Chapter 8
Tiernan
Itell Jack no, and I mean it, which is a thing I have not managed since the day she walked into my office. This is the first time my spine has stayed strong since she started destroying a contract. Of course, it’s a bigger feat because now I know how she tastes.
She wants to come. Of course she wants to come, the woman who has been the only wall between her brother and the world since she was twelve.
Jack has given me every good reason she belongs there.
Her brother only trusts her. She’s already dealt with a Moretti once.
If someone gets hurt, they might not have the time to spare.
It all makes sense logically and I dismiss it because I know better.
If she comes, she’s another option for them to turn their wrath on.
She’s my soft center, the part of my life that I will bend under pressure because I won’t risk her.
It’s almost pathetic considering we’ve turned silence into soft conversations we understand and only shared one kiss.
Overthinking this can come later, not now and definitely not at a standoff.
Not that Jack cares. She stands in the garage in a vest she's already buckled herself into, jaw set, and tells me she knows his blood type and his allergies and that he panics when he can't see what's happening.
Every word of it is true, and none of it changes my answer.
Logic can’t win when my ribs are threatening to puncture my heart at the mere idea of her hurt, in danger, or scared.
"You stay," I tell her. "If this goes wrong and you're in the building, I can't run it. I'll be running you instead."
She hears what’s under the reasonable and defendable words. I watch her process it. She doesn't like it, and she stays. That costs her more than the vest did, because being the one who waits isn’t easy. It’s harder than diving into the problem and I know she’s never learned how to do it.
I take that with me into the dark, and it’s a problem.
Callen has narrowed the holding location to three properties, shell companies that trace back to the Moretti book.
We don't have an hour to confirm which. I split the teams and take the Dorchester warehouse myself.
The math says it's likeliest and because I am in no state to sit in a car and wait for someone else to bring the boy out.
If he’s lost, so is Jack. I won’t pretend to have a noble reason to save him. He matters to the woman that matters too much to me and that means I need to protect him, even if it costs my blood or Moretti. I can dress it up for the group, but I know exactly what my own motives are.
When my eyes lock on the two door guards, I prepare for the worst.
The breach is fast, loud, and ugly, the way they always are.
A man comes around the loading dock with a pistol already up and I put him down before he can consider squeezing the trigger.
The second one reaches for his gun and Remy takes him out without a single wheeze or hesitation.
Then it's the close work, the kind that doesn't make it into the stories the young ones tell each other. A blade opens my forearm. I don't notice until later. Remy’s punched twice before he gets a gun in the right place at the right time. It’s dirty, unorganized, and there’s no beauty or honor in it.
There’s never honor, nobility, or glamour in survival when people are locked in to the moment. There’s nothing off the table. There’s only who is willing to do worse to the other and who does it fast enough for it to matter.
Remy and I survive it and the agreement never to talk about it blooms between us without words. No one talks about it. They say they survived, then list wounds that need to be repaired if or when it’s time to take care of them.
Once we get inside, pain teases my senses, just to fall to the back of my mind when I see our goal laid out in front of us.
Jamie is zip-tied to a chair in the back office with a split eyebrow and a look on his face that I recognize, because it's hers. Terror underneath, and over the top of it a stubborn refusal to give them the satisfaction. He's tried to run twice. The bruises and open marks on his wrists say so.
"Your sister sent me," I tell him, cutting him loose. The boy nearly comes apart with relief at that sentence, which tells me everything about who holds him up.
He doesn’t sob. He doesn’t spew details until we’re caught. I don’t give him the time. I haul him forward even though his feet are unsteady and he wobbles. Remy makes sure that no one gets close enough to stop what we’re doing or threaten our victory.
We're clear in under four minutes. No one of mine is dead. By the measures I've used for eight years, it's a clean job, and I should feel the cold satisfaction I always feel when a thing is done right.
The distance back to the compound bites into that. It’s too far for my liking and driving faster won’t satisfy what’s itching in my veins. The rubber band in my chest that’s been stretched taut while gone is starting to ease, but not fast enough for me to breathe properly.
I’ve run operations that mattered more than this one.
There have been shipments worth more than the boy's whole debt, and moves that decided who held the waterfront for a decade.
I ran them with my full attention, because that is the discipline the work demands and I have never once failed to give it.
Tonight, half of me was in a garage two miles back, with a woman in a vest she had no business wearing. Part of my mind has been calculating how fast I could get to Jack if the wrong team had drawn the right house and failed the mission.
I could defend and say that getting back to her would be mitigating risk because without her brother in place, she’d run or kill my own men.
I could say that if the wrong team drew the right house and shit went sideways, Emilio would try to go for her knowing I’d be gone.
All those would be honest on some level, but they’d be a lie.
Logic hasn’t kept me chomping at every reason I have to stay so I don’t go back. It’s my heart lodging itself in a person while I try to dismiss the risk in that.
That is exactly the lever Emilio is reaching for.
He took the brother because the brother is the soft place he predicted.
He is not wrong that there is a soft place, he is only wrong about where.
He was close enough this time, that it mattered, but next time…
If he ever learns the truth, he won't need a warehouse.
He'll need one room and one threat and I will hand him the waterfront to keep her breathing.
I’d offer up my own throat and choke down every acidic word I’ve ever had for him as long as a guarantee was in place. That makes me a failure no matter what tonight’s mission says.
I know all of this. I’ve spent eight years building a life with no soft places precisely so that no one could ever do to me what I am about to let this woman do.
The boy is alive in the back seat saying her name. The cut on my arm has finally started to register. Remy is beside me, blood-splattered, but not panicking. Yet the only thought I can hold on the way back, is whether she's still where I left her.
She is. I know she is. She gave me her word and she is the kind of person who keeps it even when keeping it is harder than breaking it. I trust her to trust me when it comes to violence. I trust her to stay because logically she knows it’s best. I trust Jack to keep being herself.
I drive faster anyway.