Page 17 of Danger Close (Mourningkill #3)

Moral Compass

Cobra

The boy , Greg, and Teri went inside. I watched them step into the house, his arm around her shoulders, out of view, resisting the urge to yank her from the kid.

“What did you do, Joaquin Anatoly Guerro?” I winced when Charlotte used my government name.

I was getting called to the carpet, and I was pretty sure that I deserved it.

I put my hands behind my back, ready to take my licks.

The deep heaviness of realizing that tonight, she would not be under my roof, or sleep in my bed gutted me.

I hadn’t slept with her last night. I wasn’t that much of a bastard.

I had slept on the chair at the other side of the room, and watched her sleep.

I’d been there when she moaned and cried out.

I swept the hair from her face when she whimpered, and ran my fingers over her scalp to soothe whatever dreams she had.

I expected to do that tonight. I expected to wake up in a room with her floral scent in the air.

“In my defense—” I put up my hands in surrender when Charlotte tapped her foot in agitation, waiting for an answer. “I did not keep her wallet or phone on purpose. That was an oversight.”

Charlotte’s eyes narrowed. She lifted one singular brow, and I had to remind myself that I was deadlier than she was. I was a more lethal agent than she had been. I had been undercover for far, far longer. I had no need to be afraid of Charlotte McClanahan. None at all. Nope.

“An oversight?” Her disbelief was as palpable as a physical punch to the face.

“We had to make sure everything was secure. This is a high-profile wedding, after all. We had to do our due diligence.” Which was absolute bullshit and I knew it. “We had to look into her to make sure there were no skeletons in that particular closet.”

That was the official reason, but I knew my brother. Jericho would go far deeper than needed, and snoop into every single crevice. He couldn’t help himself. Nosy bastard.

“Due diligence, huh?” As a trained field agent, Charlotte wouldn’t be fooled by my crap. I knew it. She knew it.

But I needed plausible deniability.

“That doesn’t make it sound any better.” I could feel her skeptical eyes on me.

Charlotte’s husband, Trinity, Griff, and that random guy, Goose, were all staring at me like I had a dick growing out of my forehead, waiting for an explanation.

“You kidnapped Mama?” Trinity’s voice was full of surprise, and, if I wasn’t mistaken, awe.

“You wanted her at your wedding, kiddo.” There I was, hands up in surrender again. “I went to talk to her and she fainted. So I skipped the talking bit and brought her here instead.”

Not the best defense. Certainly not the most logical course of action. But it wasn’t the main thing on my mind.

Watching her that first night in her restless slumber had gutted me. It was like she resisted going into deep sleep. Even in rest, she felt like she had to be vigilant.

“ How did she faint?” Charlotte snarked, her eyes letting me know that at that moment, she thought I was the greatest scum of the earth.

“Hey!” What the hell was she accusing me of? “I did not do anything underhanded. I approached her to talk, she beat the shit out of me, then she fainted. That was it.” Then, just to be absolutely clear, “I did not drug her, I did not strike her in any way.”

I was insulted that Charlotte would even think that.

“That skinny little woman beat the shit out of you?” Charlotte scoffed. “You must have lost your touch.”

“She's stronger than she looks.” Why the hell was I defending myself? “And I’m not going to hit my wife, for God’s sake. I would never lay a finger on her in anger.”

Not in anger, but in so many other ways, I would lay my finger, my hand, my tongue all over her.

“Your ex-wife, ” Charlotte corrected.

Shit. How many times had I slipped up on that tonight? Way more than I could count.

Trinity gawped at me. But I wasn’t going to change my stance.

“I’m telling the truth.” Somewhere in my fucking soul, I had started thinking of her as my wife. Or maybe I had never stopped seeing her that way. I hadn’t had a serious relationship in thirty years because I couldn’t get that Parisian smoke show out of my head.

“It’s hard to tell with spies,” Charlotte pursed her lips, but her tone let me know that she was leaning towards believing me.

“ You’re a spy too.” I pointed out. “Kettle, meet pot.”

“ Was ,” she corrected. “There are spies and there are spies. You, Joaquin ‘Cobra-Ghost’ Guerro, are the latter .”

Yeah, that’s fair.

“I put her in the car and brought her here. The end.”

“So, you did kidnap Mama?” Trinity asked again.

There was an unexpected, and slightly confusing, warmth blooming in my chest. My daughter was sticking up for her mother. That made me happy.

“Yeah, maybe I did.” I hadn’t thought about it that way at the time, but some people might see it that way.

I ran the sole of my riding boot over the pebbles of the drive.

“Fuck.” I let out the low reprimand as the pieces clicked together in my brain. I’m not always the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I usually figured things out eventually. “She must have been terrified.”

“Ya think?” Charlotte mocked.

“You wouldn’t have known it just from seeing her!” Why was I defending myself? “She never complained, and if anything…”

If anything, she leaned into my touch. Or was I only seeing what I wanted to see?

Charlotte shook her head, her eyes glazed over in disappointment. “I swear, some spies can’t get their head on straight after coming out of the field.”

“Not all of us have a hearth to come home to, Charlotte.” Did I sound bitter? I didn’t mean to sound resentful. But I was.

“Good to see someone else in the doghouse for once.” Mack kissed his wife on the cheek.

“I’m going to get some firewood so that we can heat the place tonight.

Looks like we’ve got company until the wedding, so we better heat the extra rooms. Don’t want our guest to wake up an icicle and think we’re inhospitable. ”

“Fact!” Goose, who had largely stood back during the proceedings, bemusedly smiling at the drama in front of him, finally quipped up. “Alright, this has been fun, but I gotta get home before the tweenagers burn the house down.”

He stopped in the driveway on the way to his minivan with a stack of tupperware. “Thanks for the grub, Mamma Mack! The kids will be happy not to eat my cooking for a while.”

Without missing a beat, Trinity repeated her question, “You kidnapped my mother?”

Charlotte patted her shoulder.

“Don’t be too hard on him, sweetheart.” Charlotte turned away from me to go back inside, effectively dismissing me. “He’s been a spy for as long as you’ve been alive. It warps their moral compass.”

“Hey!” Just because it was true doesn’t mean she had to say it out loud. “Low blow, Charlotte.”

Charlotte stopped before she went inside, turning back to Trinity with a sly grin.

“Just remember—” Charlotte patted my daughter’s arm. “Your uncle, Jericho, is much, much worse.”

“Fact!” Goose shouted, as he opened the driver’s side door of his minivan, and climbed in, turning on the car, and almost blinding us with his headlights.

“It’s not just that,” Trinity shrugged. “No one’s ever kidnapped anyone for me before.”

My kid smiled. She was twisted, just like her dad.

“I killed people for you, babe!” Griff snapped his shoulders back, mocking offenses. “I took a bullet for you – twice!”

“I know.” Trinity waved for him to calm down. “But my dad kidnapped someone as a wedding gift. That’s… sweet. Weird, but sweet.”

Damn straight! I knew my daughter understood me. She’s the apple, and I’m the tree she fell from.

Griffith let out an exasperated sigh. “What? Now I’ve got to break into Fort Knox, or… I dunno… steal the Declaration of Independence for you? Just so I’m not outdone by your old man?”

“Creepy that you think you need to compete with her father,” I grumbled.

Trinity, with a straight face that would have made her mother proud, shrugged. “It’s a start.”

Griff shook his head, letting out a low growl of frustration, mumbling something about preferring it when she had no father, as he stomped off to the guest cabin they were staying in until the wedding.

I moved to walk inside, only to get Charlotte’s palm in my face.

“Oh, no. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” Then, with a sly grin, she added, “You can stay in the cabin. The walls are paper thin, so you can imagine that you’ll hear everything your daughter’s up to with her fiancé.”

“Really, Charlotte?” I gagged. “You just had to go there, huh?”

I may have puked in my mouth.

“Will it get you off my property sooner?” she snapped back, flipping me the bird as she walked inside, slamming the door in my face.

“I just want to tell her goodnight!” I called through the door.

“Come back tomorrow,” Charlotte yelled from inside. “Bring her wallet and phone with you.”

I grumbled all the way into the Audi. I sat in the driver’s seat, pinching the bridge of my nose.

If civilian life was this chaotic, I needed to re-contemplate retirement. This shit sucked.

A white pamphlet caught my eye on the black interior mat on the passenger’s side. What the hell had she accused me of writing?

I leaned down to pick it up. It was a normal old take-out menu, folded in thirds, with spaghetti, pizza and other offerings from The Bar. It listed what was on tap, and where they sourced their local brews. But that wasn’t what stood out.

It was the scrawled, black letters that were etched over, and over, and over again into the back. It was like someone wrote it in a manic fit.

It was three simple letters: I. C. U.

What the hell did that mean? Was that the Intensive Care Unit? Like in a hospital? I wasn’t sure.

All I knew was that she had read those letters and been terrified. Why? Why had it triggered her so badly in the middle of everything else that was happening? Why had she focused on this?

Something was rotten in the town of Mourningkill.