Chapter 15
Bailee wished she could shut herself down the same way, and keep everything locked inside a box, throw away the key, and stop thinking about everything that waited ahead.
First, there was the mission. They’d been in the air nearly twelve hours, one refuel in Panama, and she’d stopped trying to count how long ago California had fallen away beneath them.
The team had been spun up the instant Fly and Than filed their Annapolis applications, Bear’s pride still warming his eyes.
Now, pride had no place here. One of their own was missing.
Mara Duran, field operative, former classmate, sometimes friend, had gone dark in the Cordillera Verde region, along with Ethan Voss, an FBI Evidence Response tech.
Both were presumed taken, likely linked to the growing network of human-trafficking operations tied to the disappearances of Indigenous women and girls.
The red cabin lights threw the cargo bay into a dim, surreal world.
Hammocks hung between tie-down points, a tangle of nylon and fatigue.
Most of the team had crashed hours ago, bodies swaying gently in the aircraft’s subtle roll.
Someone snored. Someone else muttered in his sleep.
The sound barely rose above the low thunder of the engines.
Bailee’s gut tightened. They were staging in Rio first, but across the border in Bolivia was where her cousin Taryn’s trail had gone cold. Not being able to find her felt like another failure of her family, of her people. Bringing even one girl home would mean something profound.
But the heaviest weight wasn’t the mission. It was the hotel.
Hotel Orquídea Atlantica. The Atlantic Orchid. The same place Zorro and Bear had been wounded.
Bailee sat near the tail in the strap-hanger seats, webbing stretched across the fuselage, the metal deck cold beneath her boots. This was where support personnel rode, the ones who weren’t part of the brotherhood. She didn’t mind. She was used to being the outlier.
The air smelled of hydraulic fluid, jet fuel, and recycled oxygen, sharp, dry, faintly metallic. The bay stayed at a steady chill that gnawed through layers of fabric but never froze you out. Still, it left her fingers numb around the clasp of her harness.
Her man sat beside her, as close as protocol allowed, Flint at his boots, the Malinois dozing, black fur gleaming under the red lights. Bear hadn’t moved much since takeoff, just that quiet, watchful stillness he carried everywhere, the kind that made her feel both safe and seen.
He should have been in a hammock, asleep like the others. She’d told him that twice, three times maybe, but he’d just given her that look, the one that said he’d already decided otherwise.
“You don’t have to sit back here with me,” she’d said.
“I sit where I want to sit,” was all he’d answered.
That was that.
He hadn’t said another word. He didn’t have to. His presence filled the space, steady as the bulkhead behind him. Every time the plane shuddered through turbulence, she found herself watching him instead of the warning lights, anchoring herself to the calm written in his posture.
Somewhere up front, Zorro laughed softly in his sleep. D-Day mumbled something about barbecue. The team was relaxed, unbothered. For them, Rio was just another waypoint, another op in the book.
For her, it was where she’d started to unravel for Bear, and if only one thing came out of this mission, she hoped it would be clarity. Why this city still carried blood, fear, and madness…and want.
The first time she’d flown into Rio, the world had come apart in smoke and gunfire.
Every time the engines dipped or the hull flexed, she could still hear that night, the gunfire, the screams, Bear’s voice calling her name through the chaos.
It lived in her muscles, a memory her body refused to unlearn.
She drew a slow breath and exhaled through her nose. It’s different this time. You’re different this time. The lie didn’t hold. She closed her eyes and drifted.
At the first bump and jolt, Bailee came awake, cradled against the warmth of Bear, his arm around her, nightmares fragmenting into harmless tangles of thought.
Bear’s voice cut through the hum, low and rough. “Altitude drop. We’ll hit descent soon.”
She nodded, not trusting her voice. Through the bulkhead, she felt the subtle shift as the aircraft nosed downward, trading thin, cold air for the humid thickness rising from the Atlantic.
Within the hour, the heat would find them, the kind that clung to skin and refused to let go, the kind that smelled of salt, rain, and ghosts.
She looked toward nothing, imagining the sprawl of Rio’s coast below, the glitter of favelas, the white arc of Ipanema Beach. She’d come here for answers she wasn’t sure she wanted. Sitting beside Bear in that dim red light, she didn’t know if his nearness steadied her or made it worse.
When the landing gear thumped down and the plane began its slow arc toward Gale?o, he caught her glance and held it.
“You good?” he asked.
She wanted to say yes. She wanted to believe it.
“Yeah,” she lied, her voice nearly lost to the roar of descent.
The engines deepened, the hum turning into a growl as the C-130 sank through clouds. Warm, heavy air seeped through the vents, humid, familiar enough to make her stomach clench.
Suddenly she felt alone. Everything she’d shared with Bear felt intangible, out of reach, and she wanted nothing more than to twist herself into his body and ride out the storm building behind her ribs.
But the closer they drew to Rio, the more it felt like her mind was sliding away from him, down into a place she couldn’t outrun, a living nightmare she couldn’t shake loose.
This place had almost taken him from her once, and she still didn’t understand how that brush with death had slipped past her armor and rearranged the shape of her heart, one she hadn’t let herself explore, not even when it whispered her homeward.
But shadows clung to her, even there.
Across the border, where her helo had fallen from the sky, the recovery of her support team had unearthed bones.
Taryn’s trail had ended in that wild, unforgiving hush, cut clean where the world grew steep and the river split the earth.
Bailee lived with the fear that her cousin was gone forever, a spirit wandering lost in a land not her own, somewhere past the hills, past the river where Bailee had seen her ghost, swallowed by dark, dangerous monsters who hid in daylight and carried nothing but human hunger.
As the plane dropped lower, warm air spilling through the vents, all those threads, Bear’s near-death, Taryn’s disappearance, her own unraveling, and a mission that demanded professionalism and a razor edge paralyzed her lungs.
She had no idea how to wrestle all those jumbled emotions into something she could pick apart and understand, not when that old, familiar dread was already rising, tightening around her like a warning she couldn’t name.
All her ghosts were stirring.
They were headed back into the place where everything had fractured, and if she couldn’t face that crucible now, this intricate fear, this devastating history, this impossible love rising in her like a storm, she’d lose him, lose herself, lose all the meaning she’d only just begun to grasp.
She’d die inside so completely, there would be no coming back.
Courage wasn’t the question. Surviving herself was.
The big plane touched down harder than expected, tires hammering against the Gale?o runway in a long, shuddering roll. Bear barely felt the jolt. He’d flown worse. Landed hotter. But the woman beside him had gone still in a way that made every instinct in him sharpen.
Bailee kept her eyes forward, chin high, shoulders squared like she was bracing for incoming fire.
He didn’t say anything on the taxi in. Didn’t crowd her.
Just watched the set of her jaw, the pulse at her throat, the way her fingers curled white-knuckled around her harness.
She was retreating somewhere deep inside, and he could feel the distance widening with every mile they crept toward the terminal.
By the time they disembarked into the heat and humidity of Rio, she’d wrapped tight, armored in ways he hadn’t seen since before she’d let him touch her, trust him, fall apart in his hands, tucking herself so far behind her shields, he was sure it was going to be a battle to get her to drop them… again…this time for good.
It’s a good thing he ran into fire. He was here for her.
He wasn’t going to give up because she was trying to process too much information overload, and he wasn’t going to be silent or still.
His voice had power, he was believing he deserved this woman, and she deserved to be whole.
It was her personal Hell Week, and he was going to be here every step of the way.
The team moved like they always did, loose, joking, cocky without trying, and he was thankful for the silent support and the brotherhood that never wavered.
Zorro slapped D-Day on the back. “Everly made me promise not to get shot this time.”
“Maybe listen to your woman for once,” D-Day fired back.
Bailee stiffened, her gaze going over him with snapping blue fire. “That isn’t even remotely funny, Zorro.” Her voice was cold. “Do me a favor and keep your SEAL macho shit to yourself.”
Blitz’s eyebrows lifted.
Buck muttered something about being careful.
Joker watched her slip away from them, and he looked at Bear. “You got this?”
Bear nodded. “She’s hurting, LT. This isn’t easy for her to come back here. She has a lot of weight on her shoulders.”
He touched Flint’s fur and the dog trotted off, pressing himself to Bailee’s leg, head up, nostrils working overtime in the heavy air. Good boy. He felt the tension too.
Bailee stopped, her shoulders loosening. Just enough as her hand sank into Flint’s ruff, fingers curling lightly, grounding herself on warm fur instead of fear.
Taking that lifeline Bear offered.