CHAPTER 7
THE SOONER JAKE GOT OUT OF HERE, the better. Because watching Aria stare at the dregs of her Cheetos, avoiding his gaze, only burned a hole through him.
“No, Jake. You’re not good for me. You get me in over my head.”
His sternum might have actual bruising from the way her words hit him.
He got her in over her head. He could attach a slew of other words to that. He scared her. He was dangerous. He was, um, bad for her.
In fact, boil it down and Jake was nothing but trouble.
Nice.
Yes, this little excursion was quickly turning into a trip through H-E-double-hockey-sticks. Despite his attempts to lighten the mood.
“So, what did the football coach say to the vending machine?” Jake sat on the windowsill, rooting around in his Doritos bag, looking for the last full chip.
He looked up to the silence in the room. Mimi lay on the bed, breathing oxygen through a mask, hooked up to a ventilator. But she’d demanded that “whatever party y’all are having, you’d better have in my room,” so he’d wheeled Angel’s bed in next to the older woman’s.
He liked Mimi. She reminded him of his grandmother—feisty, to-the-point, determined. Probably an older version of Aria, at least on the inside. On the outside, Aria was probably going to die in a pair of scrub pants.
“I want my quarter back,” he said to his waiting audience.
“I like it!” Angel was sitting up, petting the puppy—whom she’d named Toby. The little guy had finally stopped shivering, warmed in the nest of blankets Aria had found.
Angel had dried off too, although her dreads were still soggy. She looked desperately young. He’d like to get his hands on Baker, the guy who’d knocked her up and abandoned her.
“You should do stand-up,” Yola said. She sat on a chair next to Mimi’s bed. “There’s this great comedy club in my neighborhood in Queens. They have open mic every Wednesday.”
“You know, I know a lot of jokes about unemployed people but none of them work.” Jake found a chip, crunched it, waiting.
A pause, then Mimi started to laugh.
Jake winked. “You know why the shrimp wouldn’t share his treasure, right?” He lifted a shoulder. “Because he was a little shellfish.”
Mimi bent over, her hand to her stomach, laughing. It turned into a cough.
“Okay, that’s enough, Jake.” Aria got up from where she was sitting on the floor. She washed the Cheetos grime off her hands in the sink and went over to Mimi. “We don’t want to have to give her another nebulizer treatment.”
“Sorry,” Jake said, but the rest of the women were grinning at him. And as long as he kept everyone smiling, everyone laughing, he didn’t have to think about—no, it wasn’t fun.
Because he remembered being trapped with Aria as being very, very fun. At least when he didn’t think about the parts where someone could have died.
“Where did you learn all those jokes?” Yola asked.
“BUD/S. We had a guy—we called him Seinfeld. He was hilarious and we’d be dying, just trying to breathe and he’d come up with a one-liner that would take us out. He tapped out during hell week, but his jokes stayed.”
“How long were you a SEAL?” Yola asked.
“Twelve years. I got out about a year ago.”
He didn’t look at Aria. Because during one of the not-fun parts of their two days trapped together, he’d told her exactly why. One of a handful of people who knew the facts, even if he hadn’t told her everything.
But talk about letting someone in too far . . .
“Thank you for your service,” said Mimi.
He looked over at her, smiled. “Thanks, ma’am.”
“My Rollo wanted to go in, but I was too afraid he’d be shipped over to ’Nam, and we already had Yolanda’s mama, so he agreed to stay out. And they hadn’t started the draft yet, when he came of age, so . . . but he always felt like he shoulda served.”
“It’s not for everyone,” he said. “But it was a life I . . . well, it fit me. I liked being on the teams.” He got up then and went over to the remote near the bed. “Let’s see if we can get some reception, Mimi. Get us some Weather Channel.”
He turned it on but found static.
“We already tried that,” Aria said. “Probably the cable station is down.”
“Hopefully we’re past the worst of it,” Mimi said. “The storm sounds like it’s dying.”
The rain had gusted in bursts of fury over the past hour. Outside, one of the lights had gone out, broken. Jake reached for his cell phone, checking again for reception. Nothing.
He walked toward the window—one bar appeared, and with it, a message. He opened it before the reception died.
Jake. Hope you found your girl and are out of danger. Cat 5 hurricane headed for the Keys. Call us when you get to Miami. Dad
He stilled, then closed his phone and slipped it into his back pocket.
“You know,” he said, taking a breath, “I was thinking that if the storm gets worse, we probably don’t want to be near these windows.” He turned, a smile on his face. “I’m going to try and find a better room for us.”
He petted Toby on the way out of the room.
Aria followed him. “Jake?”
He looked over his shoulder. “’Sup?”
“What was in the text?”
He opened an inner door—supply room. Not big enough to accommodate all of them. “Nothing. My dad, checking in.”
She’d caught up to him. “You’re acting weird.”
He opened another door, a tiny bathroom. It could work, maybe. “Did you see any other rooms here that don’t have any windows?”
“There’s a chapel on the other side, sort of by the nurses’ station.”
He turned to her. Debated. But she’d said she liked to plan, didn’t want anything unexpected, so, “Lucy has been upgraded to a Cat 5, and with the intermittent rain bands, my guess is that it’s going to hit soon. Which means there will be a storm surge and pretty violent winds. We need to stay high and get someplace without glass.”
She was just staring at him. “A . . . Cat 5. No. That isn’t . . . that can’t . . .” She reached out and braced her hand on the wall. “No, this can’t be—”
“Aria?”
“This isn’t happening, this . . .” She pressed her hand to her head, turned, and wandered down the hall.
He caught up to her, grabbed her shoulders. “You okay?”
Her expression looked a little wild, her eyes big. “I’m supposed to be on vacation! Drinking margaritas and sunbathing, and . . . eating raw oysters.”
“Raw oysters. Now I know how you got sick.”
“Jake!” She focused on him now. “How does this happen to me? I go on vacation and suddenly . . . I’m in trouble? It’s like—”
“Maybe you like it. Trouble.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Really? You think I like this?”
“I’m just saying—you did choose to stay here. Mimi told me that you could have flown out on the last chopper.”
“Yeah, you’re right. I love trouble. It’s my favorite thing. In fact, after I get everyone buttoned up, maybe I’ll go out and do a little surfing in the thirty-foot storm surge. Or maybe I’ll swim with sharks—by the way, I did see one on my oh-so-fun snorkeling adventure.”
“You going to blame me for that too?”
She frowned. “What—?”
“Nothing. Just, I’m not responsible for all the trouble you get in.”
She blinked at him. “No, no, you’re not.”
He stood there, and there was clearly something wrong with him, because he still wanted to kiss her, the way she stared up at him, a little spark in her eyes. She’d impressed him on the mountain with her courage. Now, he didn’t know why he liked her . . .
Except, he just couldn’t take his eyes off that little pulse in her neck. And the way she looked so small and delicious in her scrubs and—
He wouldn’t even call them friends anymore after what she said to him. But he couldn’t get his heart to stop wishing she’d stop glaring at him and let him kiss her.
She drew in a breath and stepped back from him. “I guess I owe you an apology. It didn’t even occur to me that maybe I led you on in Alaska.”
He frowned. Oh, wait— “Aria, that’s not what I was—”
“No, no, you’re right. I was . . . well, I was just like every other woman you met—”
“What? No, are you kidding me? You’re nothing like the women I—” And oh, that’s not what he wanted to say at all. “Listen, Aria, I just meant that you didn’t know you were going to fall off a mountain. Or get caught in a hurricane. Those things happen—they’re nobody’s fault.”
“Yeah, well, I’m tired of them happening to me. And people I love getting hurt because they want to, I don’t know, save me.”
And click, suddenly her anger made sense. She thought he was going to get hurt. Because her sister had died, and because of it, Aria had lived. At her core, that had to ache. He lowered his voice. “Aria, I’m not going to get hurt because I came down to Florida after you.”
“Really? Because you’re stuck here, in a Cat 5 hurricane. Because of me.”
“I came down here because I wanted to—”
“It’s a Cat 5?” Yola stood in the hallway. “Oh, I knew it. I just knew it—”
Aria turned. “It’s okay, Yola, we got this. We’ll put everyone in the chapel. Right? Okay?” She turned back to Jake. “We need to get these people to safety.” She took a breath. Smiled. And suddenly, all the panic had flushed from her expression. “Can you help me?”
Jake just stared at her. Aria had morphed right in front of his eyes, turned into a surgeon, the boss.
Huh. “That wasn’t . . . me. The real me doesn’t, well, she doesn’t do impulsive, or unexpected . . .”
Then who had he met on the mountain? The girl who laughed with him and called him Hawkeye?
The woman who had kissed him as if she’d been starving.
That woman laughed and teased and . . . lived.
“Yes. Of course,” Jake said, morphing into the operator he’d been. Because two could play at this game.
“Good. Angel’s blood pressure is back to normal, and I got a heartbeat from the baby, so she just needs to be comfortable. Mimi, however, needs her ventilator—”
“I’m on it, Doc.”
She nodded and headed down the hall.
He followed her into the patient room.
She was already piling supplies—the nebulizer, some pharmaceuticals, the leftover foodstuffs—onto Mimi’s bed. Yola was maneuvering Angel’s bed out of the room, but Angel had hopped off.
“I can walk.” She started to limp but made a sound so Jake picked her up.
“You’re such a hero, Jake,” Angel said, the puppy in her arms.
He didn’t feel like a hero. So far, he’d become a stalker, a womanizer, a troublemaker, and maybe even a jerk.
What a fun trip.
And now, he’d somehow made Aria feel like all of it was her fault.
He carried Angel down to the chapel, a tiny room with six chairs, a small altar at the front, and a cross hanging at the end of the room. He set her down on a chair. When he scooted out, Yola followed him. “What can I do?”
“Let’s get some mattresses and build us a bunker.”
They pulled off mattresses from nearby beds, dragging them into the room. Yola made a bed for Angel, one for her grandmother.
Jake retrieved his backpack from the staff room, then helped Mimi, who insisted on walking, into the room. Aria wheeled the ventilator behind her.
Outside, the wind had picked up, a terrible moan filling the corridors.
“We should get some juice.” He deposited his pack, then returned to the staff room and emptied the vending machine of the juice boxes, piling them into his shirt.
A crash sounded at the end of the hallway. He ran out and found Aria sprinting toward him, her eyes wide, wind blowing in behind her through a broken window at the end of the hall. Rain bulleted in with a howl.
Aria’s hair had turned wild around her face. “It’s here!”
And just like that, she transformed back into the woman he’d pulled from the crevasse. Unguarded, her eyes full of emotion and definitely not afraid of him as she reached out and grabbed his hand.
The wind tore through the building, shaking it, ripping papers and supplies from the nursing station.
He clutched the juice boxes in his shirt as they raced to the chapel. Then he let them fall, shut the door, and braced a mattress against it.
Aria grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him down, his back to the wall.
Hunkered down next to him.
And then, confusing him completely, she reached out and grabbed his hand, threading her fingers through his.
Ho-kay.
He tightened his hand around hers. Maybe it didn’t matter who she was in Alaska, or even in Minnesota.
She could be whomever she wanted to be, really. As long as she was alive.
And, frankly, with him.
The lights flickered off as the wind around them raised its voice and roared.
Aria leaned her head against the wall of the chapel. The A/C had cut off with the electricity, although generators were keeping the ventilators still running. Outside their tiny spiritual enclave Lucy tore at the building. It shuddered, and with it, the wind moaned, haunting the hallways with shrieks and wails.
She wanted to press her hands over her ears.
Glass shattered all over the building, tearing at the metal frames. Rain pounded the building, the storm surge outside rising and falling with what sounded like great gulps of destruction.
She drew her knees to herself. She’d take a blizzard any day.
And, please, with Jake. Because he sat with her. She’d let go of his hand, but he was close enough for her to touch, if she needed.
Oh, she needed.
She was painfully, keenly aware of the way she’d practically launched herself at Jake, holding on to him like he might be dragging her out of a crevasse.
Again.
After she’d taken his hand and escaped to the chapel, after Jake had secured the door, and after she caught her breath, she’d tucked Mimi and Yola in, making sure they had blankets, checked on Mimi’s pulse and blood pressure. She’d done the same for Angel, then crawled back over to Jake, who’d held his cell phone flashlight on her activities.
She sat on the mattress next to him, his scent radiating off him—part seawater, part male exertion, part just Jake, a sort of force of power and safety that she could recognize anywhere.
Memories of Alaska kept sweeping into her brain, especially the way he’d held her, kept her warm inside the sleeping bag as the blizzard tried to bury them.
Yeah, any sort of misbehavior, any over-her-head with them had been all her doing, because even now, the man just sat there, his hands to himself.
Oh, she wanted to weave her hand back through his. Or better, lean her head against his shoulder.
And this was why she needed to stay away from Jake. And vacations. Because somehow they always combined to find her behaving exactly opposite of herself, as if she flipped a switch and became someone else.
Became . . . well, actually, her sister, Kia.
So, “I’m ready. Tell me one of your corny jokes.”
“What?”
“A silly joke. I need one.” She was whispering, just in case the rest of the women were sleeping.
“Okay. How do hurricanes see?”
“Tell me.”
“With one eye.”
She laughed. “Okay, that was clever.”
“What did one raindrop say to the other?”
“I have no idea.”
“Two’s company. Three’s a cloud.”
She could almost see him in the darkness, leaning against the wall, his hands folded on his lap. How many times had she woken up in Alaska to see him watching her? Funny that when skies were clear, he was the storm. But in the middle of the storm . . .
He was the calm.
“Okay, here’s a riddle. What goes up when the rain comes down?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“An umbrella.”
She wished they had lights—she would have liked to see his smile. But frankly, darkness gave her a measure of safety. Allowed her to loosen the hold she had on herself.
To relax and lean a little in his direction. And maybe . . .
“Okay, Jake, this is the last time I’m going to talk about it, but . . . what happened in Alaska wasn’t your fault. I know Jenny blames you, but the fact is, sometimes . . . well, sometimes I don’t know who I am. I want to be Kia, who flings caution to the wind and embraces life in the moment. But the prudent side of me says think it through. And right there, any spontaneity dies.”
“And in Alaska, you were Kia?”
“Yeah.”
“So, Kia is your heart, and Aria is your head.”
She’d never heard it put that way, but . . . “I guess so. Because literally, you know—”
“Your heart is Kia’s. I know.” His voice was closer now, as if he’d turned to her. “But it’s not, you know. It’s yours. She gave it to you. Your heart belongs to you.”
She frowned, not sure what to say.
“I have something for you,” he said and moved away from the wall. She heard a rustling, a zip, as if he were digging into his backpack. Outside the room, the wind howled, rattling the door.
He finally resettled next to her. His shoulder touched hers and she felt his hand trace down her arm to find her hand.
“Here,” he said and opened her hand, dropping something cool into it. “I should have given this back in Alaska, but . . . it sort of got missed.”
She ran her thumb over the coil of what felt like metal, and a flat object— “My necklace.”
“Yeah. Sorry. I put it in my shoe polish canister and forgot about it. I got you a new chain. It’s just a cheap gold one I found in the Miami airport, so if you want a better one, I’ll upgrade it.”
She fumbled with the latch—
“Here.” He found her hand again and reached for the necklace. “I’ll put it on you.”
She let him have it and turned her back to him, lifting her hair.
He maneuvered his hands over her head, his body close to hers, then latched it around her neck. The half-heart charm fell against her neck, cool and familiar.
“Now you have your heart back,” he said.
She wasn’t sure, suddenly, why his words hit her. Why, suddenly, she wasn’t sure she wanted it back. Her hand went to the charm, tracing the jagged edge with her thumb, an old habit. “My sister gave this to me on our thirteenth birthday. I have the other half at home—I could never bring myself to wear it.”
She’d turned around again but somehow ended up leaning against him.
He didn’t move away.
“You mentioned a motorcycle accident. Kia sounds like she was pretty adventurous.”
“Yeah. Completely opposite of me. We could have been fraternal twins for the differences, but I blame my faulty heart. She was born first, and she did everything first. Walked, talked, danced. Well, I never really danced—”
“You danced with me, in Alaska.”
“If I remember correctly, I stepped on your toes.”
He made a low humming noise. “I liked it.”
Oh, Jake. Stop, please. Because a rush of warmth spread through her.
She’d liked it too.
“Kia was on danceline, knew all the guys, knew how to flirt—she did all the fun things—”
“Everything you couldn’t do because of your heart.”
“I don’t know. She was brave and beautiful and adventurous. I like to read about adventures, not go on them . . .”
“I beg to differ. This from the woman who climbed Denali.”
“Yeah, see, that was for Kia. Because she would have wanted to.”
“Mmmhmm.”
“What?”
“It just seems like a lot of commitment to adventure for someone who just wants to stay home.”
She had nothing. Her hand went to her charm, ran it up the chain.
“I was really jealous of Kia.” She didn’t know where that came from, and pitched her voice low when she said it, but there it was, the truth.
And it occurred to her that Jake had this knack of pulling the truth out of her, whether she wanted him to or not.
“She used to come home after dance practice, or a date, or even some crazy thing she did and come into my room, and she’d tell me every detail. Even the kissing.”
“Yeah, that sounds like sisters,” Jake said, and she heard a smile in his voice. Then, it turned soft. “But my guess is that maybe it was hard for Kia to watch you suffer. Maybe she did all those things because she wanted you to live them too.”
She hadn’t really thought of that.
“In fact, if I understand sisters at all—and I have five of them, remember—they would do just about anything for each other. I’ll bet Kia is in heaven right now smiling down on the fact that you’ve started to live the adventures you only got to dream about.”
“With her heart beating inside me.”
“With your heart beating inside you. The one she gave you.”
She dropped the charm, his words settling inside her.
“You don’t want to hear that, do you?”
“I don’t want to think about the fact my sister had to die for me to live. And I can’t help but feel I’m a poor substitute for her.”
He said nothing then but slid his hand down to hers, took it, and wove his fingers through hers.
Squeezed.
Something a friend would do, maybe, but it ignited a fire through her, right down to her veins, the feel of his warm skin, the slight hairs of his arm brushing hers, tickling.
And right then, the awareness of him—solid, sturdy, bold, safe, sitting right next to her in this terrifying storm—swept over her.
Jake. Was here. In the storm.
Again.
Like God had decided to providentially send him.
“Jake?”
“Mmm?”
“Why did you . . . why did you come to Florida? Really.”
Silence, and in it, thunder cracked, the rain pounding, wind whistling, high and sharp.
“I just . . . didn’t want your last memory of me to be the one where I made you run away.”
Huh? But yes, maybe she had run from him. From the overwhelming sense that with this man, she was someone different.
Someone she didn’t quite recognize.
She slid her other hand over his. Then she leaned her head against his shoulder. Solid, a little sweaty, but in a second, he unlatched his hand from hers and curled it around her shoulders, pulling her against him.
“I’m not going to let anything happen to you, Aria,” he said softly. “We’re going to get through this.”
Yeah. He’d said that before. Only earlier, he’d added, “And I promise, you never have to see me again.” She held her breath, waiting.
He didn’t add the words, and she didn’t remind him.
“Thank you, Jake,” she said quietly.
“For?”
“Everything. Alaska, but . . . I’m glad you’re here.”
He gave a little chuckle. “I’m glad I’m here too, Houlihan.”
Ham couldn’t decide between the stuffed elephant or Gaius the Roman Turtle.
He stood across the street from the Baroque cathedral in Piazza del Duomo in the Mediterranean port city of Catania, the heat of the day pouring down his back, listening to the chatter of tourists as they strolled the square.
Not the tourist attraction of Rome or Florence, Catania sat in the shadow of Mount Etna, the live volcano to the north, and was built on lava flows. Still, the city bore the marks of the modern age, with trolleys and rail trains bisecting the city, bicyclists mingling with scooters to whip in and out of traffic. The smells of the sea rose from the nearby port, but he wasn’t here to see the beach.
He stepped inside the cool shadow of a kiosk that sold plush toys of gladiators, key rings of swords, picture books that detailed the epic history of Rome, and most importantly, burner cell phones.
He pointed to a phone, then to the turtle. “Per favore.”
The dark-haired teenager handed him the items and Ham handed over the euros.
Just in case he needed a secure way to call the Prince, whose number he got from Chet’s text.
The Prince, who may or may not be the man named Royal, who’d helped get Ford and his sister, along with Scarlett, out of Russia.
So much for needing Ham’s help, although he had secured them passage on a boat in the Caspian Sea. But admittedly, he’d dropped the mission ball, so to speak—focusing too hard on his quest to unearth information about Signe.
A quest that had sent him down to Sigonella to meet with the doctor on base who’d called him about Agatha. When he’d picked up his daughter, he’d been too stunned to dig deeper into his wife’s death. Now, he had a list of questions. However, Lt. Marilyn Hollybrook had nothing more to tell him.
The trim officer, who appeared to be in her midforties, folded her arms over her uniform and leaned back in her desk chair.
“We got a call from the Italian coast guard, who said they found her on a beach, wearing a life jacket, a little shell-shocked. She said the yacht she was on blew up, and that her mother was dead. Identified you as her father.”
“Did the coast guard find any wreckage, any bodies?”
She nodded. “Two men washed up a couple days later, and they found the wreckage of a yacht farther down the coast.”
“No body of a woman, midthirties?”
“You’ll have to call the local authorities.” She wrote down a number. “Salvatore D’amico. He’s the coroner in Catania, and a friend. Tell him I sent you.”
He’d given Salvatore a call, and thankfully he’d spoken enough English for Ham to explain his situation. No female bodies, but he took Ham’s number.
And that’s when a text from his old SEAL buddy Luke Dekker had come in.
Ham took the bag with the turtle in it, pocketed the cell phone, and headed down the piazza to the Caffe Opera, a small outdoor espresso bar that served fresh croissants, coffee, and gelato.
He took a seat on a wicker chair under an umbrella and watched the square. Pigeons waddled over the cobblestones, the fragrance of the potted peonies and ferns mixing with the aroma of fresh-baked bread. A server came out, and he ordered a cappuccino.
While he waited, he sent Jake another text. The man hadn’t texted him back in three days, although Ellie had kept Ham stocked in pictures of Aggie. And while he wasn’t exactly panicked—clearly she was having a great time—it did irk him that Jake wasn’t answering, especially since Ham had left the man to care for his daughter.
His daughter. He still didn’t know how to wrap his head around that word. Or the idea that Signe hadn’t mentioned a word.
Maybe Aggie wasn’t his. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t said anything. It wasn’t unheard of for children to claim soldiers as their fathers to escape a foreign country.
And it wasn’t an idea unique to Signe. Her own father had been a soldier stationed at Fort Benning, a man she’d never met.
Which made it even more strange that she’d keep his daughter from him, knowing her wounds.
Jake. How are things going with Aggie?
Check in.
Ham closed the phone just as he spotted Luke crossing the square.
Dekker still walked like a spec ops soldier, confidence in his gait. He wore sunglasses, a T-shirt under an unbuttoned collared shirt, cargo shorts, and a pair of flip-flops—his baseball hat on backward with blond hair curling out the back.
Ham grimaced. The man had American written all over him. Then again, they were less than thirty miles from the naval base, so maybe Catania was used to seeing Americans.
Maybe this was the best kind of cover for a private security operator.
Luke came up, grinning. “Hamilton.” He held out his hand.
Ham took it, then pulled him close, slapping his back.
“You look good,” Luke said. “A little thick around the waist, but—”
“At least I’m not impersonating a beach bum.”
“I live on the Mediterranean Sea. Of course I’m a beach bum.”
Ham noticed the ring. “You’re married?”
“Yeah. I met her on assignment a few years ago.” He pulled out a chair. “So, what are you doing on my side of the ocean?”
“I had a gig.”
“You’re working private security too?”
“No, I started a global SAR company. Occasionally we do extractions from undisclosed countries.”
The waiter came out and Luke ordered in Italian.
“You’re living here now?” Ham said.
“No. I live in a small town north of here called Santa Margherita. It’s private and I don’t bring my work home. It’s safer that way.” He nodded to the waiter who brought him his coffee, a frothy drink with a design on the top. “I make enemies in my job.”
He added a sugar cube, then pushed it through the froth with a spoon. “When you texted me, I was just coming off a job in Greece, so . . .” He lifted a shoulder. “What are you doing in Sicily?” He crossed one leg over the other, leaned back.
Ham had known Luke back when they both served on Team Three. “Do you remember Signe?”
Luke gave a small laugh. “Do I remember the woman who nearly cost us our lives? Uh, yes.”
Right. Because he’d dragged along Luke and Jake and North for an unsanctioned op to rescue his wife.
“I thought she was in that village.”
“Me too. I don’t know how she survived that bunker buster, but I couldn’t believe it when I saw her—here, actually—a few years later. I mean—when HQ issued that air strike, I was pretty sure it was all over.”
Ham drew in a breath. “Yeah. Me too.”
Ham could still taste the acid that had stripped his throat as he watched the air strike, as the bunker burned, his screams to abort still echoing into the radio.
He didn’t remember too much after that, how Luke and the others had gotten him back to their exfil, onto the plane.
Didn’t remember the trip home.
Only remembered waking, for six months afterward, every night, screaming.
“I should have realized that you were crazy about her when we showed up at that refugee camp,” Luke said now. “I’ll never forget the look on your face when she drove up that day in that old truck, like you’d seen a ghost.”
“She was surrounded by three men toting Kalashnikovs. Of course I was freaked out.”
“Ham, what are you doing here?” She’d said the same thing climbing out of the truck as she’d said to him six years earlier at Berkeley. Except, instead of holding her book bag, she was helping carry a wounded child to the hospital her NGO had set up on the border of Ingushetia and the Republic of Georgia.
He didn’t want to tell her that he’d arrived to help train the very people who were climbing out of the truck with her.
“I’m with NATO,” he said, and that was accurate enough.
She had changed. Lost weight and wore no makeup, her green eyes weary, her long blonde hair in a grimy braid. She wore fatigues and a loose hijab, a thousand miles from the hippie he’d known.
But still his Signe.
He’d followed her into the Quonset hut, a makeshift medical unit with twenty or so beds, a small surgical area in the back. She was speaking Russian as she made room for the boy—maybe ten years old and crying.
“They say they’re done fighting, but you know the Russians,” she said, glancing at Ham. “They don’t give up when they think something belongs to them.”
And he just . . . he couldn’t breathe. He’d found her.
Then she put her hands around her waist and dismantled him. “I knew you’d find me. But what took you so long?”
“I felt like I had seen a ghost,” he said now to Luke. “I’d spent about five years looking for her, and then, there she was. I mean, I’d heard she was in the region, but . . .” In fact, he might have arranged for his team to be assigned to this particular op, hoping . . .
But he could have never imagined what he found.
Luke ran his thumb down the handle of his cup. “She is something. Pretty, for sure. And brave. How many languages does she speak?”
“Three, fluently, besides English. French, Italian, and Russian.”
“And a local dialect. I also remember her walking away with our money after playing darts.”
“I taught her that. We had a dartboard in the barn growing up. She has an amazing eye.”
“I do remember you two sneaking off for a number of personal debriefings.” Luke winked.
Ham looked away, heat filling his chest. Yes, their Kiev trip. When Aggie was conceived.
“So, how is she?” Luke asked. “She was pretty cryptic when I last saw her. Said you were stationed at Sig, but I knew that wasn’t true. A good lie, though, for anyone who hasn’t been on the teams.”
Ham sighed. “Listen, here’s the truth. I thought she died. Until two weeks ago when she showed up here, with a kid—”
“Wait—you didn’t know she was alive?”
Silence.
“Wow.” Luke leaned back. Shook his head. “That’s brutal. And the little girl? She had blonde hair, blue eyes.”
“Her name is Aggie. She survived a yacht crash, and when they found her, she named me as her father.”
Luke had leaned forward. “And Signe?”
Ham shook his head.
“Aw, that’s rough, man. You lost her all over again?”
When Luke said it like that, it was a spear, right in the middle of Ham’s chest. He nodded.
“Are you sure she’s dead? Because she did survive last time.”
Ham looked at him. “And how did she do that? When we showed up in that village, Zara told us Tsarnaev had taken her to his bunker.”
Of course, by then it had been too late to call off the air strike. The one his commander ordered after his team found a cache of Russian munitions, enough to start another invasion.
It hadn’t been Ham’s order, but it felt like it.
“Apparently, he didn’t,” Luke said. “So, was she with Tsarnaev all these years?”
That thought sent a shudder through Ham. But Chet’s words swept back to him. Acting as diplomats and humanitarian aid workers . . . and even occasionally simply going dark, becoming ghosts.
He didn’t want the word to linger, but frankly it had been lodged there for days.
Spies.
“What do you know about Pavel Tsarnaev?”
“Just rumors. Wealthy. He’s half Russian, half Chechen, and heavily involved in the Russian mafia.”
“The Bratva.”
Luke nodded.
“Why would Tsarnaev hold her hostage for ten years?”
Luke looked at his cup. “I hate to ask this, but is the kid even yours?”
The question came in like a blow.
“When you saw her, how did Signe seem?”
“Fine. Maybe a little surprised to see me. I asked how you were, and she said fine—like you two were together. While I knew she was lying about your whereabouts, I thought you were at least together. Since I was off the teams by then, I didn’t know.”
“Healthy. Not hurt.”
“And she didn’t seem like she might be a prisoner, held against her will.”
Ham looked away.
“Sorry.”
“That’s okay. I’m just . . .” He lifted a shoulder.
“If the woman I loved came back from the dead with my kid, I’d want to find her too.” Luke finished his cup of coffee. “If you need help, let me know. Don’t be a stranger.”
He got up and Ham did too.
But as he walked away, he turned. “Ham, buddy. That little girl—she did look like you. Why don’t you get a DNA test? Then you’ll know for sure.”
Ham forced a smile and waved at Luke, his last conversation with Signe playing in his mind.
“Signe, why here, in Chechnya?”
She was sitting on a bluff overlooking the valley where the camp, with its five thousand inhabitants, was located.
“I came as a translator with a group of Doctors Without Borders about six months ago, and then . . . I don’t know, I just stayed. Because . . . well, they needed me.”
“It’s Caesar all over again.”
She grinned at him. “Stupid dog.”
“Lucky dog. He picked the right girl to follow home from school.” He wanted to reach out, tuck the errant strand of her hair behind her ear. “He wasn’t the only stray you took in.”
She seemed to consider him. The sun had long ago kissed her face, dappled it with freckles, deepened her tan. If anything, she’d grown even more beautiful since her college years, from spunk to substance. “Yeah, but he wasn’t easy. He used to try and bite me if I reached out to him.”
“He was just afraid of getting hurt.”
“He should have trusted that I knew what I was doing.”
He drew in a breath. “I thought I lost you.”
She leaned close. “You’ll never lose me, Hamburglar. No matter where I am.”
He kissed her then, because he’d been a little lost without her, because he still ached for her.
Because he didn’t care if he got hurt.
She kissed him back, sweetly, as if she expected it. As if she’d seen him yesterday.
But he couldn’t escape the memory of her words, now turning him cold. “He should have trusted that I knew what I was doing.”
What, Signe, were you doing?