“When you’re quite done,” she said, “you’ll remember you still have a contract to complete.”
That drew a look of surprise from Mack, and Delight looked at him.
“You won’t have been briefed yet,” she said, “but Cutter and Case negotiated our assistance, and then negotiated an agreement to assist us in the retrieval of you, Bennett’s agents, and Abeona’s Dasojin counterparts. You and she have some catching up to do.”
Mack straightened up, and I almost fell over. Up until that point I’d been leaning on him, and just hadn’t realized how much. Man was far too comfortable.
Pritchard snorted, and finished bandaging my other hand.
“Give it a half hour, and you can take it all off. Not before, though.” He gave me an assessing stare, and added, “You’ll need to check in with the med centre for the rest. Boy got a couple of good hits in.”
That was an understatement, but I shrugged, anyway, and registered the stiffness in my chest.
Man! The boy really had got some good hits in.
“In the meantime,” Delight said, “I need you to liaise with Bennett and Abeona.”
Mack put his hands on the table, and stood up. I followed his example. I figured I was back in his chain of command, given he was back.
‘You better believe it, girl.’
Delight gave us both a look that said we were being difficult—but no more than was expected.
“I suppose you want to talk to Case, now?”
“Wanta point me to the comms?” Mack returned, and Delight pursed her lips.
“You sure you don’t want to just pick up what you need from Cutter’s implant?”
Mack slid me a sideways look, and then just shook his head.
“I need to talk to Case sooner, rather than later. I’m betting you haven’t told her we’ve been retrieved successfully?”
Delight shook her head.
“Not yet,” she said. “And she’ll want to talk to you, anyway. Might as well get it over and done with.”
Like it was some kind of chore…but there was a wry twist to Delight’s lips that said she wasn’t surprised, and didn’t really mind the delay.
“Comms?” Mack asked, and Delight sighed.
“Can I at least get Cutter to kick things off with Bennett and Abeona?”
Maybe I was wrong about how she felt about the delay. She didn’t quite plead, but—Stars!—that was close. I felt Mack pause, looked over at him in time to see him give Delight an assessing stare.
“Sure,” he said. “You need Tens and Rohan, too?”
I watched as she let out a breath, I hadn’t known she’d been holding. Mack acknowledged it with one word, “Allies,” but it held everything he needed to say.
From where I sat, it was clear he was calling an end to the word games, or, at the least, a temporary truce. Delight gestured towards a door at the back of the room.
“Comms are that way. I’ll…”
“I’ve called them. Rohan should be okay, now.” He glowered at me, before turning back to Delight. “But the wolves hit him hard, and it wasn’t the first time.”
Delight didn’t answer that, but led the way out of the room, pausing to speak to Bennett as she did.
“Pretty sure that catering company looks after wherever they took your boys.”
I rolled my eyes. So much for not having left anything in the holding center’s system. Delight smirked.
“Holding centre is clean,” she told me. “I promised nothing about the catering company’s systems.”
Her words reminded me that the catering company and the holding centre were under two different names, and ostensibly two different corporations.
“Nice.”
Her smirk disappeared.
“Get to work.”
I pulled up a seat opposite Bennett.
“So,” I said, “where do you want to start?”
Before he could reply, however, Abby’s voice intervened.
“How about we do this as a team?” she asked, and, before I could ask her how she expected that to happen, Tens, Rohan and Cascade came into the room.
“What did we miss?” Rohan wanted to know, as Cascade bounded over to Bennett and licked his ear, before heading in my direction.
“Dog’s got no loyalty,” I said, trying to fend him off as he nuzzled the bandages on my hands.
Rohan arched an eyebrow, and gave a short, sharp whistle. Cascade returned to his side, sliding his head and back under the boy’s hand.
“He’s plenty loyal,” Rohan said, “but he knows who his friends are, too.”
He paused, catching my eye, and I noticed the bruise marring his cheek.
“Thank you.”
I really couldn’t think of an answer to that, so I waved a hand towards Bennett.
“This is Investigator Bennett, from Sharovan. We’ve contracted to help him retrieve a couple of rogue employees.”
Tens cocked his head, and laid a hand on Rohan’s shoulder.
“Care to elaborate?”
I heard Bennett draw a breath, but Tens was already rifling through the files in my implant, pulling the ones tagged with Bennett’s I.D. Rohan must have gone along for the ride, because the look he cast the investigator was little short of murderous, when they came to the memory of our capture on Depredides.
“Steady, Rohan,” I said. “You’re only getting half the story.”
Judging from the look on Tens’ face, Rohan wasn’t the only one. I was only glad when they kept watching, and moved onto the next file, although Cascade being shot came close to breaking a barely held truce between emotion and commonsense.
The explanation he gave, later, didn’t work too far in his favor, either.
Rohan was as possessive as Hell of his dog.
Mack returned just as they reached the agreement we made to find Bennett’s missing personnel, and he just dug right into the files the boys had already pulled. I saw the look on the investigator’s face, and shrugged.
“Sometimes you’ve just got to let them get it out of their systems,” I said. “They seem to think I don’t share anything with them.”
Mack snorted.
“That’s because you don’t. Not when you can help it.”
I leant back in the chair, tilting my head so I could watch him come towards the seat beside me. He
