by Hazel Parker
I paused. This wasn’t doing it. I just let it slip right after that.
“So, it’s done. I’m hopefully pregnant. I just wanted to say thank you.”
I hit End right then. That was…that was a bit abrupt. I didn’t know if I was actually pregnant yet, technically, there were a whole host of things that could go wrong that would prevent this pregnancy from ever reaching fruition.
But you know what? If it got the ball rolling…
I put a hand on my stomach. Somewhere in there, a tiny human could be starting to take shape. I would know for sure in about two weeks if the pregnancy had taken hold. It would be the longest two weeks of my life.
And for the moment, I felt…
Happy.
But not quite as much as I would have wanted to.
And, though perhaps maybe a bit naive, also a tad hopeful that Burke would still show up again at some point.
Chapter 12: Burke
In a moment of quiet, it felt like the good old days.
Liam and Scott sat at diagonals from me as we formed a triangle in a bunker. The three of us hadn’t been together on a mission like this in years. Even before Scott went into semi-retirement to settle down, we hadn’t had many opportunities to work together. But the hunting of Snake mandated it, and so I wasn’t going to allow this to become a moment of sentimentality.
If we needed to, we could toast each other and share a glass of Scotch after the mission had been completed.
But for right now, we had such serious shit on our plate that we couldn’t even contemplate eating something, let alone drinking any alcohol.
“So to confirm,” Scott said. “Five Jeeps of the cartels. Two cars of Snake’s own men. And, of course, the truck.”
“From what I saw,” I said. “Good chance that the bastards have much more at their disposal than that. They’ll probably have more after the shit I’ve done.”
“There’s no probably in that,” Liam said.
“I know.”
Scott nodded. None of us were unsettled by this fact. We just had to accept it for what it was. If we were the type to have gotten easily flustered by long odds like this, none of us would have ever become DOM agents.
“All right, here’s the order of operations,” Scott said. “One, we secure the targets. Two, we find Snake and we end him. Did you see Snake among the group there, Burke?”
“I didn’t have time to see if the cartels had women or men shooting at me, let alone if Snake was one of them.”
Scott nodded. The answer he wanted to hear was actually likely the truth—Snake probably was among them. But there was a huge difference between launching a mission on faith and launching it on effective intel, and we were a long fucking way from having effective intel right now.
Just faith. But it wouldn’t be the first time we’d operated on assumption. It just wasn’t ideal.
“All right, then here’s how we break it down,” Scott said. “Burke, you’re going to go after whoever is guarding the truck. How you do that, I’ll leave it up to you. Just take out Snake’s men.”
“Fuckers will be dead before you even get the door open.”
“Liam, you’re going to provide backup to distract or kill the cartel members. Again, I don’t really care how you take care of it. I know there may be too many of them for you to take them all out, just keep them off my back. I’m going to go after the truck itself and get the hostages back to the city. Got it?”
We all nodded. There was a brief moment of silence. And then I did something that almost felt disrespectful that I had never done in a situation like this before.
I laughed.
I laughed because the whole thing seemed absurd. I laughed because we were two married men and one man who had feelings for a woman putting their lives on the line. I laughed because I wanted to relish what could very well be the last mission we ever did together.
“Three fucking men against an army,” I said. “Guess that’s why they call us DOM, huh?”
Scott snorted. Liam chuckled. We almost never had moments of levity individually, much less with ourselves, but with our time coming to a close and things feeling like they were headed to an end soon, I figured we might as well laugh while we were still alive.
“No one better, no one stronger,” Scott said. “Get ready. We roll out in ten.”
Scott was standing up from the table before he had even finished speaking. There was a brief moment where the finality of it washed over me. If we killed Snake, DOM would be no more. Who knew if I’d even ever see these two guys again?
But being a DOM allowed no time for sentimentality. Such was the nature of life, anyway, that the people here today would be the people six feet under tomorrow. I didn’t need to waste time thinking about it, I just needed to spend time taking care of business.
I looked to Liam. He was also already standing up. Between him and Scott, he had easily mellowed the most. Both of them had gotten women, but only Liam had kids. That was probably a bigger transition than having a wife, since at least a significant other could fend for themselves if something happened to them.
In other words, I was putting myself in a hell of a position by choosing to have a kid before I even had a serious girlfriend.
Well, too late to do anything about that now.
Less than five minutes later, we were armed to the teeth.
“Let’s fucking go,” I growled.
The three of us pulled out on our bikes, though we quickly split into three separate spots. I drove up ahead first, wearing different colored gear than I had before. The “camo” would probably last all of about five seconds before Snake’s men and the cartel figured out what the fuck was going on, but those five seconds could make all the difference.
Scott trailed just a short little after. The idea was I would come in, take out the cars protecting the truck, and then Scott would swoop in and take the truck or come to my aid.
And then, trailing us all, Liam would serve as chicken for the cartel, baiting them away from the two of us while we went to work.
The whole thing, even on paper, sounded absolutely absurd, and I saw no way we’d get through this without at least one of us getting shot. But as long as we didn’t die, who gave a fuck? Wounds healed. Failed missions did not get a second chance.
Now afternoon, the hot desert sun pounded down. I fucking hated heat more than any other element. I would have sooner done this mission in northern Canada in January than I would have done this now. But fighting for the greater good wasn’t a seasonal job.
The long and lonesome road would have given me the chance to think under quieter times, but I desperately wanted to avoid my mind wandering right now. The subjects it had tended to wander to were ones I could not easily shake, and I did not need them compromising me in the middle of my mission.
It took a few hours at high speed but we caught up to the truck and the cars about an hour and a half into the drive. I looked into my rearview mirror. Scott wasn’t even in sight. But that was fine. He’d catch up soon enough.
I pulled up to the first car and unveiled my submachine gun. I took aim at the tires and fired. I managed to puncture one of the tires, but it seemed I had only grazed it, not outright made it explode, because this one car was still going along. Good news was it would eventually have to stop, but the bad news was I had no fucking idea if that would be before or after I’d have bullets riddling my body.
But this was no time to fucking dawdle and see how long I could stretch it out. I pulled ahead, swerved to dodge some fire from the back seat, and unloaded into the front seat. I must have struck someone because the car swerved off to the side of the road, now completely out of commission.
Unfortunately, that was not true for the second car. As I pulled up to it, someone emerged from the sunroof, aimed a gun at me, and fired.
“Shit!” I yelled as I swerved.
I caught a glance in my rearview mirror. Scott was gaining ground on me. So was the cartel, but I as
sumed Liam would handle that—I had to. I didn’t have much of a choice. If I couldn’t take out this car, I had to distract it somehow.
And so I served as a sort of flying duck for them to hit. I swerved, laid fire down, and did everything I could to distract them from Scott’s incoming arrival. One more guy emerged from the back seat, trying to take out Scott while the sunroof guy aimed at me, but I focused my fire on the man hanging out the window and shot at him. I didn’t think I killed him, but Scott got past the firing car unharmed.
I stole another glance back. Liam had successfully gotten three of the cartel vehicles off my back. But that still left two others.
“Fucking hell,” I muttered.
I couldn’t handle three vehicles like this. I saw an opportunity—I sped ahead of the car, turned around, and fired straight on at the car’s engine. The windshield had bulletproof glass, so I enacted no damage on it, but the bullets did their magic on the car. It, too, went out.
And then I heard an enormous screech. I looked up to see the truck coming to a full halt.
“Fuck!”
I barely swerved out of the way, but in doing so, my bike peeled out. I hit the ground tumbling, tucking myself in and rolling and bouncing on the ground. I had probably cracked a few bones, maybe even broken some, but I was able to stand on my own two feet and stagger as the truck came to a stop.
And then Scott emerged from the driver’s side window, giving a thumbs up.
“Get in the truck, fucker!” he said. “You’re in charge of weapons.”
“Better this than a goddamn bike,” I muttered.
I couldn’t really run in my condition, but I could hurriedly hop. It was a terribly awkward look, but I got up just as the cartel trucks arrived. Scott swung the truck around, breaking through a barrier on the highway, and started heading back to the city.
“Those girls must be wondering what the fuck is happening up here,” I said.
“Better they throw up than land in the lap of some creepy fuck.”
Truer words had never been spoken. I leaned out of the truck, turned, and laid fire down on one of the cartel trucks. It didn’t move.
“I’m starting to think we need something bigger and badder than machine-gun bullets,” I said as I pulled back to reload. “Something like, I don’t know, a fucking truck like this.”
“Well, we’ll get our first test here in a second,” Scott said, nodding up ahead.
We were catching up to Liam and the cartel trucks. I could see now why, Liam was trying to confuse them by zig-zagging and braking hard in different spots. It would have worked wonders against one truck; against two, it was difficult. Against three, it was prolonging the inevitable without some outside assistance.
Luckily, we liked the fucker.
“Hang on!” Scott yelled as he prepared to ram the eighteen-wheeler into the Jeep.
It was like watching a battering ram smash a window. The Jeep just ricocheted to the side, everyone inside presumably dead or at the very least completely incapacitated. It was fucking sweet.
“Now, let’s finish the job, shall we?”
The other two Jeeps did their best to avoid the damage, but in doing so, they fell behind. Whether they’d already gotten paid or just decided dying for Snake wasn’t worth the cost, they stopped giving chase shortly after. We let Liam get in the truck, and like that, we had a peaceful, if not entirely free, drive back to the city.
“Holy fuck,” Liam said. “Kelly would murder me if she knew what I just did.”
“That’s why I don’t ever tell Kaylie anything other than I have to go to work,” Scott said.
I didn’t say a word.
But I kinda wished that I could have.
But now that the tension and the adrenaline were wearing off, exhaustion was starting to kick in. And with it came the desire to know how she was doing.
We dropped the cargo off with our contact, hurrying away before the girls could give their thanks. We wouldn’t have long back at the bunker; a big-ass eighteen-wheeler in the middle of nowhere served as a sort of tip-off. But we were used to discarding bunkers and getting new ones as the situation dictated it.
“Fifteen minutes before we get out of here,” Scott said. “Do whatever the fuck you need to but hurry up.”
I slumped against the wall. I was utterly fucking exhausted from the adrenaline.
And we still hadn’t even begun considering part two of this mission—kill fucking Snake.
But I now had, well, probably fourteen or so minutes to do what I pleased. And I wasn’t about to let it go to waste.
At first, I just closed my eyes. I didn’t want to sleep, nor could I have even if I wanted to, but I did like the idea of just resting for a bit, just calming the mind so that I could focus on arguably a more dangerous part of this mission. Taking truckload of women from Snake would piss him off, but he could easily find more women to capture, shitty as it was to say; try to take his life from him, and he’d throw the full weight of everything he had at us.
But after probably no more than ten seconds, my mind went to a familiar theme from the last couple of days.
Emily Lorne.
God fucking damnit.
Just as I had when I’d gone out on the run this morning, I knew that I couldn’t keep pushing the question to the side. I needed to just fucking accept the fact that she was in my head and confront it. She was the last person I needed to be talking to right now, and yet she was the one that was coming to mind most easily.
I knew it wasn’t standard protocol to do so, but I grabbed my personal phone and turned it on so I could see if I had anything from Emily. I figured with Snake spooked by our efforts and our own certainty that we’d go after him soon, there wasn’t as much a need for precaution as before. Of course, seconds after my phone turned on, I recognized the utter stupidity of that, but too late by then.
As it was, given the texts and voice mail pings that my phone got right then, it probably would have been for the best if I’d left it off. And to my surprise, I was a little panicked. Had something happened to Emily?
It was one thing to believe that agents of DOM didn’t have love lives. It was very much another to live out its opposite to fully understand why that was an issue.
I started listening to the voicemail but it was the last couple of lines in the voicemail that really unsettled me.
“So, it’s done. I’m hopefully pregnant. I just wanted to say thank you.”
What happened to four weeks?
And right then, I realized the stupidity of my thinking. Four weeks was probably the maximum amount of time this process would take. In reality, once I jacked off to the thought of Emily, nothing else fucking mattered on my end. I just needed to claim my prize and get the hell out.
And I had failed pretty miserably at that.
So what did I do now? Just send her my address and banking info by email or letter? Or did I actually reach out? Did I tell her I was sorry for ditching her at lunch and that I kind of want to have that lunch, or did I vanish into thin air?
The contract was more or less stipulated that I vanish into thin air. The courteous thing would have been to bid farewell, but at the end of the day, I would have eventually had to do this.
But fuck that.
I did what I wanted, how I wanted, when I wanted. And I got what I wanted. And right now, I wanted to talk to Emily and get this shit settled.
I dialed her number. The good news was she picked up.
“Hel…there?”
The bad news was the reception was so awful that I couldn’t hear a thing.
“Emily?” I said. “I’m calling to let you know this isn’t over yet. OK? I need to talk to you. I don’t want to not be a part of this. I’m coming to Miami when this is done, and we are going to have lunch okay?”
“…off, you never… Come through.”
Fuck. I should have just hung up now and let the call shit be figured out when I got back.
“Emily, I wa
nt you to change the deal. I’ve changed my mind. I think I want to be a part of the kid’s life. Can you hear me?”
No answer.
“Emily?”
I looked at my phone. The call had dropped. I nearly threw my phone in frustration. Instead, rather liking the idea of being able to contact her when I got back to the States, I kicked the ground and cursed loudly.
Liam and Scott didn’t say a word.
I took a deep breath and sighed. I could still salvage the day by killing Snake.
But I wasn’t sure how much of the future I could still salvage, if any.
Chapter 13: Emily
The instant the phone rang and I saw it was from Burke, my heart leaped with joy.
It was almost evening and my day had gone pretty well. I wasn’t particularly proud of the fact that Burke’s calling could throw me back into an emotional state, as if I was some sort of teenager, but I’d deal with that later. For now, my hands started to shake as I grabbed the phone. I took a deep breath, released, and answered.
“Hello there?” I said excitedly.
But there was silence. Then a loud static buzz. And then Burke’s words, barely audible.
“…change the deal … changed my mind … this is done.”
That’s…that’s why he fucking called me? To tell me that he has changed his mind? Hiding behind some sort of impossible to hear static line?
What sort of fucking bullshit was this? Seriously? This was what he fucking wanted to tell me?
“Oh fuck off, you never actually do what you say you’re going to do, Burke,” I said, my emotions starting to get the best of me. “You never come through.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
“…coming to Miami... you hear me?”
This was too fucking much. If I stayed on this line for more than another five seconds, I would lose my shit and cuss him out like a fucking sailor. I hung up.
“Hope you have a nice life, dick,” I said, even though I’d already hung up.
