“What happened to her?” she asked.
Turning away, he crossed to the hearth to stare into the flames. “MIDNIGHT had provided us with a radio transmitter so we could report in occasionally. We kept it inside an airtight trunk, buried in the ground a couple of miles from the encampment. We were supposed to check in every couple of days. Report any activities or plans. Let our contact know we were all right. Because it was risky, I usually did the contacting. I’d do it at night. Sneak past the patrols and steal away from the camp on foot. I could cover two miles in about nine minutes. I had a hand shovel buried beneath some rocks. It took me about a minute to get the case out of the ground. I would set up the antenna, spend about two minutes passing along whatever information I could. Then I would bury everything, hide the shovel and get back into the camp without ever being discovered. It was a relatively good system.”
“It sounds incredibly dangerous,” Emily said.
“It was.” Zack scrubbed a hand over his face. “One night when she’d come into my tent, I told her we had to stop. I told her we were compromising the mission. We were distracted.” His expression was tense. “We had a fight. She stormed out of my tent. I let her go, thinking we needed some time to cool off. I had no idea she was going to go to the radio.”
“Why did she go to the radio?”
“She’d had enough. She was burned out and wanted to quit the mission.”
“What happened?”
He sighed. “A shipment of weapons had come in just that afternoon. Neither Alisa nor I realized that night-vision goggles were part of the shipment or that the guards were wearing them that night.”
“Oh, Zack.”
“It was my job to know what kind of equipment was coming in, Emily. Guns. Explosives. High-tech devices. Whatever. It was my job to know.” Setting his hand against the mantel, he leaned. “I woke to voices a couple of hours after she left my tent. One of the guards had seen her leaving the compound and followed her. They caught her using the radio.”
“Oh, no.” Emily’s heart began to pound because she knew what he was going to say next.
“They dragged her back to the camp and woke the leader, a man by the name of Guy Hind. I stood just outside my tent while they questioned her. Alisa was belligerent and tough as nails. She didn’t tell them squat.” His voice broke off and he seemed to struggle with what he needed to say next. “And so they began hurting her.”
Emily could see his hands clenched into fists. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He was blinking his eyes rapidly, as if trying to erase from his mind the images of his lover being tortured. “I kept hoping she’d gotten through to our contact at MIDNIGHT, that they would send someone in before things got out of hand. But not even MIDNIGHT could get a team there fast enough to save her. And I knew I had a decision to make. I could either save her life and blow the operation. Or I could let her die and salvage what was left of it.”
He raised tortured eyes to hers. In their depths Emily saw deep and terrible pain.
“I ran back to my tent and grabbed my weapon. I was outnumbered twenty to one, but there was no way I could let them kill her.” His voice was so low and hoarse that she had to lean close just to hear him.
“I had the son of a bitch in my sights when he pulled the trigger,” he said.
For the first time Emily felt the sting of tears in her eyes. She could see the same pain etched into Zack’s every feature. It was a pain that was a part of him. An agony he’d accepted into his psyche and learned to live with.
“I felt that bullet go through her as if it had gone through me,” he said. “They shot her execution-style. She was killed instantly.”
“My God.”
“I figured I was next, but I wasn’t going to go down without a fight.”
“How did you get out?”
“Avery Shaw, who is my boss now, was an operative back then. Alisa had indeed gotten through to her contact at MIDNIGHT. Within minutes a chopper dropped a team of five men. Shaw was in charge and got me out, but he took a bullet in the spine that ended his working in the field.”
“Everyone else got out alive?” she asked.
“Everyone except Alisa.”
“And you blame yourself.”
“I’m the only one left to blame.”
She couldn’t imagine the horror of what he’d seen or the pain he must have felt. The crushing guilt. “That’s why you’ve been so determined to protect me from the people at Lockdown.”
His gaze burned into hers. “I’m determined to protect you for a lot of reasons.”
She stared at him, conscious that her heart was doing acrobatics in her chest, that her pulse was thrumming.
Crossing the short distance between them, he set one hand on her shoulder, touched her cheek with the other. “I care about you, Emily. I care too damn much and I honestly don’t think I could handle it if you were hurt because of me.”
“I’m not going to get hurt. What happened to Alisa was not your fault.”