Chapter Twenty-Four

Harvard

As soon as Sami disappeared through the dorm’s front door, I instantly regretted the decision to bring her here. I wanted her in my home. My bed.

Fuck me.

I hadn’t just stepped over the line with her tonight. I’d blasted over it, then for good measure dropped a nuke on it. Tonight had been wrong. Didn’t feel wrong, though. Felt like the rightest thing I’d ever done in my life, but my feelings about it didn’t negate the fact that I had essentially disobeyed a direct order. Again. I should go to Quinn and come clean before he found out from the rumor mill.

A visceral memory of our evening together reared up and caught me in its heated grip. Sami arching into my thrusts, her bare breasts washed in the golden light of the setting sun, nipples puckered and gleaming from my mouth.

I was instantly hard again.

Key dangling from the ignition, the car’s engine still silent, I sat back in my seat. Closed my eyes.

I was Sami’s superior. Teacher. Mentor. Whatever.

But I didn’t want to be any of those things if it meant I couldn’t lose myself in the wonder that was Sami Blackwood again. For me, sex had always been a biological necessity that, yeah, could be fun. Never a priority and never something I’d factored into my decision-making process. It was just…sex. When the need arose, I’d find a woman to enjoy it with, then move on with my life.

Tonight hadn’t been that. Tonight had been…more. Something deeper than the physical act that I wanted to explore.

But I also really didn’t want to lose my job. And if I kept disobeying orders, I would. HORNET was more flexible than some other paramilitary organizations, but even Gabe and Quinn had a limit for what they would tolerate. And here I was, blithely tap-dancing around it.

I groaned and scrubbed my hands over my face. There had to be a way to have both. Quinn had found a way to have both the job he loved and his family. So had Gabe. Jesse, Seth, and Jean-Luc all had both—and every single one of the guys had met their women in the course of a mission. How was my situation with Sami any different than theirs?

It is, an evil little voice whispered in the back of my mind. None of the others ever fucked one of their trainees.

The other guys had all been on equal footing with their women. The power dynamic between Sami and me was all kinds of wrong. What if she’d only slept with me tonight out of fear of losing her spot in the training program? I’d never forgive myself if that was the case.

Jesus. What had I done?

I jumped out of the car, intending to track Sami down and talk to her, but the sudden blast of the dorm’s fire alarm had me skidding to a stop. Every security alarm on base reported to an app on my phone, and I pulled up the dorm’s video feed. Fire in the common room. The couch and…a body on the floor. The shock of seeing it knocked every thought out of my head except one cold, terrifying truth: Sami was in that building.

No. Not her. Please, not her.

I burst into a run, all the while trying to find Quinn or Gabe or someone in my contact list who wasn’t out of the country. I don’t know whose name I finally found. I didn’t wait for a greeting. I yelled into the phone, “Fire in the dorm! Someone’s hurt!”

People streamed out of the front door, but I didn’t see Sami. I grabbed Gavin. He was coughing, tears spilling from his eyes. The skin under his scars had gone white, and his hands shook violently. His gaze focused a million miles in the distance. Another time, another place.

“Hey, Gavin! Look at me.” I snapped my fingers in front of his face until he finally noticed me. “Where’s Sami?”

“I-I—” He wheezed and coughed again. I knew that faraway look in his bloodshot eyes. I’d seen it in Seth when his PTSD had been at its worst. I left Gavin and grabbed the next guy I came to.

Blaze.

Because of course it was.

“Where’s Sami?”

He straightened from a coughing fit and looked around. “Shit. Wolfey, too. I think they’re inside still.”

“Stay here.”

“Fuck that noise,” he said and followed on my heels.

I was fully trained to handle high-stress situations like this, and he wasn’t, but I wasn’t going to take the time to talk sense into him. I ran for the front door and shouldered through, pulling my shirt over my nose and mouth as a makeshift mask. There was a lot of smoke, thick and black. Flames completely engulfed the couch and crawled up the wall behind it. Several other fires burned throughout the common room, all of them appearing to originate in…electronics?

Yeah. Laptops. Phones.

Burned plastic and fried wires clogged the air with a caustic scent almost as unbreathable as the smoke. All of it was on fire, except for the TV and Xbox. The screen showed the same 8-bit character from Jean-Luc’s laptop virus, except this time the words underneath flashed, YOU HAVE DIED. RETRY?

What. The. Fuck?

I didn’t see Sami or Wolfe in the common room, and I couldn’t get to the hallway that led to Sami’s room. Still, I had to try. I took a step in that direction, but Blaze gripped my shoulder.

“No way, man!” he shouted over the crackle of the fire, and then coughed.

“What if she’s back there?” I tried to shake him off, but his grip only tightened.

“They’ll find a way out, but we won’t if we don’t get outta here now.” He wrapped a steel band of an arm around my chest and hauled me back toward the door. “C’mon, Nerd Boy. She’ll kill me if I let you get yourself fried.”

He was right. The logical part of my brain knew he was right and followed without any more protest, but my heart? That little shit was screaming for me to dive through those flames and find the woman who meant more to me than any other.

We were both coughing by the time we reached fresh air. I bent double, heaving in lungfuls of oxygen and spitting out smoke-tasting phlegm. Someone grabbed me and hauled me upright.

Gabe. He wore flannel pajama pants and unlaced Nikes and nothing else. His hair was mussed in a way that suggested he and his wife had been in the middle of something when I called. He didn’t have his cane, and his limp was more pronounced than usual. “Is everyone out?”

“Sami.” Her name came out choked. It was all emotion, but I hoped Gabe would mistake my rasp for smoke inhalation.

“Wolfe, too,” Blaze said. “And Will Campbell, but he—” His voice snapped like a dry twig. “He was holding my laptop when it exploded.”

I stared over at him. “Is that what started the fire?”

He swallowed so hard that his Adam’s apple bobbled. “I gave it to him and walked away. It exploded. And then everything else…everyone’s phones.”

Quinn jogged over to join us. “Why hasn’t the sprinkler system kicked on?”

YOU HAVE DIED. RETRY?

“It won’t.” Fear burned in the pit of my stomach. “It’s computerized. It’s all…computerized.”

I turned away. I couldn’t watch the building burn, knowing Sami might be trapped inside and I couldn’t get to her. My chest was heavy and empty at the same time. Like a clawed beast had reached inside and torn out my heart.

“Hey! Hey!” someone shouted. “There they are!”

I whirled to find Remy shoving through the crowd, pointing at the side of the building. I chased after him and skidded around the corner in time to see Sami’s feet hit the ground. She’d broken a window and climbed out.

“Sami!”

She glanced in my direction but returned her attention to the window as another pair of feet appeared.

I wanted to grab her, hold her, and maybe cry into her soot-streaked hair like the manly man I am, but it would have to wait. The person coming out the window now was unconscious, and she struggled under his dead weight. Remy grabbed one badly burned leg, and I took hold of the other. It was hard not to gag at the viciously wrong scent of cooked human flesh as we helped lower Will Campbell to the ground. Wolfe was close behind, jumping out the window with his medical kit on his shoulder.

As soon as Will was clear of the burning building, we laid him out in the grass, and I grabbed Sami in a hard hug. She clung to me, and I inhaled ash from her hair, but I didn’t care. I was shaking hard, fear rattling me to the marrow. “I couldn’t get to you and, I thought— Jesus, Sami. Why didn’t you evacuate with everyone else?”

“We—” She coughed, voice raspy from smoke inhalation. “We couldn’t leave Will.” Eyes wide and bloodshot, streaming tears, she stared down at the severely burned man on the ground. I followed her gaze. Wolfe worked over Will, putting his last three months of medic training to good use.

“How is he?” I asked.

Wolfe’s eyes were just as red as Sami’s, and I saw doubt there when he met my gaze. “He’s alive, but this is beyond my skill set.” He swiped at the sweat on his forehead, smearing ash across his face. “I need Jesse.”

“He’s out of the country.” I searched the crowd for Gabe or Quinn, who both had some battlefield medic training from their SEAL days. They’d moved the rest of the trainees to a safe distance. Gabe spoke on his cell phone, and Quinn was running toward the road, probably to open the main gate and let the firefighters in.

The building shuddered as the fire ate through something important to its stability. I hugged Sami tighter and met Gabe’s gaze over her head. He was furious, the rage loud and clear in the hard set of his jaw, the narrowed eyes, the tension coiled in his big shoulders. He wanted to go to war, and I didn’t blame him.

This was an attack. Here, in our home, where Quinn’s kids played and Gabe’s wife grew bigger with his baby every day. Our safe haven was no longer safe.

Holy hell.