Page 16 of Rescuing Ally, Part 2 (CHARLIE Team: Guardian Hostage Rescue Specialists #8)
SIXTEEN
Ghosts and Echoes
HANK
I guide my SUV down the coastal highway toward home.
Gabe sits in the passenger seat, jaw clenched, staring out at the Pacific like it holds answers.
The silence between us carries weight—dense, suffocating, broken only by the low rumble of the engine and the distant crash of waves against the cliffs.
Ethan looked between us in the gymnasium, blood on our faces and murder in our eyes, and made the call. “Go home. Both of you. Wait for instructions.”
Not a suggestion. An order from someone who’s seen too many partnerships fracture under pressure.
I downshift as we approach the turnoff to our cliffside road. The motion sends a sharp pain through my ribs where Gabe landed solid hits. Good. The physical discomfort helps me focus and keeps my rage under control.
“You’re favoring your left side,” Gabe observes, his first words in twenty minutes.
“You hit like a sledgehammer when you’re pissed off.”
“Yeah, well. You fight dirty when you’re angry.”
The admission hangs between us. Neither apology nor accusation. Just a statement.
Our home comes into view—glass and steel perched on the cliff’s edge, designed for privacy and defensibility. Usually, the sight of it settles something in my chest.
Home. Sanctuary.
The place where Ally learned to trust us completely.
Today, it feels like a mausoleum.
I park, engine ticking as it cools. Neither of us moves to get out.
“She’s everywhere in there,” Gabe says quietly.
“I know.”
“Her coffee mug is in the sink. That book she was reading on the nightstand. Her fucking perfume still on the pillows.”
“I know.”
He turns to look at me, and for the first time since the fight, his expression carries something other than rage. Pain. Raw and unfiltered.
“How do you do it? How do you—compartmentalize?”
The question hits like a heat-seeking missile because the truth is, I can’t. Not completely. Every room in this house reminds me of her. Every trace of her is a knife between the ribs.
“I don’t,” I say finally. “I just don’t let it show.”
If only it were that simple.
Her scent hits me immediately—vanilla and something uniquely Ally—lingers in the air despite three days of absence. The morning light streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows illuminates everything she touched, everywhere she’s been.
Her coffee mug sits with lipstick still on the rim. A hair tie lies forgotten on the granite surface of the counter, along with one of her pens—the expensive kind her father buys by the dozen.
Gabe stops in the doorway, hands clenching at his sides.
“This is fucked,” he mutters.
I move past him like he didn’t speak. Like he’s not even there. My shoulder bumps his as I push past into the kitchen, close enough to be deliberate, distant enough to make my point. He wants to voice his pain? He can do it to someone who gives a shit.
Muscle memory carries me through familiar routines. Check the security logs. Scan for any signs of intrusion. Catalog potential threats.
Nothing.
The house is exactly as we left it before we discovered the girls had been taken. We haven’t been home since—seventy-six hours of sleeping in Guardian HRS break rooms and surviving on vending machine coffee while we planned and replanned, yet got nowhere.
The tactical part of my brain files away the details. The emotional part—the part I usually keep locked down—notices everything else.
Ally’s sweater draped over the back of her favorite chair—the one by the window where she likes to curl up with her research. The indent in the couch cushions where she spent hours working on quantum equations, I’ll never understand.
“I need…” Gabe starts, then stops. Shakes his head. “I can’t be in here right now.”
He disappears down the hallway toward his suite, leaving me alone with the ghosts.
I find myself standing in the doorway of my bedroom.
Aimless.
Our bedroom.
The place where all three of us sleep when we’re together. California king bed, dark sheets, reinforced frame to handle our combined weight and activities. It sits unmade from when we left in a hurry, Ally’s pillow still holding the impression of her head.
A book lies open face down where she was reading before sleep: some quantum physics text that makes my head hurt just looking at the equations. Her clothes are scattered around—not messy, Ally’s actually quite tidy. A silk camisole drapes over the chair. Her jeans are folded on the dresser.
I pick up the camisole, fabric soft between my fingers. It smells like her. Like vanilla and that soap she uses.
A memory slams into me without warning.
Ally standing at the dresser in nothing but this camisole, brushing her hair while Gabe made coffee in the kitchen. She caught me watching and smiled—that slow, knowing smile that meant she was planning something.
“You’re staring,” she said.
“You’re worth staring at.”
She turned, silk sliding against her skin, and walked over to where I sat on the edge of the bed. “We have that meeting with Mitzy today. The one about my research.”
“We do.”
“After that, I want to try something new.” Her fingers traced the collar of my shirt, touch feather-light but loaded with intent. “Something I’ve been thinking about.”
“What kind of something?”
Her smile turned wicked. “The kind that requires both of you. And these.” She held up silk restraints, the expensive kind from the collection in Gabe’s suite.
The memory fractures, leaving me holding ruined silk. I’m staring at the torn fabric in my hands when footsteps echo from the hallway.
Gabe appears in the doorway, but he looks different. Calmer. His hair is damp—he’s showered—and he’s wearing clean clothes that don’t hide the bruises I put on his ribs.
“Feel better?” he asks, eyes going to the destroyed camisole.
“No.”
“Good. Because if destroying her things made you feel better, I’d have to beat the shit out of you again.”
Despite everything, my mouth almost twitches toward a smile.
Almost.
“Found this on my pillow,” he says, holding up a hair elastic. “She must have left it there the last time she…” He doesn’t finish. Doesn’t need to.
Gabe’s suite serves a specific purpose in our dynamic. It’s where he takes Ally when she needs what only he can give her—the intensity, the edge, the kind of surrender that requires specialized equipment and absolute trust.
“She was nervous that first time,” he continues, voice dropping. “When you brought her to my room. Remember?”
I remember.
“I trust you,” she said, standing in the doorway of Gabe’s suite, taking in the St. Andrew’s cross, the suspension points, the carefully organized collection of implements. “Both of you. But this is…”
“Scary,” Gabe finished, understanding immediately. “It’s supposed to be a little scary. That’s what makes it intense.”
“But you’ll stop if I ask you to?”
“The second you say your safe word.”
She nodded, then looked at me. “You’ll be there?”
“Every second,” I promised. “Watching. Making sure you’re safe.”
And I was there. Watching as Gabe guided her through her first real scene. Watching as she discovered parts of herself she had never explored. Watching as she learned to trust us with her darkest fantasies.
“She came so hard that night she couldn’t speak for five minutes,” Gabe says softly. “Just lay there shaking while I held her.”
“I remember.”
“She told me later that was the moment she knew. Not just that she loved us, but that she belonged with us. That we completed something in her that she didn’t know was missing.”
The words hit hard. Ally isn’t just our submissive, our lover, or our partner. She’s the piece that makes us whole. The bridge between Gabe’s fire and my ice. The center around which everything else revolves.
“I fucked up,” Gabe says suddenly. “What I said about her being mine.”
“Yes. You did.” I set down the ruined camisole, meeting his eyes.
“She chose us both. Not me, not you, but both of us. And I shouldn’t have claimed her as mine alone…” He stops, jaw working. “I betrayed our friendship. I betrayed her choice.”
“Damn straight, you did.”
“I just…” His voice cracks. “When I think about what that bastard might be doing to her, when I imagine her scared and alone, I want to tear the world apart.”
It’s not a complete apology. The hurt between us is still too fresh, the words we used as weapons still too sharp. But it’s an acknowledgment. Recognition that our personal damage matters less than getting Ally back safely.
“We’ve been partners for years,” I finally say. “Sharing everything. Women, missions, life-and-death situations. We don’t let one crisis destroy that.”
“Even after I acted like a possessive asshole?”
“Even then.”
We stand there for a moment, two damaged men in a room full of memories, trying to figure out how to be whole again when everything between us has shifted.
The silence stretches, filled with the distant sound of waves and unspoken understanding. We’re both thinking about her. About the way she looks between us in this bed, safe and satisfied and home. About the trust she’s placed in us and how catastrophically we’ve failed to protect it.
My phone buzzes, cutting through the quiet. Ethan’s name is on the screen.
“Ethan.”
“Time for a road trip,” his voice is carefully neutral. “Remember that place Doc Summers mentioned? The one with the good acoustics?”
Insanity . The beach below Angel Fire’s group home. Where sound carries differently, where conversations can’t be overheard.
“How long?”
“Now would be good.”
The line goes dead.
I look at Gabe. “Ethan needs us. Now.”
Understanding flickers in his eyes. Whatever Ethan has planned, whatever solution he’s found to our communications problem, it’s time.
We move through the house, gathering what we need for an extended absence.
As we head for the door, I take one last look around. At Ally’s coffee mug and reading glasses. At the sweater that still smells like her perfume. At all the small traces of the life we’ve built together.
“We’ll bring her home,” Gabe says, following my gaze.
“Yes,” I agree. “ We will.”
Because the alternative—a future without her laughter in this kitchen, without her body warm between us in that bed, without her presence filling every corner of this house—is unthinkable.