Chapter 31
Donovan
Sarah’s breathing had steadied against my shoulder.
Her fingers were still locked in the fabric at my back, but the desperate grip had loosened into something closer to exhaustion.
I heard the rangers’ voices outside the building.
Zayn calling out orders, Baraka and the other men’s replies as they secured the area and started cleanup.
I held on for another minute. Then I eased her arms from around my neck and leaned back so I could see her face.
The left side of her jaw was swollen. A bruise was already darkening beneath her eye.
Something hot and violent moved through my chest at the sight of it.
I wanted to walk back outside and find the man who’d done this to her.
But he was already on the ground with the rest of them.
She was here, and I’d gotten to her before anything worse had happened. I held on to that.
She looked at me and didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.
“You’re safe now.”
“I didn’t expect you to come for me.”
“Well,” I said, gesturing at those of Nasser’s men who were dead, “they didn’t expect us either.”
She nodded. Her hands dropped into her lap, and she pressed her back against the wall. I got to my feet, and my knees ached from the concrete.
“I need to go help the rangers. I’ll be right back.”
She looked at the metal ring in the floor. The cut zip ties still attached to it. “I don’t want to stay in here.”
“Okay. Then let’s get you outside.”
I helped her up and walked her outside. I found a spot in the grass at the edge of the yard, away from the prisoners and the bodies. She sat down, and I pulled the canteen from my vest and put it in her hands.
“Here, drink something.”
She unscrewed the cap and took a long swallow. Her hands were still shaking, but she held it steady enough.
I straightened up and looked back at the farmstead. It looked different from this side of the fight.
Nasser’s men were facedown in the dirt with their hands zip-tied behind their backs. Rangers stood over them with their still-warm rifle muzzles providing just the right amount of incentive for the prisoners not to do anything stupid.
Zayn was arranging a security team, making sure none of Nasser’s men had slipped away or were hiding. Jomo had a small team conducting a detailed inventory of weapons and contraband from the three buildings and the two trucks. Baraka and his team were maintaining control of the prisoners.
They didn’t seem to need my help after all.
Two rangers were carrying Andrew across the yard toward the nearest building.
He had one arm over each of their shoulders and his feet were barely touching the ground.
They propped him against the wall, and one of them knelt to press fresh gauze over the chest seals I’d put on him.
His face was the color of old concrete, but he caught my eye and managed to flip me the bird.
I owe that guy big-time.
I began walking around just to try to dump some of the adrenaline still coursing through my system. Sarah would be okay where she was for now, and Andrew was close enough we could monitor him until medics arrived.
Zayn found me behind the third building, away from everyone else. He’d slung his rifle. He had dirt on his face and had sweated through his shirt, but he was beaming with a level of confidence I had never before seen in him.
“How did you find this place?” I asked him.
He looked at me as if the answer should have been obvious.
“You taught us to track.”
I didn’t say anything.
“When you and Andrew left camp, we heard the truck. We all decided we should follow to see what was going on.”
“In the dark.”
“You taught us to read signs at night. We picked up your tire marks off the southern access road and followed them. When the road forked, the tracks told us which way you went.” He adjusted the sling on his shoulder.
“We found your truck where you’d left it, and then we followed your tracks through the woods on foot.
When we started hearing gunfire, we picked up the pace. ”
I leaned my shoulder against the wall. The concrete was still warm.
“Every man came,” Zayn said. “Nobody stayed behind.”
I’d trained these men. Week after week, drill after drill. I’d watched them go from a ragged group of kids who couldn’t field-strip a rifle to a unit that moved and fought and communicated under fire.
I’d been wrong about my own judgment, and I’d been wrong about these men.
They’d tracked me through the dark and run headfirst into a firefight because they chose to. They made the choice themselves.
And they’d been ready for it because somewhere along the way, underneath the doubt and the nightmares and the weight I’d been carrying, I’d done my job.
That was what Owen’s death had taken from me—the willingness to trust that someone I’d trained could make it through to the other side. And these men, every single one of them, had given it back.
Zayn stood beside me. He didn’t ask if I was all right. He just waited.
I put my hand on his shoulder and held it there.
“Well done,” I said.
It wasn’t enough. Nothing I could say would be enough. But his chin lifted and his shoulders squared. He gave me a single nod.
I walked back toward the front of the main building, and that was when I saw Nasser. He was among the captured. Facedown in the dirt with his hands bound, the same as the rest. His bush shirt was torn at the shoulder, the khaki pants smeared with red soil.
Just a man in the dirt with his face turned sideways.
I walked over and crouched down beside him. I grabbed a fistful of his hair and lifted his head until his eyes met mine.
“You never should have mixed business with personal.”
I shoved his face into the ground before he could answer. Then I let go, stood up, and kept walking.
Zayn made the call to KWS. Police and wildlife service arrived at the farmstead within the hour, blue lights bouncing off the walls. They took Nasser and his remaining men on-scene, cuffed them with proper restraints, and loaded them into vehicles.
Officers took statements from the rangers while the rest of the operation was cataloged and secured.
Medical support came with them. The paramedics got to Andrew, replaced the field dressing with real bandaging, started an IV with morphine, and loaded him onto a stretcher. My heart hurt seeing him get shot for helping me.
As if he could read my mind, he put a hand on my arm. “Did you get the girl?”
I laughed a little. “Yeah, I got the girl.”
“Then even if I could turn back time, I would still follow you.” He winced as they adjusted the stretcher. “Because now I know my bar tab is covered by you for life.”
“I think the last thing you need is more shots.”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to need.” He managed a weakened laugh, trying hard not to move the wounded part of his body. He let go of my arm, and they loaded him up into the ambulance. I watched the doors shut.
Faith arrived after the first responders. She wasn’t law enforcement and she wasn’t medical, but she came. She walked through the farmstead with her leather satchel and her KWS uniform and took in the scene with an expression of absolute shock on her face.
She spoke to the officers, then to Zayn. She looked at the buildings, the vehicles, the men being loaded into transports. Then she found me.
“Excuse me, Mr. Hughes. Is this your idea of protecting?” she said.
“I’m sorry, Faith, but I couldn’t wait and risk them hurting Sarah.”
“Well, officially, I have to condone such extreme levels of violence. It’s tricky from a publicity point of view.” She leaned in close. “But I’m glad you got those fuckers.”
She leaned away and brushed at her uniform as if there was something unbecoming on it.
“Nasser can be processed by authorities for all the crimes he committed. Not just the ones here, but at every other reserve as well. And clearly, all of this—” She gestured around at the bloodstained grass, the body bags for Nasser’s men, the bullet-riddled buildings.
“All of this is his fault as well. You had to utilize necessary force to protect KWS personnel from harm. Is that understood?”
“That is understood.” She extended her hand, and I shook it.
“Now, I have a lot of paperwork to do, and you need to go take care of you know who.”
She walked back toward the officers, and I went to find Sarah.
Zayn must have sent some rangers to retrieve the trucks after law enforcement showed up. Sarah was sitting on the tailgate of one of them. Her boots hung above the dirt. Her arms were wrapped around herself.
I climbed up beside her and sat down. The tailgate dipped under my weight. Our shoulders almost touched but not quite.
For a while, neither of us spoke. The night had settled back over the bush, and Sarah’s hands were trembling in her lap.
“Why did you come for me?”
She hadn’t asked how I’d found her. She hadn’t asked what had happened. The question was simpler than that. And harder.
Why. Why did I drive into the dark with one man against a camp full of armed men. Why did I risk my life and Andrew’s to go after her in the middle of the night with nothing resembling a plan.
I looked at her. The bruise darkening her jaw. The raw lines at her wrists. She was holding herself together with whatever she had left.
“Because there was no version of this where I didn’t.”
She watched me.
“You were in trouble, and I was going to come get you. That’s all there was to it.”
I let that sit, then said the rest.
“You are worth every risk I took tonight, Sarah. Every single one. And I would take them all again.”
Her face changed. Not the way it had broken when I’d found her in that room. This was something deeper and older, a thing she’d been keeping hidden with everything she had, and my words had pulled it into the light.
Her eyes filled. The tears came without sound, running down her good cheek and then across the swollen one. She didn’t wipe them away.
“Sarah.”
“I need to tell you something.” Her voice was thick and unsteady. “About why what you just said—” She pulled a breath in through her teeth. “About why that matters more than you know.”
She pressed her palms into her thighs.
“Gregory Haines,” she said.
I waited. She stared at her hands, and I gave her whatever time she needed.
“Before Kenya. Before the fellowship, before any of this.” She pulled in a breath. “I was with someone for two and a half years.”
The name meant nothing to me. But the way she said it told me my list of people to kill had just grown by one.
“He wasn’t violent. He never hit me. He never raised his voice.” She swallowed hard.
“He just made me smaller. Every day, a little bit at a time, until I couldn’t remember where I ended and his version of me began.”
I kept still and let her talk.
“We were in the same program at vet school. We started at the same level. But I was better with the animals. I always had been, and it was the one thing I never doubted about myself. He couldn’t stand it.”
She gave a little sniffle and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“So he went after everything else. The things I wasn’t sure about. How I looked. How I dressed. Whether I was interesting enough or experienced enough or—” She stopped.
“He told me I was plain. He told me I wasn’t enough to hold a real man’s attention. He said the only thing I had going for me was that I was good with animals, and that wasn’t enough to keep anyone around.”
She paused, took a deep breath. Kept going.
“He didn’t say it all at once. That’s not how it works. It was a comment here or a joke at dinner that wasn’t really a joke. And because I’d never been with anyone else, I didn’t have anything to measure it against.”
Her voice dropped to almost nothing.
“I believed him. Every word.”
I knew what it cost her to say that. Every part of me wanted to reach for her, but she was giving me something fragile and I needed to let her finish.
“When I finally left him, I didn’t feel free. I felt empty. Like he’d scooped out everything that made me a person and left the shell.”
She pulled her knees up on the tailgate.
“I came to Kenya to prove I could stand on my own. The fellowship, the work, the distance from home. All of it was about finding out whether I was still a whole person away from the voice of someone telling me I wasn’t.”
“And you are.”
“I know that now. I’ve known it for a while.” The tears were still coming, but her voice was steady. “But what you said just now, that I’m worth it. That there was no version where you didn’t come.”
She pressed her hand to her chest.
“Gregory would never have come.”
The words hung between us. Five words that carried two and a half years of damage inside them.
“That’s what broke me open just now. It wasn’t the rescue.” Her voice steadied, and the conviction in it was the realest thing I’d ever heard from her.
“It’s what the rescue means. That I matter enough to someone that he weighed every risk against losing me—and chose the risk. Every time.”
Her hand found my forearm. Her fingers closed around it.
“Gregory convinced me I wasn’t the kind of person someone would cross a room for. Let alone drive through the dark in the middle of the night with one man and a rifle because I was in trouble.”
I watched her as she said it. This woman who’d rebuilt herself from the ground up in a place ten thousand miles from home, who’d earned her way into work that mattered.
She was sitting on the tailgate of a truck in the Kenyan bush telling me the truth about a wound she’d carried across an ocean, and every word she said made Gregory Haines a smaller man.
“Gregory was wrong,” I said. “About every single thing he ever told you.”
She let out a breath that sounded like it had been sitting in her chest for years.
“I know,” she whispered. “I finally know.”
I didn’t try to fix it or explain it away or make promises about what I’d do to Gregory Haines if I ever had the chance. She didn’t need that.
She needed what she’d given me when I’d told her about Owen—someone to sit with the wound. A witness. Someone to carry half the weight without trying to take it from her.
She leaned into my shoulder. I put my arm around her and felt her ribs expand against my side with each breath. Her hand settled on my chest over my heart and stayed there.
“Donovan.”
Her voice was barely above a whisper.
“Yeah.”
She lifted her head. Her eyes found mine in the dark.
“I love you.”
I cupped her face with both hands, careful of the bruise. My thumbs at her temples, my fingers in her hair.
“I love you, Sarah.”
She closed her eyes. A fresh tear slipped free and ran over my thumb, and I brushed it away.
I kissed her forehead. Her arms circled my waist and I pulled her against my chest, and neither of us moved. She curled her fingers into the fabric at my back.
We stayed like that. And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I knew I was making the right choice.