Plans of action unfolded before Knox, a dozen possibilities, each hampered by the lack of solid intelligence. “Stay here,” he murmured to Rafe and Gray. “Keep an eye on Conall when he gets back.”
Gray nodded. “Don’t worry. We won’t let him spin out.”
Knox pivoted and started toward Mace, assessing him physically as he came closer. He was leaner than he’d been before. His dark hair was longer than usual and unkempt, and though Mace had always been pale, there was an unhealthy pallor to his skin.
Like Knox, Mace was in his early forties. Unlike Knox, he no longer looked a decade younger. Pain had left its mark on his face. His nose had been broken at least once and left to heal crooked.
The harshest change was his eyes. The warm, blue gaze that had set the injured and sick at ease was gone. Mace watched him approach with dead eyes carved from ice.
Pain sliced through Knox’s palm. He eased his grip on the dog tag, but when he opened his fingers, blood stained its silver edge.
That seemed appropriate.
Knox stopped a few feet away from the chair. Mace could break free of the zip ties with one good heave of muscle—but they’d slow him down enough for Knox to have time to react. “Mace.”
The answer was automatic, chilling, with the flat affect of recitation. “Mason, James. Medic. Designation MD-701.”
Knox’s heart seized. “Mace—”
“Knox, Garrett. Captain. Designation 66–615.”
Knox crouched down to be at eye level with Mace. “Yes. I’m Garrett Knox.”
“Gray, Matthew. Sniper. Designation 66–793.”
Reciting his own designation was the standard training in this sort of situation. Reciting the rest of them … It was as off as the tone of his voice. Wrong. Terrifying.
“Morales, Rafael.” A hint of desperation crept into Mace’s eyes. “Intelligence. Designation 66–942.”
“Quinn, Conall,” Knox finished for him softly. “Tech. Designation TE-815.”
Mace turned his head, his gaze darting wildly as he strained against the plastic ties binding his wrists.
If he tugged much harder, he’d snap them, and the situation could easily escalate into violence. Knox lowered his voice, but the words still rasped out around the lump in his throat. “C’mon, old man. You and me are the only things standing between these puppies and certain death.”
Mace froze, then dragged in a rough, uneven breath. “Or pissing all over the furniture.”
Uncertainty vanished. How many times had they exchanged those wry words in the first months after Knox had formed the Silver Devils? Rafe had been all of twenty-three years old, and Conall just twenty-one. Their exuberance at being freed from the rigid confines of training had been exhausting sometimes.
Moving slowly, Knox settled cross-legged in front of Mace, his hands resting carefully on his legs. No weapons. No sudden movements. “They still piss on the furniture sometimes, but they grew up okay.”
Mace looked at him. Studied him, his gaze flickering from Knox’s relaxed hands up to his face, then back again. “You’ve changed.”
“We all have.” Knox didn’t hide the pain from his voice. “Losing you changed us.”
Mace didn’t react to Knox’s words or his pain. His stare remained flat, dead. “My captain never turned away from hard truths.”
Knox exhaled softly. “You’re a trap.”
“Yes. So what are you waiting for?”
“Were you released, or did you escape?”
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe. How did you find us? Richter?”
“No. I know you better than Richter ever did.” A simple answer, one that Mace followed with a soft noise of impatient disgust so familiar that it ached. “You’re stalling.”
“No,” Knox corrected him. “I’m doing what I’ve always done when presented with a trap. Studying it to understand my enemy. What kind of tracker did you have?”
“Trackers,” Mace corrected. “Standard subcutaneous and IM installations. Several satellite-enabled, and a backup radio frequency model.” He paused. “I cut them out, but there might be more.”
“Conall will look. He has this whole building signal-blocked, so no one’s getting anything off them right now, even if they are there.” Knox focused on keeping his hands relaxed as he asked the question he didn’t want to know the answer to. “Why were you attacking Gray?”
Mace shuddered. His eyes glazed over, and he whistled a few discordant notes before shaking himself and focusing on Knox once more. “Richter is hoping you’ll be too sentimental to do what needs to be done.” His voice dropped. “Prove him wrong, Garrett. Now, before it’s too late.”
“No.” The word cracked out of him too harshly. Knox couldn’t claw it back. Wouldn’t. He turned over his right hand and uncurled his fingers, one by one.
Mace’s dog tag sat there, edged with Knox’s blood.
“I will not kill you,” Knox told him softly. “Don’t ask me to go through this again.”
A hint of sympathy and something like regret flashed through Mace’s eyes, gone in the literal blink of an eye. “I warned you. Remember that.”
“I don’t need warnings, Mace. I need intel.”
“And I don’t have it to give, Captain.” He exhaled roughly. “All I have is a mission. And the Devils don’t know how to fail … even when they want to.”
“I won’t let it come to that.” Knox rose and curled his fingers around the dog tag once more. “Conall’s going to scan you, and then we’ll make a plan. Okay?”
Mace turned his head, his wrists straining against his plastic bonds again as he resumed whistling.
His heart shredded, Knox returned to the tense knot of people on the far side of the room. Conall had returned with a bag of equipment, his expression haunted. Rafe looked shaken, and even Gray’s eyes were tight with concern.
Nina’s sympathetic gaze was Knox’s only relief as the potential pitfalls of their situation spun out in front of him, every plan he considered prohibitively dangerous.
Nina touched his arm. “Is it what we thought?”
“Yes. A targeted weapon, sent to eliminate us.” Knox looped the dog tag back over his head and tucked it under his shirt. The metal burned over his heart. “He asked me to kill him.”
Conall made an incoherent noise of grief, and Maya wrapped an arm around him with a soothing noise. “That’s not an option,” she stated firmly. “Obviously.”
Knox couldn’t look away from Nina. Reality loomed between them, vast and unspoken.
Tobias Richter knew they were alive. Maybe the rest of the TechCorps didn’t believe him. Or maybe they did and they were keeping that knowledge off the record for reasons of their own.
It didn’t matter. Only one thing did. “He’s a threat,” Knox said softly. “To all of us, but to you, too. Especially Maya. If Richter tracks him here…”
“Then we’ll deal with it,” Nina said firmly. “Mace is your family, Knox. His place is here.”
“If Richter shows up, I will murder the shit out of him,” Maya said, her cheerful confidence a thin layer of bluster over the fear lingering in her eyes. Knox opened his mouth, and she glared at him. “Or I’ll let one of you bastards do it. I don’t care. Dead’s dead, and between all of us, we can make the guy real dead.”