by Lori Ryan
An alert chimed on his computer and Logan glanced to the screen. A message from a friend in Colorado popped up.
“Sorry, Sam. I just have to reply to this real fast,” Logan said as he turned his attention to the screen.
“Do you want me to leave?” she asked, but Logan shook his head.
“Nah, just have to get him some info real fast. It’ll only take a minute.”
“’Kay,” she said.
Logan typed the name and contact information for another one of his buddies into the message screen. He hit send before turning back to Sam. “Sorry. Just connecting a couple of people together about a job.”
Sam raised her eyebrows in question and Logan continued. “I have a buddy who got released from a rehab center about a month ago. He’s having trouble finding work and he’s got a young kid and a wife to support. It’s not looking good where they are, so I told him I’d hook him up with another friend in Colorado who might be able to find him work out there.”
“They’re former SEALs, too?” Sam asked, packing up the remnants of her lunch and tossing used napkins into the bag the food had come in.
“One guy is. The other is Army. I served with him in Afghanistan for a while. They sometimes pair a SEAL to an Army unit during deployments. We worked together for a few months.”
Logan shifted in his seat, not sure he wanted to tell her about any of this, but she had this way of simply looking at him and waiting with her face open and genuinely interested. It made him want to talk to her. Damned woman could have been an interrogator in another life. That, or a shrink. She had mad skills. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just her effect on him. He seemed somehow undone by her.
“Some of the guys I know are coming home to some pretty screwed up situations. They can’t get work, their kids either don’t know them at all because they were overseas when they were born or they don’t want to listen to them anymore because they’ve been gone so long. Their spouses have been holding things together here for so long, they’re just excited to have their partner back, but for the guys coming home, it’s not easy to slip back into things. They can’t really seem to just step back into what their wives need them to be. You add in the stress of not being able to make a living and things get sideways pretty fast.”
“So, you’re networking for them, helping them to find work?”
He nodded. “Where I can.”
“How many people have you tried to help this way?”
“A few,” he said. More like twenty, but she didn’t need to know that. He’d discovered he could match people up around the country. If one person couldn’t help, that person got in touch with someone who could, and so on, and so on. So far, things had worked out pretty well for many of the guys. “I’m really lucky to have this job from Jack. A lot of guys coming back aren’t finding work, anywhere. And, I don’t even have a family to feed. They do.”
Sam was quiet for a bit and Logan was lost in his own world, thinking about the guys who were struggling with coming home and the guys who hadn’t made it back.
“Oh, I get it,” Sam said quietly. Logan’s eyes flew to hers but he looked away just as quickly. She knew. Somehow, she knew.
“You’re feeling guilty because you have this job, aren’t you?”
Logan didn’t answer. What the hell could he say? Besides, the woman seemed to know everything whether he voiced it or not, so he didn’t see why he needed to participate.
“You earned it, you know. It’s not just because you’re friends with Jack’s brother-in-law. Jack might be a softie nowadays, but he doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to. And, he would never make a decision for Sutton Capital that isn’t the right decision. He’s not going to give you a job like this out of sympathy or loyalty to Zach or anything. Maybe a mailroom job, but not this job, Logan. You’re here because you’re the right man for the job.”
Logan didn’t say anything. Just because he had the credentials didn’t mean it was right that he had this job. Why him? There were no answers down that road, no matter how many times he traveled it. Only questions and a whole bunch of shit. Shit that messes with your head. He’d spent plenty of time on the why me? bullshit when he’d come home alongside coffins draped in flags. Alongside men with injuries far more life-altering than his own. When he’d come home.
*****
Diya Molov smiled as she looked at the image on the screen, but the smile was one of sad memories, not joy. She wiped at an errant tear under one eye and forced herself to look past her own feelings. She was happy for her ex-fiancé, despite the fact there was a new woman on his arm in the photo. It wasn’t his fault their world had been torn apart, any more than it was hers. When her family had died, something inside of her had died with them. In that moment, her life had been irreparably altered, and there was no going back. She’d been forced to abandon all she’d known, all she’d loved. To give all of it up in search of justice. None of this had been fair to either of them, but she wanted his happiness, above all else. She wanted at least one of them to be able to continue to live happily.
Well, that wasn’t true. She wanted to avenge her family’s deaths above all else. Then she’d be satisfied to sit down and die along with them. To let her life slip from this world on to whatever it was that waited on the other side. On to join her family. Her beautiful baby brothers and their smiling faces. Her mother and father.
Her hand went to the locket on her neck, where she carried pictures of her brothers’ smiling faces. Little cherubs. Her little baby cherubs. They had been ten and twelve when they were murdered, but in her mind’s eye they would always be little babies with chubby cheeks and pudgy little legs, running toward her for sticky kisses. Throwing dirty arms around her after a day playing in the yard at their family home.
Hearing a noise outside the room, she clicked the window closed on her laptop and turned to face the door. Yoshi entered quietly, as he always did. He wasn’t a leader, but he was a damned good soldier. She understood why her father had kept him so close all these years. Aside from the family connection, that is. Yoshi Bogolomov was her cousin, son of her father’s long deceased brother, but he was also loyal and true. He would have gladly died alongside her father had his arrival at their house not been delayed the night of the attack. And now he served alongside her as she sought vengeance.
He had come with her from Russia to New York City, after they’d buried her family. New York was where they had begun to collect the information they would need to complete their task. It was where they were calling on markers her father had held, to seek the justice that had been denied to her family.
“Yoshi,” she said quietly. “You have news?”
He came and kneeled before her, pulling papers from his back pocket. “I’ve located the two who are no longer overseas. Stone is one of them. He was sent home injured several months ago and is living in Connecticut now.”
Diya tilted her head to the other chair in the room as she took the photos from his hands. She glanced at the images of one man before dropping them on her desk in exchange for the pictures of Logan Stone. The one who had led the ambush against her family. Rage washed over her as she saw the life he lived. The photos showed him entering a large office building, living a life that shouldn’t be his. A life he didn’t deserve. The injustice of it steeled her resolve. One simply cannot erase an entire family from the face of the earth and expect to move on. But, Stone hadn’t erased them all. He’d left her alive and that would be his mistake. He’d underestimated her. And she would take advantage of that fact and make him pay.
“Should I make arrangements?” Yoshi pulled her out of her head and back to the present with his question. She knew what he was asking. Did she want him to arrange for their deaths? But, no. She didn’t. Not like that. It would be too easy to rely on the connections her father had built over the years. To call on the favors owed her father and his empire, and have the men killed efficiently and without fanfare.
“No. Each of these m
en must pay a much higher price than the simple cost of their lives. They need to suffer as we have suffered, Yoshi. To have it all taken from them. Everything they love. All that they value. They need to see it all destroyed. Then, and only then, will they die.”
Yoshi nodded as Diya looked back at the images in her hand. “We start with Stone. He is responsible. He was the leader and it is he who must pay first. Find out everything. Where his family is. Who his loved ones are. If he has a dog, find out. I want to take it all from him.”
She glanced down at the photos again and turned one toward Yoshi. In it, Stone and a woman stood together by the same building Stone had entered in the previous picture. “Who is she?”
“I’m not sure yet. Could simply be someone he works with, but they’ve been seen coming and going from the building together a number of times.”
Diya murmured, and then handed the photos to Yoshi. “Find out if she’s more to him. If so, she’ll be taken away.”
Yoshi nodded and left the room, slipping out as quietly as he’d come, and leaving Diya alone to remember all she’d lost. All Stone had stolen from her.
Chapter Four
“It’s surreal, isn’t it?” Zach Harris said as he sat down on the couch next to Logan in Jack’s living room. The others were on the opposite side of the large room, half of them sitting or standing near the couches by the fireplace. The others spilled over into the kitchen where Jack’s housekeeper was holding court while she cooked.
Logan turned and grinned at Zach, the man who’d been his best friend growing up. He knew if anyone understood the odd feeling he had, being surrounded by friends on a Saturday afternoon, it was Zach. And surreal was right. Unreal. So far away from where he’d spent the last twelve years of his life. Zach had served overseas a long time ago. A much shorter stint than Logan’s, but he understood. He knew what it was like to try to come home. To try to be normal again.
As he watched the others across the room, part of him envied their ability to make a home, a family. To bring children into this world. As much as a piece of him craved just that, he had to wonder if it was right to bring children into this world. A world that had shown him unspeakable cruelty. He envied them their innocence in that. The blind ability to see only what they knew, here in front of them. Then his eyes turned to Chad, who held his young daughter above him. He tossed her up in the air, bringing squeals forth with each toss. Chad had seen what Logan had. He knew the evil the world bred, and he’d chosen to have a child.
“Something like that,” he said in answer to Zach. Surreal was right.
“You hanging in there?” Zach asked. Logan grunted a response. It was as close as the two of them would get to talking about their feelings.
“How’s Sutton? You like it there?”
“Sure,” Logan said, raising the beer bottle in his hand to his lips. He’d been nursing the same one for an hour now. If he knew nothing else, he’d instinctively known, if he let himself seek the numbness a bottle of alcohol could bring him, he wouldn’t come back up. He’d been careful not to allow himself that solace.
“What’s not to like? It’s a great company. Good people.” He nodded to the group across the room, trying not to note that Sam’s eyes had crossed to him more than a few times. Everyone else seemed to be content to let him stay on the far side of things. He knew her head was probably trying to calculate some precise measurement of time before intervening, balancing all the factors to know when to step in and try to lure him into the group. He had a feeling she’d been studying even more about PTSD, since she seemed pretty damned sure he had it. Not that he could argue with her. He didn’t question that he had it. He just didn’t know what the hell to do with that information.
“They are,” Zach said, and Logan thought he was about to say more, but the screech from a baby monitor on a nearby table interrupted him. Logan’s body stilled and tensed as he shifted into autopilot. His mind instantly processed the noise, eyes checking his surroundings before his brain gave the all clear. But not fast enough, or subtly enough. Logan slowly willed his breathing back to normal, but his heart rate was another story. His body just didn’t seem willing to come on back down out of fight-or-flight mode nowadays. And the toll was starting to wear on him.
Zach had seen that.
Zach’s voice was quiet as he spoke, talking more into the glass he raised to his lips than to Logan.
“You still seeing someone? Getting some help with being back?”
Logan’s lips thinned as he shook his head once. “Not since the hospital.”
Both men kept their eyes on the group across the room as Jack reentered, holding little Maddie, fresh from her nap. The way she scowled at everyone and reached for her mom was almost comical. Apparently, the little one wasn’t one for company first thing after her nap.
Zach took a long swallow and Logan knew he was measuring his response. “Think it might help?” he asked.
Logan grunted. “You obviously do.”
“Well, it’s that or head out to the monastery.”
Logan laughed out loud at that. That was Zach’s thing. He’d gone all Zen-like when he returned, going off to chant with the monks or some shit like that. Not exactly Logan’s thing.
“If you don’t want to use the VA services, I’m sure your health insurance would cover it.”
Logan nodded and smiled at Zach. “Yeah, I’ll call.”
What else could he say? That the fact that he now had insurance to cover something none of the other guys who’d come back with him were getting was just one more thing to piss him off. He needed to get out of there before the anger took over. Before he was blinded by it and ruined this party for everyone. He should be grateful. He was lucky to have what others didn’t. Instead, it fueled his anger in ways he couldn’t explain. Rage scratched at his skin and raked his bones.
He stood and handed Zach his beer bottle. “Can you take care of that and say goodbye to Jack for me? I gotta take off.”
Coming here had been a big mistake. He wasn’t ready. And no amount of therapy was going to change that.
Before he could walk away, Chad approached from the other side of the room, quietly joining them to make a trio of former military.
“You know I like you, right, man?” Chad asked.
Logan laughed, in spite of himself, and shook his head at Chad. Just like that, the anger ebbed a bit and he felt a fraction of the tension drain. It took the edge off a little, being flanked by two guys who understood.
“All right, give it to me,” Logan said, readying himself for a new way to die. The guys had christened “You know I like you…” as the opening line of the now-running joke of ways they’d kill Logan if he messed with Sam. He had to admit, some of them were pretty funny. Zach wanted to cover him in banana puree and toss him in the gorilla cage at the zoo. The plans were getting further and further from the realm of reality and more into the land of the ridiculous. As evidenced by the gorillas.
Chad smiled wide as he launched into his latest “kill Logan” plan. “Well, first we need to build a big pit.”
He was cut off as Jennie and Sam walked over to join the group, Jennie shaking her head at her husband.
“Enough with the plans, mister,” she said as she twined her arms around Chad’s bicep and looked up at him with a chastising scowl on her face.
Logan’s eyes flipped to Sam as she stood next to Jennie. His heart jumped when he saw the wistfulness in her gaze as she watched her two friends. She must want that kind of love as badly as he wanted it. She was a hell of a lot more suited to it than he was. He wasn’t able to give her what she needed right now, but part of him selfishly hoped she didn’t meet anyone before he got his shit together. Wow. How screwed up and selfish was that?
“What plans?” Samantha asked, her head swiveling around the group. Logan all but choked as he realized how that explanation might go. Yeah, Sam. They’re all planning my death because they’re afraid I’ll act on what I’m feeling and then
dick you over in the end. Yup. That explanation would go over well.
Jennie had the tact to explain the joke without making the connection to Sam, and Logan had a feeling his relief was matched by that of Zach and Chad. “The boys think it’s fun to come up with ways to kill a SEAL.”
Samantha gasped. “Kill a seal? Why would you do that! Poor baby seals.”
They all laughed and Chad made the clarification. “No, Sam. As in capital S-E-A-L. Like this guy.” He tossed a thumb toward Logan, spelling out the designation that stood for Sea, Air, and Land, the three theatres of operation Navy SEALs were trained to excel in.
“Oh! That kind of SEAL.” Sam nodded thoughtfully at Logan and the wheels started to crank in her head. Unlike when the guys laid their plans, Logan actually squirmed. What would she come up with?
“Hmmm,” Sam murmured, clearly deep in thought as she walked away from the group, muttering under her breath.
The remaining friends looked at each other, eyebrows raised.
“She’s the one who could do it, you know,” Chad finally said, and the rest nodded. And, apparently, Logan thought as he watched her walk away, she was busy coming up with the step-by-step of precisely how she would take him out. Wonderful.
Chapter Five
Sam wanted to lean on Jennie as they walked toward the locker room, but it seemed ludicrous when Jennie was a good few inches shorter and probably twenty pounds lighter. Okay, thirty. Thirty pounds lighter.
But, it was Jennie’s fault she was here.
“That woman is nuts. Certifiable. She needs to be stopped. Someone needs to stop her. Stop the madness,” Sam said as she clutched her stomach with one arm and leaned a hand along the wall on the way back to the locker room.
Jennie laughed.
Traitor.
“I think you’ll survive. Besides, people love her spin class. They line up for it a half hour ahead of time to get a spot. You’re lucky I saved you a place.”
