Die for You

Chapter 68

It felt like I was sitting outside myself listening, so detached I was from what was going on around me. My mind was elsewhere, running images of Becky, involved in an ambush, screaming her lungs out in terror as the bullets flew around her. '

You should have been there,' my brain told me.

'You could have saved her if you were there.'

'You might have killed her if you were there,' the other side of my brain berated me, reminding me why I was sat here in the UK and not in India. 'You're a jinx remember?'

It was a fucking mess, yet one more fucking mess in my fucking career of keeping people alive. Damned if I do and damned if I don't.

"Freen?" I blinked and looked up as James called out my name, "you ok there, kid?"

"What the fuck do you think?" I replied turning and looking into his eyes before, "sorry, boss," I said as I saw the honesty in him; "not doing well right now."

"No need to apologize, kiddo," he said placing his hand on my shoulder. "I know how you must be feeling right now."

"Do you, James? Do you really?" I snapped, causing him to look away, catching Tony's eyes.

"I do though, Freen," Jenna interrupted, squeezing my forearm, "I know that pain if not more. This isn't helping dear, and Becky wouldn't thank you for it."

She was right. Everything I knew about Becky told me that sitting here in a funk wasn't what she would have wanted. What she would have wanted was for me to pull myself together and look for a way to help her. And punching my way through a television screen wasn't helping at all.

Five minutes later, my hand was covered with bits of sticking plaster and one of the IT guys had been in and removed the damaged television, the cables left dangling from the plaster work in mute accusation to the rage I had suffered. Half an hour after that, and I was wearing out the carpet again, tramping between Ops, the conference room and James' office trying to confirm or refute the story on the news. 

Everyone in the office was tiptoeing around me as if they were waiting for me to explode again, everyone except Jenna that was. Jenna was a tower of strength once more, the self-control that she had shown with the death of Rob being exerted once again with the possible loss of her daughter.

Damn, I love that woman.

I jumped in my seat as the phone on the conference room table rang again, James snatching it out of the cradle before the first ring had ended. 

"Yes?" he said quickly, before going silent. I was watching his face as he listened, and I caught a look from Jenna that told me she'd come to the same conclusion I had.

"Well, James?" she said when finally he put the handset back into the receiver; "is my daughter alive or is she dead?"

James blinked at the directness of her question, pausing to look across at me. I didn't actually say a word, but I desperately wanted him to speak up, give us the good news, or the bad.

"We still aren't sure, Jenna," he said, his voice low. "The reports that are coming in say the cars were shot up pretty badly. I'm afraid it looks like we've lost some more people and that Becky and some of her people were taken."

"Taken?" Jenna interrupted, "you mean they've been kidnapped or something?"

"That would be my assumption," James replied nodding, "if you remember, the team thought that the game plan had changed; looks like they were right."