Blade (The Alpha Elite #11)

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Juniper

W ondering how much his friend had heard, horrified to think that it was probably every word, I looked back at the ridiculously tall, muscular man and put up the only kind of front I knew—attitude. “Let me guess, you’re a SEAL too.” He looked like a cross between a beast and a warrior, if beasts had stupidly good looks.

“Blade said you hadn’t eaten.”

Thrown by the statement, my attitude took a nosedive. “When did he say that?” I hadn’t seen Blade speak to him for more than a few seconds, and that’s what he had said to him? My guilt compounded, and so did my fear as the last thing Blade had said to me played on repeat.

With the same type of unwavering stare that Blade had, Delta focused on me, but it was like he was looking right through me. “Does that matter to you?”

Oh God. Delta had heard every word. Worse, he was judging me for it, and I couldn’t even blame him. “Fair question.” One I wasn’t going to answer. “Where did Blade go?”

A part of me felt like I had no right to ask. I was keeping my past locked down. I didn’t know Blade. I didn’t ask to come here. Every crap emotion that had made me run my mouth was still swirling. But the other part of me was drowning in the jumbled mess in my head, reliving the moment he’d saved me.

Again.

But more than his immediate actions once the bullets started flying, more than my past, I had a bigger problem.

After just one full day with Blade, I now felt his absence like a piece of me was missing. And that was more terrifying than the thought that he may know exactly who I was.

Ignoring my question, Delta tipped his chin toward the bag Blade had dumped on the stone island in the designer kitchen that was more Architectural Digest than log cabin. “You need to eat.”

“What do you need to do?” Wrestle a bear? All I saw out of every picturesque window were trees and more trees. And a rushing river.

“Don’t concern yourself with me.” Delta turned toward the door.

Panic set in. “Where are you going?”

I could handle cold. I could even handle mountains. But I couldn’t deal with freezing temperatures in isolated mountains by myself with no car and no way to escape. Especially not after a blue-eyed SEAL had sliced me apart with brutal honesty, then said he might not come back and walked out. It wasn’t only physically painful to bear the weight of that, but it made me feel more trapped in my life than my entire upbringing and past did.

“Perimeter check,” Delta answered.

“You just did that.”

He didn’t comment as he walked out the same door as Blade, except when Delta closed it, he didn’t make so much as a whisper of sound.

But nature did.

Rushing water and howling winds whistled into the heated space right before the door shut. Then there was no sound.

Like make your ears ring because it was so quiet no sound .

I stood there, looking around a cabin that was nothing like a cabin except for the log walls and double-height plank ceiling. Everything else was plush cream and light gray furniture, gleaming ivory kitchen countertops, stainless steel appliances that looked like they cost more than his plane, and windows.

All the windows.

With no drapes—unless you counted the curtain of trees outside that were quickly disappearing into the darkening twilight like giant, looming monsters.

I’d soon be in a fishbowl.

Fighting to breathe, fighting to do what I had always done and push everything down, I glanced out the massive two-story-high windows in the living room. Stretching all the way to the ceiling, the huge glass panes then angled at the top to match the slanted pitch of the roof, but because they were so tall, it was almost as if there was no roof at all.

Staring at the structural marvel of that much glass, the now-dark sky suddenly caught my attention.

One by one, twinkling stars started to pop.

Then it was as if they all woke up, and I was gifted with a whole sea of shimmering specks of light blue, white, silver, gold, and orange as they danced across an endless midnight backdrop.

For a single moment, I stargazed, and I let everything go—my past, the shooting, Del Cielo’s, the green-eyed man patrolling outside, the SEAL who’d saved me then left, the loneliness of my life, the isolation, the fear—I let it all go, and I simply stared.

I didn’t think I’d ever felt so small or seen a sky so big.

Then again, I didn’t spend much time looking.

In Miami, at night I looked at the inside of my Jeep.

Before that, I….

I sucked in a breath and forced the thought down as I turned toward the kitchen island and stood on tiptoe to look into the brown paper grocery bag.

Then I stilled.

Four everything bagels in a plastic sleeve, two bags of Lay’s original potato chips, and a four-pack of Starbucks’ bottled Frappuccino.

I burst into tears.