THE COUGAR'S BABY - 19

C H AP T E R N I N E T E E N - - - - D A N I E L L A

Every time the door swung open, Dani fidgeted, looking up like a deer staring into headlights before realizing that it wasn’t Shaun. It was never him.

The office had been busier than ever now, with key details unfurling under the keen eyes of Dani’s team. But she found it harder and harder to concentrate on her work when feelings of guilt and remorse twisted her up so tight it was difficult to breathe.

I shouldn’t have done that to him, she thought grimly, trying to read the same line on the screen for the tenth time and failing yet again as her thoughts drifted easily to Shaun.

“Daniella?” a voice called, sounding like it had done so more than once already.

She recoiled from the screen, spinning around to meet the fresh face of one of the junior operatives, Kylie. There had been an influx of agents to The Firm whose age made Dani question their true calling in this madness, but it was not her place to judge The Firm’s HR decisions. Especially since she didn’t intend to be there for very long.

Finish this and you get out. This can all be a bad memory.

“Yes, Kylie?” she asked, trying to put some authority into her voice, though she scarcely felt it at the time.

“I think I got something,” he said, waving her along across the room to his station.

Dani padded up behind him as Kylie sunk into his chair and pulled up more video footage from a recent drone flight, as it remained the only way they could get any eyes on the place. The Firm had shut down the blocks around the building, which they’d found out the hard way when trying to create a recon nest in one of the nearby buildings. Luckily the operatives involved had been disguised and with any luck, the Silk Slayers had not caught onto the plot quite yet.

“You remember how you told us to keep an eye out for the guys you used to run with? We knew they were on the move but they hadn’t been spotted yet, right? Well, I think I got them,” he said, his voice conversational but betraying a modicum of pride.

Kylie pulled up a video and pointed to two men heading into the building from the back of a truck. They could only be seen for a moment, but after the video was replayed a few times, Dani had to agree. It was Shar and Ron.

Her lips tightened into a line and she nodded curtly, putting a hand on Kylie’s shoulder.

“Good work. I think it’s time to call that strike,” she said, her throat constricting at the words.

***

Dani hated this. It was late and night had fallen over Ilocos. Somewhere in those shadows, Squad Six was getting ready to move in, along with Squad Nine and some of her own men. And she was stuck in a damn mobile command vehicle, listening to chatter.

Once or twice, she’d heard Shaun’s voice come in over the comms and it damn near ripped her heart out. He sounded flat, strained, annoyed. She couldn’t blame him. She’d tried reaching out to him more than a few times, to make him speak to her regardless of what had happened that night with Roman. To make it better.

There was no swaying him. And it was all her fault. She’d wounded him harder than she even knew she could and now she was left to deal with the consequences of a great man brought to his knees by her careless tongue.

But you were right! He said as much! she tried to protest in her head, a feeble attempt to rationalize the pain she’d caused.

“Command, Squad Six ready to move in,” came Jerome’s stoic voice over the comms, crisp and ready for action.

“Squad Nine in position,” another voice recited. Dani gave a quick glance to the camera feeds running into the van. There was one on every team lead and essential personnel they had in there.

“Teams One and Three in place.”

Dani took a deep breath. Kylie was sitting in the car with her, keeping an ear on radio chatter in the surrounding areas and any incoming movement. She wanted badly to be there with the men, boots on the ground, making sure no one got hurt. But that was not her place. Ace had made it very clear that her mission here was to see this through, and while he hadn’t said it in as many words, Dani got the distinct feeling that he was worried about casualties.

He seemed to always know something that she didn’t and it was frankly pissing her off. She knew she wasn’t the only one who had such a reaction to the intelligence officer who seemed to run The Firm with an iron fist, though.

The plan was thrown together at best. They still didn’t know what the Silk Slayers were doing or why they needed Isabela, just that they’d been going to great lengths to keep it secret and hidden from prying eyes. Dani had managed to get her hands on the floor plans of the building, but there was always the possibility that there’d been extensive remodeling done on the inside.

As far as they could tell, there couldn’t be too many troops inside the compound, but that could always turn out to be wrong as well. After all, there was a steady flow of trucks moving in and out of the center, and while it was rare that they’d seen biological beacons pop up when scanning the vehicles, it had happened enough times to suggest that whatever was being transported was alive.

“I remind you all, this is a bag and tag. Take prisoners where you can, but keep yourself safe. The surrounding buildings are not to be cleared out; if there’s spill from them then you will have to deal with them within the walls of the compound. I expect all of you to get out of there in one piece. Am I understood?”

A round of ayes flooded the channel and Dani smirked mirthlessly, checking the gun she carried on her ankle and the gear belt she had thrown on just in case. Kylie had done the same.

Prepare for the worst.

“Lock and load,” she called, the traditional war cry of The Firm’s field troops, something that the office agents tended to mock with great relish.

But Dani had been a sailor herself and she knew the lay of the land. There was great power in tradition, in doing things the way they’d always been done, because it created a level of comfort and safety that was both rare and fleeting in this day and age. Her muscles tensed as she saw the teams burst into action, cutting into the fencing around the center, rappelling in from a nearby building where they’d been airdropped, barging straight in through the front gates.

But what if you’re wrong, Dani? What then?

It was the same nagging voice that came far too often lately. She wasn’t even sure whether the current bout was on account of the mission or her grand and explosive failure with Shaun. She figured it worked for both.

Roman’s face had fallen the moment he saw Shaun striding away, his powerful shoulders hunched and so tense that Dani could see them straining. It was as if she’d shot him in earnest, but the bullet didn’t kill, simply maimed and made him void to the world. Not only had she hidden his son from him, but she’d told him he wasn’t fit to be in his life. Rationally, she knew she was supposed to believe that.

Emotionally though? She couldn’t believe that Shaun would ever be a danger to her or Roman. Not anymore. Not after the way he’d looked when he’d left her house.

The only person she could get through to in Squad Six had been Jerome, and he’d told her in terms that were hard to misunderstand that Shaun did not want to talk to her. There was tension in Jerome’s posture whenever they would meet after the incident, showing Dani that Shaun had told his commanding officer about what had happened, but she could also see understanding in him.

His new wife had done much the same to him, in a way. They’d had a child together and she hadn’t told him, not even when they met again, and she’d tried to hide it from him. Dani could only imagine what her reasons were, but it wasn’t hard to find justification with these men.

They were killers. The only problem was, so was she. So who was she to judge?

Biting down on her lower lip, Dani watched the screens, her attention flipping from one to another as the men and women in the squads piled into the compound. She hated missions like this one, where the endgame was fuzzy and the options were both painfully limited and open to interpretation at the same time.

Communication was kept low, silence being their best friend as the troops moved in. Dani didn’t notice but it wasn’t long until her hands were balling into fists on the controls, a slow shudder running through her body. Something felt off. She simply didn’t know what it was.

Her eyes kept glancing over to Shaun’s feed more often than not, reading his heart rate and body temperature as he slipped in through an opening sawed into the fence, creeping along the length of it with his heavy sniper rifle tucked in a case on his back and an assault rifle in his hands. All of Squad Six seemed rather attached to their big guns, but they were effective with them, so Dani took no issue with it.

When Shaun clambered up steps of a tower on the outskirts of the compound, one that seemed completely devoid of life and looked to be a perfect nest for a sniper during the mission, things started unraveling. She heard it moments after Shaun must have, the heave of breath, the fall of a boot above, but it was too late for him to stop.

Dani watched as Shaun flung himself over the edge, the steel rungs clinking beneath his feet as he threw down his rifle and grabbed for the knife on his hip. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone there, but the moment that the steel blade crashed into the darkly clad man’s neck, sending crimson blood splattering as Shaun attacked him from behind, it became painfully evident that this assumption had been wrong.

The man’s finger twitched on the trigger of his automatic weapon, sending a spray of bullets flying in every direction. It was a short burst but enough to draw attention.

“Shit,” Dani mouthed, voicing the feelings Shaun must have had.

“Cat Four has been made,” Shaun growled into his headset, the sound tinny in her ears as Dani watched him drag the big and beefy lifeless body of the guard into the cover of the tower’s central post.

He stepped out just as quickly, grabbing his rifle from the ground, and when he looked down Dani could see several forms running toward him in the darkness. Her knuckles went white as he took aim with the assault rifle, not having time to take out the sniper rifle, and killed one of them a few feet from the tower. The second man fell from the rungs of the ladder with one deadly shot to the face and she could feel Shaun cursing as he moved to unpack his sniper rifle.It was a shitty position to be in, but he couldn’t move either. It was the only place where he had any kind of a view of the sparse buildings of the compound and until someone called for them to fall back, Shaun would be stuck.

Dani took a quick breath, willing herself to be calmer, but the next thing she saw on the screen left her anything but.