Final Siege

by Scarlett Cole

  “Stop,” he said quickly, pulling her wrist out of the way and snapping the gloves off his wrists. “It’s bad enough that your prints are on the envelope, but you don’t need to get them on this.”

  The sound of car tires on gravel filtered through the warehouse, and a thin sliver of light filtered under the roller shutter door. Mac quickly hit the light on the desk, casting them into darkness.

  “Shh,” he breathed quietly against Delaney’s ear.

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  He took her hand, and, obviously familiar enough with the building to navigate it in the dark, led them back to the office. Once they were inside it, he flicked the lights on again and hurried to the bank of monitors.

  For a moment, nobody got out of the car. It sat, engine running, lights off.

  “What are they going to—”

  “Shh.” Mac focused on the screen, his eyes on the car.

  She’d been around the block enough to not take offense to being shushed. Instead, she tried to make out the occupants. The car door opened. “Will they be able to get in here?”

  Mac shook his head. “I doubt it. But if they do, they’ll get a surprise.” He pulled his SIG, the one he’d let her practice with earlier in the week, from its holster. “Don’t panic,” he said. “It will take them an age to get through all the security measures we have on this place.”

  The three men on the monitor separated. One went down the side of the building, and the other two went around the back. No one approached the front, which made sense as it faced out onto the road. Dressed in black, they blended into the night. Suddenly, lights flooded the area.

  “How d’you like that, asshole?” Mac said, and then laughed. He must have installed automatic floodlights over the entrances.

  The lights blinded the two around the back, and they scuttled back into the darkness of the shrubbery that edged their property.

  He pulled out his phone. “Cabe,” he said quietly. “I’ve got Delaney here and she was followed. There’s company outside. Floodlights scared them for now, but … Shit.”

  On the screen, the lights went dark as one of the men fired shots at the lights.

  “Yeah. Just shot the bulbs out.”

  Delaney listened as Mac railed off details about the three men and then hung up. “We’ll have reinforcements soon. Faster than the cops would get here, and they’ll be way better armed.”

  The guy from the front came running from the side of the building and gesticulated between the three of them. He was angry about something. And also twitchy, constantly looking over his shoulder.

  A light from a car on the side road glanced over their faces, and all three men jumped. It only took one man to break from the group and head for the car before the other two followed.

  And as they drove away, Delaney slumped against Mac’s shoulder in relief.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Two hours later, after Cabe and Ryder had arrived at Eagle Securities and spent time freeze-framing images of the perps’ faces to send to Noah to see if they could get a hit off SDPD’s database and after they’d spoken to all the relevant authorities involved, Mac had finally gotten Delaney into his truck and home.

  He reached for the corkscrew and opened a bottle of wine.

  Delaney was taking a bath. She’d said she’d needed a moment, and he’d given it to her. But in return, he’d made her promise that when she came out, he was going to tell her about Brock. Yeah, the timing might be rough, but one thing he’d learned was that stepping out on the battlefield with any kind of bad blood between you and a brother was a recipe for disaster. He and Delaney needed to be on the same side—fully on the same side—for him to do his job, and they’d never get there with Brock between them.

  He poured himself a large glass and walked out onto the balcony with a second one and the rest of the bottle. “So, Brock,” he said to the night sky as he sloshed his wine around in the bottom of the glass as if he knew what the fuck he was doing and placed the rest of the stuff he was carrying down on the table. “I’m sorry, brother.” He didn’t know why he felt compelled to talk out loud. It wasn’t something he usually did. Usually he just spoke to his friend in his head, shared the experiences he was having with him. At first he’d thought it was foolish, but it had become a habit. Before Brock had died, they’d spoken all day, every day. Lab partners, swim team buds, wingmen. The first few weeks after Brock had died, he’d pull out his Nokia to call him over some stupid shit he’d seen, put it down and stare at it, pick it up again to call Delaney to tell her what he’d just tried to do, and put it down again.

  “I’m gonna tell her what happened that day. I know I said I wouldn’t ever talk about it. But that was before you died on me. Not telling Delaney what happened that day is killing me. And worse, it’s killing her. I hope you can see how torn up she is. And yeah, if she forgives me, I get to keep her for the rest of my life, which seems so fucking unfair when you don’t get a girl of your own, and married, and kids and shit…” His voice wavered. Tears stung the corners of his eyes like they always did on the rare occasion he let his real emotions bubble to the surface. “But, man … knowing will let us all breathe.”

  “Knowing what?” Delaney asked as she walked out. There was a chill to the air, so over her leggings she was wearing an oversize cream sweater that slid off her shoulder. She pulled out a chair at the patio table and sat, tucking her knees under her sweater.

  Mac coughed gruffly to clear his throat and poured her a glass of wine. “You were right. Brock didn’t want to jump off that cliff.”

  Delaney pushing the wineglass away. “I knew it.” The metal feet of the patio chair scraped across the patio and she jumped to her feet. “He looked up to you. Everybody did. He would have done it just because you said so.”

  Mac shook his head. “Yes, I goaded him, but it wasn’t like you think, Delaney. He didn’t want to jump, but he asked me to help him do it anyway.”

  Eyes wet with unshed tears, she glared back at him. “That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “People who were there said they saw you taunting him to jump.”

  “I did.” Mac felt sick thinking about the way he’d at first encouraged Brock and then had pushed and cajoled. “And I regret every word I uttered that day. I regret not talking him out of it. I wish I’d never let him talk me into it. But he was convinced that he’d never make it as a SEAL.”

  “What do you mean, you wish he’d never talked you into it?”

  Mac pulled a chair from the table and swung it so it directly faced hers. He reached for her wrist, which she attempted to tug away. “Just come and sit and listen. When I’m done, if you’re still mad at me, I’ll drive you to Cabe’s myself.

  “I’ve carried this around for too long, letting you suffer when I could have put it right. When you walked out, I was apologizing to your brother for giving up his secret.”

  Reluctantly, Delaney did as he asked, and took a long sip of wine. “I’m listening,” she said, her tone terse.

  “Your brother knew that you and your parents didn’t think he would make it as a SEAL.”

  Delaney sank back into the chair. “That’s not true. I thought … well … I didn’t think it was a good fit for him, sure, but I didn’t think it was because he couldn’t do it.”

  Mac shook his head. “Well, that wasn’t how he saw it. It put second thoughts into his head. And he knew, from everything he’d read, that SEAL training is eighty percent mental. He was doubting his abilities, which was the worst thing he could do. But he didn’t want to go back on his word to enlist and prove that you guys were right all along. Once he saw the Twin Towers fall, he wanted to enlist so badly, but your parents made him finish college. As time went on, some of what you and your parents said made him begin to think he wouldn’t be able to do all the things expected of him.”

  His thoughts drifted to that afternoon.

  “Dude, it’s not working,” Brock said as he walked into Mac’s room.

&nb
sp; Mac closed his poly sci book. It wasn’t like what he was reading was sticking in his brain anyway. It was a glorious day outside, but he needed to study, no matter how badly he’d rather be on the beach with Delaney. “What’s up?”

  “The fucking height thing…”

  This again. Goddamn, he didn’t know why Brock didn’t just give it up. He’d tried everything to help Brock get over it. They’d started small on an indoor climbing wall, then Mac had tried to build him up from there. But nothing had worked. They’d gone to San Francisco for a state swim meet and Mac had arranged for the two of them to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, which had turned Brock greener than their swim uniform.

  “Dude. Have you considered you might just need to move on? I mean, I get it, wanting to achieve this, but if you can’t—”

  “You know I can’t.”

  Mac shrugged his shoulders. “So, kill or cure, right. Go big or go home. All that motivational crap.”

  Brock nodded.

  It was a bad idea but Mac said it anyway. “What about cliff jumping? We could go jump off the Arch … you know, that bluff at Sunset Cliffs.”

  “Or take a ride up to Laguna Beach. You said it took ninety minutes to get up there. What was the name of that cliff you said was like a hundred feet tall? El Morro?”

  Shit. That had been a fucking thrill jump … a once in a lifetime even for him.

  “I mean,” Brock continued. “I know you and Six have done it before and got a kick out of it. Maybe I just need to do something akin to the worst it’s ever going to be. Experience that and know I got through it.”

  Brock was right, cliff jumping was way more exciting than poly sci, but if he was going to blow off studying, he’d rather it be because Delaney was going to blow him. Since they’d had sex—her for the first time—it was constantly on his mind. But he couldn’t say that to his friend, who had only just gotten his head around the fact that Mac had broken the bro code and banged his little sister. Not that “bang” was how Mac saw it. Just being around Delaney brightened his whole world.

  Then he noticed Brock, like really noticed him. He was bouncing on his toes like he did before the first swim of a meet. And he looked a little gray and was speaking a little too fast.

  “I’m game, but are you sure you want to do that?” Mac asked, putting his textbooks in a pile.

  “Not really, but how can I be a fucking SEAL when the idea of dropping any height into water makes me want to puke?”

  “Fine,” Mac said, grabbing his beach towel and keys. “But if we’re driving all the way up there, I’m making sure you go over. Deal?”

  Brock nodded his head. “Deal.”

  Mac shook his head to clear the memory and took a sip of his wine. “He was worried about jumping into the ocean and told me he wanted to get over it. I told him it was a stupid way to try to fix it. That he should start jumping from small cliffs first, build up confidence. But you know Brock … knew Brock. He did everything big and didn’t want to wait.”

  “And you couldn’t talk him out of it?” Delaney asked.

  “I was twenty, Delaney. With balls of steel and shit for brains. That’s why Brock asked me to help him. He told me that he didn’t want to give you guys ammunition to talk him out of his decision. He said he needed to get out of his own head and stop doubting what he was capable of. He made me promise that I wouldn’t tell anyone that he was terrified. It was an easy thing for me to do, so I was all in to help him. I mean, I’d jumped before. Six and I had been goofing around the summer before, thinking we were cool because we were too clueless to know better. So, we called up Cabe and Six, who happened to already be up there surfing, told them we were on our way.”

  “You should have talked him out of it, Mac. He was scared. If I’d known, I would have stopped him. You shouldn’t—”

  “Don’t you think I know that now, with the benefit of hindsight, and maturity, and over a decade of nightmares about dragging my best friend’s dead body back to shore? Fuck, Delaney. I know I should have.”

  Delaney tucked her knees back underneath her sweater and wrapped her arms around them, the wineglass hanging loosely in her fingers. Pain—and worse, disappointment—etched her features.

  “Anyway, on the drive up there, he talked about how he wanted your dad to be proud of him, how he wanted you to see your brother amount to something, how he wanted to get your mom to stop worrying about him by showing he was capable. And he wanted to have something to say when he joined the Navy. He wanted to be ready to sign up and get straight into BUD/s, the SEAL training program, as soon as the process would let him. He didn’t want to show up on day one with doubt already planted in his mind that he was never going to make it.”

  Mac sighed as he recalled the way his friend’s dark hair had flapped around violently as they drove with the windows wide open. “He made me promise to not let him back out. Told me to say anything up there to make him do it. And if I had to, I should pick him up and throw him off. I told him it would be easy, seeing he was such a lightweight. And he laughed.”

  “Mac…” A tear rolled down her cheek. He wanted to reach for her, but he didn’t feel worthy of her right now, and she’d need to be the one to close the gap between them once his story was over.

  “I joked that if I did that, I might…”—he swallowed hard—“I might kill him. And he joked that he was ready to kill me for fucking his sister, so it made us even.”

  He placed his wine on the table and rested his elbows on his knees. He could see Brock’s face as clear as day in his mind. “He asked me to promise to make him jump, to use any means necessary to get his ass off that cliff. I tried to talk him out of his decision to enlist, or at least enlist for a different group. If he hated the idea of heights, and the combination of height and water so badly, go sign up for a hard-core unit in one of the other military branches. But he wouldn’t have it. His mind was set. So, I did. I started light at first. We walked to the edge together, talked about timing it right with the waves. It’s a hundred foot drop. Another guy went ahead of us, screamed all the way to the bottom, and then panicked when he hit the surf. It took him an age to get his head back above water.”

  Brock had begun to shake his head and step away from the edge, mumbling “I can’t do this” over and over.

  “He said there was no way he could become a SEAL. I asked him if he was sure because if he was, he should just back out now. I tried everything to persuade him. Positive shit, like Muhammad Ali quotes and that kind of thing, but he just kept going on about how your dad had been poking at him, asking him why he was wasting his life and education to go be a glorified sailor and saying that he didn’t have the backbone it took to do such a job.” Mac leaned back in the chair. “Shit.”

  “So what happened? Witnesses said you were arguing on the way up to the cliff.”

  Mac nodded. “We weren’t … I was just … I don’t know. I was trying to motivate him. Getting all Bob Knight on his ass without the chair throwing,” he said, referring to the controversial NCAA coach. “It probably looked like we were fighting. I thought I could get inside his head. Stop the cycle of doubt in himself by giving him something else to think about.”

  “They also said they saw you bump him.”

  “I told him I was going to say something that was going to make him mad enough to follow me over the edge. That I was going to make him kick my ass, but he’d have to come get me.” Mac covered his eyes with his hand. He didn’t want to see her when she heard the rest. “I bumped him before I walked back to take my run up, not on my way past him to the edge. I told him your dad was right, that he was a coward, that I was a bigger man than he was because I was jumping off that cliff with or without him.… And on the way past, I told him you were the best lay I ever had.”

  Silence hung in the air. Delaney didn’t move or say anything. In his mind, he heard Brock’s yell as he followed him over the edge. It had been too soon. Brock should have given him time to get clear. When Mac ha
d hit the water, having timed the height of the wave, he knew there would be enough water to break his fall. Quickly, he’d swum clear and turned to watch his friend jump. But he was already halfway down, sheer panic on his face. He’d mistimed, hadn’t waited long enough. Before Brock had caught the rocks at the base of the cliff and been thrown forward into the churning water, Mac was already swimming toward him.

  Mac’s breath caught in his throat as he remembered the burn in his lungs as he’d powered back toward the cliff and had begun to dive into the swirling salt water. He remembered the six dives it had taken to locate Brock. He remembered the way his eyes burned as he swam around the bluff and pulled his best friend’s limp body onto the beach, shouting so loudly that his voice had given out. He remembered the blood covering the side of Brock’s head, and the passerby who he later learned was a doctor vacationing from Salem knocking him out of the way to perform CPR.

  And he sure as fuck remembered the paramedic declaring Brock dead on the scene.

  * * *

  Delaney watched as Mac leaned forward and made a sound somewhere between a sob and a cry of anguish, and her heart cracked open at the pain he’d been carrying all those years. Never in all the years she’d known him had she ever seen him lose control and cry. Not after he’d shown up at their home to try to explain what had happened, or at the visitation when Mac had quietly slipped in at the very end to say goodbye to his friend, or at the funeral when she’d slapped him.

  She wanted to get up, go wrap her arms around him, hold him and tell them that one way or another, they’d be okay. But she still had questions.

  “Why didn’t you say any of this to the police when they were investigating his death, or the coroner, or anyone else?” she asked. Would it have made any difference if he had? Delaney wasn’t sure. It probably would have made it worse. And she most definitely would have spent the time in between hating herself.

  Mac took a moment to compose himself, wiped his eyes, and let out a whoosh of breath. He sat back in the chair and took a sip of wine.