TWO
After weeks of rehab, evaluations and fighting his way back to Sierra, Rivers had expected this to feel better.
The war room door shut behind him, cutting off the voices of the team he’d missed like hell. Cannon’s grip, Rome’s crooked smile, the welcome from the others—he’d gotten his life back.
When he neared the common room, he listened for voices inside. He stepped up to the entrance and peeked in, but it was empty. Continuing on, he checked the gym next but the room was dark.
He finally found Jolie and Stina, their first and only guests on Sierra base, in the kitchen. They perched on stools, sipping mugs of coffee with a splash of some sweet syrup on the counter in front of them.
Rivers’s shoulders knotted, but he forced them to lower as he crossed the threshold. As soon as the ladies looked up, they jumped off their stools and rushed to him, stopping short of flinging their arms around him.
Jolie looked him over. “You’re back? You’re healed? Can we hug you?”
After what he let them go through, they shouldn’t be worrying about him.
As soon as he nodded, they threw themselves at him. Four arms banded around him tight, and he issued a short laugh of surprise while awkwardly patting them in return. God, they were okay—no thanks to him, but okay.
When they drew away, Jolie’s eyes were a little damp, and Stina’s were swimming with tears.
“You’re good now?” Stina’s voice wavered with concern, as if he hadn’t left them to be kidnapped while he bled out in the snow.
“I’m good.”
“We’re fine too, Rivers.” Stina was a little more outspoken of the pair, that much hadn’t changed in the time he was gone.
Jolie glanced at her friend. Then, as if they’d practiced what to say to him, she said, “You didn’t let us down.”
“I’m so damn sorry—” His voice clamped on the words, and his sentence ended in a groan as they hugged him tight again.
He flexed his arms around them and let the moment sink in.
He’d been in this line of work long enough to know the difference between a battle scar and the one he carried.
The second where he hesitated back on that mountain road would never heal clean, no matter how many times the women he was protecting told him they were fine.
“There he is.” Younger’s voice boomed through the kitchen. “The Rizz Man himself.” Henry Younger was one of the more seasoned members of Sierra, and his eyes creased with his grin as he took a seat at the big dining table.
The ladies let Rivers go and carried their coffees to the table too.
On his way to the coffeepot, Rome clapped Rivers on the back. “The Rizzonator,” he said, deadpan, not looking up from the coffee he poured.
“The Rizzoni.” Carino, known as O for no reason any of them could uncover, flashed a grin at Rivers as he plopped into a seat and planted his elbows on the table.
Heat crawled up Rivers’s neck. “Stop.”
Rorke entered next with Monk right behind them.
“Are we rizzing up Rivers, or what?” Rorke tossed him a smile as he grabbed an entire bag of croissants on his way to the table.
Rorke had been the one to get him to the hospital and he’d been there to hear the things he said when he came out of anesthesia. Only they had it wrong. He hadn’t said rizz.
He’d said Ryss.
“Tell us about this beautiful woman.” O leaned in.
“The one you couldn’t stop talking about when you came out of surgery,” Rome added with a glint in his eyes.
Stina and Jolie gave him identical side-eyes like the best friends they were.
“Rorke told us you talked about how much you missed her.” Stina’s grin widened.
“Ached for her,” Rorke corrected.
Everyone laughed, but Rivers only felt that sharp ache again. In his lowest moments…he’d called out for a woman who’d once been his whole life.
“I was on enough painkillers to sedate a horse.” He poured himself coffee, hoping for nonchalance as he carried it to his usual seat.
Rorke grabbed a croissant. “Dude. You mumbled a whole speech. It was beautiful. Shakespearean even.” He bit off half the croissant.
Stina gaped at him. “Hey! I made those fresh yesterday. Do you know how much work went into them? You’re supposed to savor croissants, not gobble them.”
Rorke ignored her and struck an actor’s pose, croissant raised as a prop skull.
“But soft—what light through yonder kitchen breaks? It is the East, and Rizz is the sun.” He pressed a hand to his heart.
“Arise, fair sun, and kill the anesthesia, which made me babble like a lovesick fool before my brother.”
“Stop,” Rivers said, but nobody was stopping.
“Parting is such sweet sorrow,” Rorke went on, “that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow—and also possibly hit on a nurse before my liver finishes healing.”
“How did you even come up with that on the fly? You must have been practicing it!” Stina shook with giggles.
Unrepentant, Rorke stuffed the rest of the croissant in his mouth.
“Are you finished?” He cocked a brow at his teammate.
“Not remotely.” Rorke grinned.
He was still working on a comeback when Cannon walked in, all business, cutting through the noise with his presence. “We’ve got a suit coming in.”
Monk was pulling ingredients for sandwiches out of the fridge and tossing them on the counter. “Suit?”
Cannon grabbed the loaf of fresh bread and a knife from the block to slice it. “Townie’s picking her up. She’s coming to talk to the girls.”
Stina’s back snapped straight. “We are not girls. We’re in our twenties. Not girls.”
“We’re women.” Jolie looked at Monk, flushing to her hairline when he waggled his brows at her.
“To me you’re girls.” Cannon was completely unbothered as he grabbed the meat and cheese and began building a sandwich. Before Stina could protest, he said, “Don’t suggest sensitivity training again. This is as good as it gets. Take it or leave.”
“You mean leave it,” Stina said.
“No.” Cannon sliced off two fat chunks of bread. “I mean leave.”
It had been a running joke around base that Cannon disliked having the women here.
They were Blackout—dead to the world, and rules were no girlfriends or wives, no families.
Though a couple other Blackout teams had twisted the rules to suit them, Cannon claimed he wasn’t on board with the change because Jolie and Stina were here under their protection.
“Sir.” Monk issued a choked laugh.
“With all due respect—” Rome drifted to stand behind Stina’s chair, guarding the woman he loved.
“God.” Cannon tossed the knife down on the table with a clatter. “They make one batch of brownies and you all trip over yourselves like it’s a five-star bakery. Brownies from a box. What the hell is happening to this team?”
Rivers let the noise wash over him, glad the teasing shifted from him to the others. Suddenly, he realized that six months ago this had been a brotherhood. Adding the ladies made it feel closer to a family. As close to one as any of them had in years.
In a way it hadn’t in years, it smacked him hard.
He’d left behind his entire life. A family with a different set of faces.
Mom in the kitchen, always burning the garlic bread and swearing she wouldn’t do it again.
Dad, laughing over it. Two brothers who used to fight Rivers for the last food in the pan.
A host of aunts and uncles and cousins, filling up every seat in the house. Grandparents who were probably gone by now. He could look it up if he wanted, but he couldn’t bear to.
This was the deal he took the day he signed on to Blackout Sierra.
Go dark.
Stay dark.
No going back.
He thought he understood what dark would end up costing him. Now he did. It wasn’t just the family behind him. It was the one he’d wanted ahead of him too.
As recently as last night he’d dreamed about a house, a yard and kids…with Ryss. He’d made his choice, if anyone could call what he did a choice. A choice implied there had been another option worth taking, and there wasn’t.
He had to disappear to save her. To save all of the people he loved.
This was the closest thing to a family he would ever get, a team morphing from a brotherhood into something with roots.
He watched Rome settle his hand on the small of Stina’s back, watched Monk lean closer to Jolie like gravity pulled him there, and the sight hit him somewhere between everything he’d lost…and everything he still had.
* * * * *
As the car door opened, Caryssa turned her head and the hood trembled as it was blasted by wind. Her escort gripped her arm and guided her out, and she wobbled for a moment, disoriented.
Several times during the journey she considered taking off the hood, but a sixth sense told her the moment she twitched a hand toward it, her escort would notice.
“This way.” It was the first words he’d spoken to her, but she didn’t recognize his gritty voice.
“Where are we?” She took a step forward and her foot slid out from under her. With a cry, she flung out her arms to catch herself. She went down hard, palms out, her knee taking the worst of the fall.
Rough ice scraped across her palm. She felt her skin split and the sting of blood welling warm against her flesh before she even got her breath back.
She started to haul herself up, knee throbbing and hand dripping warm blood onto the ice that just took her down.
“You all right?” came the voice.
She nodded.
He caught her arm again and she moved forward with careful steps, settling her feet squarely on the icy ground before she took another.
The wind howled at her, rocking her body and tearing at her clothes.
Snow pelted the fabric where her face was and cold flakes struck her bare neck, making her wish she’d buttoned her coat.
She was almost grateful for the hood that blocked the brutal gusts that would have made her eyes stream.
Not being able to see the terrain didn’t make it easy on her, and her choice of footwear was worse. That morning she’d grabbed dress flats without a thought to where she’d end up later that day. Cold seeped up through the thin soles and into her bones.
Her escort walked her forward, a hand at her elbow, his tough fingers tense, ready to catch her if she slipped again.
A door closed behind her, and the wind cut off instantly. Stairs came next, her knee protesting every step.
The space around her opened up, and they walked far enough for her to guess they were in a long hallway. Her hip eventually brushed the wall. She reached out, trailing her fingers over cold concrete or stone.
Voices traveled to her, close but muffled by the hood. She registered that several voices overlapped, there was laughter and the scrape of a chair on the floor.
When her guide stopped, so did she, fingers folded into her bleeding palm.
The hood lifted, and Caryssa blinked, and blinked again at the big dining room full of people. Mostly men but two women sat at one end of the table, one of them mid-laugh.
What kind of secret base is this?
A man to her left half rose from his chair. He nodded at her hand. “You’re bleeding.”
The statement silenced the room with the abruptness of shattering glass.
At the very end of the long table piled with the remnants of a meal, a man sat with his back to her. At the word bleeding, his back went rigid. Something about the set of his broad shoulders and his dark hair snagged her attention.
Then he turned.
She knew that controlled movement, the careful restraint in every inch of him.
She knew him. She could pick him out blind from a legion of men.
Her eyes found his face, and every ounce of grief she’d carried for years detonated at once.
It wasn’t her life that flashed in front of her eyes. It was his death—the one she’d rebuilt herself around surviving.
She thought he was going to propose. That was the cruelty of it, looking back. She’d spent the weeks before waiting for a ring, replaying every hint and waiting for him to drop to one knee while somebody sprang out of the bushes with a camera to capture the moment.
Instead, his family had called her and told her to sit down. She remembered gripping the armrest and saying it wasn’t true, over and over again.
A funeral followed. A closed casket, because there hadn’t been enough of him left to show anyone, they’d said gently, as though gentleness helped the tragic pain the people who loved him had to carry.
A photo sat on top of the polished wood, the one from his graduation from boot camp, smiling like he had every reason to believe in a future.
She’d replayed their last conversation more times than she could count. He’d told her he was getting out of the military, and she’d been giddy at the prospect of their next step together.
Then nothing. A void where the rest of the story should have been.
At Christmas she wondered what she would have bought him. On his birthday, she wondered what kind of cake he would like. For months afterward, she caught herself listening for his key in the door.
Eventually—slowly, brutally—she’d accepted that the door was never going to open.
And now it had. Now he was standing twenty feet away in a room full of strangers. He was the same and not the same—older around the eyes—and every part of her cracked open at once. Devastation and elation and a fury so total it left no room inside her until it exploded.
He could have found a way to tell her he was alive.
He never had.
“Reid.” Her voice came out much steadier than she felt. “I thought you were dead. That actually makes this easier—now I get to kill you myself.”
She was moving before she registered that her brain told her to. The man beside her—the one who noticed her hand was bleeding—stepped into her path with hands raised to stop her.
Instinct and training kicked in and she swept his leg out from under him without breaking stride. He hit the floor with a startled grunt.
“That’s new,” Reid said. His voice hadn’t changed at all, and hearing it nearly buckled her knees worse than the fall on the ice had.
“Yeah.” She kept coming, chest heaving, hand still dripping blood on the floor between them. “I’ve learned a lot of new tricks since you’ve been gone.”
“I had no choice.”
She stopped an arm’s length from him, close enough to see every year that had aged his handsome face.
Close enough to see he wasn’t a ghost. That he wasn’t just a memory.
He was real and warm and breathing.
“There’s always a choice,” she bit off. “And you made the wrong one.”
The room had gone dead silent around them. She was distantly aware of everyone at the table watching, but all she really saw was Reid. His jaw worked around a hundred things he couldn’t seem to say.
For years Caryssa imagined versions of this moment. In the dark, on nights she couldn’t sleep, she rehearsed what she’d say if he walked through her door.
In every single version, she imagined relief.
She never imagined this. Standing feet from the man she’d loved with all her heart and mourned with all her soul, her hand bleeding and her heart pounding out of her chest…she wanted to hit him a hell of a lot more than she wanted to hold him.
And she was terrified that she might do both.