Spider Game (GhostWalkers, #12)(21)
“Let it go, you’re rockin’ the boat and you’ve got the water churnin’. Seriously, man, get it under control.”
No one in his life had ever told him that other than his older sister, Dru. He could almost hear her, there in the quiet of the swamp, laughter surrounding him, telling him to “get it under control.” She didn’t mean the same thing, but still, it was a good memory. One he cherished. She always laughed when he annoyed every other person around him. His mother loved him, but she mostly had no idea what to do with him. Dru had a mind like his and a sense of humor that got both of them through the first part of their childhood with a drunken father and an absent mother.
He forced himself to nod. To breathe. The volcano of rage inside of him subsided and became buried under the glacier of ice he had painstakingly built to protect himself and the rest of the world from what he knew he’d become. He sank onto the bench, turning his back once again on Wyatt. What was he doing? He had to think it through. Nothing disturbed him. He didn’t allow it. He sure as hell had never experienced jealousy, especially jealousy brought on by his own imagination.
Ever since he’d laid eyes on Cayenne he’d been intrigued. He had gone with his team members to rescue two of Wyatt’s little daughters. They were locked in cells, scheduled for termination in Whitney’s facility there in the swamp. He had gotten them out and then gone to the other side of what essentially was a jail to find Cayenne.
She’d taken his breath away, but more importantly, she’d taken something else from him, some part of him he knew he was never going to get back. It was hers now. Each time he saw her, the longing in him for a home of his own, one like Wyatt had, filled with love and laughter and warmth, grew in him. With all that, just what was he doing? What did he expect? The woman had spent her entire life in a laboratory. She’d been used as a lab rat. She’d never tasted freedom and had no idea what to do with it.
Trap was certain she was making the building where she’d been scheduled for termination her home, and she’d practically admitted it to him. She hadn’t left the swamp when she could have. She should have. She was trained as a soldier – all the children Whitney had taken from orphanages around the world had intense combat training as well as combat experience. She might not have practical experience, but she’d had the training. If they were skilled as assassins, he always made certain they were tested in the field, just as he’d tested Cayenne by putting her in the maze with a team of supersoldiers.
Pepper, Wyatt’s wife, was a seductress, able to kill with one bite, but they lost control of her, not factoring in that she might be too stubborn, abhor violence and be too moral to control. She had a code, and that code didn’t include killing innocents. Trap hadn’t been able to read the file on Cayenne. When they’d rescued the children, Wyatt had removed as much as he could from the labs, but Cayenne’s file was corrupted. All he knew was that she was deemed too dangerous for anyone to handle her. Every single handler apparently was too terrified to work with her. He had a couple of experts working to recover the data, but it was going to take time.
So how would she get the two brothers off the waterway where she could more easily rob them? And why wouldn’t they remember she had been the one to take their wallets? She had to either cloak herself – and that made no sense when she had to lure them to her – or she had a way of completely wiping their memories. In the bar, she’d used her voice to dull the memory of her presence, but what if she could actually wipe out incidents entirely? That was the scariest answer to him because he never wanted her to try that shit with him.
“She’s ahead of them, Wyatt. She has to pick her victim weeks in advance and then figure out a route they’re going to take to get home,” Trap said. That had to be how she did it and why she didn’t rob often in spite of her need for money. She set everything up far in advance, including her own escape route. She was a GhostWalker, and GhostWalkers always prepared for everything to go south.
“She somehow gets ahead of them and her boat ‘breaks’ down,” he continued. “She plays the damsel in distress. She was in that cage, and she used her voice to draw me in. She whispered to come closer. She’s good at what she does, but she doesn’t want to make a mistake. That’s why she didn’t hang with them longer. She’d already chosen the brothers and was just making certain she’d been right about them being slime buckets.”
“So I need to figure where she’s going to draw them to the bank and stop before they hear the boat.” Wyatt frowned. “Best place would be right before they turn into the canal heading to their homes. The Comeaux brothers all built next to one another, just off of Honey Island. You have to turn off the main canal right where it gets extremely shallow, and there’s a narrow canal that leads back to their homes. No one uses that canal but them, so she wouldn’t have any business there. I’m betting she gets herself hung up in the shallows on purpose so they have to help her.”
“Would they? They don’t seem like good Samaritans to me.”
“A woman alone at night? Hell yeah, they’re going to stop. No one around. They figure they can do anything they want to her and she won’ say a word because she’ll be too afraid of them. They’d tell each other she had it comin’. She flirted with them. She wanted it. Whatever it takes to make them live with themselves. Who knows? Maybe they just get off on hurtin’ a woman. Their brother Vicq certainly did.” There was not only distaste in Wyatt’s voice, but an edge of anger.