His mouth quirked. The motion tore a ragged edge through his upper lip, but he didn’t care.

  There was no such thing as innocuous anything when his grandmother was involved. And he’d known the fiercely protective woman would find him. Whether or not she should.

  They all knew the risks. Fighting for her, with her, came with a single guarantee: trouble. He’d known it all his life. Accepted it.

  But he’d be lying if he didn’t admit to stark-raving relief now.

  Not all the objectors the Church captured warranted the risk to free them. A strict policy of disavowal is what helped keep the cells alive, even after the Mission did everything in its power to run them to ground. Danny had never known if he’d be one of the lucky ones, or if they’d leave him to rot to keep the rest safe.

  Part of him hoped to be rescued. The rest of him knew that dead men revealed no secrets.

  But that wasn’t true, either. He didn’t know if he’d last another round.

  Crawling across the floor, he hissed out words that would have had his feisty grandmother reaching for the back of his head. It took more effort than he wanted, more energy than he’d have strictly liked, but he did it. And the metal bit he found as his fingers closed around that swaying black dot had his heart singing hosannas. Within seconds, he’d managed to fit the small comm into his bruised, tender ear. “Hello?” It came out a guttural rasp.

  “You found it, great job.” The voice that filled his straining ear sheared through . . . damn, everything. Pain and fear and impatience turned to a focus so sharp, so intense, that for a single moment, the gray cell faded to nothing. “My name is Jonas.” Masculine, warm without edging into inappropriately cheerful, Danny listened to the finest tenor he’d ever heard and fell back with a raw, visceral shudder. His shoulder collided with the far wall. He didn’t care.

  There was someone out there. Someone real. He wasn’t alone.

  “Danny? Danny, are you all right?”

  Trembling, he cupped one hand over his ear and rasped, “Nice to meet you, Jonas.”

  “We’ll meet face to face soon enough,” said that finely tuned voice. “Stay with me, kid. I’m going to get you through this.”

  He closed his eyes. “I think I love you,” he managed through the shudders gripping him, rocking through his hard-won sense of calm. He wasn’t alone.

  There was a brief moment of silence, and then a touch of amusement murmured through the link. “I bet you say that to all your rescuers.” His mysterious benefactor didn’t wait for a response. “Hang tight, man. We’re going to have to wait for the right moment, but I’ll be with you every step of the way. Can you walk?”

  Danny’s eyes squeezed tighter. Even through the red and white fireworks detonating behind his eyelids, he knew what he’d say. “You bet.” Now, he just had to make sure he meant it. “Can . . .” His voice cracked, embarrassingly loud in the still silence of the cell. He braced an elbow against the wall behind him, wincing through the pull of abused muscles. “Can you see me, Jonas?”

  “No,” he immediately replied. “So I’m going to have to rely on your eyes.”

  “Eye.”

  “What?”

  Danny’s mouth quirked again. Another flick of wry humor. Another twinge of torn scabs. “One’s swollen shut.”

  The man said a word that turned the comm link electric.

  It took effort not to laugh. “It’s a good eye,” he assured the mystery man. Jonas. He didn’t recognize the name, but he didn’t know all of his grandmother’s people. She liked it better that way. Hell, he was only one of a handful—a seriously trusted handful—who even knew she existed.

  He shifted on the cement floor, cringing as his tailbone failed to find a comfortable spot on the unyielding surface. “How long?”

  “I’m not sure.” At least the man was honest. “A few minutes? An hour? A day? When it happens, it’ll happen fast, so you better stay with me, okay?”

  Maybe it was the pain. Maybe it was the surreal kind of intimacy in the small cell; just him and a mysterious voice from God. He couldn’t see Jonas’s face. Didn’t even know what to picture, with that smooth-as-milk-chocolate tenor and decisive optimism. He kept one dirty hand cupped over his ear, only vaguely aware he did it.

  “With a voice like that,” Danny murmured, his chin sinking to his chest, “I’ll follow you into hell itself.”

  Chapter Two

  * * *

  EVERYTHING FROZE. HIS mind went blank. Jonas’s fingers spasmed across his keyboard, sending a string of gibberish into the communications relay and forcing him to concentrate enough to delete the extraneous digits.

  Be cool.

  This wasn’t the first agent he’d gotten out of a tight spot. Jonas knew the amount of strain something like this put on a body and on a mind. Hadn’t he spent untold hours flirting with Naomi West during the most stressful times? Of course he did. He’d done that with most of the female missionaries, and teased the men when he thought he could get away with it. He was—no, he’d been—a technical analyst, the master of the wave. Information had flown to and through him; at the time, he was one of a handful of tech analysts who served as a touchstone for every operative who’d ever gone into the field.

  Every analyst knew the game.

  And nobody—nobody—had known his. Jonas had preferred it that way. He still did.

  So he took a deep breath, let it out in an easy chuckle that felt like glass in his throat. “No need, kid. Follow my directions and I’ll lead you right out to freedom.”

  On the screen in front of him, he watched Danny raise his head, but he didn’t look around. He’d taken Jonas at his word. Jonas didn’t mind lying. Telling him the truth might have put Danny in an uncomfortable spot. Made him think twice about everything he said or did. The kid had pride, and nobody liked to be seen at their worst.

  Jonas needed him to trust everything he said. To believe in him. And, if that meant a little harmless banter, that’s exactly where Jonas excelled. Well, that and masterminding technical sabotage.

  As if on cue, a silhouette passed under the security camera mounted in the far corner of the hall outside the cell.

  “Okay,” he said, keeping his tones even and light. His fingers danced over the keyboard, a complicated jig that didn’t take much more than a fraction of his attention. “There’s someone coming in.”

  “Do I—?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “Don’t do anything. Don’t even look up. Act normal.”

  In this case, normal meant beat to shit.

  He’d seen some brutal things over the years, but this ate at him.

  Danny didn’t move as the operative swiped his thumb across the access panel outside the door. While the security system filed through its database, Jonas’s fingers skated across the keys in a pale blur.

  Almost there. On a third monitor to his left, two columns of code compiled.

  Jonas watched the screen, disengaged his right hand from his contest of man versus machine and tapped in a command that brought three more cameras up in a split-screen survey. The largest remained focused on the cell.

  “Got it,” he murmured, a nanosecond before the mechanical tumblers released.

  The Mission had changed their security parameters. Smart move. He would have done the same.

  But not good enough.

  On the surveillance screen, the operative with the close-buzzed hair crossed the narrow cell.

  “Shit,” Danny muttered. It fractured into a grunt as the operative bent, fisting a hand in his collar and hauling the prisoner back into the chair. “Round two?” He grimaced. “Round three?”

  Try round fifteen.

  The interrogator—a different one, Jonas noted; broader but more squat than the last—wasn’t wearing a jacket. He also didn’t bother with the restraints. Cocky. And helpful.

  “Stay calm,” Jonas murmured.

  Danny didn’t verbally reply, but Jonas saw him close his eye. He stiffened, bracing for an impact that didn’t come.

  Jonas adjusted the rimless glasses on his nose. A habit born from waiting too long before tightening the frame’s grip on his temples.

  Why was the interrogator just staring at him? Like a statue, all wide shoulders and breathing heavily enough to pick up through the earpiece and the surveillance camera.

  After too long, Danny cracked open that crusted, blood-smeared eye. “Don’t make me wait for it,” he complained, even if it did shake.

  “Brave,” Jonas said into the line. “But don’t get cute with him. I need you on your feet.”

  “Been a while.” The interrogator’s voice was deeper than the previous one’s, lacking the refined polish of higher intelligence. A meat-man, then. Fists and facts. All Jonas saw of his head capped in hair buzzed so short he couldn’t tell if it was brown or blond. Thick rolls carved lines into the back of his neck, disappearing into his collar.

  “Can you hear everything?” Danny asked.

  “Oh, yeah, I’m all ears,” said the operative, but Jonas knew it wasn’t for him.

  “I hear it loud and clear,” he replied softly. “Go easy.”

  The man put his fists on his hips. A posture Jonas had seen other missionaries adopt, especially the men. Fist to hip, elbows wide out, legs braced. A stun baton hooked into his belt beside his right fist, a knife sheathed by his left. The man was a fighter. And he obviously didn’t count Danny as a threat. “You going to tell us anything?”

  Jonas found himself holding his breath, his hands frozen over the keyboard as Danny stared at the squat man in the white button-down shirt. The thick line that was his lashes, crusted into dark spikes, dropped.

  Then swept up again. “Blond.” Pure terror fought for control under a nonchalance Jonas sensed Danny struggled to maintain.

  The man bent, bracing one hairy-knuckled hand against the back of the metal chair. “What?” He frowned. “You out of your head already?”

  Jonas’s eyebrows rose.

  “Maybe not,” Danny murmured. “Too smooth for blond. Maybe a redhead. I like redheads.”

  Something twisted in Jonas’s chest. Something that felt a hell of a lot like laughter. And warning. Because Danny wasn’t talking to the interrogator.

  “I’m not blond,” Jonas confirmed quietly. There was no way that operative—Jonas couldn’t bring himself to call the unknown man a missionary—could hear the earpiece. Even still, he didn’t risk it.

  “Quit playing,” the interrogator demanded, shifting his hand to Danny’s short hair. He wrenched the kid’s head back, scowling down at the blood and bruises. “You going to tell me where your people are or not?”

  Danny’s grunt of pain echoed in the suddenly vise-like tension of Jonas’s chest. Come on, Gordon. Hurry your ass up.

  Through his teeth, Danny gritted out, “Red?”

  Jonas’s breath shuddered. “Nope,” he managed, somehow keeping his anxiety, his fear from his voice. Nice and easy. A touchstone. “Afraid not.”

  Danny’s bloody mouth curved up. Just a hint.

  Just enough to break the operative’s patience. As Jonas watched, horrified, he drew back a heavy hand and slapped Danny across the face. Right on the side already swollen nearly to twice its original shape. Already strained flesh tore. Danny cursed; pain and anger twisted together, strangely obscene coming from the kid’s lips.

  Come on!

  “Brown, then,” Danny gasped. Blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

  “Hang on” was all Jonas trusted himself to say. It was as good as a confession. “Help is coming. Just hang on a little bit longer.”

  The interrogator closed both hands over Danny’s shoulders, wrenching him upright. After being restrained for so long, Danny’s muscles would be stiff. Jonas knew that from experience. Too tense to take his own weight easily. The pain of it locked Danny’s shoulders, pushed the tendons of his throat into stark relief as Jonas seized the edge of the monitor and held on tight.

  So strong. So . . . hell, the kid was too brave.

  “Please tell me you have—” Danny sucked in a breath, hands limp by his sides even as the operative held him. “Green eyes.”

  What would it hurt?

  “More or less.”

  “You stupid fuck,” the interrogator said grimly, and let go. Danny’s knees buckled. “Keep playing the games, witch. You’ll break. They always do.”

  They always did, too.

  Jonas swallowed a surge of nausea. Then forgot all about it as motion in one of the thumbnail sections on his monitor caught his attention. “Shit,” he whispered. “Not yet.”

  Not until the operative was gone. Danny was in no shape to—too late. Every light on the systems array hooked into his computer went red. The virus was in. Way earlier than expected. May’s mole must have hauled ass. He had ten minutes before the Mission caught on.

  Less if they’d managed to find some technical talent in Jonas’s wake.

  The guard reached for the door, sure the broken body behind him remained no threat.

  Jonas straightened, hard enough to send his spine into spasms of shock and pain, but he didn’t care. His hands darted over the keyboard, even as he ordered, “Don’t let him go.” Every word compressed to a firm line. “Danny, he can’t get out, or the jig’s up.”

  The noise Danny made—not quite a grunt, too shrill to be a sigh—didn’t sound like a confirmation.

  Shit. No. “Kid, I know you can do this. I’ve talked with your grandmother. Your blood is pure hot sauce.” Even as he poured all the encouragement, the reassurance, the strength he could into the line, he mainlined command after command into the program his insider had dropped into the Mission computer banks.

  One by one, coaxed along with every keystroke, the cameras along his plotted escape route flipped back on a loop. Locks clicked open. All that idiot had to do was reach for the security panel and he’d know.

  Please.

  It wouldn’t be enough. They waited too long. Hell, even a hard-ass agent like Silas Smith would be thinking twice after a week of beatings. The shaken wreck that was Danny Granger didn’t have it in him.

  “Fine.” A bare murmur.

  “Christ,” Jonas breathed as the kid shifted. Between one scudding heartbeat and the next, soundless, he lunged across the three measly feet separating him from the squat man’s back. Quicker than even Jonas could catch, the stun baton at the man’s belt was in Danny’s battered hands. Clumsy as hell, but it didn’t have to be anything but unexpected to work.

  “Fu—!”

  Without a blink, without even hesitating, Danny’s thumb depressed the rod’s power switch and the live end slammed into the back of the guard’s head. Just at the base of his skull, where the thick rolls of flesh began. The exclamation tangled in the man’s throat. Body jerking violently, the man folded in on himself like a building with its foundations torn out.

  If he didn’t die with that much voltage to the brain stem, Jonas might just reconsider his shaken faith in God.

  The narrow figure on the screen swayed, dropping the baton. “Okay, angel,” he muttered, rough and just this side of keeping it together. “Now what?”

  HE’D KILLED A man.

  At least, Danny thought he had. The baton was a thing of sleek menace, beautiful in that he’d had no sense of the voltage arcing through its slender haft. If he hadn’t been on the receiving end already, he could have spent hours just poking at the guy and never know how bad, how horrifyingly painful the fucking thing was.

  But he knew. And so he left the baton where it rolled under the bolted chair and didn’t touch the heavy-set man at his feet. Dead or not, it wouldn’t make any difference to Danny’s need for escape.

  Or to his mysterious rescuer’s state of mind, apparently. “Out the door,” Jonas instructed, his sublime voice calm. “Hang a left, and keep going.”

  Danny wasted no time. He didn’t hop so much as stagger over the prone torturer, but given the circumstances, he didn’t care. He’d have plenty of time to convalesce and get his usual athletic stride back before he went hunting for the brown-haired, green-eyed man with the voice of an angel.

  And when he did, Danny knew he’d be holding his breath.

  Maybe he misread the signs.

  Maybe he wanted to misread the signs. It wouldn’t be the first time. Danny wasn’t quiet about his sexuality; at least not in the kind of crowds that didn’t care. He saw a man he liked, he took a chance. He just had to get there.

  But as he gripped the edge of a door he couldn’t get away from fast enough, he didn’t stop to wonder why the mystery voice in his ear pushed his buttons. It didn’t matter. He wanted to push a few of his own. If it worked, he’d find himself enjoying those first tentative steps of the relationship dance. Sleek and sweet and just a little bit clandestine, given the Church’s views on men like him.

  If not, if Jonas tended toward a thing for women, he’d move on. He always did.

  He reached back behind him, shut the heavy door with a final, audible click. All at once, a vise unlatched from around his lungs, and he took a deep, painful breath. It stitched a cramp all the way up his side; he didn’t care.

  He was out. He could breathe.

  “Now I can see you,” the angel said in his ear, low and soothing. “Good job, kid. I knew you could do it.”

  “Only because you’re there.”

  The truth slipped out without Danny’s conscious permission. A tight, intense statement of fact that seemed to throw Jonas off as much as it did Danny. The man on the other end of the frequency sucked in a hard breath.

  The silence in his ear stretched taut.

  Wow. Even if the man ended up straight as a playboy on a woman-conquering bender, walking away from this one would leave a mark. He could add it to his collection.

  He closed his eyes, shoving a filthy hand through his limp hair. “Which way?” First things first. Whatever the case, whether Jonas made a habit of flirting on comm lines or Danny was a special case, he owed the man his gratitude.

  In person.

  With his heart on his sleeve.