You Only Love Twice (Masters and Mercenaries #8)(109)

Something was wrong. It didn’t make a lick of sense.

“I’m going to review the tapes, but this looks like some sort of practical joke.” Ten looked up at the fire detectors. They blared through the space. “Can we get these turned off? I can’t think.”

Simon moved beside her. “Where’s Jesse?”

“He’s asleep.”

Why would anyone risk a practical joke in a building where everyone was armed to the teeth?

Simon looked back at their suite of rooms. “In your room? The one that’s farthest from the lifts?”

She nodded. It was the farthest from the elevators and everything. “Why?”

But she’d already started to answer her own question. If it wasn’t a joke, then what was it? A distraction. Everyone should have been in bed. She and Jesse had the room farthest from the king’s. She doubted Jesse would even have heard the gunfire if he’d been awake, but the outer bedrooms would have heard it easily.

Phoebe turned back and started to run. Her heart pounded in her chest. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be because they would have to have gone through the hallway. She would have noticed someone dragging a body down the hallway. No one had gone past her so it was all right.

“Phoebe?” Ten was behind her.

“Jesse. This was about Jesse.” Simon kept up with them.

She just ran. She ran past the living area and back to the room where she and Jesse had become man and wife. Maybe not in the eyes of the law, but they’d bonded in their hearts. Her husband was sleeping and she was going to laugh because she was so damn paranoid.

Except she wasn’t. She flung open the door and the bed was empty. There was a huge hole cut in the window and she could see the ropes that had allowed the team to lower the scaffold down.

She watched in horror as a helicopter flew past and then moved quickly into the distance.

Jesse was gone.





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN





He was stuck again. Damn. He knew this dream. It started with the world going hazy. His eyes wouldn’t focus. He could shake his head, but somehow the world remained fuzzy. His stomach twisted and that was when he realized that whatever he’d eaten was about to come back up.

He was on his back. That wasn’t good. Even with the world spinning around him, he knew he couldn’t stay on his back. With sheer force of will, he turned just before the bile got to be too much.

So f*cking weak. He needed to make it to the bathroom, but his gut wouldn’t wait. He got to his knees and then let it go. He shuddered and shook, but when it was done, he finally felt the tiniest bit better.

He moved away from the mess he’d made and tried to focus. This time it was a little easier.

“Phoebe?” He seemed to have some sort of flu. Or he’d eaten something he shouldn’t have. He couldn’t remember. Why couldn’t he remember? The last thing he could recall was Phoebe in his arms. She’d cried herself to sleep, but it had been a good thing. It had been healing.

Where was she?

Why was the ground under him so hard? Their room had plush carpet. Everything about it was luxurious, so why had his knees banged against what felt like concrete? He forced himself to really still. His eyesight finally stabilized and he could see the ground beneath him. Definitely concrete and not the pretty, stained kind. This was the color of dull steel.

He wasn’t in his room.

His back was to something. His hands were free so he reached around. A wall and then to his left was metal. Through the haze he recognized a cot. He’d been laid on the cot in a room he didn’t recognize.

“Hello, Mr. Murdoch. It’s a pleasure to see you.”

He was going to be sick again. That voice. Yes, this was a nightmare and he needed to wake up because he was going to scare Phoebe. He could get violent when he dreamed, but since he’d started sleeping with her, he hadn’t had the dream. Not even once.

His hands shook. Fine trembles that were as much about fear as they were the shaky state of his body. He was afraid. He’d always hated that, didn’t want people to see it. After he’d come home the first time and started seeing Eve and then Kai, he’d told them he wasn’t afraid. It was a lie meant to save face. And then Ian had sat him down with a beer one night and told him that only a f*cking idiot wasn’t afraid and that fear was a gift to help the intelligent creatures of the world not get their asses blown away.

So he was willing to admit just how scared he was and somehow in accepting it, he was able to control it.

“I see you’re not as used to our cocktails as once you were. I’ll have them dial down the dosage for next time. I don’t want you to be sick. I need you good and healthy for our training sessions.” The voice had a deep, almost hypnotic quality to it. Just the sound of it sent him back years to that horrible place where he wasn’t Jesse Murdoch anymore, to where he was someone’s dog to be beaten and abused.

His vision started to fade again. That was when he realized this might not be a dream. In his dreams, he always stayed in control and fought. He was a better version of himself in his dreams. In real life, he retreated and let some f*cking beast take over. Or he gave in to the drugs and pretended nothing was wrong.

“You’re wondering if you’re dreaming,” the voice mused. His shoes rang against the concrete as he moved closer. “Aren’t you? Let me ask you this. What would be worse? Learning that this is the only reality? That the last few years were only a dream brought on by the narcotics I gave you? In that scenario you’ve really lost nothing, but you gained nothing as well. Your woman was simply a dream. Or is it worse if she’s reality and you’ve lost her?”