Blade (The Alpha Elite #11)

Chapter Sixty-Five

Juniper

E very mile he drove, I sank further.

Snow-covered mountains, endless hills, giant pine trees—Montana was beautiful.

Then he turned down a dirt road and, minutes later, pulled up to the most perfectly perfect picturesque cabin on a partial cliff edge overlooking a rushing river.

Except it wasn’t just a log cabin.

It was a soaring two-story structure with walls of glass, a steep-pitched roof, wraparound decks, and a giant front door. If a cabin could look like a mansion, this one did.

Stunned speechless, suddenly more horrifically embarrassed by my Jeep and my life than I’d ever been, I barely had time to process how every inch of the place fit Blade—and how I didn’t—when an SUV pulled up behind us.

“Delta” was all Blade said by way of explanation as he got out of the truck.

I glanced back.

Delta was a muscled tower of a man as big as Blade, and he was looking right at me as he greeted Blade.

Then my door was opened, and it was dominant commands all over again. “Put your jacket on. Grab your purse.” Blade reached for the grocery bag at my feet. “We’re heading inside the cabin.”

“Then I don’t need a jacket.” I was afraid to put it on and feel its warmth. “You’re not wearing one.” He was still in his T-shirt. The same T-shirt from this morning that seemed like a lifetime ago. “Why do I need one?”

“Just put the fucking jacket on, woman.”

Grabbing my purse, holding the puffer coat to my chest and ignoring him, I made a horrible mistake.

I tried to slide out of the truck and bypass him.

I tripped, a warrior caught me around the waist, hauled me into his chest, and shouldered the door shut.

A whimper escaped, and a man named Delta spoke up with a voice so deep it didn’t carry.

“Perimeter check.”

“Copy.” Blade whisked me up the porch steps and to the front door, then he punched in a code on a security panel.

A moment later, I was being ushered into the most beautiful home I had ever been in, but it wasn’t awe or envy or gratefulness that struck me.

It wasn’t even happiness that a man like Blade had a place like this to come home to.

It was self-sabotaging despair.

“Bathrooms and bedrooms on the first floor. Kitchen’s stocked. Heat’s on.” He dumped the grocery bag on the massive kitchen island. “I have to go handle something. Delta’s staying. Don’t go out alone. Don’t fucking fall in the river.” He grabbed a down jacket from a hidden coat closet in the massive entryway.

I stood there.

“Problem?” he clipped.

“You know what I think?” I couldn’t stop myself. I was tired and hungry and so, so fucking embarrassed by my life and my absolute shit choices. And now he was saying he was leaving me here, and I couldn’t unsee this cabin. Or stop thinking about his plane and his flying skills. And him buying me the nicest hoodie I’d ever owned in my favorite color like he knew me and cared when no one cared, but he was leaving anyway, and more shit just spilled out of my mouth. “I think you like to play hero. You probably always have, because then you don’t have to deal with your own life.” I told myself to shut up, I really did. But it was too late. “You can orchestrate these elaborate rescues and control them. You can work for some South Beach company in your security job and feel better about your anger or whatever it is you did when you were—” I waved my hand around like an asshole. “—scheming or maneuvering or doing whatever it is you call it when you were in the military being a SEAL. But now you’re not that, so you had to transition to doing things like you did today to pretend you’re still an ordinary human.”

“Scheming,” he stated, low and threateningly.

“Did I stutter?” I hated myself.

For two heartbeats, he let my ugliness hover in the hurricane between us, which was exactly twice as long as I needed to hang myself with it.

“Scheming,” I repeated, digging my own grave. “Conspir—”

“I’m not some fucking politician pulling some bullshit démarche move. This isn’t atonement.” Spitting out the last word like it was vile, he lowered his voice to a lethal dominance. “I’m not a hero, and I don’t play at shit. I’m a trained asset. My job was eliminating bad fucking people from the face of the earth. I’m a Tier One operator who does one goddamn thing, and one thing only. Kill. You think I’m gonna go from the tip of the spear to being an ordinary goddamn human?”

I opened my mouth to apologize.

“I’m not fucking finished. You think this is me angry? You think I’m playing rescuer to your bullshit for sport?”

“I’m—”

“You’re what? Sorry you had the room to fuck up parts of your life while others were losing theirs? Sorry operators like me choked on the fog of war, watched our brothers get blown up, then wrote After Action Reviews with their blood still on our hands?”

Oh my God .

“Clue in, woman. I don’t fucking scheme or orchestrate. And I sure as fuck don’t have the time or luxury to get angry. I’m a SEAL who eats trigger time like it’s fucking candy. If I let my actual temper flare for one goddamn second, civilians would piss themselves. Make no mistake, woman, I’m one of the military’s highest-trained weapons. My entire career is stacked with targeted kills. You think that transitions to a fucking security job ?”

He didn’t give me room to answer, not that I was going to try, because I was a horrible person. And I couldn’t ever imagine him doing any sort of regular job. I couldn’t imagine him doing anything or being any way other than how he was—lethal and uncontained.

“I didn’t go from being a dog of war to a fucking lap pet just because I was let off the leash. I know who the fuck I am, and I don’t apologize for it. You want to mouth off, lose your shit, project you’re fucking trauma—have at it. Your life, your choice. But don’t stand in my kitchen and pretend like you don’t know why the fuck you’re here.” His gaze steeled more than I’d ever seen it right before it cut above my head. “Clear?”

“Affirmative.”

I turned at the threateningly deep voice.

Standing not five feet behind me with his arms crossed, looking even more impenetrable than Blade, Delta stared me down without so much as a flicker of emotion in his green eyes.

“Fucking great,” Blade muttered. “Twenty-four hours. If I’m not back by then, you know what to do.”

“Copy.”

I whipped back around. “What do you mean, if you don’t come back?”

His only answer was his lethal stare aimed pointedly at me for exactly one second before he strode past and opened the door.

The blast of frigid Montana air struck me in the face, then chilled me to the bone before the heavy wood slammed shut, and he was gone.