Chapter 8
CALLEN
THE FILE WON’T open. It’s been “loading” for two hours, suspending me in false hope.
I have a screen full of classified Navy deployment records in front of me and a security wall between me and the only page that matters.
It’s a metaphorical gray box with a padlock icon and a permissions error I’ve read so many times the rejection code is starting to look less like gibberish and more like a second language.
Anytime I get to anything Kesara-related.
Locked. The only thing available is a loose memo about a SEAL mission that resulted in casualties, sanitized of any meaningful details.
It’s the same one they handed me after I clawed my way home, but the originals, the ones I know exist, were scrubbed clean before I got a chance to question them.
I can see the edge of my former nightmare.
The metadata. Redaction stamps. A whole document that officially doesn’t say what it says.
I won’t be able to get in. Not the proper way. I have to be patient while Vesper does what Vesper does. Calls in favors, makes a few subtle threats, sniffs out the rats. I can’t beat her to it. There’s a method to her madness I have to respect.
I sit back and rub my eyes. The office has no windows—none of us down here do; the whole bunker’s buried under thirty feet of reinforced nothing—so there’s no way to tell it’s the middle of a sunny afternoon except the analog clock on my wall.
The short hand has circled around twice since I started my pointless digital investigation, chasing a lead that isn’t there.
Waste. Of. Time. Such a fitting way to spend a Wednesday.
I turn off my monitor, accepting defeat. The moment my mind isn’t actively preoccupied by the screen, my thoughts drift to her and what happened two nights ago.
Sylvie assumed I’d be boring in the sack.
I’m still turning it over in my mind like a stone in my pocket, because it’s too uncomfortably accurate.
At least boring in comparison to what she probably enjoys.
She looked at me on that couch and saw a lights-off, missionary, four-minutes-and-done man, and the assumption offended something deep and stupid in me.
My father was a Marine. His father before him. They were men who opened their wives’ doors for fifty years and pulled out their chairs and never once raised their voices at a dinner table—decorum bred into the bone. I was raised to treat a woman like she was worth the trouble of doing things right.
But Sylvie doesn’t want a gentleman. Sylvie wants a porn star.
The truly humbling part—the part I’ll take to my grave—is that the coffee table move, the one that shut her up so thoroughly, was entirely out of character.
I stole that move from some racy office-romance thing I half watched on HBO one insomniac night, where the guy did the whole balancing act with hard candies.
I didn’t have hard candies. I had a sleeve of Oreos in the pantry and about four seconds to commit. So, I improvised.
I improvised. For a woman I’d sworn I couldn’t see again.
For a woman I know isn’t good for me. But who am I kidding right now?
I raided my coveted snack cabinet just to impress her.
It tells me something I’d rather not know: I like her more than I’m willing to say out loud, even in a locked room, even to myself.
Knock, knock.
So soft. It’s the knock equivalent to a whispered “excuse me, don’t mean to bother you.”
“Come in,” I bellow in contrast.
The door’s already cracked, and Eden’s head appears around it.
“Am I interrupting?”
“Never,” I say. “You’re better company than this damn thing.” I pat the top of the monitor.
She enters, and I do a double take, because Eden looks like springtime walked into my concrete tomb. Her hair’s pulled loose into a low ponytail, and she’s in a yellow dress with little flowers on it. Imagine that, actual color, on a person, in this building.
“New look?” I ask.
She squints one eye, half wincing. “Too much? I just…I needed a break from all the black. We dress every day like we’re attending our own funerals down here.”
“No, I’m with you.” I gesture at myself. I’d made an effort this morning too, though I couldn’t have told you why at the time. I shaved, styled the disaster my hair’s become, put on a light gray polo instead of the tactical black. “See? Solidarity.”
Eden smiles, warm and quick. “You look good, actually. Rested.” She lifts the paper bag in her hand. “I come bearing sustenance. Vesper said you’re wasting away down here.”
I push back from the desk. “Only mentally.” I mean it as a joke but it comes out truer than intended. I gesture toward the chair across from me. “Sit. Join me. Where’s Linc?”
Eden lets out a small sigh, half a laugh in it.
“Doing Linc things. Somewhere I can’t reach him.
” She doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t push, because it looks a whole lot like a thread I shouldn’t pull at.
I was once with a woman who feared every time I walked out the door that I wouldn’t come back through it.
The worry isn’t something you can comfort away with words.
She starts unpacking the bag onto my desk like she’s preparing an aesthetic spread.
More muffins than we can eat. Two coffees.
Something warm wrapped in wax paper. A little desk picnic laid out between my keyboard and a screen full of dead classified men.
The contrast of it, the flowers on her dress, sweet muffins, rich coffee, and what we actually do at our jobs is so absurd, it almost makes me laugh.
“Can’t kick the corporate out of you, can we?”
“There’s no work problem that can’t be solved with free muffins,” she teases. “Now, dating problems…that requires a little something extra.” She pulls out a tiny bottle of Baileys from her purse and sets it by my takeout cup.
“Something on your mind, Eden?”
She looks up, deadpan. “I wanted to hear what’s on yours actually. Vesper mentioned you’ve got a lot going on.”
I take my time pouring the Baileys into the cup, and selecting the perfect muffin. The sweet tang of blueberries brings me back to that first breakfast with Sylvie who looked like a man bringing her food was about as peculiar as a vegetarian crocodile.
I bite it, savoring the warmth. Of course it’s still warm. Eden does everything with presentation and gravitas. If she’s feeding you, the food is warm. The conversation usually makes you feel warmer. A people person, through and through. I see why PALADIN desperately needed her.
“Vesper sent you to babysit me,” I state as I slide the monitor six inches to my right so I can see her properly.
Eden settles into the chair on the opposite side of my desk, and I have the thought I always have about her—she’s in her late twenties, almost a full decade younger than me, and somehow the most grown-up person in this entire building.
She reads people like I read old case files.
It’s why Vesper made her second-in-command, and it’s why Vesper sent her and not, God help us, Lance for this chat.
“Not babysit,” Eden says. “She said you probably need a friend.”
“And what exactly did she tell you?” I ask between muffin bites.
“In loose terms?” Eden teeters her head back and forth, considering how honest to be, then decides on all the way.
“That after a run-in with Melissa, you’ve been walking around like a kid who lost his brand-new puppy.
” She looks me over. “But you look fine to me. Better than fine. So…if you don’t mind me asking, what happened? ”
I groan. “Do all women, including Vesper, apparently, sit around gossiping about their guy friends’ love lives?”
“Absolutely.” Eden crosses her legs, then her arms, getting comfortable, settling in for a good, long story. “In fact, I’ll save you the suspense: the next woman you bring around is going to have to pass our approval process before we decide if she’s good enough for you. It’s very rigorous.”
I snort. “What does this process entail?”
“Oh, the usual. An obstacle course. A polygraph. Then, a short swim with some great whites.” She waves a hand, breezy.
“Nothing nefarious.” Then the teasing drains out of her a notch, and she levels a kinder look at me.
“But seriously, Callen, look—I know it has to be more than complicated, trying to date while being part of whatever it is we are. Even when you feel like you’re not really a part of it, and simply standing on the edge of it—”
“Man.” I set the muffin down. “Vesper really just put all my shit on blast, hm?”
“Just to me,” Eden says. “And I’m bound by HR-employee confidentiality. Your secrets are safe.”
“That’s not a real thing.”
“It’s real enough. Take the bait, come on.” She wiggles her crossed foot at me, coaxing. “Let’s talk it out. You’ll feel so much better.”
The bait is friendship, and it’s too enticing. So I do; I take it.
I give her the short version of the Melissa fiasco—the reservation I made thinking I was going to fight for us, the speech I’d rehearsed, the way she let me finish all of it before she told me about Ben and the baby and the years she’d spent cheating on me and staying with me out of pity.
As if it was my fault I got myself half killed and trapped her into it.
I keep it to the point, like I’m giving an emotionless brief.
But my ears still go hot admitting how embarrassed I was, showing up dressed to the nines, ready to give my whole heart to a woman who’d already left long before I was alone.
Eden listens fully, without rushing to fill the gaps. When I finish, she nods slowly.
“That’s a special kind of betrayal,” she muses.
“Being kept in the dark like that for such a long time. It takes the one wound and turns it into twenty. Death by a million papercuts, or in this case, more like a million bullet holes. I’m so sorry to hear all this.
You deserved better, Callen.” She says it plainly, and it’s exactly right.
It’s the first time anyone’s articulated it so cleanly.