“YOU DON’T HAVE TO TELL ME ANYTHING,” Lyndon said.
Kadance took a slow breath. “I have to.” It wouldn’t be fair to him to let him get entangled with her without understanding what he was getting into.
Lyndon quietly let her organize her thoughts.
“I was in the CIA, Special Activities Center.”
“Covert operations,” he said. “Black ops.”
She nodded. Sometimes the fact that he seemed to know at least a little about everything made talking to him easier. She wasn’t used to talking to people, and she liked that she didn’t have to spell out every detail for him. “I specialized as a sniper.”
“That’s why you have that gun in your back seat and why you spotted the shooter at the storage facility.”
“It’s a McMillan TAC-50 sniper rifle. I’ve considered getting rid of it several times, but I feel unprepared without it.”
“Unprepared for what?”
“I entered service just out of high school. I’ve completed a lot of missions.” She looked over at him. “I’ve killed a lot of people.”
He nodded.
She turned back to the road. “I was positioned in the Middle East for years. I was alone, entrenched in cultures so different from America. I speak fluent Farsi and Arabic, and with my coloring, I could blend in pretty well.”
“They left you there a long time.”
She closed her eyes for a second and nodded. She’d felt alone, had feared she’d been abandoned at times when she received no communication for months.
“It was hard on you,” he said.
“I kept reminding myself of what I was there for—to protect not only our troops and our country but the innocent people trapped by evil regimes and terrorist groups. But some days were much harder than others. I could take action only when orders came in. There was so much I couldn’t stop . . .”
“Tell me,” he said.
She glanced at him.
“I think you’ll feel better if you tell me the details,” he said.
She wasn’t so sure about that, but she’d started this and needed to follow through. “I spent years with certain villages. They’d give me a backstory and place me, and I had to blend in. The men who ran these villages believed in Sharia law, including hudud.”
“I’ve heard of Sharia, but not hudud.”
“It’s the mandated punishments under Sharia law. They’re extreme. Hudud is not enforced widespread, but some want it to be the unwavering standard. So many of these men used Sharia to terrorize. I saw things, and I knew of things going on, but I couldn’t do anything, or else I could risk the larger plans in place.”
“So you weren’t just a sniper.”
“It was my job to find intel, get it to my superiors, and when the order came to eliminate certain people, I knew the terrain and the patterns of the community to get it done quietly.” Her handler had called her a “one-stop shop.”
“Did anyone ever figure out it was you?”
She didn’t answer.
He leaned forward to look at her more closely. “Someone did. And you had to eliminate them too.”
“I did my job.”
“But it was hard on you,” he said. “More than you’ll admit.”
She was quiet. He was right—she still felt blood on her hands, of all the people she couldn’t save, even of the evil terrorists she’d killed.
“I’m not going to sit here and tell you all of it was right. I honestly don’t know.”
For some reason, his blatant honesty was refreshing. It didn’t make her feel better about what she’d done and seen, but it made her feel okay about not feeling okay. She’d always felt that she was wrong for feeling conflicted about some aspects of her service.
“But,” he said, “I do know that you tried to protect the innocent. No matter what, that was the right thing to do.”
She nodded. The problem was she was just scratching the surface of what she needed to tell him.
“A lot of the time,” she said, “I didn’t know who was in my sights. I had to trust that the intel was good and my superiors made good decisions when they gave me orders. Sometimes I imagined who my targets were leaving behind, but I tried to trust that I was making a difference.”
He didn’t respond, and she glanced over at him.
He was looking out the windshield at the darkening sky.
“I think you probably already guessed that part of my background,” she said. “At least to some degree.”
“Something like that.”
“What I really need to tell you,” she said, “is something entirely different.”
She saw peripherally as he tilted his head.
“When I finally came home, I was so relieved,” she said. “I’d never truly appreciated this country until I came home after ten years of living in communities where I barely had rights just because I’m female. I saw girls married off at the age of ten, women punished for the offense of having been brutally raped, child suicide bombers, and nonbelievers killed simply because they had a different faith. I became so entrenched in it that I could barely remember what it was like to live here, have rights, be equal.
“Then I went home. My first night home was hard. My family was so proud of my service, and they wanted to hear my stories, but I didn’t want to relive them. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t concentrate. My dad said I just needed to get back into action. He’s the one who’d trained me as a sniper. He and my uncle and all my cousins are accomplished. He got me out on the range on the ranch and raved about my skill. I’d always been good.” Too good.
“Are you still dealing with PTSD?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Probably.”
She felt his gaze on her.
“This isn’t the end of your story,” he said.
“No,” she admitted.
He reached over, took her hand, and squeezed it. His hand was warm, strong, but his grip gentle. Some emotion that she couldn’t quite identify washed over her. She’d forced all emotion out of her life for so long, she could barely recognize it at all.
With their hands on the armrest between them, Mac scooted over to Lyndon’s left thigh and rested his front paws and chin on their hands. Then he closed his eyes again. She was shocked at how relaxed Mac was being.
“Keep talking,” Lyndon said gently.
“My family took me back out to the range every day. It was familiar, my childhood all over again, and I started sleeping better, eating more. I don’t think I was happy really. I think I was letting the numbness of routine calm me. My father was pleased. He thought I was coming back to my old self, but my old self, the little girl who’d get up at dawn to try to beat her daddy at target practice, was gone.” She sat up straighter in her seat. “I’d known that would happen when I went in the CIA. I’d made the decision that protecting my country was worth whatever it did to me.”
He squeezed her hand.
“But that ten years isn’t what cut away the last threads of who I was.” She took a slow breath and looked over at Lyndon. “I became an assassin for hire.”