Chapter 1
Shane
“Idon’t get it,” I repeated, as Ethan put on his cuff-links.
They were a gift from Kat, his bride, made of platinum and jet, and they gleamed on the starched white cuffs of his dress shirt.
“Why the huge spectacle? Why invite the whole fucking world to your wedding? After all the shit we’ve been all been through.
Do you need to prove something to somebody? ”
Ethan turned to look straight into my eyes. “Yes,” he said. “To us. Most specifically, to you.”
“Me?” I echoed, alarmed.
“Yeah, you. You’ve paid a higher price than any of us for what happened. You deserve to get your life back, and then some.” His smile flashed. “Which you have, for sure. Looks like Cass has seen to that.”
“She makes up for a whole lot of bad shit,” I admitted. In spite of what I’d gone through, I had Red, as I called her. I couldn’t think of her as Cass. “Red” had sliced deep into my mind, the first time I saw her, from behind that thick wall of glass.
“I know,” Ethan said. “Having Kat makes up for everything.”
“Same,” Jed Clearwater said. He was our brother-in-law now, married to our sister Frey, but he’d been our brother in arms first. He was just our brother now, after all the shit we’d been through with each other, and for each other.
“You guys make our teeth hurt,” Darius Drake observed, as he straightened his own tie. “All this sentimentality is killing me.”
“Suck it up,” Ethan murmured. He and Jed eyed each other, grinning.
Both men had clawed through their own bouts of mortal danger with Kat and Frey.
It was a miracle we were all alive, if not completely whole.
But even battered and bruised, we were still ready to pursue love, happiness, all the good things life could bring.
But this monster wedding? “I still don’t get why you had to invite three hundred of your closest friends to an extravagant party,” I said stubbornly.
“It’s a statement to the world,” Ethan said.
“It says, hey, everyone. We’re back, stronger than ever.
Nothing can keep us down. It says, gawk at our good fortune if you want to.
Lift a glass of expensive champagne, munch fancy finger food, be jealous of our stunning, brave, talented women, from a safe distance.
Get buzzed, dance up a storm, have a great dinner, catch a bouquet. Eat your hearts out.”
“Ethan—”
“It’s time for us to get out of survival mode, and back in the game,” Ethan said. “This wedding marks the shift.”
I knew he was right, but I had just barely gotten my head around being in the company of my nearest family without emotionally short-circuiting. I was not ready for teeming hordes of schmoozers and networkers. Even paparazzi, for fuck’s sake.
Plus, the news had recently gotten around that Red had inherited Owen Halliwell’s grotesquely large fortune, so now everyone wanted to be her best friend.
It was not generally known, however, that Red had no interest in Halliwell’s fortune, and had begun the process of giving that bastard’s blood money away to whoever it could feed, help or heal.
God knows, she didn’t need his billions.
She was brilliant, canny, and rich in her own right.
She ruled her company, Red Queen, like a benevolent goddess.
But the upshot of all this was that any venture into a public sphere involved getting way too much attention for either of our tastes.
“I’m sorry,” Ethan said. “I know you’re still recovering. Which is why we didn’t give you a hard time about marrying Cass privately at the Mountain House. But that choice means that I have to compensate. By overdoing it. Egregiously.”
“Do you? Seriously?”
“Seriously. We have to get the ball rolling. Do you have the rings?”
“Of course I have the damn rings,” I said testily. For fuck’s sake, I wasn’t that far gone. I could be trusted with my brother’s and sister-in-law’s wedding rings. But to soothe his wedding jitters, I pulled out the box.
He relaxed visibly as I opened it up, showing two thick, rounded bands of white gold. His was simple and unadorned, but Kat’s had a double band of tiny diamonds. They shimmered and gleamed. “See?” I said. “All under control.”
Amos Drake came up behind us, clapping Ethan on the shoulder with his enormous hand.
“I saw the Colonel had a bug up his ass about wanting to be Kat’s father figure and take her up the aisle, at brunch this morning,” he said.
“Sorry about that. I should have headed him off before he got started. He’s still bitching about it. ”
I winced at the mention of it. Colonel Hobart had been a kick-ass commander back in our Army Ranger days.
We had trusted him with our lives and he’d always come through for us, but personality-wise, he was a huge pain in the ass, as his luckless daughter Milla, my sister Frey’s best friend, could bear witness.
“Yeah, the Colonel’s making friends right and left,” I said.
“He pinned down Red at the brunch today, too. Told her it was her patriotic duty to put everything she was doing at Red Queen at the service of the US military. You can imagine how that went down.”
Darius, Amos’s brother, grunted. “Like a lead balloon?”
“Right. Are you guys taking off with the Colonel tomorrow?” I asked. The three Drake brothers were often called by the Colonel for top secret missions all over the world.
“Hobart’s been chomping at the bit,” Remy said. “I’m glad he agreed to stay until the wedding. We’ll do this gig, but after, I think we’ll all be ready for a change.”
“Yeah? What kind of change? Retiring?”
Amos shook his head. “Not necessarily. Being as how you always said that if we wanted to partner with you on Ready Line…we were wondering if you and Jed were going to power that up again.”
I froze at the mention of the security company that Jed and I had founded together. It had been torn apart by Wex Boer’s massacre, the day they abducted me, killed six of my colleagues, and almost killed Jed.
Jed edged closer. “Uhhh…I actually hadn’t broached the subject with him yet,” he said, in a warning tone. “Baby steps, you know.”
“Ah,” Amos murmured. “Okay. Well, if you ever decide to take any grown-up steps, just be aware that we’re interested.”
I turned to look at Jed. “You’ve been thinking about re-booting Ready Line?”
“I’ve had some proposals,” he said evenly. “Raine Lazar and Seth Mackey want to know if Ready Line was back in business, now that our troubles are resolved.”
“How long have you been sitting on this?”
“A few days. I’ve been waiting for a good moment to say something.”
“And you all decide that the right moment is right before I head up the aisle to say my deathless vows?” Ethan snapped. “Fuck’s sake. Dudes. Later for this, okay?”
Jed’s shrug was elaborately casual. “Why not?” he asked quietly. “We work well together. Always have. Think about it. There’s no good reason not to.”
“I can think of three reasons,” I said. “Hank. Billy. Franco.”
Flat silence followed my words. Those were the men who had been lost the day Nicole Volange and Wex Boer had attacked Ready Line. They had worked for me, trusted me, and they had died because I fucked up.
That had been the day my long captivity had begun. But I had always felt, in some hidden, secret part of my mind, that I deserved it, for failing my friends.
“No one holds that against you,” Darius said. “Wex fooled us all.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I can’t be responsible for anyone else getting hurt. It would break me.”
Jed sighed. “Shane. You’re good at running Ready Line. And you’re amazing out in the field. You pull off miracles. Like you did with Cass. The van, the ice-sculpture. That’s just how you roll.”
I waved that away. “What does Raine Lazar want with Ready Line?”
“She needs to protect medical teams who are heading into war zones, and that’s just for starters,” Jed said. “Trauma surgeons. She wants only the best security for them. And that’s you, buddy.”
“Yo! Gentlemen!” It was Jenn’s sharp voice, to my intense relief.
Jenn, Ethan’s personal assistant, and go-getting, relentless organization machine, marched purposefully into the room, dressed in a snazzy black suit.
She had declined to be a bridemaid, and insisted on being a groomswoman instead, hence the suit.
“The band is all set up and ready to play the processional! Everybody into formation!” She gave me a dubious look. “You have the rings?”
I rolled my eyes. “I have the rings.” I displayed them to her.
“Good,” she said briskly. “Hop to it. C’mon, guys. On the double.”
Ethan shot me a rueful glance as she herded the whole lot of us out the door and down toward the grounds where the flowery arbor was set up.
“It’s not my fault,” he said under his breath.
“I pay her to be that way, because it gets shit done. But she doesn’t have any off-switch. Occupational hazard.”
“I heard that,” Jenn called back to us. “If I didn’t move things along, nothing would ever happen around here! Do you want to get married, or what? Yes? Good. So let me do my job.”
The laughter was a welcome dispeller of built-up tension.
Jenn chivvied us into our places at the arbor, thickly wound with flowers of every color.
The Seattle sky, amazingly, was clear and warm this late spring afternoon.
Even the weather had decided to fall into line.
Probably Jenn had given it a talking-to.
The seats were all full, and a crowd had gathered behind and all around the back.
Too damn many people. It made the back of my neck itch. Suck it up, Masters.
Nighttime Visitor, the indie rock band who we had befriended years ago, was set up near the arbor, guitars and keyboards at the ready, grins all over their faces. They gave us a big thumbs-up.