Hell on Wheels (Black Knights Inc. #1)(23)

If I tell you, I might have to kill you. That was a joke, wasn’t it? Or maybe not.

She gulped before nodding, aware that this was the turning point.

“Don’t, Boss.” Nate spat.

Frank turned to him, his expression darkly resigned and fiercely uncompromising. “She deserves to know, Ghost.”

Nate swore violently beneath his breath, then glued his eyes to the table.

Ali suddenly felt the need to throw up. A sick foreboding settled at the bottom of her stomach like a disease-encrusted rock.

“Nate and Grigg were on a mission to Syria.” Frank began. “Before they could complete their assignment, they were captured by tangos, uh, terrorists, and tortured for three days. Nate was able to make it out. Grigg wasn’t so lucky.”

He stopped there. Just stopped.

She frantically searched around for a trash can. No lie, she was going to hurl.

Becky must have recognized the look on her face, because the woman jumped up and before Ali could begin to heave, a plastic-lined waste basket was shoved under her nose.

The first wretch brought up the Coke she’d been drinking. The second one was all blue slushy.

As she looked down at the regurgitated Coke and slushy covered smattering of papers and discarded Post-its, she realized, despite her less than gracious response to the news, Frank had no doubt given her the short, clean version. If tales of torture could ever be short and clean.

Holy crap.

Saliva pooled hot and acrid in her mouth, but nothing else came up. Thank goodness. As if she hadn’t humiliated herself enough today, now she had to go and lose her lunch in front of these iron-willed, no doubt iron-stomached, men and women. They probably thought her a total wimp. They probably thought, no wonder Grigg never told her the truth. She’s got the backbone of a jellyfish.

Wonderful. Just…wonderful.

And maybe they were right. Maybe Grigg hadn’t trusted that she could handle the truth.

The urge to cry returned in earnest, but someone offered her a distraction when they handed her a bandana. Choking back her disgrace and horror, she wiped her lips before lowering the trash can.

Hesitantly, she returned her attention to the group and was simultaneously gratified and humbled to note there was no censure, no disappointment or disillusionment on any of their faces. In fact, most of them looked as torn-to-pieces as she felt and that just made the tears gather faster. She blinked rapidly and fervently wished for a moment of privacy. Unfortunately, privacy wouldn’t help her figure out what was going on. Sticking it out, hearing the rest of the story—no matter how awful—was the only thing that would help with that.

Dragging in a trembling breath, she folded the bandana into a neat square and asked the only question there was, “Why?”

“Why were they captured and tortured?” Frank replied calmly, as if he hadn’t spent the last couple of minutes watching her completely lose it.

She nodded, though part of her wanted to plug her fingers in her ears, shake her head, and sing la-la-la. Sometimes ignorance really was bliss, but she’d come too far to back out now. She wanted to know it all. She needed to know it all.

Frank dropped his reluctant gaze to his big hands, carefully folding them around his cup of coffee as he shook his head. “We don’t know. Wrong place at the wrong time, as far as we can tell. The terrorists who took them weren’t supposed to be operating in that region, considering Syria and Lebanon aren’t exactly cozy neighbors. All our sources indicate it was happenstance. Piss poor luck. Grigg and Nate were in transit to their target when their vehicle was ambushed by Hezbollah militants.”

She shivered and swung her teary gaze back to Nate. His square jaw was working hard enough to crush granite. Then she remembered. “Oh, my God, I hit you that day. You’d been tortured and I hit you. I…I’m so sorry, Nate. P-please forgive me.”

She hiccupped and one mutinous tear escaped. Her chest was so tight she wondered how her heart continued to beat through the constriction. She’d hit a man, a patriot who’d sacrificed so much, who’d been recently tortured.

“Nothin’ to forgive,” he managed to grind out. “I’m the one who should be sorry.”

Huh?

She dashed away that single tear with shaking fingers. “For what? What have you possibly got to be sorry about? It wasn’t your fault you made it out and Grigg didn’t.”

Becky made a strange strangled sound, and Ali’s eyes darted over to the young woman. She was using the frayed hem of her grease-and-paint-stained T-shirt to wipe at the fat tears running down her reddened cheeks.

What in the world was going on?

The horror on the men’s faces, the anguish on the women’s was about more than Grigg’s death and her ill-timed venture into physical violence.

“So,” Dan said softly as he put an arm around his wife, who was also fighting a flood of tears. “If it wasn’t Brazil and it wasn’t the capture by the Lebanese, what else could it be? Grigg hadn’t been tapped for anything previous to those assignments in about two months.”

He was changing the subject. Ali knew a blatant evasion when she heard it. She opened her mouth to ask just exactly what it was they weren’t telling her, but Becky beat her to the punch.

“No,” the young woman announced firmly, every eye in the room settling on her tear soaked face. “He did have one other mission in there. A brief, personal security job he did for some senator.”