Chapter 5
CALLEN
I RAP TWO knuckles on Vesper’s door and immediately regret it, because right after I do, I hear Lance’s huffs of annoyance…through a door. He’s that dramatic.
Lance being in Vesper’s office means one of two things: either he’s already in trouble, or he’s about to be, and either way I’ve just volunteered to be a witness to an uncomfortable exchange.
“Come in, Callen,” she says through the door before I can retreat. Ah, dammit.
I ease the office door open. Lance is slouched in one of the two chairs facing Vesper’s desk, long legs sprawled out in front of him like he owns the floor and everything under it, jiggling one knee, drumming two fingers on the armrest. He’s been told to sit still and is losing the fight against it.
He’s mid-lecture. I know his posture because I’ve given him these same lectures before.
Lance is an elite operative, but he’s sloppy and sassy and he loves to twist the details of an assignment.
“It’s not urgent,” I say, already backing out. “I’ll come back.”
“Sit down, Callen.”
Vesper doesn’t look up when she says it.
She’s behind the desk with her attention nailed to her monitor.
The lights in here are dim, like they always are.
Vesper’s a bat and likes to work in a dark cave, but I get the full picture of her in the blue wash of the screen light: all black, like always—a fitted turtleneck, sleeves shoved to the forearms, the leather of her shoulder holster a shade darker than the fabric.
Ruby lipstick, perfectly neat. Her dark hair is scraped back into a ponytail so tight it lifts the corners of her eyes.
There’s a stillness to her that most people read as calm and that I’ve learned to read as the opposite.
When Vesper goes quiet and precise like this, something somewhere is on fire, and she’s already deciding who to send to put it out.
I sit. The chair’s still warm from whatever’s already been happening in here.
“Where’ve you been?” she asks, eyes on the screen, fingers moving. “And who with?”
“Nowhere.” I settle back. “And nobody.”
Lance’s head turns toward me slow, like a security camera swiveling to catch a shoplifter. I don’t like the way his eyes go childlike and mischievous. He grins before he even speaks.
“Did you use a condom…with nobody?”
I don’t dignify it with a look. “Mind your fucking business.”
“See, that’s the thing.” He shifts, getting even more comfortable in his seat, committing to my extreme discomfort. “You are my business. When my mom and dad are finally getting together, that’s officially my business.”
“We are not—” I start, but there’s no point.
There’s never a point. The whole crew has been running this bit since the beginning when they were dumped on my lap as FBI recruits, only slightly held together by Vesper’s menacing scowls and Eden’s paperwork.
I was once their boss, but let’s be real, I was never in control.
Vesper and I are the oldest at PALADIN, she just has me by a couple years, so she says.
Everyone else is about a decade younger than us, which is why we’ve been labeled “Mom” and “Dad.”
Perhaps they suspected we’d get together.
Honestly, me too for a while. I asked Vesper out once.
It was innocent. Just a dinner and a conversation, which we do all the time, just this time I suggested we throw some flowers on the table, maybe light a candle.
It’s natural to feel close with the only other sane woman at your job.
Well, Eden is like me, but she’s late twenties, too young for me in my opinion, not to mention Linc would dismember me limb by limb if I ever entertained the idea of her and me out loud.
Anyway, Vesper rejected me. She was smart to do so. I retreated so fast, I tripped over my own feet. But she told me it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with her heart—one that never healed. One that never let go of what she once had.
Maybe that’s why I got stuck on Melissa again. I thought I’d love my ex the way Vesper loves hers, but I bet her guy never had an affair and stayed an extra few years in their marriage out of pure pity and guilt.
I wish everyone would let this narrative of me and Vesper die. So I don’t respond to Lance’s comment, hoping he lets it go.
He doesn’t. Lance just takes a brief moment to reload.
“I’ve been thinking,” he announces, which is never good.
“Hear me out: Cricket’s not into the whole baby thing—she’d rather field-strip a rifle than a onesie, God you gotta love her.
Not to mention mine and Linc’s nards are broken, medically speaking, tragic”—he points to Vesper—“thanks for that by the way.”
She ignores him.
“Anyway, we’re in a new era. We’re not senseless killers anymore. We take the jobs we want. No FBI or CIA holding us by the necks. It’s time for PALADIN to evolve, don’t you think?” He spreads his hands like he’s laying out a business proposal to a board. “I think our family needs a baby.”
Without a word, Vesper lifts one hand off her keyboard and points.
I follow the finger to the corner of the office, where there’s a dog bed roughly the size of a kiddie pool, and in it, belly-up with all four paws pointed at the ceiling, is Mouse.
Eden’s guard dog—about one year old, looks lethal when he’s awake, but when dead asleep, snoring like a man with a deviated septum and a grudge, he’s anything but a threat.
If he’s in Vesper’s office, that means Eden isn’t here.
He’s made his hierarchy of preference very well known.
Anyone with a dick, is at the bottom of that totem pole.
“We have a baby,” Vesper murmurs.
“I meant a human baby.” Lance points between the two of us, me and Vesper, back and forth, in case the geometry isn’t obvious.
“Come on. When is this going to happen? We all know you two are going to get together eventually. Just”—he gestures obscenely, making a circle with two fingers, then shoving his other pointer through it—“hump already and put us all out of our misery. In fact.” He sits up, delighted with himself, winding up to his real pitch.
“My wedding. Mine and Cricket’s. Next week.
We would love—love—for our parents to attend as a real couple. ”
“You done with him?” I ask Vesper and she nods briefly in return, still fixated on the screen. I point at the door. “Lance. Get the fuck out.”
He does not move a single muscle. He looks, if anything, more at ease.
That’s when Vesper rises. It’s not a fast movement.
That’s what makes it work. She unfolds from the chair without hurry, plants her fingertips on the desk, and the temperature in the room drops about ten degrees.
What a superpower, like Elsa from Frozen.
Which I have not seen ten or so times. Lance, who towers over Vesper, and has a couple inches on me, suddenly looks very small in his seat.
“Get out,” she says. Cool. Even. “And remember—you pull that stunt with the accounts again, the thing we discussed, I will have your head. On the actual desk. Separated from your body. We clear?”
“Crystal,” he mumbles.
“Good. Go.”
He rises like a dog that’s been caught in the trash—all that swagger folded up and put away, shoulders rounded, the picture of contrition that both of us know will last approximately eleven minutes.
He shuffles for the door. On his way past me he mutters something that might be “think about the wedding” or might be an insult, and then he’s gone.
The door clicks, and the office goes quiet except for Mouse sawing logs in the corner.
Vesper watches the door a beat longer. Then the corner of her mouth ticks up—just barely, just for me.
“You’ll get there with him. You just need to put more gruff behind it,” she says. “You go soft at the end, every time. Like you pity him.”
“I pity his intelligence. And back in my day, it was in poor taste to threaten my team’s life with every command.”
Her brows lift slightly. “I threaten them, because I’d die for them. They all know it. This is how I raised them. Loyalty, and severe consequences.”
“So if you raised them, what am I? The unwelcome stepdad?” It lands flat between us, and I don’t try to soften it.
She catches it. She catches everything. “Something on your mind?”
I lean my head back against the chair and let out a breath I’ve been holding since the sushi restaurant.
“I still don’t belong to PALADIN. Maybe I never will.
Maybe I’m never going to fully be part of your guys’ world.
” I’ve been chewing on this for a while and never said it, and now I can’t not.
“Let’s be real about what I am. I’m a security guard with a badge and a filing system.
A desk rider. I’ve seen action as a SEAL and an agent, yet you don’t trust me in the field.
You never ask me to leave this compound. ”
Vesper studies me. The screen light throws hard shadows up the planes of her face, and for a second she looks exactly as old as her eyes actually are, underneath the skin that never seems to age.
“You’re right.”
That is not where I expected that to go, and it lands like a slap I begged for.