Maya Banks - Forged in Steele

“Maren.”

Caldwell’s voice froze her. She went utterly still, her blood turning to ice in her veins.

“What do you want?” she asked hoarsely.

Steele and Hancock both crowded close to her, their expressions fierce as they strained to hear every word.

“It’s obvious what I want,” Caldwell said coldly. “You and my child. Back where you belong.”

“It isn’t your child and you know it!” she screeched.

Steele put his hand on her arm and then put a finger to his mouth to signal her not to do anything to anger him. As if! She was bloody furious. If she could reach through the phone and wrap her hands around the bastard’s neck, she’d do it and squeeze the life right out of him.

“You are mine. The baby is mine,” Caldwell said. “And I want you both back. You have a choice, Maren. You come back to me and I let your parents go. You refuse and they’ll die while you listen on the phone.”

In the background her mother’s scream rose, and every hair on Maren’s neck stood up.

“Stop!” she yelled. “Don’t you hurt her. I’ll do whatever you want, but don’t hurt her or my father. Tell me what you want. Just stop it!”

“That’s more like it,” he said smoothly. “I want you here, Maren. You have exactly twelve hours to arrive or they both die.”

“Where?” she asked desperately. “You want me to just walk into their house and I’m supposed to believe you’ll leave them and take me?”

“You won’t meet me at their house. They won’t be at their house. I’ll give you the location once you’ve landed in Florida. As for you believing me, I don’t see that you have an alternative. It’s your choice, Maren. Get on a plane and get here. I’ll call this number in eleven hours and tell you where to meet me. Once you arrive, I’ll make the call for your parents to be released. If I don’t place that call in exactly twelve hours and fifteen minutes? They die. So don’t even think about fucking me on this. If anything happens to me and I don’t make that call, they will die a horrible death. I’m not bluffing, so don’t try to call me on it.”

“How do I know you won’t kill them anyway?” Maren asked, her voice rising with hysteria.

“I have no reason to kill the grandparents of my child. Not unless you continue to keep my child from me. I want you and I want our child. I see no need to have their murder between us for the rest of our lives. And if you prove cooperative and don’t fight me, I’ll even allow you to see them on occasion.”

“I’ll be there,” she choked out.

The phone went dead and Maren fell to her knees, sobs erupting from her chest in painful bursts. Steele’s arms came around her, pulling her up and against him as he held her firmly, stroking her hair, kissing the side of her head.

“Shhh, Maren,” he whispered. “You have to be calm. We have to think this through. I need you with me on this. You have to be strong for your parents. Do you understand? Pull yourself together so we can figure this out.”

“He’s crazy!” she said, her voice rising precariously. “Oh my God, you heard him, Steele. He actually expects me to just leave with him and if I’m a good girl, he’ll let me see my family every once in a while. As if we’re some married couple visiting relatives.”

“I told you, he’s unhinged,” Hancock interjected. “Completely lost his shit. I admit, I never saw this coming. I knew he had a thing for Maren, but he’s focused on business. He’s ruthless. I would have never imagined that he’d fuck over Maksimov. He’s signed his death warrant. When I got Maren out of there, he just lost it. She became his obsession. Getting her back. That became his single-minded goal. Nothing else mattered. And the hell of it is, I think he’s actually in love with her. He’s pissed that she got away, no doubt. But this isn’t about a power play and him seeking revenge for being thwarted. The fucker is actually in love with her and he’ll do anything to get her back, not even realizing that even if he’s successful and even if there were no KGI or Titan to take him down, Maksimov would take him and Maren both out. He’s living on borrowed time and he’s fucked from all directions.”

“Jesus,” Steele muttered. “Goddamn it.”

“Call in your team,” Hancock said to Steele. “We’re going to have to move fast.”

“We?” Steele demanded. “There is no we here, Hancock. You stay the fuck out of this.”

Hancock regarded Steele with a steady gaze. “I’m going in too. You need all the manpower you can get.”

“Just stop the arguing!” Maren said, anguish tearing at her insides. “We don’t have time for this. We have to go!”

Steele strode to the living room, picked up the radio and barked a terse order for his team to return to the house on the double. Then he came back to Maren and gripped her shoulders.

“There is no way in hell you’re going with that bastard, Maren.”

“What choice do I have? You heard him. We can’t trick him and send in KGI with me to take him down. If he doesn’t make that phone call, my parents die. And I believe him! He’s just crazy enough to do it.”

Steele’s team poured in from the back door and the front and within seconds they’d congregated in the kitchen, their stances rigid, completely alert and awaiting Steele’s orders.

“I’ll keep this brief because we have to hit the road. I’ll put a call in to Sam on the way to the airport and have him pull in whoever he has. We don’t have time to pull in Rio and his team. They all flew out yesterday, so Sam, Garrett, Donovan and the new team are going to have to be it.”

Then he quickly went over the situation in clipped sentences and in the end there was a room full of pissed-off, ready-to-go-in-and-kick-ass people.

“I’m going,” Maren said, staring down the entire team. “There’s no way you can do this without me. He’s calling me and if I don’t answer, my parents die.”

“Yes, you’re coming,” Steele said, each word dragged painfully from him. As if he recognized the inevitability of her having to go and had no choice but to place her in harm’s way.

She touched his arm and locked gazes with him. “I trust you, Steele. I trust KGI. We’ll think of a way out of this. But for now we have to go and we have to play it his way.”

Steele nodded, but he looked tortured. Then he turned to his team. “Let’s roll. We’re going to have to do all our planning in the air. We don’t have time to map it out with the others at the compound. I just hope to fuck that Sam and the others are available and can meet us at the airport.”

AN hour and a half later, they were in the air. Hancock’s presence had been contentious, and it was clear that no one wanted him there and that they didn’t trust him. But at the moment, Steele didn’t give a fuck who came as long as it meant keeping Maren out of Caldwell’s grasp.

She was sitting on the end of the couch in the lounging area of the jet, feet curled underneath her, silent and pale as she listened to the strategy being discussed.

Sam, Garrett, Donovan and even Ethan had come, as had Nathan, Joe, Swanny, Skylar and Edge. Plenty of muscle. If only they knew what they were up against.

Hancock had taken the floor, giving what information he had on Caldwell. It was his opinion that Caldwell wasn’t operating with a lot of manpower. Only two of his men had disappeared with him the morning Maksimov had lost patience and had moved to take Caldwell out. So if Caldwell had hired more men, it wasn’t likely he’d been able to recruit the most qualified of candidates on such short notice.

It had been only days since Maren had been taken from Caldwell, even though it seemed like weeks had gone by. Caldwell had disappeared only two days before, and finding hired muscle that quickly, while not out of the realm of possibility with the wealth and resources at Caldwell’s disposal, was difficult for a man who’d gone off the deep end.

One point in their favor. Hopefully they were dealing with subpar lackeys who were only looking to score a few quick bucks off Caldwell.

“If we knew where Caldwell was going to have Maren meet him, it would make things a hell of a lot easier,” Donovan muttered. “We’d know if it’s open or if there’s room for us to move in and take position, surround him on all sides.”

“But we can’t do that,” Maren broke in, her tone desperate. “If anything happens to him and he doesn’t make that call, my parents die. I can’t trade my life for theirs. I can’t! It’s obvious he doesn’t want to kill me. He’s talking a long-term relationship here.”

A visible shudder worked over her shoulders. Skylar was sitting beside her on the couch and reached over to squeeze Maren’s hand. Maren clung to it, as if desperate for that connection. Shared strength. So far she was holding up well, but Steele could tell she was teetering on the edge and could lose it at any moment.

“We know, Maren,” Donovan said, his voice low and soothing. “But if I can get in close enough to lock on to his cell signal, I can trace the call to the location where your parents are being held.”

“But he’s not going to make that call until he has Maren,” Sam said grimly.

No one looked pleased with that statement. Steele barely controlled his own reaction. He had to turn it off. He had to think of this as any other mission. Focus. Turn off emotion. Turn off the fact that the thought of Maren being in Caldwell’s possession for even a minute made him want to lose his mind.

Edge sat forward and cleared his throat. Everyone turned in his direction. The man never said much, but it was clear he had something to add.

“Look, I know this isn’t ideal, but as Maren said, he’s not planning to kill her. He’s obsessed with her. And he thinks of her child as his. So he’s not going to do anything that would risk her or the baby unless he feels threatened and decides to take them both out with him.”

Steele scowled, the words evoking images that had his insides so twisted up he could barely breathe.

Turn it off. No matter how many times he told himself to do it, he couldn’t manage the feat. His tightly leashed control that had never failed him, the tight rein he had on his emotions at all times, was frayed and at its breaking point.

“So we send Maren in just long enough that he makes that call. We wire her up, have her demand to speak to her parents. If we keep that line open long enough, Donovan can do his magic and lock onto that location. We split teams. One with Maren, one ready to move out the minute we get a bead on where her parents are. The minute that call ends, we go in, take Caldwell down, and the other team takes out the fuckers who have her parents.”

“Gotta say, that’s not a bad idea,” Donovan said.

“I don’t want her in his hands even for a minute,” Steele ground out.

“We don’t have a choice,” Maren said. “It has to be done, Steele. I trust you. I trust all of you. You’ll have my back. You won’t let him get away with me.”

“What if he doesn’t make that call until he’s on the move with Maren?” Skylar asked. “There’s a fifteen-minute gap between the time he says she has to show and when he has to make that call. That tells me he’s prepared for exactly what we’re planning, and he’s going to make that call on the move.”

“Then we have to make damn sure we don’t lose visual contact at any point, and we move when he moves. We also plant a tracking device on Maren, be prepared for the worst-case scenario if we lose visual or he actually gets away,” Sam said. “This guy is certifiable. He’s nuts. He’s not thinking clearly. That’s obvious. So he can’t have covered all his bases. His sole objective is to get Maren back. He’s discounted us from the beginning, when Hancock first warned him about us. In his mind he’s untouchable. That gives us an edge because even if he’s expecting us to make a move, he’s already thinking that he’s outsmarted us and he won’t be expecting the magnitude of our power and resources.”

“If he’s in a fixed location and isn’t on the move when he makes that call, I want Cole, P.J., Skylar and Joe in position, and when the call is done, I want him taken out,” Steele said.

“And why are you here again, Hancock?” Garrett drawled. “The way I see it, you aren’t offering much of anything unless you’re going to be holding pom-poms and cheering us on.”

Hancock stared coldly at Garrett. “Caldwell is my mission and I’ll be there when he goes down.”

“Yeah, yeah, failure isn’t an option,” Ethan said with a roll of his eyes. “We’ve heard it before. But from where I’m standing, this is one giant F on your report card, Hancock.”