CHAPTER FOUR

 

 

I’VE GOT TO get out of the barracks—like yesterday,” Sam groaned, hitching the small backpack higher up on his shoulder as he and Wes walked down the hallway to Noah’s apartment after work the next day.

The building wasn’t the Ritz, but it was clean and quiet, with actual grass growing in the common areas. Noah’s place was a two bedroom with one and a half bath. And as an added plus, it had a small balcony where he could grill. Compared to Sam’s living situation, it probably seemed like Nirvana. Wes didn’t blame his Teammate. Living in the barracks sucked. If base needed someone to do manual labor, they always looked there first. And if you wanted to hook up with a girl, bringing her back to a room that wasn’t much bigger than a closet with thin walls to boot wasn’t an option.

Wes glanced at his Teammate. “Why haven’t you moved already? With the limited space in the barracks, nobody’s going to have a problem approving your request to live off base.”

Sam shrugged as they took a right and headed upstairs to the second floor. “Yeah, that’s not the problem. Apartments are so damn expensive and with the measly housing allowance I have as an E-4, I’ll be lucky to be afford a condemned one-bedroom on crack-house row.”

Wes chuckled. He couldn’t argue with that. “You’ll find something.”

Sam only grunted in reply.

Noah’s apartment was at the far end of the hallway and when they reached it, Wes rapped his knuckles on the door. Their Teammate had been on quarters—aka sent home to rest the bum knee he’d gotten in Nigeria—since getting back from Africa, with the exception of the short amount of time it had taken him to provide his statement on what happened on the mission. Wes and Sam were there to check to see how he was doing, as well as bring him some groceries.

But a pony-tailed blond pixie with a grin about a mile wide opened the door instead of their slow moving buddy with a bad wheel.

“Laurissa!” Wes grinned. “Don’t tell me your brother has you over here waiting on him. Does the man have no pride?”

Noah’s younger sister laughed, opening the door wider so he and Sam could step inside. “Apparently not. He’s chilling on the couch while Mom is in the kitchen making homemade chicken noodle soup for him, acting like he got blown up or something.”

Out the corner of his eye, Wes caught Sam’s surprised expression and gave him a quick little head shake before his friend could tell Laurissa that was exactly what’d happened to Noah. Because obviously, Noah hadn’t told them.

Noah was indeed hanging out on the couch opposite the sweet big-screen TV in the living room, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, his leg elevated on a cushion. It had started swelling on the flight home from Africa and by the time they landed, he couldn’t even bend it. The thing looked even worse now. His knee was roughly the size of a cantaloupe with black and blue streaks running through it. Yeah, it was pretty gross.

Noah’s mother was at the stove in the kitchen, stirring the soup Laurissa mentioned she was making. From where Wes was standing, the stuff smelled amazing.

“Hey Mrs. Bradley,” he called, giving her a wave her way as Sam set his backpack on the floor beside the couch. She lived thirty minutes up the coast in Carlsbad and regularly stopped by to bring Noah homemade goodies. “Noah causing you trouble?”

His mom laughed, glancing over her shoulder at Wes, her straight dark hair brushing her shoulders. “Doesn’t he always?” Covering the pot with a lid, then walked around the counter peninsula and into the living room to give him and Sam each a hug. “You boys are all so slim. You need more meat on your bones.”

Laurissa snorted. “Mom, I think they call that being fit. Women like that, trust me.”

Grinning, she waggled her eyebrows at Wes and Sam, earning herself a frown of displeasure from Noah. He was extremely protective of his “baby” sister and was very vocal about not wanting anybody on the team messing with her. Which not only tended to piss Laurissa off, but also pretty much guaranteed the guys joked about asking her out all the time simply to get a rise out of him.

Noah’s mother was too busy checking on his busted knee to see the looks being passing back and forth between everyone, which was probably a good thing. “Well, they may be fit, but do they have to play so rough? I mean, seriously. This much damage from a volleyball game is crazy.”

Wes lifted a brow in Noah’s direction. “So, what did the doctor say about your volleyball injury?”

As fibs went, it wasn’t that far-fetched. The guys on SEAL Team 5 did play volleyball a lot and it usually tended to get violent. Hell, that’s why they called it Combat Volleyball.

“She said it’s a Grade 2 ligament sprain to my MCL and ACL,” he said. “Luckily, nothing that needs surgery. Just some rest and rehab. If it were any worse, I could have been looking at a complete knee rebuild. Maybe even a medic discharge.”

Damn. That thought silenced Wes immediately. From the expression on Sam’s face, it hit him equally as hard. As SEALs, they all knew they did a dangerous job. But the idea of any of them getting injured badly enough to get kicked out of the Navy was something none of them ever thought about. They couldn’t…not if they wanted to keep doing the job.

After Noah gave them a rundown on how long he’d be off his feet and what his rehab would look like, his mothered pestered him about the importance of “healthy” food during his recovery. Apparently, she’d discovered his kitchen cabinets were full of nothing but “junk” food.

“That’s why I filled your chicken soup with lots of vitamin packed kale and ancient grains,” she added. “And I’ll bring more food tomorrow, so don’t worry about running out.”

Wes almost laughed. He was pretty sure running out of healthy food was the last thing Noah was concerned about. He was right.

“Please tell me those are cheeseburgers I smell in that backpack you brought,” Noah said to him and Sam when his mother and sister left a little while later.

Sam unzipped the backpack with a chuckle, handing a take-out bag with burgers and fries from In-n-Out to Wes and Noah before eagerly opening his own.

“What am I missing at work?” Noah asked as he pulled the grease-stained paper wrapper off the first burger and took a big bite. “Have they figured out where the leak came from yet?”

Wes unwrapped his own burger with a snort. “Not yet. Be happy you’re stuck here on your couch. Because work was absolutely shitty.”

“Everyone is trying to blame us for the leak that ended in the ambush,” Sam added, shoving a handful of fries in his mouth.

Noah frowned. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. There must have been thirty investigators at HQ today.” Wes bit into his burger. It was juicy with the perfect amount of melty cheese. “CIA, NCIS, SOCOM, even the frigging National Security Agency showed up. Nash, Sam, and I dissected every single moment of the mission from the second we got the call to come in until that IED went off. None of them came right out and said it, but it’s obvious they think there’s a leak and that it had originated with our team. Some of the investigators from the CIA even went so far as to imply we’re jealous of having to take a backseat to SOG and that we purposely leaked the plans for the raid so they’d look bad.”

“That’s frigging insane,” Noah said. “We work with those guys from SOG all the time. They can’t believe we’d be that petty we’d put their lives—and ours—in danger.”

Wes dunked a handful of fries in the ketchup he’d squeezed out of the packets onto the wrapper. “They didn’t seem to think that part through.”

“Things only got uglier after that,” Sam said. “If Commander Hunt hadn’t stepped and got everyone to calm down that might’ve been the end of anymore joint CIA/SEAL operations.”

“It might still be,” Wes pointed out. “To say everyone is walking on eggshells right now is an understatement. The CIA is pulling out all the stops to find Chapman and those drones, and when they do, the plan is to once again use our team for backup. But if something goes wrong next time, I don’t want to think about how bad the fallout is going to be.”

Noah ate in silence as he considered that. “So, what’s the latest on you getting arrested?”

“My lawyer doesn’t think the district attorney’s office is going to prosecute,” Wes said.

He hoped so. If they did, it was likely to have serious implications for his security clearance—and his job as a SEAL.

“That’s good.” Noah shook his head. “I still can’t believe Kyla showed up at Nesbitt’s with a gun. I mean, not that I blame her. How’s she doing?”

“Well, on the bright side, after I got arrested, we finally sat down and talked about us. We’re going out on a date this weekend.”

“About damn time.” Noah reached over to fist bump him. “So, what’s the not so bright side?”

Wes hesitated, not sure how to answer that. “I think Kyla is in some kind of denial about the whole thing. She’s not acting the way I expected her to.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Noah asked. “There’s no manual for how she’s supposed to act, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.” Wes sat back, resting his ankle on the opposite knee. “It’s just that before that sniper shot him, Nesbitt said he only hired Stavros to scare Kyla’s dad, and that if Stavros did, in fact, murder him, he must have been working for someone else. But for some reason, Kyla isn’t curious about who might have hired Stavros. I mean, she started her own underground hacktivist group so she could find her father’s killer and now, suddenly, she’s acting like she doesn’t care anymore.”

Noah’s brow furrowed. “You don’t believe her?”

“I don’t know,” Wes admitted. “She’s always been this force of nature, someone not afraid to go after the truth and risk everything for what she believes in. Regardless of what Kyla said, there’s a part of me that’s afraid she’s going to keep digging until she finds out who hired Stavros. I only hope she thinks before going after whoever it is this time.”

Or ending up in jail again might be the least of his worries.