to his old cabin . . . a cabin he’d sworn he’d never come back to.

So yeah, he was doing the hindsight thing with every decision he’d ever agonized over and wondering which ones were wrong turns. At this point, the only decision he
knew
he’d gotten right was parting ways with Justice. There was too much pain between them, too many memories that were still too crystal clear with no dull edges to soften them.

Which was why contacting the man had been the hardest call of his life, made only after finally realizing he had nowhere left to run. This cabin was his last stand, and his choices came down to dying in a hail of bullets or begging Justice for help, because he sure as hell wasn’t going to let Itor take him again. So, yeah, crawling back to Justice beat bleeding out in the snow.

Barely.

And didn’t it just figure that ACRO had assholes running the switchboard? As if it didn’t suck enough to have to reach out to his former best friend and lover, he’d had to listen to some pompous prick tell him he couldn’t talk to Justice.

Itor had been full of pompous pricks too.

ACRO isn’t Itor, Tag
, Justice’s voice rang in Tag’s memory.
They’re different
.

That had been Justice’s mantra from the day their mothers had finally told them everything they knew about the two agencies that employed—or enslaved—people with special abilities. The difference, according to Justice, was that Itor used and abused people, while ACRO helped them. They were
different
.

Fuck different. If that phone call was anything to go by, ACRO was run by arrogant fuckwads cut from the same cloth as Itor.

Shivering, he removed his snow gear and piled it next to the couch before making a beeline for the wood stove. The iron door creaked open, revealing a sad pile of dying embers. In the dim light streaming through the tiny bulletproof windows, he grabbed the closest thing that would burn—the slip of paper with ACRO’s number—and tossed it on top of the glowing embers. He watched with grim satisfaction as the note went up in flames, the last physical reminder he had of his time at Itor. Just one week before ACRO’s attack, he’d nearly been caught while copying a file containing basic Itor intel on ACRO. At the time, he wasn’t even sure what he was going to do with the information, but damn, today he’d thanked his lucky stars he had it.

Now he just had to wait and see if his theft paid off, or if calling Justice proved to be a waste of time.

Justice.

Shit.

He shoved a shard of kindling into the wood stove with more force than was necessary. A shower of sparks bounced off his flannel shirt, except the one that started to burn into the fabric. He slammed the stove’s door shut and slapped the damned ember onto the scuffed wood floor, where he crushed it with his boot.

Jesus. At this rate, he didn’t need to worry about Itor finding him and destroying the cabin; Taggart was going to do that himself.

Something cracked like a gunshot, ripping apart the silence. For a heartbeat, his magnetic ability exploded to life, ready for action, ready to use against . . . the pop of sap exploding in the fire.

Ah, damn, he was losing it. He scrubbed his hand over his face, hating that he was this twitchy, but hating more that his power had reared its ugly head. He hadn’t used it since the day he’d escaped Itor, hadn’t been tempted even once, so the fact that it had engaged so quickly and easily meant he was far more on edge than he’d thought.

Cursing, he flipped on the lights and strode across the room to the front window to peer out into the rapidly growing darkness. Nothing moved, but he’d know if so much as a coyote tried to approach the cabin. The leg trap he’d set a few minutes ago was just one tiny piece of a larger defense system. He’d also installed an arsenal of nonlethal booby-traps around the perimeter and four lethal measures closer in, all four controlled by a single phone on his counter.

Anyone trying to get to him would be in for a lot of nasty surprises. He just had to hope Justice would know what to look for. He should, since Tag had intentionally rigged the area with the kind of stuff he and Justice had played around with as kids. A fucked-up childhood, sure, but he was alive because of it. Every minute of the endless hours they’d spent practicing with traps had been worth it. So had all the time spent learning to shoot, to disguise themselves, to pickpocket, to track and set alarms—all done in preparation for the day Itor found them.

Turned out that you could never prepare for that.

He was about to fetch a beer from the fridge when the lights flickered. The generator needed more gas. He threw on his snow gear again, and ten minutes later, the generator was happy and he was back inside, trying to thaw himself.

December in Alaska sucked. Oh, it might be a Christmas-lover’s wet dream, but Tag hadn’t celebrated since his and Justice’s mothers died on Christmas night.

The next day, he’d lost Justice too, but to ACRO. And the bitch of it was, Justice had gone willingly. The bastard had left Tag behind and had gone with people who were no different than the sick scumbags at Itor.

“They’re different,”
Justice had insisted for the millionth time.
“They’re the good guys.”

“You stupid fuck,” he muttered to the empty air as he grabbed that beer.

Good guys. Seriously? Did Justice think Itor thought of themselves as bad guys? Did the KGB, CIA, Mossad, think they were the bad guys? No fucking way. Everyone thought they were good guys. Hell, Al Qaeda and ISIS thought they were good guys too.

Ian thought he was a good guy.

Ian.

Goddammit, that Itor bastard had no business butting into Taggart’s ragey memories of Justice. But then, Ian had been pushy since the day he’d sauntered into Tag’s Key West bar, oozing sex and danger, just when Tag’d gotten to the point where Justice wasn’t on his mind every minute of every day.

He’d fallen hard for Ian, believing he was a sport-fishing charter boat captain. They’d spent six months fucking, talking, and fucking some more. Tag had told Ian his secrets—well, not about his powers or his mother’s time as a captive in a secret superagency, but he’d confided about his fucked-up life after his mom died and Justice left. He’d told Ian the sappiest fucking things about his feelings for Justice. Ian had been understanding. Kind. Loving.

And Tag had fallen for it, not knowing that Ian had been screening him for Itor. Six months to the day that Ian had come into Tag’s life, Itor captured him. Took him to a training facility in Japan, where he’d been poked, prodded, blackmailed, tortured, and finally sent to Itor’s Madrid base and forced to kill.

Because of Ian.

So now, here he was, once again hiding from Itor, but this time begging help from the organization he had avoided for so long.

Now he just had to wait and wonder who would get here first. ACRO or Itor. And the thing was, he didn’t know which would be worse. Especially because, while at Itor, he’d killed two ACRO agents.

So it was entirely possible that, by reaching out to Justice, he’d just signed his own death warrant.

And it could very well come at the hands of his childhood best friend and former lover.

Justice landed the plane forty miles outside of the coordinates for Tag’s place at an outpost that let him pay for storage for the week. Then he used the snowmobile he’d brought along to get him a mile out.

From there, based on how Tag’s mind had worked, even before that fateful Christmas, he had to snowshoe it. And obviously nothing had changed because, as he’d suspected, it took him a good deal of time to thread through the death traps of doom Tag had laced through the heavy, crusted snow leading up to the metal, domed structure the coordinates indicated was his hideout.

Granted, if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you could easily pass this place. It’d been built into the mountainside, blocked in by trees, and it didn’t stand out at first or even fifth glance.

After a freezing half an hour of battling his snowshoes, bulky snow gear, and Tag’s nonlethal traps—and Tag had definitely been practicing—Justice found the ones that could do far more damage.

Why the hell am I jumping through hoops for this asshole? Isn’t it enough that I jumped when he needed me?
He faced the dome, took off his glove, and gave Tag’s cabin the finger.

And Tag must’ve been watching because Justice heard a subtle
click
, which meant the traps were shut off for the moment. Justice’s breath froze on his skin as he quickly crunched through the snow before the bastard turned them on again—for fun. Then the heavy front door jerked open before he’d put a single, booted foot on the porch, and Justice stilled at his first look at Taggart in four years.

Tag looked exhausted. He was as big as Justice remembered—at six feet six inches, he towered over most and had always made Justice feel tiny in comparison at six one. He was as hot as Justice remembered too, all dark hair and lazy amber eyes, and Justice willed his fucking libido to
sit
and
stay
.

Just because he hadn’t gotten laid recently wasn’t any reason to lose his shit.

Over Taggart.

His first love. The guy he’d wanted to spend the rest of his motherfucking life with.

The guy who’d promised Justice that he’d wanted nothing more than that as well. But instead of “Thanks for making the trip to come help me even though I’m an asshole,” Justice got a dose of Tag’s typical bullshit.

“What the fuck took you so long, Justice?” Tag demanded, his breath hanging in the still air.

“Good to see you too,
Tag
.”

Tag stared at him in that way he had. For a long moment, it was pure coldness but then . . . then his eyes flickered and yeah, there it was, that electricity between them that’d always been able to override everything else.

Until it hadn’t.

Tag swallowed hard, and Justice wondered if he could push him back into the cabin and fuck him on the floor—or the couch or the bed—before ushering him to the plane. “Come on in.”

Come in and fuck you against the wall? Not a problem.
“I uh . . . look, we need to get back to my plane and get you to ACRO.”

Tag gestured to the wall of dark clouds looming to the north. “Can’t. Storm’s coming.”

“Okay, Yeti, thanks for the update. I can fly through storms. And look, nothing to the south,” Justice motioned over his shoulder. “So the faster you can shut up and get on the plane . . .”

A low-flying plane zoomed overhead.

“Fuck. Get in here.” Tag grabbed him and pulled him inside. Justice went along, one hand instinctively hovering over the sidearm in the specially made pocket of his jacket. Tag slammed the door behind them. “Where did you park?”

Grateful for the warmth in the cabin, Justice peeled off his gloves and bent to remove the snowshoes. “The plane? The nearest settlement. The snowmobile? A mile out, hidden by trees.” He started to open the door to check if the plane was still close, since this place was fucking soundproofed, but Tag stopped him.

“Don’t.”

“Who’s after you, Tag? What’s so bad that you contacted me—contacted ACRO—after all these years?”

“Don’t ask questions, Justice. You always ask too many questions.”

“Really?” Justice dropped his pack. Unzipped his jacket and let it fall as Tag watched him. “I guess I feel like questions are the way you get to know things. Like, I’m gonna pretend you asked me questions, like you should’ve. I’m great, Tag. Nice to hear from you. Awesome the way you endeared yourself to the motherfucking head of ACRO—you know, the place you want to go for help right now?”

Tag stared at him, unblinking. “I didn’t say I wanted to go to ACRO. I needed
your
help, Justice. Not ACRO’s.”

“One and the same,” Justice ground out.

“Fuck. When did you turn into such a self-righteous prick?”

“Same time you ditched our promise.” Justice held up his hand, the one with the scar from the blood oath, and yeah, maybe he’d been a bit dramatic about it. But fuck it all, Tag had been equally so. Then and now. “You brought me here, opened up all these old wounds—”

“I needed help.”

“And had me fly halfway around the world to do what? Drag your ass out of here and drop you . . . where? Into more trouble?” He kicked off his snow pants with jerky movements, heard the rip of stitches when they caught on his damned boots.