"You'll need the other one but you know where it is. Texas has it," Gregory read. "Then some shit in letters and numbers." He crumpled the note and threw it on the floor. He turned the key in his hand. It was small and silver; nothing fancy. Beckett watched as Gregory pocketed it.

  "The other what?" Alastair shouted into Beckett's ear. "Another key? Where in Texas? Who do you know in Texas? What is the key for?"

  "No one—" Beckett started but Alastair hit him again, and again. Always with the same questions. Where. Who. Why. His head snapped from side to side and bile clawed his throat. This seemed like the end of things; after a day of questions and dealing out pain Alastair was finally at the edge.

  "Fuck, Alastair; what is wrong with you? You'll kill him." Even Gregory seemed shocked by the level of anger in Alastair and Beckett felt a glimmer of hope that Gregory would step in and stop this.

  "You wanna know? You really want to know what this little shit has been doing?"

  "What?" Gregory sounded lost.

  "I had him followed. He was cozy with Elisabeth, you know that, but I dealt with that. Then he had a meeting yesterday with a PI, some guy in a shopping center and fuck knows what he handed over. Security cameras have him using your computer in your office, Greg. Taking copies of files." Another hit and Beckett felt bile rise in him. He was going to be sick. Alastair pulled him to his feet. "Tell him what you were doing you little shit—"

  "Studying—" Beckett blurted out the single word. Alastair's expression held derision.

  "In your private files, Greg."

  "Dad?" Beckett pasted his best pleading expression on his face. May as well use the possible connection. There was nothing in Gregory's eyes. No compassion or fatherly affection. Just ice.

  "You never came here to find me, did you Robert." Gregory's voice was flat. There was no question in what he said. "Did she tell you to come here? What did you come here to do? Kill me? Avenge what happened to her?"

  "No—" All the breath left his body as Gregory ended what Alastair had started even as Alastair held him. The barrier had broken and the hate and violence Gregory had been hiding behind his mask of civility was out in force. The punches he threw connected with Beckett 's chest, the pain quick and sharp.

  "Have you shown anyone? What did you do with the files?"

  "I didn't—I was studying—" Beckett felt consciousness slip away from him. Step by step his vision was blurring and the only thing keeping him standing was the tight grip Alastair had on his arm. The next hit wrenched the socket hard and he felt something tear and snap in his arm.

  "I told you he was talking to Elisabeth. Fuck, Greg. I told you we should have shut him down as soon as he arrived here." Alastair released his arm and Beckett dropped to the chair. It scooted backward until the wooden back hit the bed and only sheer willpower kept Beckett upright. "He'll need to die. Like Elisabeth."

  "Okay. I don't have the stomach for this—" Greg didn't sound sad or grieved. His words were bitter and staccato. "You find out what he knows. What he's done."

  "I got it, brother. Leave it to me." There was an unholy glee in Alastair's voice. This was a man who enjoyed hurting and killing.

  "I want names and numbers and when you're finished put his body on the mountain." Greg said dispassionately. Beckett heard the words and fear chased up his spine. Mind numbing and utterly all-consuming terror. He lifted his head, barely able to see through the slits of his swollen eyes. Greg was staring at him. "You could have had it all Robert. All of it."

  Then everything went to hell.

  Shouting. Demands. A gun. A shot. Then strong arms pulling him upright and a muttered. "Got you, kid."

  Beckett allowed himself to be pulled up, his only conscious thought getting to the key and the letter. He fell to his knees, the curse of whoever held him ripe in the air, and scrambled to where Gregory lay in a widening pool of blood. Beckett snatched at the letter and then dug through blood and gore to find the key. He couldn't see anything in the blur of pain and was feeling his way around pushing aside material and sticky blood.

  "Fuck. Kid—"

  "Wait—" he screamed the words in his head but all that left his cracked, bloodied lips was a near whimper.

  "We gotta go. Dale, for fuck's sake—"

  Beckett's fingers closed around the small key and with a thrill of triumph he clambered to stand.

  "You're not taking him—" Alastair's voice, the sound of a scuffle and Beckett was pushed violently from behind. As he fell his head connected with the edge of the dresser and his last conscious thought was that he was alive and he had the letter and the key. The rest would sort itself out.

  Chapter 2

  "It's been three days. Shouldn't he at least be conscious?" The words filtered into Beckett's thoughts. His dreams. Experimentally he attempted to turn his head, anything but nothing happened. His brain told him he could move but his body wasn't helping.

  "Today." Another voice replied simply.

  "He still looks like shit." The first voice was familiar. Beckett wanted to ask who it was. Where was he? Why couldn't he move?

  "He'll be back to being a pretty boy in days." The second man was talking with very little emotion in his voice, not like the first who seemed anxious. Was this second guy a doctor? Was it two doctors? "Talking of pretty boys, I am assuming Joseph has gone now?"

  "Ten minutes ago." That sounded like Dale. So he was with Dale? Inch by inch the tension seeped from his brain. If Dale had him then he wasn't near Gregory and Alastair Bullen.

  "That was some intense shit you had going with super-SEAL." The second guy's tone was pure sarcasm.

  "Yeah." A loud laugh framed the response "He's an intense guy."

  "You're good together—"

  "Jeez, Kayden, that sounds almost poetic coming from you."

  "Fuck poetic. Just, the ass on that man, hell, not to mention you. That is one SEAL sandwich I would die to get in the middle of."

  There was laughter and the other guy left, leaving the one called Kayden with Beckett. He knew that because Kayden was talking to him. Soft and low, his voice was like honey and Beckett desperately tried to move to acknowledge he could hear. The voice was reassuring, comforting and he was clinging to every syllable.

  "Hell," Kayden was saying, "damn idiot operative falls in love with a SEAL. Can't see that lasting past the next mission. If you're gonna be gay you need to choose the ones who don't go off getting themselves shot at." There was a pause and Beckett felt hands on him pressing and pushing over his body. Kayden continued conversationally, "But, shit kid, the chemistry those two had going was intense. Wish you coulda woken up in time to see Joseph. Hell, he was a sight for sore eyes. Tall and dark, with the sweetest ass you ever laid your eyes on. Not that this would interest you normal types. But jeez. To tap that… hmmmm.

  "Now Robert… how about you open your eyes for me?"

  Beckett, I'm Beckett. Please don't call me Robert. The words just wouldn't form. Trapped in his head they buzzed and clung to his brain.

  "I know you're in there, kid." Kayden continued. "Your vitals are good, your responses are mostly there but you won't let yourself wake up. So how about opening your eyes for me? I could use the company."

  Beckett tried damn hard. He wanted to see the man whose voice was a balm to his pain. He forced himself to relax as tension and pain knifed through his head. Unbearable pain. It had to stop. He wanted to open his eyes. Open your eyes. Open.

  I want to open my eyes.

  "Okay. I get it. You think I'm going to be boring."

  No. Please help me with the pain.

  "So. You're not waking up this morning then. Shit. I bet Dale a twenty you'd be awake today. Don't you go making a liar out of me, kid. I want you up and at 'em by evening." Kayden, his doctor it seemed, had a voice that wrapped its way around his thoughts. It made Beckett want to wake up for the Doc. "I'm pushing your meds 'cause you look like shit."

  Meds? Meds were good. But what kind of doctor spoke like that? And Dale was here? Dale whom he'd spoken to in the coffee shop? Dale who had promised he would be okay? Wait. Was it Dale at the mansion? Was it Dale who had spoken to him and held him together in the stumbling half-conscious walk from mansion to car? A trickle inside him and the pain in his head began to ease.

  "So, I'll be outside if you need me, Robert, yeah? Usual place, kid."

  Stop calling me Robert.

  Stop calling me kid.

  * * *

  Doctor Kayden Summers wasn't feeling this case at all. Not only was it a non-official off-record-but-really-Sanctuary case, which made the whole thing a pain in the ass, but the kid remained unconscious. He prided himself on knowing what a patient needed. Hell, he was a fully-fledged doctor at twenty-six with four years ER training under his belt and a raft of experience in blunt trauma that went years back.

  Given his experience of patient care, the kid should be awake by now. As much as he'd joked with Dale, the part where the kid wasn't waking up formed a worry that niggled at him. He made coffee and slumped in the plush sofa of the main lounge. The room was closest to the medical area and if he didn't have the TV on he could hear if he was needed. Television was a necessary evil and he only watched it to catch up on news. It wasn't as if he were a sports fan, or that much into reality TV, to bother with it. Given he hadn't seen a television until the age of around thirteen meant his formative years had shaped him into someone that really couldn't be bothered with the shit forced on most kids.

  His cell vibrated and danced on the wooden table that he had his feet up on and he glanced at the caller ID. For some reason Jake had a stick up his ass about where Kayden's head was at. He didn't answer. He may well owe Jake Callahan his life but that didn't mean he had to put up with the shit that Jake kept throwing at him. The phone vibrated again. It moved closer to the edge of the table. Next time it would fall off into the deep pile rug. That would solve the problem.

  "I'm packing up," Dale announced from the doorway.

  "Thought you were here for two more days?"

  "Nik's picking me up and Jake called." As he spoke Dale checked his gun and then he slid it into his shoulder holster. "He had a message for you."

  "Yeah?" Kayden could well imagine what Jake wanted to say to him.

  "He says, and I quote, 'get that fucker to answer his phone'." A grin broke across Dale's face. Smiling was something Dale had been doing a lot of in the past few days and it unnerved Kayden. A fuck was a fuck. Sex had never made Kayden freaking smile like some hormonal girl. He ignored the feeling of envy that pricked inside him at what Dale seemed to have found with Joseph. They didn't know he'd been listening, but he couldn't help it. Hearing exchanged promises of more for both of them was wrong in Kayden's head. Man or woman, nothing lasted long enough in this world for enduring attachments. Dale may well fancy himself in love with Joseph but love was like having a perpetual Achilles heel.

  Attachments? Love? Just makes you weak, boy.

  His dad's words were indelibly etched into his soul. That and ten years of military-based training. He had stopped listening to his dad's warped view of the world a long time before the old man died. He smirked inwardly and some of that humor must have shown on his face.

  "What's funny?" Dale asked as he rolled his neck and stretched.

  "Nothing. Just shit in my head." He shrugged and Dale crossed his arms over his chest.

  "Phone Jake, yeah?" he said simply.

  "If I have to." Subject closed, Kayden deliberately picked his cell up from the table and pretended to scrutinize it. Dale huffed his own laugh and left, presumably to pack his gear. Kayden wondered for a moment if Dale's new posting was all on the up and up, or if it was more of this unofficial shit. If the case he was on now, babysitting this kid who'd had the snot kicked out of him, had been official then Sanctuary would have put him in one of the city located safe houses with medical units. Being out in the middle of freaking nowhere surrounded by trees and behind a wall of security smacked too much of his childhood. Jake knew damn well Kayden only took cases in the damn city. So why dump him here?

  His cell vibrated again and Kayden simply turned the phone off. All he was doing was delaying the inevitable lecture. He wasn't actually cutting off total lines of communication simply because the whole place was wired to Sanctuary ops. Jeez. You could even contact them from the bathrooms. Still, he felt a little thrill at ending the call. Jake Callahan may well be rich enough to have created, run, and built the Sanctuary Foundation but hell if that meant a thing to Kayden. To him, Jake was his annoying elder stepbrother. The young man who, at the tender age of nineteen along with his dad, had liberated Kayden and a few others from a compound at the ass end of nowhere. An ex-veteran compound, it was all Kayden had known from a young age but when Jake arrived as part of some liberating mission, fourteen-year-old Kayden had been the first to switch sides.

  Hell. That was only because his dad had made him.

  "You're a waste to us here. Fucking useless when all you want to do is book learn." His dad had spat that at him with the fire of trauma-driven hate in his eyes. "May as well do what they say and move out. I can't protect you no more. You have to make your own way." Stupid thing was, book learning remained a useful tool. With both the learning and the experience Kayden was the best in the compound. The best learner, the best fighter, the best at strategy. Still, nothing he had done for his father had ever been good enough and the young Kayden had tried so damn hard every single day.

  Kayden closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the sofa. Only when his dad had held his hand tightly with blood and air escaping his chest from a wound as big as Kayden's fist did he get the real reason why his dad had screamed he was useless. It was, according to the fucking idiot, the only way Jack Summers knew to get him to leave the place that his dad called his own form of sanctuary.

  God knows why Kayden was so damned introspective today. He turned the cell back on and near immediately it vibrated in his hand. This time Kayden answered the call with a curt hello.

  "Kayden. Stop avoiding my calls." Jeez. Jake sounded pissed.

  "I'm not avoiding them. I was busy." Kayden lied. Jake didn't even call him on it but he was used to Kayden's avoidance tactics.

  "Dale's been re-assigned so you're Robert Bullen aka Beckett Jamieson's case controller now."

  "There's not a lot to control. The kid's still unconscious."

  "Still?" Jake sounded skeptical and professional pride put Kayden's back up. He contemplated retorting with reasons why the kid, beaten to within a breath of dying, was probably not choosing to join humanity for a while but he didn't. That the trauma the young man had undergone had left him with internal injuries and a fractured arm and swelling so bad on his face that it was near unthinkable he would ever heal. Instead, Kayden resorted to what Jake expected from him. What everyone expected from him.

  "I poked him with a stick. He didn't move."

  Jake snorted. He could see through his brother's smoke blowing instinctively. "Just keep me apprised."

  "I'll keep you apprised." Kayden confirmed with sarcasm dripping from the words.

  "Hell K, what crawled up your ass and died?" For the first time in a while Jake sounded stressed and tired. It wasn't easy juggling millions of dollars in investments to the face of the world and then running Sanctuary behind the scenes. Added to that he knew Jake was being shadowed by some kind of FBI internal investigator. What the hell for no one other than Jake knew. As a man he should be respecting Jake and answering civilly. As a younger brother he really didn't know what to say to Jake's question. 'You sent me to the middle of freaking nowhere with a comatose patient', would probably be a start. Instead he just chose silence and finally Jake huffed his disapproval. "Not all your cases can be action filled little brother."

  Kayden frowned and felt more than a little uncomfortable. Jeez. How did Jake do that? How did he manage to cut to the heart of what drove Kayden's bad mood.

  "You know I don't do sitting around well. I have all this need in me to get physical. I'd give anything for a good fist fight," Kayden replied. Jake was the only one on this earth he would ever say that to. The restrained violence that lived inside of Kayden was only thinly veiled by civility. He had a temper but it never blew. He couldn't allow it to. That would mean losing control and Kayden didn't lose control. Ever.

  "A few days, K. Get him awake and debrief him. Then we can move him to another safe house, assign this elsewhere." He paused and Kayden imagined his brother ticking off items in his head. "Also, we have a training camp for some newbies and I could use your skills on that after you're done."

  Great. Just what he needed. Raw recruits from the alphabets—FBI, CIA, who the hell ever. All needing to be retaught skills and how to control being the one that stopped the bullet.

  "I need my martial arts expert," Jake continued. "I need the strategy expert."

  "Yeah, yeah." Kayden waved away the words. He didn't need to hear he was the best. Jake had him on the training team for hand to hand, strategy and survival. Whatever people insisted on labeling his skills, he knew that was the type of thinking that led to letting your guard down, didn't keep you at your peak. He had learned his lessons well and scars on his back and thighs proved just how much he had suffered for what he got wrong. At least in Sanctuary the training was civilized and included beer after. The irony of it all was being so damn good at hurting and defending didn't count for anything when the call to want to train as a medic happened. The intensity of his focus led him to want to be a healer. He had seen so much illness and pain, psychological damage, and PTSD that went untreated or remained misunderstood when his dad refused outside help for his fellow Veterans. Kayden wanted to learn to fix everyone. Jake had never commented when Kayden had announced his degree choice. Just supported the decision in the way an elder brother would.

 

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