Own (Command Force Alpha #1) (30 page)

Walking next to him almost managed to distract Kat from the echoing stillness of headquarters. This was her first glimpse into the vaunted fortress, but it was more empty than she’d expected. Evan was orchestrating the unit from a secret hospital ward.

The redesigned wharf building had industrial splashed all over it, but whoever had split the back half of the building into a row of offices hadn’t spared a penny. Every door was soundproofed. Every entry was coded. Many had retinal scans. A couple had security measures she didn’t even know how to identify.

She didn’t want to. If she were smart, she’d back out of this world as soon as she could. Maybe now that everyone realized the depth of her knowledge about CFA, they’d offer some sort of reconditioning program. There would be drugs involved, and an element that explored the limits of her physical capabilities—hypnotism or some sort of bullshit.

Anything would be better than knowing Evan was walking into the city in order to do violence. That her father had already paid the grander price. That
worse
prices would always be waiting.

Crandall kept up a pleasant line of chatter as they’d traveled between the hospital and the HQ, but little had sunk in beyond what was necessary for Kat to give appropriate nods and smiles. She’d turned down an invitation to a rugby match. That much she remembered. Crandall was Australian, and he hadn’t given up the sport upon moving to the U.S. For his sainted colonel, of course. Crandall kept trying to get other guys to play, but they were all smart folks and didn’t want their necks broken in a game that was supposed to be fun.

Broken necks were for work hours only.

Crandall stopped beside a door, punched the code and held it open for her. Kat took one step into the room and froze. “Oh no. Fuck no.”

“Something wrong?” He was big, but she didn’t buy his perfectly stupid unblinking stare, not for a second.

“Jesus Fuck, Crandall. I didn’t realize you were this much of an asshole.”

“Following orders.”

“I bet you do that a lot, don’t you?” She twisted her mouth into a sour and unpleasant shape. The guy was just the nearest victim. This wasn’t his fault. She was shooting the messenger, but the effort made her nauseous. She tried to reel it in.

Her stomach flipped a half dozen times as she stepped into the room and took in a hundred tiny details.

It was Evan’s office.

She dropped her bag to the middle of the floor. It was all she could do not to kick it. “I suppose the computer is off-limits.”

Crandall’s smile—that was what gave him away. Sly and cheeky, it lit him from the inside and made a body wonder just how many brain cells were firing in there. “I’d lay money against you even being able to get into it, but we’ve learned how dumb that bet can be.”

She pushed out her lower lip. “I’m guessing I get no Wi-Fi for my tablet.”

“Nope,” he said blithely. “There is no Wi-Fi in here. Everything’s on a secure network. In fact, you might find that your cellular reception is…suspect.”

“Of course it is.” She flopped down on a nondescript brown couch. She was tempted to succumb to the fatigue that clawed up her toes, worked its way up her limbs and made her
heavy
. “Any chance of getting some entertainment?”

Crandall blinked a few times. He had wickedly long lashes for a man, though most people wouldn’t notice past his slightly craggy features. “Want some…magazines?”

She gave a disgusted sigh, but nodded anyway. She knew by now that she wouldn’t get much else. With the promise to bring her breakfast as well, Crandall ducked out of the room.

Evan’s office was smaller than she’d expected. On some level, it appeared as though he’d subconsciously designed it to have the same flavor as her father’s home office, which featured bookshelves and framed unit flags on the walls. Evan had none of that, but the feel of all-work, no-play was out in full effect. The only thing that hinted at Evan’s service background was a square piece of polished granite with the red-and-black Marine Corps emblem on top.

The rest of the room seemed designed for maximum comfort. To be honest, it was more comfortably lived-in than his make-believe farm. A fleece blanket was folded neatly over the back of the leather couch. Kat pulled it around her shoulders, staring at the small flat screen and the three-drawer cabinet in the corner. Was this where Evan
actually
lived? Most of the time? His farm was more than an hour out. The commute into the offices would be killer, and that didn’t count that he was
gone
so often.

She stood on numb toes—numb feet, for that matter. It had been a long night, and dawn was hours off. She’d crawled for Evan. Actually
crawled
for him. Then she’d been forced to sit calmly by while Evan stepped into her father’s hospital room for something so damn important it was worth endangering his recovery. Then she’d been bitched out like a fourteen-year-old kid who’d stayed out past curfew.

No wonder she was tired. She should leave this whole thing alone. Not touch it.

Right.

Her hands moved of their own accord to the little cabinet set against the wall. The top portion had two doors, and beneath that were three drawers. She started with the doors. A few books. A small DVD player that could jack into the flat-screen TV on the wall. A gaming system, but the games were dusty and about a year and a half out of date.

She was shaking when touching his possessions. She picked up a tidy shower caddy. Soap. Toothbrush. Floss. All the mandatory things.

The first drawer was filled with underwear and rolled socks. She dropped to the floor, unable to endure any more. That was Evan. That was all he’d ever be. The man she’d come to know was make-believe, which meant she’d given her heart and her will to a figment.

The industrial concrete was cold against her ass. Her brain…emptied.

She scooped socks into her lap. Methodically, she broke open their precise rolls until they were snakes dangling over her thighs. All his underwear had been folded too. If she really wanted to try to make her brain work, she could figure out if he still used the same method midshipmen were required to use at Annapolis.

She didn’t want to know that. She didn’t want to be still tempted to follow the pointless, arbitrary rules handed down to her by her father and her boarding school headmasters. Katsu Stafford could leave her clothes in a jumble and dirty dishes in the sink and she
didn’t give a shit
.

She pulled open the second drawer. Shirts. PT workout shirts and T-shirts he could wear out and about. She threw them over her shoulder, one at a time. They were quiet when they landed on the coffee table, the floor, the edge of his desk. Fuck that. She wanted noise and lights to balance the emptiness in her, the gaping maw where some sort of response should be. The third drawer didn’t provide that satisfaction. She pulled out his jeans and pressed them to her face before strewing them across the office.

She’d been left. Again. Just like always.

Just like Evan had left her to go to Special Operations training, and he hadn’t said a fucking word about what might happen when he returned. He’d simply sunk into her father’s world and disappeared from her life.

She could understand it on a logical level. It was his job. More than that, it was what he did to right the world against callous people—even more benignly corrupt people like his father, the senator. Evan’s work was
needed
. Somewhere out there he’d find a woman who could cope with that, or he’d be raising horses on his own for the rest of his lonely life.

Kat wanted no part of that heartache. He’d meet some nameless, faceless woman, and knowing Evan, he wouldn’t settle. She’d be his to control, with the precise intensity that said she was the center of his universe and that he wanted to crawl inside her head and make order of all the jumbled pieces…

Kat buried her face in the cushions of the couch. That line of thought was more than she could stand, but she couldn’t give it up. She couldn’t dwell on anything else, because the only other train of thought was Evan coming home
dead
. Harsh sobs worked her chest and racked her shoulders. She wound her fingers through her hair, scratching across her skull. Trying to hold herself down wasn’t doing any good.

She couldn’t do this. She wasn’t built for it. The parts of her mind that kept her orderly and under control had been shredded for years. She thrived when following orders. There was no two ways about it. She lived for the constraint that said someone cared about her. Evan had given her that peace and attention for such a brief time. Now she felt the lack like burns on her skin.

She loved a man who would always leave.

She was the biggest fucking idiot in the world.

Somehow, at some point, she slept. It didn’t feel like rest because she stayed in the kneeling position by the couch. When Kat again opened her eyes, they were gritty with the aftereffects of crying for a long, long time. Her tongue was sticky too. Sleep must have been a refuge though, because someone—probably Crandall—had dropped off a foot-thick stack of magazines and takeout containers of food.

Maybe she’d slept more than she realized. The takeout had the obvious trappings of lunch. A Styrofoam bowl of soup was topped by a thin plastic lid, and bread was wrapped in wax paper and foil to keep the heat in. It was the good stuff—chowder and a crusty roll perfect for dipping.

Wonderful. Someone else had seen her in this state. Crandall, maybe, had seen the hissy fit she’d thrown in Evan’s office. He’d seen her wrecked and lost. It wasn’t enough that her humiliation went so bone-deep she shook.

Her stomach knotted at the idea of spooning the creamy soup into her mouth. She sipped at the matching Styrofoam cup of tonic instead. Lemon lime and caffeine free. An invalid’s food.

Because they all knew how fucked up she was.

“Thanks, Crandall,” she said bitterly, looking straight at the security camera in the corner of the ceiling.

She managed to choke down half the chowder and picked the soft insides out of the bread. The crusts she left on the coffee table.

Magazines kept her busy for about three hours. She paged through them, comfortably peeling out pages she might want to spend more time with later. She stacked those next to her on the arm of the couch, though she didn’t bother to pick them up when the first stack fell. When she finished a magazine, she flicked it to the floor. Each time she did, she came as close as possible to smiling.

Let Evan deal with the mess.

Let him deal with
her
.

Once he bothered to show up.
If
he managed to show up.

Fletcher might be the one to come and escort her to another safe house, or back to the hospital. She’d know Evan was dead, even before her father had the chance to break the news. That was how these things worked. The powers that be made sure someone important handed over the hard shit, someone with weight and rank—
if
those left behind got the luxury of knowing their loved one was dead. Otherwise, one might fly off the handle.

Like she probably already had.

But…can’t have that. Tantrums and grief weren’t covert.

Once she finished the magazines, which now lay in satisfying shreds on the bare floor, she slept again and awoke to another meal delivery from Crandall. She plugged in the DVD player and ate without tasting, sitting among the ripped pages, punching in movie after movie. Watching only fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, she went through Evan’s whole stack. He kept a weird range, including titles she wouldn’t have expected him to love, from classic war movies to quirky brain-bending romances.

She shouldn’t have been sitting in the middle of the floor. When the unmistakable beeping of the keypad echoed through the little room, she had nowhere to back up against. She froze. Her fingers locked on the remote and accidentally hit fast-forward. Characters on screen jerked into super motion. Her heart moved at the same speed.

Evan stepped into the room. She sobbed with the pure relief that charged through her.

He dropped to his knees beside her and whispered her name over and over. “We found two bad guys. I can’t tell you more, but you’re safe. I’m safe. Everything’s fine.”

Kat flipped out. Everything hit disconnect. She didn’t know what to do about her own body because it was beyond her control. She smacked his chest. Then she pushed.
Hard.
His hands were folded over the back of her shoulders. It was obvious he didn’t want to let her go, but she skittered back on palms and heels. “Get away from me. You locked me in this room and went and now you’re back. And I fucking
hate
you.”

“No, you don’t,” he said with implacable assurance.

“Shut up. Just shut your mouth. I don’t want to hear your calm-crap bullshit.” She scrambled to her feet. He was still kneeling where he’d tried to comfort her. She didn’t much feel like being comforted. She’d been trapped inside her worst nightmare for hours, perhaps for years, where she was alone and they were all gone and everyone died. Had she carried this fear for him around for all these years? Had she carried it right beside fear for her father? That was…devastating. “No, you’re right. Maybe I don’t hate you. Maybe I love you. But it doesn’t matter a good goddamn, because I don’t want to be anywhere near you.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight