Page 82 of Crosscurrent

"I've had worse from people I liked better." Skye’s words swelled with bravado, but Cara could see the effort it took.

Reagan gestured for Cara to move closer. “More towels. Lots of them.”

Cara lurched toward the bathroom. So much blood.

Lord. Not her. Keep her here.

She returned with every white towel the guest house possessed. Wade held out his arms. “Reagan’s got this. She’s good.”

Skye snorted weakly, then hissed in pain as Reagan worked. “She give you that one?” She eyed the thick white scar on Wade’s arm.

He grinned, holding out the thick limb. “It’s great, right?”

“T-totally.”

Cara and Gabe exchanged a look. No sarcasm present.

Reagan smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “We’ll see what we can do, sweetie.” Then she met Cara’s eyes. “This isn’t as bad as I thought. Once we get the bullet out, she’ll do.”

The stress hit Cara all at once. Her legs turned to jello. She sank down on a graceful Scandinavian chair, her body vibrating with excess adrenaline and a whole lot of residual fear. One bullet dodged. Almost literally.

Gabe was already on to the next challenge. He shook his head, cheekbone already swelling. "They'll come again."

Tom stood at the window with two fingers parting the curtain, watching the empty street. "We can't hold this town. One way in, through the air. No way out. They've got all the time there is, and they know it."

Wade sat down with a towel around his injured hand. "That was them being gentle. They could've had Owen in a vehicle in nine seconds if they didn't care whether he kept breathing." He looked at Skye on the table. "We got off easy. That won’t happen again."

Skye levered herself up on her elbows. Pain shot through her eyes. "We have to make them believe there's nothing left to take. No witness. No cipher. No prize left on the table."

Skye’s words landed in Cara’s chest like a roundhouse kick. She'd spent her whole first life learning to make people believe a lie completely enough to bet their lives on it. Until Dom Adler pulled her out of prison, she’d never spent that gift on anything good. And here it was, turning over in her hands like a tool she'd finally found the job for, and she made herself stop before the thought reached its end.

Cara met her gaze, two women with the same background who knew all too well how vicious desperate people could become. “Exactly.”

31

“Skye’s right,” Cara said. “There’s one way to make them stop.”

Fifteen years in the Bureau had taught Gabe to catch the moment a person made up their mind, the small shift that came a beat before they said a word. Tonight he didn't need the training. He only needed to watch Cara.

She stood a little apart by the window Tom had been working, gone somewhere behind her eyes — the place she went when she'd run a plan all the way to its end and didn't like where it stopped. He'd seen that look across a hundred briefings. It had never once scared him until now.

Reagan's focus stayed on Skye's wound. "Neptune knows about the list. They know Skye and Owen are connected through Harney. You can't un-ring that bell."

"So we break it." Cara turned around. "We don't hide Owen, or the list. We take them off the board. Permanently. An accident. A body they can't recover taking his uncle’s file with him." She let it sit. "Nobody hunts a dead man."

The floor went out from under Gabe. Every instinct he'd built over years of protecting people objected. You protected a principal by putting your body between him and the threat. You did not protect him by erasing him off the face of the earth.

“Totally diabolical.” Tom’s eyes lit up. “I like it. They think Harney’s files, and all his knowledge, dies with him.”

"It's not enough." Gabe heard the cop come back into his voice. "They'd take Owen dead, sure. But what they want is the list — they'd settle for the cipher and a new man to read it. Kill Owen, leave the notebook breathing somewhere, and they're back on us by spring. Both have to die. The man and the means. Same hour, where Neptune can see it."

"Then they see it." Cara hadn't moved from the window. "Owen doesn't slip off an ice floe. Owen gets taken — driven out by one of his own and put in the water, with the cipher burned down to the steel sleeve it came in. We leave them the ashes to find. Neptune doesn't have to believe we're good. Only that we'd sooner burn it all than let them have it."

Wade stared out through a small slit in the curtains. "I'll do it."

It was Owen who didn't understand. "But they know you. They know you've spent all this time protecting me. Why would they ever believe one of you would⁠—"

"Because they don't know what we are." Skye's eyes stayed shut, her voice coming flat off the table. "They know we're good. Trained, armed, dug in. They don't know we're yours. To them we're a crew that took a contract and got cornered — and a crew about to lose the package doesn't hand it over. It denies it. You put the asset in the ground, you burn the rest, and the people hunting you walk away with nothing but a story." A pause that cost her something. "I've watched it done. They'll believe it because it's the smart play. It's the play they'd make."