Chapter 2
The ringtone cut through sleep like a blade.
Mason's eyes opened. Not groggy, not disoriented. He woke up immediately, fully present, the way that twenty-six years of being a SEAL had hardwired into him. He knew that ringtone. He’d programmed it specifically to reach him through a dead sleep, through a Do Not Disturb setting, through anything. It had never once rung at a good time.
Sophia was asleep on his chest.
He could feel her breath, slow and even, her hair spread across his skin, her hand curled loosely against his ribs.
She hadn't stirred. The phone was on the nightstand to his right, and to reach it he was going to have to move her, and moving her was going to wake her, and waking her at one in the morning was going to start a conversation he always hated but would have anyway because that was what their life looked like and he wouldn't trade it for anything.
Fuck it.
He moved her gently, sliding out from underneath her with the particular care of a man who had done this before, who knew exactly how to shift her weight without jolting her awake. She stirred as he rolled toward the nightstand and snagged the phone.
“Gault here.”
“Mason.” Captain Hale's voice was clipped and awake in the way that meant things were already in motion. “We've got a live one. I need you and your team on base in one hour, ready to move out.”
He felt Sophia's hand on his back. Her hand moved slowly, deliberately, soothingly. Could she be any more perfect?
“We'll be there, Captain.”
He ended the call and turned. He caught her hand in his before it could finish its path down his spine, and he held it as he looked at her in the dark.
“Baby—”
“I guess you're going on another mission after all.” Her voice was quiet. Not accusatory, not broken. Just quiet and true.
He nodded. “The pinning ceremony is going to have to wait.”
He watched her face in the low light coming through the curtains.
He had spent sixteen years learning to read his wife in the dark and he read her now.
He saw the series of things that moved across her face in the span of a few seconds.
The adjustment. The recalibration. The moment where she took what she had been expecting, which was him finally staying, and replaced it with what was actually happening, which was him leaving again.
He watched her do this and it cost him something he didn't have a name for.
She had never once made him feel guilty for being what he was.
Not in sixteen years. She had never stood in a doorway with her arms crossed, never let the silence between them curdle into resentment, never allowed his job to become a fault line in their marriage.
That was one of the specific, particular ways Sophia loved him—by making room for all of it without complaint, without conditions.
But he had noticed something in the past two months, after his stateside command assignment.
The way she moved through the house differently.
The way she slept. There had been a looseness in her, a kind of ease he hadn't seen before, and it had taken him a few weeks to understand what it was.
She was relaxed. Truly relaxed, in a way that told him she hadn't fully been before, even though she had never said so, not once in sixteen years.
He had filed that away. He was filing it again now.
“I know the ceremony will have to wait,” she said.
She cupped his face in both hands and kissed him.
He kissed her back the way he always kissed her when he was leaving, like she was the most precious thing on this earth and he knew it.
That he loved her beyond life itself, and would work like hell to keep his promise to always come back to her.
When they broke apart, he rested his forehead against hers, and they looked each other in the eye.
“I love you,” they said simultaneously.
They laughed.
“Better get going, Navy Boy.”
He grinned. “You’re right.” He got off the bed and pulled on clothes.
He got his go-bag from the closet. Sophia sat on the edge of the bed watching him move through the room, neither of them filling the space with unnecessary words.
He zipped the bag and turned. She was standing now, and he pulled her in and held her, her face against his neck, his arms around her.
“Be smart,” she said into his collar.
“Always.” He kissed her forehead, then her mouth, then her forehead again. “Go back to sleep.”
She made a sound that meant she would try.
He moved down the hall quietly. Lisa's door was first.
He opened it without knocking because Lisa slept like she'd been sedated.
Nothing short of a fire alarm reached her.
She was sprawled diagonally across the bed in the particular way of a ten-year-old who treated a mattress like a wrestling opponent she had recently defeated. Her covers were on the floor.
He went in, picked up the blanket and spread it over her. She didn't move. He leaned down and kissed her forehead and said quietly, the way you said things to sleeping people, not expecting to be heard but needing to say them anyway: “Love you, baby. Be good.”
He pulled her door shut behind him.
Kayla's room was next. He could see the thin line of light underneath her door and he was not surprised by it. Kayla read late, always had, even as a little kid, even when she was supposed to be asleep hours earlier. He knocked lightly.
“Come in.” Just loud enough for him to hear. She’d known it was him.
He opened the door. She was exactly where he expected her to be, propped upright against a fortification of decorative pillows that she had arranged behind her with the architectural precision of someone who had done this many times, her nightlight casting a low warm glow, a paperback open in her hands.
She looked at him over the top of it with eyes that were too alert for one in the morning.
He nodded at the book. “Why not read on your e-reader?”
She gave him the patient look of someone who had explained this before. “Nobody does that anymore. Paperbacks are back, Dad.” Then the look shifted into something quieter, and she bit her lower lip. “You've got to go again, huh?”
It wasn't a question.
“Looks like.” He crossed toward the bed. “Can an old man get a hug?”
He didn't make it to her. She scrambled out from under the covers and the fortress of pillows, crossed the room, and threw herself at him the way she had been throwing herself at him since she learned how to walk, full-speed and without reservation. He caught her, the way he always had.
“Love you, Dad.” Her arms were tight around him. “Be safe.”
“Always.”
She pulled back just enough to look at him. She was fourteen and she had her mother's blue eyes along with her mother's ability to see directly through whatever he was projecting to whatever was actually true. She gave a soft, sad laugh. “You can't promise that.”
He held her gaze. “You're right. I can't.”
She considered this with a seriousness that made him realize, not for the first time, that she was more her mother's daughter than she would ever fully know. “Then be smart.”
He grinned. “That I can promise.”
She gave him a small grin back, the one that had a little bit of relief in it. She let go and stepped back. “Love you, Dad.”
“Love you more, baby girl.”
He pulled her door shut behind him and stood in the hallway for a moment. The house was quiet. His wife was in their room not sleeping. His daughters were in their rooms; one dead to the world, one holding herself very still reading a paperback like it was armor.
He picked up his go-bag and headed for the garage, then got into his truck.
He had fifty-five minutes.
He called Clint Archer, the man who was in charge of communications for his Midnight Delta SEAL team, as he backed out of the driveway, the night air cool through the cracked window.
Clint picked up on the second ring, which meant Clint's phone had already been in his hand, which meant Clint had already gotten a heads-up from someone.
“I know,” Clint said before Mason could speak. “I'm already moving.”
“Gather the team. Briefing room, oh-two-ten. Captain Hale.”
“Copy that.” A pause. “Last one, Mase.”
Mason didn't answer that. He pulled onto the empty street and headed toward the base.
He was the second to arrive.
Jack was already there when Mason walked into the briefing room, which made sense.
Jack lived closest to the base. He was sitting in his usual chair with a cup of coffee that smelled like it came from the machine in the hallway, which meant he was either very tired or very motivated, because nobody drank from that machine by choice.
Clint came in two minutes later, then Drake, then Aiden, then Dare.
Finn was last, cutting it with two minutes to spare.
Mason clocked this. Finn Crandall was many things but he was not a man who ran late.
Not that he was technically late, but he’d cut it close.
In eleven years of working together, Mason could count on one hand the number of times Finn had been anything other than early.
He let the others settle and moved to where Finn was standing, slightly apart from the group.
“Everything all right?” Mason kept his voice low.
Finn looked at him. Something moved behind his eyes, not evasion exactly, but deferral. “I'll fill you in later.”
Which meant everything was not all right.
Mason filed this, the way he filed everything that matters, in the part of his mind he would return to when he had time for it. He nodded and moved back to the front of the room as Captain Hale walked in and he didn’t waste time.
He never did. He moved to the front of the room with the particular economy of a man who had delivered briefings in rooms exactly like this one for thirty years, and he laid it out, the situation in West Africa, the American aid worker taken by a Boko Haram splinter cell in a region where American military presence was politically sensitive.
The extraction had to be clean. Quiet. No footprint.
Twelve days estimated, given the terrain and the positioning requirements. They needed positive ID before they moved, and positive ID took time.
The team listened. Not passive, but active, running calculations and contingencies in real time behind still faces.
Dare raised his hand. “Medical resources available at the extraction point?”
Hale answered.
Clint asked about communications infrastructure in the region.
Aiden followed with a question about air support parameters.
Jack asked about the intelligence source and its reliability rating.
Drake asked a question that was technically about logistics but was actually about what would happen if the twelve days became twenty, and Hale heard the real question and answered it directly.
Four minutes. Five questions. Everything necessary.
Hale gathered his materials and looked at the room. “You gentlemen have done this before. I have no doubt about the outcome.” He paused at the door. “Wheels up at oh-four-hundred.”
Then he was gone.
For a moment the room held the particular silence that followed a briefing, the quiet in which many years of working together did the thing immediately that words would take ten minutes to accomplish.
Then Drake pushed back his chair and looked at Mason with the expression that meant he was about to say something that was true but was going to be wrapped in enough nonsense that Mason couldn't get irritated about it.
“Well,” Drake said, leaning back with his arms crossed, “guess you're stuck with us a little bit longer, Lieutenant.” He let that sit for half a second.
“Honestly I'm starting to think the higher-ups are just going to keep sending you out on missions indefinitely.
Just keep finding new ones. There's never going to be a pinning ceremony.
You're going to be just a Lieutenant until you die.”
The room laughed. It was real laughter, the kind that came from tired men who were about to go somewhere dangerous and needed thirty seconds of something human before they compartmentalized everything else.
Dare shook his head, grinning. “Works for me.”
Jack nodded. “Same.”
Finn, who had been quiet since he walked in, looked at Mason from across the room. Something in his face settled, like he had made a decision about whatever he hadn't been ready to say outside. “Couldn't imagine working for anyone else,” he said simply, without the frame of a joke around it.
The room took that in. Nobody added to it, because nothing needed to be added to it.
Mason looked at his team, these men he had moved through the world with for over a decade, who had bled and carried and come home alongside him more times than he could count. He looked at all of them and felt the weight of it, clean and solid.
“Oh-four-hundred,” he said. “Get your gear.”