From his own experience in combat, he knew civilians sometimes became casualties despite every effort to minimize that risk. He recognized, too, the look of PTSD, the post-traumatic stress disorder he saw written in her blue eyes.
But he pretended not to see it, respecting his promise not to bring up the incident. Instead he zeroed in on his real concern. “What do you think the odds are of the feds taking my information—data illegally obtained by Garrett’s hacker buddies—as gospel and running with it before another woman dies?”
“We’d make it top priority, but you’re right, there would have to be independent, legally obtained confirmation. For the search warrant, among other things—”
“And,” he added, “you’d also have a hell of a lot of interdepartmental chest-thumping as all the various bureaucracies fought for jurisdiction and wrangled over who got to take the credit.”
She opened her mouth as if to argue, then very slowly let it close before nodding. “Even if I were crazy enough to agree to take part in this lunacy,” she began, “do you honestly think a force of three has a prayer of pulling this off without getting a bunch of people killed? Starting with us, I mean.”
“I’ve come back from riskier missions,” he told her. “And run more than a few of ’em myself.”
“With men you trusted?”
“With my life.”
“Yeah, well, this time,” she said, “you’d have exactly two on your team. A woman whose career is toast if she doesn’t betray you, and a techno-nerd brother-in-law who—no offense—looks like he couldn’t fight his way out of buying siding from a determined telemarketer. Do you really imagine you can rely on us?”
“It’s a chance I’m willing to take.”
“For what, Rafe? Because I can’t begin to imagine that a guy like Dominic Powers is keeping a bunch of infants stockpiled at his swanky Palm Beach hacienda. Can you?”
“There’ll be records of where they’ve gone. Who’s adopted those kids. Somewhere. I have a source that mentioned some kind of ledger he keeps close at hand. He takes it out of his wall safe every morning.”
“And you think it’s his client list, maybe even records related to the babies’ mothers?”
“That’s exactly what we’re hoping.”
“Is that another risk you’re willing to take? There sure seem to be a lot of them.”
“I’ll find some way to do this,” he swore through gritted teeth. “With or without your help.”
She shook her head. “You’re not the only one who knows a bluff when she hears one. You wouldn’t have risked snatching me off a crowded street if you thought you had a shot without me. But before you risk both our lives on some half-baked raid against what you and I both know will be a well-fortified, heavily guarded compound, there’s something you should know. Some information I have that your amateur-hour investigation didn’t turn up.”
Though he bristled at being called an amateur—especially considering how he’d caught her off-guard earlier that day—Rafe clamped his jaw shut to hear out what she had to say.
Would it be another lie, like those she’d spun online in her bid to snare him, or was it possible she might be seriously considering helping him?
TIME TO TREAD CAREFULLY, Shannon warned herself as apprehension knotted in the hollow of her stomach.
Nothing she did, nothing she said, during this crisis could be more dangerous than the news she had to give him. Unwelcome news that might easily spark the ugliest of reactions in a man who had already crossed so many lines.
But however many laws he had shattered, however many oaths and regulations he had sacrificed, she still sensed a core of honor in him. A set of rigid values he placed above all bureaucratic rules.
Here’s hoping that not punching a woman is part of that code. After reinforcing her courage with a deep breath, she lobbed her opening volley. “It’s about your sister’s husband, Garrett.”
Rafe snorted in disgust, contempt written in his green eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re going to try that divide-and-conquer bullshit on me, too.”
She leaned slightly forward, determined to cut through his distrust. “Listen to me, Lyons. Your brother-in-law… We think he’s had a girlfriend, a lover, these past six months. A woman he met online and—”
When Rafe jumped to his feet, she jerked back, then cursed herself for reacting. For showing she’d been physically intimidated, when all he was doing was getting up to pace the room.
Yet she couldn’t force herself to relax, for there was nothing safe about the wild energy crackling through his muscles, or the warning, low as a growl, in his voice when he spoke.
“Don’t you dare sit there and try to play me,” he said. “Don’t imagine for a minute I’m that stupid.”
She sat back, scarcely breathing, waiting for his anger to wind down. But he was only getting started, his temper revving to the red zone.
“Do you know Garrett was the one who found her?” Rafe demanded. “Can you imagine what it did to him, a guy like that, who’s worked in nice clean offices his whole life and doesn’t even like to think about where his chicken dinners come from, walking into that hell he saw? I’ve seen some horrible things in war zones, but the idea of what he found that night—Lissa left—left like some animal had torn into her…”
He swallowed audibly, his voice choking down to silence, the silence that so often marked the helpless rage of the survivor of a loved one’s murder. Seeing it, Shannon was haunted by the echo of her own pain, her impotent eight-year-old fury, after her father was gunned down.
If she had been a grown woman when it happened, a woman qualified to fire automatic weapons and trained to deliver a crushing blow to a man’s most vulnerable targets, would she have taken the law into her own hands as Rafe was doing now? If she had had a chance to save some part of her father, would she have been willing to sacrifice anything she had, even her own life, as Rafe would to reclaim Lissa’s daughter?
“Listen, Special Agent,” Rafe said grimly, “you haven’t lived with Garrett these past two weeks, haven’t heard the way he wakes up screaming about the blood. You haven’t watched the guy break down and sob her name, listened to him retching in the bathroom. It’s killing him, killing both of us to think of—”
“People feel remorse.” Shannon’s voice floated to earth as cautiously as the feathery pink seed of a mimosa. “People can feel regret when they’re faced with the consequences of what they’ve set in motion.”
He spun around and crossed the room in two steps before grabbing her by the arms with hands as hard as vises. “Not Garrett. I know him, know him well enough to trust him to take care of the most important person in my life. And now you have the freaking nerve to accuse him, and you think I’m going to stand here and listen to you do it?”
Heart leaping in her chest, Shannon could do no more than stiffen, frozen by the knowledge that she might have pushed too hard. Might have assumed too much about who this desperate man was, and what he would or wouldn’t do to her, despite his need for her cooperation.
He could kill her with his bare hands for the insult she had offered. Almost worse in her mind, he could try to break her will. Considering both his training and the places where his missions had taken him, he would be well acquainted with dozens of methods of coercion, from beatings that wouldn’t show to the kind of torture that would scar her soul forever.
Not him. He could never…
Yet despite her efforts to convince herself, she could feel her body recoiling, could hear the trembling of her own exhalation. Her head throbbed with the effort of containing boundless