Page 33 of Danger Close (Mourningkill #3)

No One Else to Tell

Cobra

Three Days before the wedding

Beaufort returned, knocking on the door before entering with a bag in his hand.

I’d sent him back to the Vasiliev house to get Teri clothes.

Those hospital gowns were hideous, and I knew she hated them.

It also gave him and Jericho a chance to compare notes, because I didn’t have the space to lead the discussion and get everyone on the same page.

“I could have lost her,” was all I said when Beaufort put the bag down beside me. I didn’t need to check it. He’d have been thorough. “One more hit, one more fucking second, and I could have lost her. For good, this time.”

I wasn’t really talking to Beaufort. I was using him as an excuse to say my words out loud. I needed to unravel the tangles in my head; to unknot it bit by bit and come up with a plan. A hunting plan.

“Look what they did to her, Dave…”

I wiped my palm over my beard, feeling the course, graying hair on my palm.

He nudged me with the back of his hand, and I looked over, seeing an offered coffee cup.

“You’ll need sleep to make sure you’re firing on all pistons,” Beaufort said. “Tiring yourself out won’t help her.”

“If you were me, would you be able to sleep?”

“Nah, I wouldn’t.” Beaufort answered a question that I think I asked hours ago. “Sonia wants to talk to you directly. She won’t tell me or Jericho what she has.”

“Fuck,” I whispered.

Sonia Norkus claimed that she had a name.

The name. We could only do so much with “Ray”.

Even with automatic searches, we’d have a million combinations.

It could be a first, middle, or a last name, a nickname.

Then of the millions that came back, it’d need to run through locations.

Even narrowing that down, we’d still have thousands to manually sift through.

If Norkus could just tell us who it was, she’d save us hundreds of hours in manpower.

“She told me something,” I said, quietly. “Twenty years ago, when Trinity was ten, she saw me while I was undercover with The Frontline.”

Guilt. That was the thing tightening my chest at that moment.

My jacket was in her fists. She clung to it like she was lost at sea and that was the final life raft.

“I didn’t think anything of it. Hell, I half didn’t believe it was her.

But I guess it was.” I leaned back in the chair and drank the bitter hospital coffee—the tar so thick it helped the nurses get through their long shifts.

“She’d packed everything up into a car, taken the kid and disappeared in the middle of the night.

That might be related to…” I gestured obliquely to my wife, the room around us, the situation we were all in. “All of this.”

“Where did she see you?”

“A border town called Georgialina.” I remembered it so clearly because the moment I saw her, I had to slap myself silly to figure out if I was dreaming or not.

I’d been thinking of her more than usual that week. I don’t know why. I blinked, and there she was. Disheveled. Wide-eyed, scared. Beautiful.

“That’ll help narrow the search.” He said the words slowly. Stupidly slowly. Which told me that it wasn’t as helpful as I wanted it to be. It’d be easier to get the answers from Norkus.

I fucking hate the CIA. But agents, especially of Norkus’ caliber, wouldn’t bluff and say they had information that they didn’t. They traded in secrets, and their reputation was their recommendation. If she said she had something, she did.

I’d get the answers out even if I had to put a gun to her head.

“You couldn’t have talked to her back then,” Beaufort said, reading the regret written all over me. “You would have dragged her into a den of vipers.”

That was true. It was part of why I hid.

But the heaviness of that guilt kept me in that seat, staring at her. Every bruise was a reminder of my mistakes. Of all the ways I’d failed.

“But if something had changed, even just a little. If I could have done something different…”

“You may have ended up in a worse situation than the one you’re in now.” Beaufort put his hand on the doorjamb, one step out the door.

He didn’t put up with melancholy bull shit, especially if he didn’t find it logical.

“I love her,” I confessed.

“Why the hell are you telling me?”

Because I had no one else to tell.