hanging in the balance, but the clock was already ticking. Knox had to get them to the rendezvous point and secure their futures before their own innate senses of decency overrode their survival instincts.
He had to be hard enough for all of them. Merciless enough. They might hate him before the end of this, and Knox wouldn’t blame them.
But he couldn’t care. Not about that and not about Nina, with her alluring smiles and irrational compassion. She could be the best damn person in the world, and it wouldn’t matter to Knox. If betraying her could buy his men their futures, he’d do it in a heartbeat.
He couldn’t watch another one of them die.
DANI
Nina came back from her perimeter sweep silently seething, and a frisson of alarm raced up Dani’s spine.
Trouble. So much about this job was plain old, straight-up trouble.
It made more sense when Knox strode into the cavernous main room of the warehouse a few minutes later, looking just as pissed. He shot Nina one irritated look before pointedly turning his back on all three of them and stalking to where Conall lay, stretched out on a bedroll. Nina ignored him, every ounce of her attention focused on pouring herself a cup of coffee.
Dani nudged Maya with her foot. “Guess the honeymoon’s over.”
“Good,” Maya grumbled softly. “I feel better about life when she’s a little mad at him.”
It wouldn’t last. It never did—Nina could get angry or irritated, but she always seemed to burn through the emotions like flashfire. She just didn’t possess the bitterness that fueled and sustained grudges. “She likes him.”
“Nina likes everyone.” Maya settled more comfortably on her bedroll, her legs crossed, a little silver packet of freeze-dried peaches in one hand. “She can afford to give people the benefit of the doubt. If they try to fuck her over, she can just flatten them.”
“Yeah.” That was the easy part. Dealing with the fallout, that was another thing entirely.
Dani opened her bag and set out several soft, folded pieces of cloth and her gun oil. She grimaced when she pulled her knives from their sheaths—she’d wiped them down after the fight earlier, but she’d missed some of the blood, which sucked. She liked 1095 carbon steel for fighting, but it rusted like a motherfucker.
She started the slow, meditative process of cleaning and oiling her blades. She could do it without thought. Hell, she could probably do it in her sleep.
The TechCorps trained their executive bodyguards well.
Dani let her hands move about their task and looked up as Nina joined them. She was still tense, though her breathing had steadied, and she no longer looked like she might snatch one of Dani’s blades and go after Knox. She sipped her coffee, grimaced, and made a soft noise of frustration.
Maya held out her bag. “Hungry? I can reconstitute something for you.”
“No, thank you.” Nina sighed. “It’s just … been a day. And Captain Knox doesn’t seem to want to play nice.”
No shit, he didn’t. He had something up his sleeve, and only a sociopath would want to smile and laugh with someone before jamming a knife into their back. It was a special kind of hellish mind game, and, for all his faults, it didn’t seem to be Knox’s thing.
But Dani had already voiced her opinions about him, and about the mission, so she only shrugged. “Some people don’t want to get close. We don’t need to be buddies with them. Let’s save that for the people back home.”
“Yeah. Though the nerdy one is growing on me.” Maya ran a finger over the edge of her battered watch. “He fixed the crackle in my left earbud. Is he going to be okay?”
Nina’s fingers tightened around her mug. “I don’t know. I hope so.”
Dani glanced past her. Conall kept trying to reach for his tablet. Every time he did, Knox snatched it away with an admonition she could clearly read on his lips: Relax. Judging from the painfully tense set of his shoulders, he didn’t seem to be taking his own advice.
Gray had another gun broken down—how did he have more than her?—and was cleaning the barrel. Rafe was reading an actual book, his long, nimble fingers toying with the corners of the pages long before he actually needed to turn them.
That figured. He seemed like a tactile sort, one of those touchy-feely types who were always rubbing up on people and things, exploring the world through physical perception instead of using their other, easier senses. Nina was