Chapter Text
Dani couldn’t believe her luck. Or rather lack thereof.
First she had been dragged into Six’s mess. Then her boss had revealed himself to be some kind of shady psychopath. Then she’d had to reckon with the involvement of yet another shady psychopath (thankfully that one had been tranqued before he could cause too much trouble) and now that she finally had Six where she wanted him, she was being pursued by some speed demon from hell.
She was getting fucking tired of it. Her week had been a disaster to begin with and now she had to deal with all of this without so much as the promise of a paycheck.
“I really think you should pull over,” Six’s voice croaked from the back of the car. He’d kicked down the seat a while ago and had been giving unsolicited advice for the better part of an hour now and she was considering driving in a zigzag just to make him shut up.
“You pull over,” she said through gritted teeth, cutting in front of a truck that was going way above the speed limit. Their tail didn’t falter for a second and she watched its silver silhouette veer smoothly into her rearview mirror before she’d even finished realigning the car.
“I’m telling you he’s not going to give up. You’re just wasting gas.”
Great. So the maniac was someone Six knew. How many people were after him, exactly?
“You’re telling me to pull over so that the guy that has been breathing down our necks can catch up to us?”
She made a sharp turn, slipping between a biker and an SUV and felt a chill go down her spine as their pursuer found an even more narrow gap to squeeze through.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. All things considered he’s been very patient but we really should stop before he decides to put you off the road for real.”
She shot him an incredulous look in the mirror.
“Relax, he’s friendly.”
A beat.
“…as long as you let me walk out of your trunk in one piece.”
The car was swallowed by silence as she let the absurdity of that statement sink in. Then her hand jerked towards the gear shift, the car slowing and shuddering as she guided it to a nearby pullout. She could only hope Sierra Six wasn’t as insane as his reputation reasoned he should be.
“A mate?” she hissed furiously, her voice carrying in the small confines of the safe house.
Opposite her, Six was silent, plucking bits of dust and debris from his hair after his explosive escape from Lloyd.
Dani couldn’t believe her ears. Forget insane, Six was raving mad.
“We’re not supposed to have attachments,” she said, level. “We’re not even supposed to have friends. And you decide it’s a good idea to have a mate?”
A quick glance in her direction as her displeased scent flooded the space, curling sharp and accusatory around them. There was a nonchalance to Six she was still getting used to, a necessity perhaps if you were a Sierra and dealt with the kind of shit they faced on a daily basis. It still grated on her and forced her to recalibrate to find a stable footing in his presence.
In the silence that followed, her eyes involuntarily slid to the small kitchen attached to the room they were in.
The man, the ghost, the omega stood in the far corner of it, the bleak light of the lamp over the kitchen counter casting deep shadows over his face. He was slim and brooding, hadn’t said a word since they’d walked into the house, his scent and posture radiating the kind of serene tension she wasn’t used to seeing in an omega.
She could still picture it. The almost unnatural way the car had glided over the pavement. Six limping over to him, hands still zip-tied in front of him, one foot missing a shoe, before he stopped and leaned over to scent the man’s neck, a low purr reaching Dani’s ears over the roar of the traffic.
Six trying be calming or the omega trying to take the edge off his injuries. She wasn’t sure. Not that it mattered. All that did matter was that Six had gone and done something incredibly stupid without losing an ounce of credibility and that pissed her off to no end.
“We’re not supposed to,” Six said finally. “And yet it happened.”
He shrugged, picking at the caked mixture of blood and debris plugging one of his scrapes. Dani sent another look in the direction of the kitchen. Then swiveled her eyes back to him.
“You’re going to tell me exactly how it happened,” she said slowly. “Or you won’t see me lift a finger to help either of you out of this mess.”
The shitty fluorescent bulb above them flickered cheerfully and Six tossed her a tight grin.
“Mighty generous of you. I guess that’s too good to pass up.”
The story was as banal as it was outrageous. He’d been tasked with clearing an area of California from mob violence and found the kid sitting smack dab in the middle of it; some robbery mishap making him a target of the mafia and setting him on the run, leaving a trail of bodies and progressively angrier mobsters in his wake.
At some point the situation had escalated into a war of finger-pointing and factional infighting and the government had begun grumbling about the chaos, whining loud enough to get someone to bring Six in.
It was a quick kind of job. A holiday almost, by a Sierra’s standards, quickly cleaning up the scene, rounding off rough edges and scaring the mob back into order while getting rid of whatever was vexing them and causing them to rebel in the first place.
Only he’d found that the center of it all was an omega and somewhere along the line he’d lost the guts to kill the kid.
Dani grit her teeth at that.
A target at Six’s mercy somehow ending up as his mate. There were implications there, unpalatable scenarios that she didn’t want to think about because she didn’t want to believe a man like Six would stoop that low. Thoughts of duress, lack of choice, power imbalances.
But whatever the case, all three of them had ended up here, with both Six and the omega still alive and Dani wading through Carmichael-made shit that she needed to scrape off before it sucked her into a place of no return. Obscurity. Redundancy. Inconvenience.
She had no time to think about Six’s dubious choices or the agency of the omega lurking in the kitchen. She couldn’t if she wanted them to cooperate long enough to survive. She could only pray that there wasn’t an uglier side to the story that would fester at the edges of her conscience long after they moved on with their lives.
Six’s gaze was steady as it held hers while he waited for her to make a decision. Dani felt the itch on the back of her neck subside as her scent stopped spitting invisible daggers.
“Come on,” she said, standing and hiking her bag up over her shoulder. “Let’s go and find Cahill.”
Dani felt vindicated when they arrived at Cahill’s Prague residence and the woman took one second to look at the omega before turning back to Six and calling him all manners of things synonymous with idiot. She hadn’t been nice about it.
Dani thought she could have been even less nice.
Admittedly, though, the kid had come in handy once the shit started hitting the fan. The collateral would have been astronomical if it hadn’t been for his driving, to say nothing of Six’s rapidly expanding collection of injuries.
“I told you, he’s unmatched.” Six had tried to lighten the mood once they were in the clear and Dani had given him a look that spoke more for itself than a cocked gun did. He’d been shameless enough to break every rule in the book. He could at least try and scrounge up some shame now.
The kid followed them like a shadow throughout it all, never protesting, never stepping out of line and never questioning their instructions. The only thing she’d been able to glean was that he seemed genuinely afraid for Six which was plain in the tightness around his eyes and the way his hands gripped the steering wheel while the bullets zipped past Six’s ears overhead.
He had still made himself useful all the way up to the hospital where they’d stationed him as a lookout while she and Six ducked inside to locate Claire’s pacemaker. He hadn’t been able to spot Lloyd’s mercenary. In his defense, Dani wouldn’t have tagged him either.
The scramble that followed was a bit of a blur and she merely remembers snapping out of it once the merc’s bike had disappeared around the bend, the low frustration of an unloaded gun simmering in her chest and her heart hammering behind her ribs as she looked around for Six.
She found him on his way out of the hospital, a decidedly guilty expression on his face.
“Where’s your mate?” she’d asked, running an appraising look over his injuries. He didn’t have many fights in him left. Maybe one. Two if they were lucky.
“Inside. Sleeping.”
“Sleeping?”
“It’s a hospital. They have drugs.”
The answer made her reel back and stare at him, anger momentarily forgotten.
She put the pieces together before her conscious mind could ask for a catch-up. Any steps they took now would be bringing them closer to Lloyd Hansen.
No sane man wanted something they loved anywhere near Lloyd Hansen.
Six’s eyes were steel hard, his scent a bleeding wound. She’d let her upper lip slip under her teeth for a moment before slinging his arm over her shoulder and walking them to the nearest patrol car.
Lloyd had lived up to his reputation and created a hell on Earth for them that Dani had no intention of revisiting anytime soon. By the time dawn had peaked over the horizon and she looked at Six’s battered body, she’d made up her mind to end this ordeal as quietly as possible.
Cooperating with Carmichael left a taste worse than a three-day-old hangover in her mouth. Still it was a better alternative to losing her career.
The next time she heard of Six – outside of one horrid briefing she wished she could erase from her mind, if only for the reek of Carmichael’s cologne – he was a ghost in the wind. A specter haunting Carmichael’s fuckup whose name was fleetingly attached to Claire Fitzroy’s abrupt disappearance before any and all trace of him was wiped from the world.
As far as anyone knew, Sierra Six was a shark that had briefly broken the surface, wreaked chaos and then quietly retreated back to the depths where no one could find him without his meaning to. Dani could only wonder what had happened to his mysterious mate.
(She had gone back to the hospital to check, a few weeks after the fact. Her expectations had had a brief pleasant meeting with reality and that was basically that.
The driver had taken a dive with the shark.)
For all that Six had done something immeasurably stupid though, she’d gained enough respect for him to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was out there finally taking responsibility for his actions. She could only guess.
The only thing that mattered was that she’d never have to work with a Sierra again.