Forged by Sacrifice Kindle rev 100519

by Evans, LJ

  As if we were really lifelong friends, she insisted on helping me unload the truck after she’d changed, and to top it off, she followed me to the rental office to drop the truck off. After giving up the truck keys, I sank into her Mini Cooper, and she zipped through the D.C. traffic as if it was nothing. Between the help with the boxes and the way she drove, I was half in love with her.

  “Keep spoiling me like this and I’ll never move out,” I told her.

  She smiled at me. “I’m buttering you up so you don’t move out when my obnoxious younger brother shows up.”

  I’d been worried about it before, but the way she teased about it, I had a feeling it was going to be okay. After we got back to the apartment, Daniella said she was heading to the gym but would be back for dinner, and then left me alone to unpack in the loft.

  I’d fallen in love with the apartment back in June, and nothing had changed in the couple weeks I had been gone. It was modern, full of metal, glass, dark floors, white cabinets, and gray walls. The kitchen was to the right as we entered, and it opened up into the main living area full of windows that had a breathtaking view of the Capitol Building.

  The apartment had a gray leather couch and black tables and shelves, but none of it appeared as cold as it could have because of the colorful blankets and pillows that were scattered across the furniture. What set the living area apart from anything I’d ever seen was the huge TV that had two smaller TVs on either side of it. It was disconcerting to see all three TVs on, even if only one had the volume up. When I’d first mentioned it upon seeing the apartment back in June, Daniella had said she used it to keep abreast of what was happening on the Hill after hours.

  In the loft, I opened boxes, filling the wardrobe and the built-in bookshelves that lined either side of the queen-sized bed with my books, knick-knacks from my life with Grandma, and pictures of my friends and family. I softened the metal and black furniture with my own floral prints and the purples and teals I favored. Once I’d gotten through most of the boxes, I stood, arms wrapped around my middle, and stared out the wall of windows that let in the sunshine and held the same view of the Capitol Building as the windows downstairs.

  I was finally here. An excitement that I’d been holding at bay filled me. It was like I had expected something to happen at the last minute that would have prevented my new life. But it hadn’t.

  I heard the apartment door click open, and Daniella hollered up the stairs that she was ordering Chinese, asking if I wanted some. I journeyed down the stairs with a smile on my face that I felt to my core.

  While we waited for the food to arrive, Daniella made martinis as a way of welcoming me to the apartment and the city.

  “If Robbie was here, he would be making fun of my martinis,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “He’s a beer drinker. I told him he’s going to have to give it up and get used to the cocktails they serve at all the receptions we go to.”

  “My ex was all about wine and mixed drinks. The more expensive the better.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “He’s a model.”

  She grinned at me. “I can see you with a model. I can see you being a model.”

  “I tried it out a couple times, but it wasn’t for me.”

  “I knew it. The leather pants and peach top you were wearing the first time I met you looked like you’d stepped out of Vogue.”

  “I was jealous of your suit.”

  “You can have my suit. I’m so tired of wearing suits.” She placed her empty glass on the coffee table and flung her head back against the couch, pulling a pillow to her stomach.

  “How long have you worked on the Hill?”

  “Nine years.”

  “You don’t look old enough to have worked there that long.”

  She smiled at me, and her smile tugged at my memories again—so familiar and yet unplaceable. Like a dream that had flitted away before you woke.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I started on the Hill as a runner when I was in college. Then, I interned during the summers. Finally got a job there because of my grandfather. Washington is nothing more than one big nepotism cesspool.”

  I laughed. “Can’t really be that different than corporate America.”

  “Getting your law degree, you’ll fit right in here. Everybody’s a lawyer.”

  When the food arrived, she turned on The American President and made fun of all the real and not real scenarios in the movie. She was funny, and it made me like her easy nature. There was no artifice that I could tell, just her being her. Like Ava, in many ways. I was glad I’d seen her ad and that she’d liked me enough to let me move in. I hoped the feelings between her brother and me would be the same, or at least that we’d be able to stand each other long enough for me to pass the bar.

  Mac

  HIGH HOPES

  “Fulfill the prophecy,

  Be something greater.

  Go make a legacy,

  Manifest destiny.”

  Performed by Panic! At the Disco

  Written by Urie / Juber / Sinclair / Youngs / Jeberg / Pritchard / Hollander / Parx / Lobban-Bean

  Truck and I spent a week out at sea together. We fished, swam, and pulled into ports to eat at dive bars. We just hung. Truck expanded on his desire to get out of Hawaii. I had a feeling there’d been a girl there who he’d been seeing and broken it off with, but he didn’t want to elaborate. I didn’t force it. If he wanted to talk, he would.

  His baby brother had been in some trouble with the law in the small town in northern California that they’d grown up in, and Truck was in the middle of trying to get him straightened out. To get him on a course that didn’t lead to serious jail time. Truck wanted to settle somewhere his brother could come stay for a while.

  We didn’t have that kind of trouble in our family, for whatever reason. Maybe because all of us kids had known exactly how it would impact our family if we’d messed up that badly. Our grandparents and parents were in the political and media’s eye on a regular basis, and news of our screw-ups would have been plastered everywhere.

  When Truck and I neared St. Petersburg, Florida, I sent a text to my buddies, Nash and Darren, to see if they wanted to meet up before Truck and I continued our journey down toward the Keys. Even though they were part of Joint Special Operations Command as members of a top secret S.E.A.L. Team Six squadron and would normally be stationed with the rest of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group out of Virginia Beach, they’d been stationed at MacDill due to classified Special Operations Command needs for the last two years. Long enough for Darren to bring his wife and baby down to Tampa.

  NASH: Why would we want to meet up with you, traitor?

  DARREN: Traitor or not, we may need him when he’s in office someday. We better schmooze him now while we have the chance.

  NASH: I don’t schmooze.

  ME: Truck is with me.

  NASH: Well, hell, why didn’t you say?

  We met at a restaurant that we often frequented whenever I was in town liaising between DoD Naval Intelligence and SOCOM. When Darren walked into the restaurant with his Captain America charm, eyes turned. His wife, Tristan, didn’t even bat an eyelid at it. Maybe because she was equally blonde and beautiful on his arm. She had their newborn baby girl, Hannah, swaddled up against her chest. They were the perfect, all-American family. Born in the heartland, serving their country. They were people country songs were written about.

  Nash followed them in. He was the dark to their light with demons from his past that had followed him into his present. Demons that had him always picking the wrong women even when he craved what Darren had. Family. Love. Home.

  “How are things?” I asked after we were all seated with drinks in front of us, except for Tristan who was still breastfeeding their little one.

  “Shit. They’re still trying to vet that op you’ve talked them out of twenty goddamn times,” Nash said.
r />   Darren cleared his throat. “It won’t go through. The numbers are never in favor of it.”

  “The moneymen are drooling over it. They want the channels it will open.” Nash glowered.

  “It won’t happen,” I told them, taking a swig on my beer. “I’ve shown them the odds.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not there anymore,” Nash groused.

  “If you really believe Mac had that much sway with the powers that be, then I have a bridge to sell you that goes all the way to Hawaii,” Truck said.

  It warmed my heart that Truck was really sticking up for me even when it sounded like he was putting me down. In his own way, he was telling Nash to back off. But my heart still clenched a little at the thought of letting Nash, Darren, and all the JSOC teams down. I’d left. It had been harder than I thought.

  After dinner, Truck and I drove with Nash to Darren’s house where we were challenged to poker. Nash and Darren had been trying to beat me since I’d first been stationed on the USS George Washington and they’d been catching a ride. They’d already been S.E.A.L.s by the time I’d met them, and even though we’d only been on the ship together for a few months, we’d become friends—friends who cheated at poker in order to beat me, but still friends. Ever since I’d called them out on the “cheating scandal,” they’d been determined to win on their own mettle. I was equally determined to not let it happen. Long after Tristan had put the baby down and gone to sleep herself, the four of us stayed up, trying to best each other in Texas Hold ‘Em.

  My phone buzzed.

  BRAT: Where are you?

  ME: At MacDill with Nash and Darren.

  BRAT: Tell the otters I said hello.

  Dani liked to bust their chops about being cute and cuddly sea creatures instead of hardened S.E.A.L.s.

  “Dani says hi,” I told them.

  The men all grunted.

  “Tell her she still owes me a beer,” Nash said. And of course, I didn’t, because there was always an undercurrent to Dani and Nash’s conversations that I didn’t encourage.

  “What does Angie think about that?” I asked, referring to Nash’s girlfriend of at least a year. Maybe more.

  “I don’t know, let me ask her,” Nash said, waving his phone with a wicked grin that proved exactly why I didn’t leave him alone with my sister.

  ME: What’s up?

  BRAT: Roommate moved in.

  ME: That sounds ominous.

  BRAT: Only you would read dark and dreary into my words. Everything is good. You’ll like her. She’s got sass.

  ME: Great. Just what I need. More women with sass in my life.

  BRAT: You know you love us. When can we expect you to make an appearance?

  ME: In another week or so. I’ll stop in Wilmington to store the boat, and so everyone in the family can see Truck before he flies back to Hawaii.

  BRAT: Okay.

  ME: Do you miss me?

  BRAT: **puking GIF**

  ME: So, you really, really miss me, huh?

  BRAT: Just for that, I’m going to leave bugs in your bed.

  ME: You wouldn’t infest the apartment.

  BRAT: Sigh. You’re right.

  I put my phone away.

  “She still working for that senator?” Nash asked.

  I nodded. “Yep. But only until I can snake her away to run my campaign.”

  “God help us all. Mac the politician.” Darren grinned.

  “Just for that, I’m taking all these chips,” I told him as I turned over my winning hand. Everyone groaned. I swept the chips over to my pile and added, “Anyone think they can beat me yet?”

  “One day, Macauley. One day.” Darren smacked me on the shoulder.

  ♫ ♫ ♫

  Early the next morning, Truck and I left Darren’s house with a promise that we’d see each other again over Labor Day weekend. My family had a tradition of tennis and poker tournaments that were spread over the long weekend, and Tristan’s family lived close enough to my family’s homes in Greenville for them to stop by as long as their PTO held out. I hugged my friends goodbye and then was quiet while Truck and I put out to sea again.

  “They’re a good group,” Truck said.

  “Yep.”

  “Why the long face?”

  “It’s harder than I thought it would be. Leaving,” I told him truthfully. “But I’m doing it for important reasons.”

  “For the Baby Wyatts and Baby Darrens of the world,” Truck said softly.

  I nodded. “Yep. They deserve a better country than the one we’ve deteriorated into. I want our nation to be worthy of them.”

  “If anyone can do it, it’s you, Mac.” That choked me up, and Truck saw it. He laughed and said, “Don’t go all Home Alone and cry on me now, Macauley.”

  “You wish,” I said.

  “I wish that you’d cry? Only so I could rub it in when I see your sisters. That way, they would never let you live it down.”

  “They already have enough over my head.”

  “Siblings always do.”

  I sat, looking out at the ocean, the breeze in the sails sending me careening toward my new chapter. And for some reason, it made me think of Georgie and her own new chapter that she was starting. As if we had gotten to this juncture in both our lives, not by accident, but by fate. Yet, I’d left her behind, sailed away from her on purpose. Because it was obvious that politics and Russians didn’t mix. That thought hurt almost as badly as leaving the Navy and my S.E.A.L. buddies. The thought that I couldn’t have her and the life I wanted all at the same time.

  Georgie

  WHAT IF I NEVER GET OVER YOU

  “I'm right back, lost in that last goodbye?

  And what if time doesn't do what it's supposed to do?

  What if I never get over you?”

  Performed by Lady Antebellum

  Written by Green / Veltz / Hurd / Ellis

  A couple weeks went by with July slipping into the heat and humidity of early August. The air in D.C. was as humid as the air in New York had always been. I realized, as I settled into my new apartment, that D.C. had as much energy as the city I’d left behind, but it was an energy that held a different vibe. New York was contained chaos. D.C. was forceful control.

  The planner in me required me to learn my new city—the facts, the directions, the streets. I needed to know it all. The places you didn’t want to journey to on your own, as well as the places that were too rich for your blood. I’d chosen Georgetown after a significant amount of research, including the pros and cons of living in D.C., but now that I was here, I needed to experience it for real. To prove what I’d read.

  The first couple days, I spent doing touristy things, like hitting up the memorials and the museums as well as learning my way around the city by foot and public transportation. Then, I wandered the campus so I knew exactly where everything was and how to traverse from one place to the next. I got my schedule and bought my books, and my excitement about going back to school slowly increased.

  I found myself cracking the books open and even taking notes on the chapters. It felt good to be delving back into research and studies. The portion of my brain that I needed for papers and textbooks felt stale, and I wanted to kick the rust to the curb before the first day of school.

  Once I’d started delving in, I couldn’t stop. I journeyed to the law library almost daily, looking up abstracts and case law that applied. I was listening to the news Daniella had blaring from the three TVs and found new things to look up based on that news.

  I was deep into my research at the library one day, typing furiously and highlighting lines in a newspaper article, when a man stopped at the table where I had my materials spread. He was in a suit and tie that seemed to have been crafted specifically for him, but what caught my attention was the look of curiosity he had on his face.

  “Fourth Amendment?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Are you looki
ng for something in particular?” he continued.

  My cheeks flushed slightly. I wasn’t exactly embarrassed by my uber enthusiasm, but I also wasn’t sure why or if this man would really be interested in my recent obsession.

  “I’ve been looking at varying case studies regarding search and seizure,” I told him.

  “Because you’ve been arrested?” he asked with a smile, leaning against my table in a way that put him in my personal space. I backed up a little at the same time I smiled back.

  “No, I haven’t been arrested. I was just following a case on the news where a woman had told an officer she didn’t consent to the search of her bag, and he did it anyway and then arrested her for the illegal drugs he found there.”

  The man, who still hadn’t introduced himself, was slowly taking me in. “Did the officer have a warrant or cause?”

  “No warrant. But the cause is the conflicting part, right? What exactly would deem a situation cause worthy?”

  He looked down over my books. “Are you enrolled in summer classes or starting in the fall?”

  “Starting in the fall.”

  He smiled. “Professor Collins on your schedule?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, now you’ve met me,” he said. He stood up from his lounged position. “I have to head out now, but if you stop by my office tomorrow around two, I can get you started on the case studies we’ll be doing in the practicum course.”

  “Really? That would be great,” I said, no longer caring if my enthusiasm topped the side of overly eager. “I’m Georgie, by the way.”

  “See you tomorrow, Georgie.” Then he headed out the library doors.

  My stomach squished with ridiculous happiness followed by an audible growl that had me looking around to make sure no one had heard my hunger cry. I didn’t need to worry. The library was obnoxiously empty during the summer.

  I packed up and headed back toward the apartment.