by Megan Crane
“Not much to lose, then,” Jonas muttered.
“Obviously I assumed you had a history, but I was thinking more the naked kind,” Isaac said. “Not this. Not that she dared see you in a compromised position and live to tell the tale.”
Jonas wanted to break things. He wanted to let the quicksand have him. He wanted to turn around right now and go deal with Dominic Carter, because he owed the other man a world of pain, and it would be deeply satisfying to deliver it.
He mostly wanted not to be having this conversation.
“We need to figure out who this guy was back then,” Jonas said with as much quiet dignity as he could muster. “And how he got from mercenary work to defense contracts and, more important, weddings like this one.”
“I have a lot of follow-up questions,” Isaac said.
Jonas couldn’t seem to maintain his cool, and that was the most galling part of this whole thing. He’d lived through one of the worst missions of all time with Isaac and Templeton without once losing his cool, despite how very many times he’d thought they were well and truly screwed. But throw Bethan into the mix, and he was a disaster.
“I’m not answering your questions,” he snapped. “Things that happened out in the field should stay in the field. Bethan showing up in Alaska complicated that, and I resent it. I don’t understand why that requires so much commentary or speculation.”
There was a pause. And as it stretched out, Jonas got to think about how incredibly foolish it had been to show his hand like that.
To Isaac Gentry, of all people, who knew him better than almost anyone else alive.
Another reason Jonas preferred to remain unknowable.
“I meant follow-up questions about Dominic Carter’s rise to power,” Isaac said calmly. Much too calmly for Jonas’s peace of mind. “Although now I definitely have other questions, too.”
The worst part was knowing he’d brought all this on himself.
“We’ll be finishing up the wedding portion of this mission tonight,” Jonas managed to say, doing an admirable rendition of the version of him who would never have shown a crack in his armor in the first place. “I think both of us are more than ready to get back to reality.”
Or maybe that was the worst part. That he could say things like that, believe them, and also have this other thing in him. The part of him that couldn’t seem to let go of how she’d felt in his arms, swaying gently to a love song. The part of him that couldn’t get past the way she tasted. The way her scent moved through him, brighter than all those California flowers.
He didn’t know how he was going to lock all that away once they made it back to Alaska and returned to form. He only knew he would.
Because what other option was there?
“Listen to me,” Isaac said then, and Jonas braced himself at that particular note in his friend’s voice. “I know you think that if you allow yourself even one stray second of anything like humanity, it’ll be the end of you. I’m going to tell you right now, it’s not.”
Behind him, the tent was filled with light and music and the sounds of happy people. But Jonas stood outside in the dark, in this place where even the stars hid themselves. Alone.
He reminded himself that this was better. This was normal.
This had always been where he belonged.
Everything else was playacting, and he knew that even if no one else did.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He was pleased to hear he sounded cool and unbothered, as he should.
“None of us are unmarked,” Isaac said quietly. “None of us walked through those fires and came out the other side unscathed. That’s not how it works. But all that means is that you were marked. That you have scars. They’re part of you, but they’re not you, Jonas.”
But Jonas had always known exactly who he was. He hadn’t had the benefit of a before-and-after scenario. He had no fond memories of a portion of childhood without darkness. He had no fond memories at all until the service.
He wasn’t like these people who called him friend, and he never had been.
“I have no problem with my scars,” Jonas told the man who had led him into more hells than he could count, yet still didn’t understand whom he’d had at his back. “I was little better than dead when I started. The fires we walked through didn’t mark me any, Isaac. I was born ash, crushed into coal, and never had a single thing to lose when the service made me a monster.”
And that, too, felt like another solemn vow he could feel in every part of him. A part of the very shape of his face. His true reflection, the one he’d always been brave enough to face.
It was other people who objected.
“Let’s say any of that is true, which it isn’t.” Isaac almost sounded mad, somewhere beneath that calm tone he was using. “So what? You have a hell of a lot to lose now, my friend. Are you willing to do that just to prove you can?”
Jonas hung up, which was kind of like standing naked in the middle of the lodge in Fool’s Cove and offering a three-hour theatrical performance of all his issues.
He knew Isaac would see it as more or less the same. With popcorn.
There was nothing he could do about that.
There was nothing he wanted to do about that.
He called the local team next and ordered them to stand down, break down the command center, and get ready for an early-morning return to headquarters.
“The party’s that good, is that it?” Jack asked.
Jonas hung up on him, too, before he started making derogatory remarks about flyboys.
And if he was grateful that the local team on this op was made up of newer guys, none of whom would ever dare challenge him on anything—much less confront him about his feelings—he was wise enough to pretend he didn’t.
Because there was only so much quicksand he could take.
He turned his back to the comfort of the dark and ducked back into the wedding tent. He found Carter in another little knot of high-placed, highly ranked people, and it took everything he had to keep from going over there and handling the situation here and now.
He knew it would be foolish. It would be acting from emotion instead of any tactical advantage, and that wasn’t him.
That hadn’t ever been him.
Jonas forced his carefree expression back into place on his face as he weaved his way through the reception tables. He found Bethan where he’d left her, still with her sister out there in the middle of the dance floor.
And there was no time for this. They should be plotting, planning, coming up with strategies and backup strategies—
But he knew, whether he planned to admit it or not, that the real reason he didn’t get her attention and indicate that it was time to go was because she looked so happy.
Happy.
His beautiful Bethan with her arms in the air and sheer joy on her face.
Jonas didn’t have it in him to cut that short.
He pulled out a seat at the nearest table, smiled at the other guests as he sat himself down, and . . . waited.
Because he wasn’t sure he’d ever felt much in the way of joy, but she made him think it was possible. Even for someone like him. And he was going to sit here and bask in it a while, because deep down, Jonas figured that quicksand or not, Bethan was the only human thing about him.
And she wasn’t his.
Which meant this was as close as he was ever likely to get.
Seventeen
They were back in Alaska by early afternoon the following day.
It was pouring rain in Juneau, the clouds so low and tight they blocked out all but the faintest suggestion of mountains or sea.
As homecomings went, Bethan found the gray, soggy weather perfect. It matched her mood.
They’d left her parents’ house at 0600 hours, swinging down into Goleta
to rendezvous with the rest of the team. And then they’d been on their way to the airfield shortly thereafter to board the Alaska Force jet for a few hours’ direct flight north.
For the first time in a long while—maybe ever—it was hard to pull on her usual version of casual tactical gear. To wear a deliberately restrictive sports bra, cargoes, and boots, rather than a sundress. To secure her hair in her preferred ponytail, low and tight, instead of letting it fall past her shoulders.
As if the soldier were the costume.
Or at least as much of a costume as the version of herself she’d been playing all week, and Bethan didn’t know quite where to put that. It was easier to march along with the rest of the team, pretend Jonas was nothing more to her than the leader of this mission, and sit quietly during the little jumper flight back to the island, counting down the minutes until she could finally be alone to decompress.
Landing in Fool’s Cove took her breath away, the way it always did. First the cheery lights and bright-colored buildings of Grizzly Harbor, then the hidden bit of water carved into the rocky base of the cloud-shrouded backside of the same mountain. She felt her whole body relax as they came in for their landing.
And by the time Bethan made it to the top of the wooden stairs that led up from the dock, she felt like herself again. It was something about the air. The moody Alaskan spring. And the pleasing slap of the lodge doors as she opened them, like the old fishing camp was welcoming her back.
Isaac came out from the offices in back as they dropped their gear, all smiles. Because he might be the leader of Alaska Force and therefore one of the most dangerous men alive, but he liked to pretend he was nothing more than an average, relatable boy next door here in his hometown.
Maybe these masks they all wore were as much to protect themselves as anyone else, Bethan thought. Because they were all lethal. They were all at or near the top of their games. If they walked around showing all of that all the time . . . it would make this place a battlefield, not a refuge.
“Oz has some thoughts,” Isaac said. “Jonas, Bethan, come on back.”
That cut the rest of their team loose, so Bethan took a moment to say the usual good op, good job good-byes that followed fieldwork. Jonas did not. Bethan caught up to him and Isaac in Oz’s lair, where the team’s technology wizard was going back and forth between his series of huge monitors and only glanced at them quickly as they came in.
“Dominic Carter is clean,” he said without preamble.
As usual, Bethan took a moment to reconcile herself to the fact that most computer nerd types did not look the way Oz did, as if he could win wars as easily with his own two hands as he could online. But that was one more thing to tuck away.
“But that’s not surprising,” he was saying. “He would have to be to maintain such a public profile with so many government ties. The mercenary group we think was responsible for what happened to you two in that convoy back then, though, is another story.”
Bethan repressed a shudder, because it was one thing to make that connection and know it was real. It was another to stand here with the colleagues she admired and have that connection treated as fact. It made her stomach feel a little fragile.
That only made her stand straighter.
Oz typed something, and one of the monitors filled with photographs of men. Pseudomilitary men posing with various weapons, tanks, and backgrounds. “This particular outfit had a bunch of different names but distinguished itself pretty quickly. Mostly by doing things no one else would touch. That means we’re talking about scraping a pretty low barrel.”
“That sounds right,” Bethan said, cool and professional, which was her preferred method of self-soothing. “There are certain hits you take and accept that’s just how it goes. That’s what being in a war is, like it or not. But this one wasn’t strategic or necessary from an enemy perspective. It was mean. Punitive.”
In the doorway, Isaac shifted, though that cool, assessing gray gaze of his didn’t come to Bethan. It moved to Jonas instead.
Who said nothing. He might as well have been a slab of granite.
“We lost the whole convoy.” Bethan heard her voice change as she spoke, becoming less civilian by the syllable. She handled the things she’d done, the things that had happened to her while she was doing them, because she’d been a soldier. That was how she made those things intelligible. Palatable.
Or that was how she tried.
“The irony was that it was an aid mission,” she said. “Or maybe that’s not ironic at all. Maybe that was the point.”
Oz moved in his chair, turning from one monitor to another. “The group we’re talking about wasn’t official in any capacity. Just a group that liked killing people and blowing stuff up, as far as I can tell. They took no sides. No loyalty at all. It was all about the money.”
“Men like that are always the same,” Jonas said quietly, and Bethan was certain she wasn’t the only one in the room startled that he had said anything at all. “They serve war. They like chaos. And they particularly like it with a body count.”
Bethan bit her tongue, because she knew it would serve no one if she lashed out at Jonas for what sounded a lot to her like another one of his appallingly self-lacerating autobiographies. Especially not if she had to explain how, why, or when he’d told her more details about his past. That would be even worse.
“There was a core group of about eight individuals,” Oz was saying.
A fuzzy picture filled one of his screens, bursting with what looked to Bethan like a pack of Grade A jackholes. But that wasn’t a purely professional response, so she shoved it aside and looked more closely. Eight men, all in good physical shape, though some of those muscles leaned toward steroids. They were all toting guns and ammo as they gathered around an all-terrain vehicle in some indistinguishable place. It looked hot, which made her imagine it was another desert, but then again they could have been squinting anywhere.
“The resolution sucks,” Oz said bluntly. “It’s very unlikely that I’m going to pull facial recognition off of this picture. But it’s an overview, anyway. And there are other ways to narrow down the members here.”
“Death records, I can only hope,” Bethan said.
Oz nodded, his hands flying over the keys. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Three of these men are dead. If we get no love combing through the rest of them, we’ll revisit the deaths and see if there could be any shenanigans. We all know how easy it is to fake a death.”
Especially following a tour of a war zone, Bethan thought. She’d met so many soldiers who were out there trying their best to cling to an ideal in the face of almost unimaginable horrors, day after day. But then there were the others, who’d found human misery an excellent opportunity. To profit. To make a grab for power. Then to wield it.
She found it was usually pretty clear who was who.
“I don’t like how much time is passing for our scientist while we’re digging around in all this ancient history,” Isaac said, his arms folded across his chest. “It’s coming up on a month since he and his sister have been God knows where. I don’t like it.”
“I told Iyara Sowande that she could trust me,” Bethan said, the way she had in California. It didn’t get any less bitter. “So far, that’s nothing but a lie. And I’m not a liar.”
Jonas looked at her, black and steady, but said nothing.
Isaac nodded. “Understood.”
“Two more of these guys are easy enough to find,” Oz said, his voice as calm as it always was while his hands moved like liquid over the keys. “They both work for bigger security firms. Though not Dominic Carter’s, interestingly enough.”
“That leaves three men,” Isaac said. “If we can’t find them, we have to assume that might mean we already have. That one of them could be, for example, hiding in plain sight at Bethan’s family wedding.”
“What hap
pens to aging mercenaries?” Bethan asked, allowing her spine to soften slightly as she stood there. “That’s not a philosophical question. I’m honestly curious. What’s the typical career path after you finish selling your soul for money?”
“Tropical island,” Oz replied.
“Easily accessible bank account in the Caymans,” Isaac countered.
“Hit man,” Jonas offered.
Everyone in the room looked at him, and he did that thing where he gave the impression of shrugging without actually moving.
“Your average mercenary generally goes for a squad so he can pretend that he’s the same as the military, only better paid. I figure it would have to be easier to go solo later. When you can’t keep up with the demands of work-for-hire wetwork and air-assault insertions into enemy territory.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought, have you?” Isaac asked from beside him. He shook his head. “That really warms the heart.”
“Seems like a natural progression,” Jonas replied.
“Better get on that, then,” Bethan said, ostensibly talking to Oz, though her gaze was on Jonas, too. “I’m sure they have social media for sociopaths, don’t they?”
“Yeah,” Oz said. “They call it social media.”
“I have a lot of questions for this guy when we find him,” Isaac said while Bethan was still grinning at Oz’s grumpy statement. “How they got into the safe house, then abducted two grown adults, is a puzzle, sure. But I want to know how he knew we were coming for the scientist. I want to know how they tracked us without our knowing it. That’s what’s keeping me up at night.”
It was possible that was a joke, too, as Isaac famously rarely slept. Though maybe that, too, had changed now that he had a life outside of Alaska Force to cuddle up with at night.
“They didn’t track us,” Bethan said when no one else responded. “They tracked her. Iyara. I would say they injected her with a microchip and set her up as bait.”
She smiled faintly when they all looked at her. “Maybe it was keeping me up, too.”
“There’s still the possibility she wasn’t bait against her will,” Isaac pointed out. “That she’s been in on this from the start.”
