Hide and Seek (12 page)

If that was even a possibility now.

He met Alec’s serious gaze. “It’s not safe for Lisa to stay here. We have to get her off this island ASAP.”

Alec nodded. “Agreed. You got an idea where you want to go, or should I arrange for another safe house somewhere?”

Duarte considered his few options. Time would be working against them. Hell, it already was. They’d been on the radar since the minute they had left his cabin. “Another safe house would be best. Your pal Zapata got a place to spare down in Colombia, by chance? The farther away, the more remote, the better.”

“No.” Lisa’s quiet but firm interjection drew both their gazes. “No more running. No more safe houses. I’m not going to live like this. I can’t.”

“You don’t have much of a choice right now,” Duarte told her, as gently as he could. “You have to keep moving. You can’t let these people get their hands on you. Damn it,
I
won’t let that happen.”

He sounded possessive and overbearing, but fuck it, he didn’t care. So long as he was drawing breath, he meant to keep this woman safe. Whether she felt he had that right or not.

Lisa’s jaw tensed as she stared searchingly into his eyes. “Kyle wanted me to hide. You’re telling me I need to run. But if I do either of those things now, when will I be able to stop?”

“I’ll make it safe so you can stop.” A promise he would uphold with his life, if it came down to that. With her brother’s life, too, even though he knew that price would come with Lisa’s hatred. “I’ll make it safe. You have to trust me, and give me that chance.”

She slowly shook her head. “I can’t do that, John.” The fear he’d seen grip her just a few moments ago began to fade into a subtle, but stubborn determination. “I’ll never have answers if I don’t go after them. I need to know where my brother is, and if he’s in trouble, I need to know why. Even more than you or Alec or anyone else in the Phoenix program,
I
need to find him. I can’t do that if I’m on the run or in hiding somewhere.”

She was right. He knew in his heart that she couldn’t hide forever. She couldn’t run far enough if the men trying to reach her had any part in Phoenix’s demise.

Hell, he and Alec and the rest of the program’s operatives had been running and hiding for too long already. It was time to put an end to that, too.

“Whoever put that tracker on Lisa knows she’s here. They don’t know we’ve found this.” Duarte picked up the small disk. As much as he wanted to smash the damned thing to dust, he wondered if it might serve them better to keep the tracking device operational. “And since we took out the first guy who followed her to my place—”

“I believe you mean since
I
took out the first guy. With a flawless shot, I might add,” Alec said, arching a brow. “Credit where credit’s due, man.”

“Whatever.” Duarte didn’t try to bite back his smirk. “Since their first guy’s at the bottom of a cliff in North Carolina, they may not know he’s dead yet. And they may know Lisa’s on the move now, but that doesn’t mean they know who she’s with.”

Alec nodded, conspiracy glinting in his eyes. “So if someone comes looking for her here—”

“We’ll be waiting,” Duarte said. “We’ll be ready. I don’t think they’ll make us wait too long.”

“What if they send more than one next time?” Lisa asked. Her anxious gaze bounced between the two of them. “What if they do know their first man is dead? I’ve been carrying around that tracker all this time. Someone else could have tailed us to Florida. What if they know exactly who I’m with and they decide to send a full team armed to the teeth next time?”

She was smart, thinking strategically, like a partner.
His
partner, even though he knew she still didn’t fully trust him when it came to her brother.

Duarte wanted to tell her they’d sort it all out—the same promise he’d made to her the night she’d shown up at his cabin, rain-drenched and terrified, pleading for his help. He wanted to explain to her that five years ago, he’d been an idiot to let her leave his place thinking the night they shared hadn’t meant anything to him... that she hadn’t meant anything.

Right now, when she was standing beside him yet never further away, he wanted to tell her that they’d find a way to make it work between them this time.

But the truth was, he wasn’t sure if that could happen. He wouldn’t be sure until the questions surrounding Talon were answered and the threat pursuing Lisa was eliminated.

Duarte cleared his throat. “We’ll be ready.”

“The two of us and the four men guarding this house will be ready,” Alec said.

“Are you sure about that?” Lisa frowned at him, lowering her voice. “Isn’t it just as risky to put your life in the hands of a bunch of drug dealers?”

Duarte grunted. “He’s sure. Long story.”

He set the GPS tracker back down on the counter, his tactical mind already running through various attack and ambush scenarios. None of them were without potential problems. Then again, the same could be said for every other battle he and Alec had lived to talk about. “So we’re agreed? We sit tight for a while and see what turns up on the other end of our hook?”

“Agreed,” Alec said, grinning like the fearless bastard he always had been. He gestured for Duarte and Lisa to follow him. “Let me show you what we’ve got in our tackle box.”

He led them out of the kitchen and down the main artery of the big house to the spacious great room. At the far end of the space stood a massive built-in bookcase filled with countless volumes from the classics to commercial potboilers. Alec strode up and ran his palm down one section of the hand-carved wood. There was a small electronic beep, then the bookcase popped open to reveal a hidden room.

As Alec stepped inside ahead of Duarte and Lisa, lights snapped on inside the cool, climate-controlled room. Guns of various types and calibers lined the walls of the space. Gleaming hunting knives and blades of every size bristled on shelves, ready for action. There were enough boxes of bullets to supply a small army.

“Holy shit.” Duarte had seen some sizeable weapons caches in his day, but this was impressive. He walked farther inside, taking note of the pump-action rifles and Russian semiautomatics that made his hands itch to hold them. “Which ones can we use?”

Alec shrugged. “Any of them. All of them. Whatever we need.”

John nodded and continued with his mental cataloguing of the tools at his disposal should he need them. He was aware of Lisa moving alongside him as he strolled past one collection then another. This wasn’t her world—dealing in violence and death. He didn’t want it ever to be her world. But to her credit, she didn’t shrink away or flinch at the sight of so many lethal instruments.

She was virtually unshakable, except when it came to her beloved brother.

And for what wasn’t the first time, Duarte found himself wishing things were different. Wishing
he
was different. Just a man, not a warrior. Not a precognitive freak whose life had been defined, then forfeited, by the power of his gift. Not the former Phoenix operative whose duty and commitment to the program now stood in the way of what he felt for Lisa Becker.

She drifted past him, taking a sweeping look at a case filled with sniper sights and night-vision equipment. “What’s in this cabinet?” she asked Alec, already heading toward it.

“Ah, those are Mr. Zapata’s favorite rifles.”

A knot of panic lodged in Duarte’s chest as he glanced up and watched Lisa reach for the door handles on the tall gun cabinet. The familiarity of it froze his blood.

All at once, his nightmare vision seized him in a cold fist. The opened gun cabinet. Three rifles inside. Then the explosion that obliterated everything in its path. He lunged for her. “Lisa, no. Don’t—”

She pulled the doors wide, throwing a questioning glance over her shoulder at the same time. “What’s wrong?”

Nothing
.

He stood behind her, panting as if he’d run a marathon, his entire body coiled in horror. Terrified for what might have happened to her. To all of them.

But the gun cabinet wasn’t the one from his premonition. Half a dozen rifles stood inside it, not a single one of them anything less than pristine. There was no derelict weapon. No earth-shattering roar of obliteration. No hellish fire and heat that he could never prevent.

Lisa’s hands were tender on him when she turned to face him. She held his shoulders, touched his face, smoothed her fingers into the sweat-dampened hair at his temples.

“John, are you all right?” Genuine care and concern shone in her sweet hazel eyes. “What just happened?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing.” The words were a raw croak on his dry throat.

Alec eyed him gravely. “Not the vision again? While you’re awake this time?”

“No,” he said. “I thought... Forget it, it’s cool now. Wasn’t the same as in my vision.”

“What vision?” Lisa searched his gaze. “What are you two talking about? Another vision about Kyle? About me?”

“Nothing like that.” Duarte caught her anxious hands and brought them to his lips. He kissed her fingers gently, then stepped out of her embrace because holding her felt too damn good.

He wanted her arms around him, and he wasn’t going to be satisfied with having just her sympathy if she kept on touching him so tenderly and looking at him so... affectionately. Lovingly.

“John, tell me what you’ve seen.” Her voice and gaze were soft, but he could tell from the angle of her chin that she wasn’t going to let him off until he leveled with her. Not after today. Not about anything anymore.

He cleared his throat. “I’ve had a recurring nightmare since Phoenix went down. Alec’s been having the same one, too.”

She glanced briefly at Alec before looking back to Duarte for confirmation. “You mean a premonition? Something awful.”

He gave a sober nod. “A massive explosion. Catastrophic. When it happens, it obliterates everything. In the vision, I know I have to stop it... I know what’s coming every time the damn thing starts, but I’m too late. Every fucking time, I’m too late.”

She absorbed the information in silence for a long moment. “And when I opened the gun cabinet? Is that part of the vision, too?”

“The cabinet, yes. The detonation happens right after I see it. In the vision, it’s me who opens the cabinet, but when you reached for it...” He trailed off, unwilling to speak the words.

The dread he’d felt when she had started to pull open those doors still gripped him. Seeing her in harm’s way—imagined or not—was a terror that still raked him with icy claws. And the danger for her
was
real in other ways, from the men who had her in their sights now, and from the other vision he and Alec shared. The one that predicted Lisa being held at gunpoint, the nose of a pistol resting at her temple.

Chilling, hideous thoughts, all of them. His gut clenched, and it took every bit of his self control to resist dragging her into his arms now, just to feel her against him, safe and sound.

He cleared his throat, needing to get a hold of himself and his thoughts. “Alec’s recurring vision is different from mine. He doesn’t see the gun cabinet or the three rifles inside. But the end result is the same.”

“Total annihilation,” Alec confirmed grimly. “My hair ignites. My skin melts away. The heat and fire leaves nothing behind. It’s a destruction that can’t be stopped.”

She looked to Duarte in question and he nodded. “The same for me.”

“My God...” Her voice was reduced to a whisper. “You’ve both been seeing this vision—living it—how many times for the past three years?”

“Hundreds, easily.” Duarte had lost count a long time ago. “I didn’t know Alec was having the same premonition until we met up again yesterday.”

“It’s possible other Phoenix members are having it, too,” Alec suggested.

“And if they are?” Lisa asked. “Maybe there’s something more to the vision. Maybe if you work with the others, there could be a way to prevent it from happening.”

Smart girl. She was just coming up to speed that moment, and she was already on the same page as Alec and him. “It’s something we need to find out, yes.”

“First we’d have to locate them,” Alec said. “And there’s no telling which of them we can trust.”

“Including my brother,” she murmured.

Neither Duarte nor Alec could deny it. It killed him to see her soft gaze on him shutter now, but he refused to reassure her with what he felt in his heart would be tender lies.

She crossed her arms over her chest in the heavy, uncertain silence that followed Kyle’s mention. Her lovely face was pinched with worry, with regret. And with fresh hurt as she looked at Duarte. “I need some time to think,” she said quietly. “I need to process... everything.”

When she turned to leave the weapons room, Duarte took a step after her. He reached for her hand, took it gently in his. “I’ll come with you. We still need to talk.”

“Please don’t.” Her head shook slowly and she withdrew from his loose hold. “Don’t come with me, John. I don’t want to talk anymore. Right now, all I need is for you to leave me alone.”

14

Although she’d told him she refused to run or hide anymore, Lisa knew that’s exactly what she was doing behind the closed door of her guest room the rest of that day and into the evening. She’d ventured out once, only to eat. To her relief, John had been off somewhere else on the property with Alec, the two of them no doubt planning and preparing their next move.

Seeing them working together, undertaking a new personal mission, kindled something warm inside her. Pride, she thought. And a sense of reassurance, that no matter how dark and dangerous they believed Phoenix’s enemies to be, no matter how grim the fiery premonition John and Alec shared, these two men would not rest until their world was set to rights.

The problem was trying to imagine that her brother could ever willingly stand on the wrong side of his friends and his former operatives in the program.

To believe that would mean she had never really known Kyle.