Maya Banks - Hidden Away

“I asked you a question,” Stanley snapped. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Oh God, he’d find Allen’s body and think she murdered him. Or worse, he’d see Marcus and then Marcus would go to jail. Stanley could place them both at the scene. Even if she wasn’t herself accused of the crime, she could be forced to testify against Marcus.

Something snapped inside her. Rage mounted and swirled like a tornado. She thrust her knee into his groin, balled her fist and swung as hard as she could just as he howled in pain and doubled over.

Her fist met his jaw and he went sprawling.

As he started to scramble up, she ran for the entrance, burst into the night and bolted toward the street. She saw an off-duty cab rounding the corner and she ran in front of it, her arm held up to stop him. The cab screeched to a halt a mere inch from her knee. The driver threw his fist out the window, and obscenities blistered the air.

Ignoring his outrage, Sarah yanked open the back door and crawled in, slamming the door behind her. “Drive!”

The cabbie gave her a disgruntled look in the rearview mirror, then accelerated sharply, muttering about crazy women as he swerved through traffic. “Lady, I was not in service.”

“I’ll make it worth your while. Just drive!”

He heaved an exasperated sigh. “Where to?”

She slammed her eyes shut for a moment as she sought to regain her bearings. Where could she go?

Think. God. What did one do in a situation like this?

She stared down at the purse slung over her neck. She had some cash, her passport, a credit card, her driver’s license. She couldn’t go back to her apartment, could she?

Stanley would have found his brother’s body by now. He’d probably already called the police.

Think, Sarah, think!

“Airport,” she managed to get out.

Her cell phone rang, startling her. She rummaged in her purse and turned it over to check the LCD. Marcus.

Tears burned her eyelids. Her brother. The one person in the world who loved her. He was all she had and now he’d killed for her.

She opened the phone and put it to her ear.

“Sarah,” Marcus barked before she could even get a greeting out.

“Marcus,” she croaked out in a cracked and scratchy voice.

“Sarah, honey, where are you?”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t ... we can’t ... I have to stay away. I need to go away.”

She was babbling, but she didn’t care.

“Sarah, stop. Listen to me.”

“No.” She cut him off, her voice firmer now. “I have to go. Don’t you see? They’ll know. They’ll know I saw you. They have surveillance in that building. All they have to do is play the security tape back and they’ll know we were both there. You have to get out of here, Marcus. Go. I’m going too.”

“Sarah, goddamn it, listen to me!”

She closed the phone and turned it off so he couldn’t call back. She leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.

She had no idea where she was going or what she’d do when she got there, but she couldn’t stay here. She could never come back.

“I’m so sorry, Marcus. It should have been me who killed him,” she whispered.

GARRETT Kelly came awake with a start, his muscles tense, sweat beading his brow. His breaths came in rapid, harsh huffs. For a moment he lay there, his unfocused gaze sliding across the window to the darkness beyond.

Explosions echoed in his ears. The staccato of gunfire made him flinch, and the smell of blood and burning flesh assaulted his nostrils, making them flare as his breaths tore from his lungs.

God.

He shook his head and raised his hand to scrub the sleep from his eyes. His shoulder protested, and he snarled with impatience at the ache, which still nagged. He rolled and sat up in bed, planting his feet on the floor. He stayed there, head hanging toward his knees, sucking in air like some pantywaist in basic training about to puke his guts up after a twomile run.

It pissed him off when past memories ambushed him. He’d gone a long time without the images that interrupted his sleep. For some reason, after taking a bullet for his sister-in-law, he’d had a harder time sleeping. His consciousness seemed more vulnerable to things he’d shut out.

He cast a sideways glance at the clock. He wouldn’t be going back to sleep and everyone would be up in an hour anyway. Maybe a run would clear his head and get his blood flowing again.

With a sigh, he hit the shower and turned it cold to shake the cobwebs and the lingering smell of blood. After he was dried off and dressed, he walked quietly down the hall and out the front door.

It was still dark when he started off down the winding road that paralleled the lake. He ran farther this morning, pushing himself beyond his normal routine. He could still hear the explosions and still hear his teammates. He closed his eyes and increased his pace until his lungs screamed and his side ached.

It was over. A lifetime ago. He needed to get over it. He had gotten over it. All this R and R was for the birds. It had only served to make him lazy and idle. Fuck it. He wanted back in. A mission. Something besides all this goddamn free time.

By the time he returned to the house, he was sucking serious wind. The sky had lightened to shades of lavender and a diamond-sized star hung stubbornly over the lake, blanketed in the soft hues of dawn. He stood on the dock staring over the water—smooth, not a single ripple disturbing the surface—and breathed the clean, unspoiled air.

He let the peace of home and the lake he loved envelop him until all the noises of the past dulled and receded.

SWEAT beaded Garrett’s brow as he completed his last pull-up. He held himself, chin hovering above the bar, until his muscles rolled and contorted and his shoulder burned. His lips thinned and nostrils flared. When his arms began shaking, he dropped to the floor and palmed the scar on his shoulder.

Impatient with the twinge of discomfort that still plagued him, he dropped down and began a series of push-ups. He forced everything from his mind but the goal of complete recovery—a process that had already taken too long for his liking.

After yesterday morning’s run and a full day of PT, he’d slept marginally better last night than he had the night before. But he still couldn’t rid himself of the lingering images of his dreams. Dreams that hadn’t haunted him in some time but now seemed determined to shove themselves back to the forefront of his consciousness.

“Hey, man.”

Garrett extended his arms to hold his position and turned to see his brother Donovan standing in the doorway to the basement.

“Why the hell are you interrupting my workout?”

“Resnick’s paying us a visit. Should be here in the next few.”

Garrett sighed and hopped to his feet. He rose and picked up the towel he’d tossed on the couch and wiped the sweat from his face. “What the hell does he want?”

“He didn’t say. But you know he wouldn’t come out here unless he wanted something.”

“Doesn’t anyone use the goddamn phone anymore?”

Donovan chuckled. “I’ll be over in the war room. A word of warning. Sophie’s on a tear in the kitchen.”

Garrett groaned. His very pregnant sister-in-law had been nesting furiously in the last week. She’d already cleaned the house top to bottom, and her next project was cooking enough food to outlast Armageddon.

Since marrying Sam, she’d bullied everyone into family time. They were her family now—as she liked to constantly remind them—and they would eat as a family, which meant everyone at the table, all accounted for, on time. The only excuse for missing a meal was hospitalization.

Garrett and his brothers indulged her because family was the one thing she’d always lacked. At first she’d been overwhelmed and cautious with the very large Kelly family, but then she embraced them all and took to her new life like a duck to water.

As he climbed the stairs from the basement, he rolled his shoulder, testing the wound. It had been months since he left the hospital, and it still wasn’t healed to his satisfaction. He had residual soreness when he worked out, but if he went more than a day without pushing the exercises, it got stiff.

He was still rotating his arm when he got into the living room. Sophie looked up from the stove and frowned. “Is your shoulder still bothering you?”

Not waiting for his answer, she hurried around the corner—as fast as a woman in her condition could—and stood in front of him. Her belly protruded, nearly bumping into his hip. She looked about thirteen months’ pregnant—not that he’d tell her that.

“I’m fine, Soph,” he said good-naturedly.

“You’ve been working out again. Should you be pushing yourself so hard?”

He rolled his eyes and dropped a kiss on her cheek. “I’m fine. It’s never going to get to one hundred percent unless I strengthen it.”

Her blue eyes clouded and she briefly looked away. He sighed. She was the reason he’d taken the bullet, and she was also the only one determined not to forget that fact. He tugged at her hair just to annoy her, and when she looked back at him, he scowled.

Her sadness lasted all of two seconds. Her shoulders started shaking and her lips split into a wide smile. “Okay, okay,” she said, putting her hands up as she backed away. “I’ll stop the guilt and the mother hen act.”

“Yeah, save it for the kiddo.”

She walked back into the kitchen and he followed, sniffing the air.