Saved by Venom 3 (Grabbed)(38)

“Cipher, run intel on this guy and this woman. Find someone who knows them. I need to know the score between this couple.”

“Working on it already, boss.”

Venom gathered four team members and quickly laid out three tactical plans. Once they docked with the Arctis, they deployed to the food court with maximum speed. Venom quietly signaled his men to take up a perimeter around the victim and the subject, replacing the policeman who had kept the situation contained.

Smiling broadly and projecting friendliness, Raze cautiously approached and made himself visible. “Ben, my name is Raze. I’m a member of the Special Response Unit and I’m just here to talk.”

“Stay back!” Ben shouted as his wild-eyed gaze darted around the cavernous space. “You stay back or I swear to god I’ll put a bullet through her brain right now.”

“Okay.” Raze moved back a few steps and held his hands up in front of him. Still smiling, he said, “We’re hanging back and giving you some space but I need to get some medics in there to retrieve that wounded man.”

“Stay back!” Ben’s shout echoed in the evacuated food court.

“Ben,” Raze said calmly, “I hear you, man. Okay? I know that you’re feeling cornered but I need you to understand that I cannot help you out of this if more people die. Let me send three men out to grab this wounded man and then we can talk about what I can do for you.”

Venom’s adrenaline amped up as he prepared to move forward with extricating the wounded man. Fierce and Threat sidled up next to him with two of their heavy-duty shields. The mic attached to his uniform and tied in to the earbud he wore allowed the team to communicate. “We’re in position, boss.”

“Copy that.” Raze continued to negotiate with the hostage-taker. “Ben, this guy is badly wounded. He’s bleeding everywhere. Let me send my guys in to drag him out and then we can talk about what you want.”

“What I want?” Ben snarled furiously. “What I fucking want you took from me!”

Venom eyed the growing blood pool on the floor. The witness reports stated the injured man had been hit in the legs and arms. They weren’t immediately fatal wounds but that much blood loss presented a serious problem. He glanced at Fierce and Threat who nodded with understanding. This wasn’t going to be an easy extraction but it had to be done.

“Ben, I hear you. I understand you. But Ben, I need you to look at this man you shot. He’s not one of us. He didn’t take anything from you. He’s one of your people. He’s innocent. He has family. Please let us help him.”

Venom watched as Ben’s panicked gaze darted from Raze to the small team he headed and back again to the boss. “Yeah. Okay. They can take him.” He lifted his weapon menacingly and pressed it against the woman’s temple. “If they try anything stupid she’s dead. You understand?”

“Yes, Ben, I understand you.” Raze tried to build rapport with the hostage-taker. “My team is going to slowly walk out, grab the injured man and retreat. Then we can talk. Okay?”

Ben nodded jerkily. He swung the poor woman he held around, putting her body between his and Venom’s advancing team. The sight of a man using an unarmed woman as a shield sickened Venom but he pushed down his disgust to focus solely on the job at hand—rescuing the injured man.

Safe behind Fierce and Threat’s shields, Venom gripped the wounded man under the arms and dragged him out of the line of fire and beyond the perimeter to the medics who waited. Two bloody streaks marked the path they had taken.

After handing off the injured man, Venom silently delivered orders to his men with a series of hand signals. They fanned out to take their new tactical positions. As Venom moved to the spot he had picked, he caught sight of Terror. The Shadow Force operative wore a murderous expression. Venom was reminded of his friend’s quip about farmers and pitchforks. Clearly somewhere the security chain had been broken.

“Thank you, Ben. You’re a good guy. I can tell you don’t want anyone else to get hurt.” Raze thought nothing of the sort but he was damn good at telling gun-wielding subjects whatever they wanted to hear if it mean a peaceful resolution.

“Boss,” Cipher’s voice carried across the team’s earbuds, “we’ve got a problem. The female hostage is thirteen weeks pregnant. Her husband is a fighter pilot and he’s arrived at the perimeter. He says this Ben character was her childhood sweetheart but he was wrapped up in that League of Concerned Citizens group and she broke up with him right before she was Grabbed.”

“What’s this league?” Raze asked the question they were all thinking.

“Shadow Force suspects they’re a front for the Splinters.”

“Great.” Raze’s grumbled answer mirrored Venom’s feeling. An armed and highly agitated man with possible ties to a terrorist group holding hostage a woman pregnant by the Harcos male who had taken her away from him? This had shitstorm written all over it.

“Ben, let’s talk about what I can do to help you, okay? Because, man, you’re looking a little boxed in here. I have a feeling this day didn’t go quite the way you had anticipated but it’s all right. I can help you.”

“You can’t help me.” Ben glanced around nervously. “I’m on my own now.”

Now? Venom wondered at Ben’s choice of words as he moved into position. Is there an accomplice lurking in the crowd? Maybe an inside man? It would explain how he had been able to board the transport ship with a fake ID and get his hands on a weapon once aboard the Arctis.

With the practice of so many years staring down a scope, Venom picked a spot beside a column and behind a fake potted tree. His rifle felt so natural in his hand. He treated it as an extension of his body. Painfully aware of its deadliness, he treated the rifle with the respect it deserved. This wasn’t a weapon to be used lightly. This was a weapon of last resort.

But the tactics Raze attempted with the crazed man weren’t working. The minutes ticked by as Raze tried to build rapport but Ben couldn’t be reached. He grew more agitated and panicked. This man, this Ben from Grogan’s Mill, had boarded that transport ship earlier in the morning with one sole purpose—he wanted to kill this woman and then take his own life.

“Boss, I have the solution.” Venom stared down the scope at the gun-wielding subject.

“Understood.” Raze continued to attempt to reach Ben through negotiation. “Ben, put the gun down and talk to me. Let me help you find a way out of this situation.”

Ben gripped the gun even tighter and brought it back up toward the female hostage’s face. “There’s no way out of this.”

Venom’s finger itched against the trigger. Ben had already killed one man and attempted to kill three others. Venom wasn’t going to give this bastard the chance to hurt that woman or her baby.

“There is, Ben,” Raze hurriedly assured him. “But you have to lower your weapon.”

The subject swallowed and scanned the room. He let his arm fall and pulled the gun away from the woman’s face.

“Thank you, Ben. I appreciate your cooperation. You need to remember that if that gun comes up again, you’re going to force our hands. Do you understand?”

Ben nodded. “Yeah. I get it.”

“Good. Ben, tell me what I can do to help you.”

The man perked up suddenly. “You can stop taking our women!”

Was this a politically motivated hostage situation? Venom couldn’t wrap his head around this guy. First, it seemed as though Ben had taken the woman and shot up the place because his love for her had been twisted into something cruel and dark.

Now Venom suspected someone in that stupid league of his or even a Splinter member had wound this poor jackass up, shoved a gun in his hand and pushed him onto that transport ship on a suicide mission. There was no end to the list of people who wanted to cause problems between the Harcos warriors and the people of Calyx.

“Ben, that’s a demand that goes above my pay grade. If I had the power to save Kate’s life by ending the Grabs, I would do it in a heartbeat.”

“Bullshit.”

Raze kept that smile of his plastered in place. “It’s not bullshit.”

“You expect me to believe an officer like you doesn’t have one of our women chained up in your bedroom?”

“I don’t have a mate anymore. The one I did have for a short while was from my home planet. She came to me of her own volition. I didn’t need to steal a woman to find a bride.”

“That’s because you’re a real man,” Ben remarked. “You’re not like these other cowardly dicks who come down and take our women.”

“I understand your frustration, Ben.”

“What happened to your wife?” The arm Ben had clamped around Kate slid down a little as his grip loosened.

Venom didn’t take his eye off the scope but he could imagine that vein in Raze’s temple jumping at the very mention of his first mate.

“She left me.” Raze spoke the words calmly and without any hint of the embarrassment and pain his old friend still felt. “For a man from the colonies. For one of you.”

“Because you beat on her?”