Page 98 of Shards Of Hope

“Yeah,” Jack responds, voice quiet and devoid of the emotion you might expect from someone who once had a bomb surgically sewn into their own living body.

“How the hell did you survive that?” I move a little closer to him, wrapping myself more firmly in his solid embrace. It feels like maybe I should be the one holding him. But Jack is unlikely to appreciate any form of coddling, no matter how well-earned.

“Idiots left me alone, unchained.” Jack sounds genuinely offended to have been underestimated, like someone doubted his business projections in a meeting, which is mad. He threads his fingers through mine, holding my hand over the raised scar. “Cut that fucker out and bolted.”

“With what?” I ask, regretting the question the second it leaves my mouth.

“There was a mirror in the room they left me in.”

Jesus.

“Please tell me you did not cut a bomb out of your stomach with a fucking piece of broken glass, you actualmaniac!”

I’m appropriately horrified. Jack is frighteningly nonplussed about the whole thing.

“Dan was pissed at me for making him do first aid midmission again.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you running around with half your guts spilling out was a real inconvenience,” I say dryly.

“Nah, he wasn’t pissed ’cause of that. Dan was always a crap nurse,” Jack confides. “Couldn’t use a needle and thread for shit. He had no patience for stuff he was bad at.”

I’m saved from having to find an adequate response to that boatload of insanity when my FISA communicator rings from where I left it on the bedside table during the process of removing my clothes earlier. The incessant buzzing moves the phone further and further away from me.

Rather than letting me sit up, Jack, being closer, reaches over to grab the phone. He hands it to me. I push the button to answer and shove the phone to my ear.

“Agent Snow.”

“You need to report in,” Senior Agent North barks down the line at me, the urgency in his voice bringing me to a more alert state of being.

“Sir,” I stumble over the word, “what’s happened?”

“They’ve taken another one,” North answers ominously.

“Another one?” I parrot, my brain still working too slowly to understand what North is telling me. Then it clicks. “You mean another scientist’s been abducted?”

“Yeah, one of our own this time. They snatched him off the street, just like they did Rush,” North confirms. “We caught it on a hidden security cam.”

There’s something heavy and dark in North’s voice that has the hair on my body standing at attention.

I extract myself from Jack, pushing up so I’m able to look down at him. He tilts his head, brows drawn in concentration, indicating that he’s listening to the other side of my phone call with his enhanced hearing.

“Who did they take?” I ask.

A sense of foreboding pricks at my heart when North hesitates before responding.

“Agent Sathe.” He intones. An earth-shattering pause. “Obsidian Inc have taken Rohan Sathe back.”