Chapter 14
SYLVIE
CALLEN’S ON HIS back with one heavy arm thrown across my waist, holding me tight, even unconscious, his face slack and young in a way it never is awake. The scruff, the wrecked hair, the deep lines between his brows smoothed flat. He looks ten years lighter asleep. Satiated.
I’m beaming with pride. I lie in the curve of him and listen to him breathe, and I feel something in my chest I have spent the past decade detaching from, but it’s nice. Companionship is more peaceful than I remember.
Callen doesn’t really snore. It’s more like a kitten’s purr, and I get the feeling it’s not a common occurrence. I think I wore him out. After a few more rounds of the guttural, salacious fucking, I think I need to tell him, I’m perfectly fine making love too. I like it tender. I like it rough.
I’m convinced I’d like anything with him.
I’d wake him up to fetch me water, like the devoted boy-toy he is, but he’s sleeping so deep. I can navigate on my own and let him rest.
I leave his boneless body beside me, his chest rising and falling peacefully.
We fell asleep with the lights on, completely naked, so I snag his T-shirt as I roll out of bed to cover myself, then turn off the lights on my way out of the bedroom.
I feel him running down my leg, so I have to make a pit stop into the powder room in the hall.
I clean up the best I can between the toilet and the sink.
He really did mean it when he said, “fuck it,” because he came inside me.
For a man who calls me a liar so much, he sure does trust I’m on birth control.
The way I’m dripping, it feels like he shot off at least three times.
But there’s nothing to worry about. I can’t have children.
The doctors confirmed it before I was old enough to care.
Whatever parts are necessary to grow a child are twisted up inside of me.
That seems about right. Even my DNA knew I wasn’t worthy of bringing another human being into this world.
Whether or not it would bother Callen, it’s a conversation for another day.
I pad out toward the kitchen for a tall glass of cold water. After fetching a glass from the cabinetry, I realize I know this layout all too well, from watching him. But I swallow down the pang of guilt. It’s different now. I’m not going back.
I cringe at the clink of the ice from the fridge, not wanting to disturb him down the hall. After filling up the cup halfway, I gulp down the icy water, letting it soothe my throat before I refill it. It’s then that I notice the glow of the laptop still lighting up the dark room.
It’s on the coffee table where I clocked it coming in, screen dimmed but awake, and I mean to just close it—save the battery, a small domestic courtesy, the kind of thing I keep catching myself wanting to do for him lately. My hand’s already on the lid.
Then I see what’s on the screen.
A photo album, half scrolled. And behind it, a document, open. And a word in the title that stops my hand cold.
The Legend of Teret: The True Story of Kesara.
I know that word. I’ve read that word in Salisbrie’s flat black brief. Teret is a small village in the country of Kesara. The place a war erased, the place that officially never existed, the place I was hired to help finish erasing by putting a bullet in the last man who remembers it.
This seems like it’s exactly what Salisbrie is looking for and every instinct inside of me tells me to delete it. Now. Before I can get caught. Before Callen gets caught.
Shit. I have to at least know what I’m working with. I set the water glass down on the table with no coaster. I’m too on edge to care about the savagery of a condescension ring on this nice wooden coffee table.
I sit down on the couch and start to read.
I only mean to glance at a few paragraphs.
Cursory details to indicate whether this piece of intel is valuable enough to destroy.
What I didn’t expect was to get sucked into the cushions, mesmerized, haunted, because Belai might be the most gifted storyteller I’ve ever encountered.
However, the story he’s telling is haunting.
Far more gruesome and morbid than Salisbrie let on, and let’s be honest, she’s no peach.
I speed-read through all the layers of her lies and deception.
There’s a clear villain in this story and it’s not Callen, Belai, or anyone from the tribe of Teret or the neighboring villages. Kesara was a casualty the government was more than willing to sacrifice.
Woven with poetic lyricism, Belai somehow brings the beauty of his people to the surface through the gruesome massacre.
It isn’t a screed. It’s beautiful. It’s the whole history of a people, from their cuisine to their songs, the sacred hills, the way the light fell before all of it was taken because they had the audacity to build a village on top of oil-laden soil.
Oil that belonged to them. Oil that fed the earth.
Oil that was sold through a dirty deal.
The truth Salisbrie so desperately wants to bury is clear.
They needed dead U.S. service members as a justification to storm Kesara and declare war.
Salisbrie said they were neutralizing a terrorist threat, but they let a civil war—or more accurately, genocide—ensue, at the hands of a violent militant movement, and then the military proceeded to put their own “partners” in the ground after they’d served their purpose.
An entire war that cracked a country open like a wound, so the right hands could reach in and take what was underneath.
The moral of the story? The government does indeed negotiate with terrorists.
They incite them, use them, then they wipe them out at the most convenient moments.
If it wasn’t so horrendously evil, I’d call it impressive.
Every single puppet string carefully tugged with the exact right tension to spin a narrative the public could guzzle down like truth.
This is the truth I needed. The real one. What Salisbrie’s brief left out, because the brief was a lie built to aim me at a target.
I guess she underestimated my ability to feel.
My mind is made up. I won’t let Callen die for this.
Not at my hands, not at any others. Especially not after learning the burden he carries.
Six SEALs were sacrificed for a fruitless mission.
Only one came home. I know the guilt of being a sole survivor.
I know what it feels like to ask why me?
so many times the words blend together and sound like something else entirely.
I read the part about Callen’s rescue.
I read it again.
He and his comrades were sent on a mission designed to kill them.
The orders were a fiction, the intelligence manufactured, the whole slaughter engineered from a desk.
I read how six men flew in and one crawled out.
I read Belai’s account of finding him, a man broken on the rocks, more dead than alive, the enemy they’d been warned about turning out to be a sailor the sea spat back up.
I read how they hid him, fed him, sat with his fever for days while he screamed the same five names into the dark.
And then, in such careful, measured English, the kind of clarity that only comes from years of perfecting a second language, he names the aggressor.
The one responsible for signing away six American lives, the one who kicked an entire nation of people off the board like sacrificial pawns in a game of chess.
Admiral Bridget Salisbrie.
And they gave her a fucking medal for it.
I’ve known what she is since she showed up in that garage.
Honestly, I thought I’d worked for worse.
But there’s a difference between knowing your client ordered a killing and reading, in a grieving father’s own hand, exactly whose lives she spent and exactly how little they weighed when she did it.
The brief made Kesara a tragedy: a firefight gone wrong, the fog of a bad war, bad intel and a PR nightmare.
Belai’s manuscript makes it what it was.
Murders. Five of them her own. Far more deaths of innocent people than can be named.
Planned. Signed. Shelved.
The bizarre thing that stops me cold on that couch in the dark is that my fists are clenched tight.
I’m angry.
I don’t get angry. Anger is a luxury for people who still believe the world is supposed to be just and fair.
I lost anger lying near death in a field, watching my father’s estate burning to the ground when I was sixteen.
I’ve watched terrible things happen to good people my whole life and felt nothing but the cool professional interest of a woman noting the weather.
Life is just the thing that happens before death. I’ve built my entire survival on that philosophy. I killed my best friend and grieved her and still never once let myself be angry, because anger is caring, and caring is a door I welded shut a long time ago and swore I’d never pry back open.
But here I am, with hope, heart, a revived sister, a man who makes me believe in something I can’t name, and I’m sitting here shaking with it. My hands. My actual hands have stretched out and are shaking uncontrollably. I stare at them in confusion like they belong to someone else.
I’ve held a lethal scorpion steadier than this.
The world is unjust; I made my peace with that young, and I made it in blood.
It’s that it’s him. Thirty feet away there’s a man asleep with his arm still warm from holding me, and every broken thing about him—the fists he wakes up clenching, the two, now grown, little girls he can’t make himself visit, the five ghosts he drags everywhere, the word coward he wears like a badge…
all of it traces back to a woman in a good suit who ran the math on his life and his brothers’ lives and decided they were an acceptable cost.
She didn’t even hate him. Hate, I’d somewhat understand.
She just spent him, the way you spend loose change, the way I’ve spent people, and the symmetry of that should make me feel something cold and kindred.
Maybe an admiration for Salisbrie. Instead it makes me want to burn her and her career to the ground.
I am so angry I can’t see straight.
Which means I’m compromised. Fully. Completely. Past pretending, past any story I could tell myself.
I cannot finish this mission. Obviously.
But I’m more than certain that not finishing is a death sentence. I’m not one-hundred-percent certain where Callen and I stand, or what he wants in the future, but I’m certain he’s not interested in a relationship with a corpse.
So I can’t just walk away. I have to stop it.
Because if I walk, if I take Fiona and run for the green hills, Salisbrie just sends the next one at him.
And the next. She has the resources to send an army, and sooner or later one of them gets through, and Callen dies in his bed or in his car, and every mile between me and here won’t matter because I’ll know I left him for the wolves.
The goodbye plan is dead. I can’t run. Not until he’s safe.
What I need is a way to get Salisbrie to stand down. Killing a potential Secretary of Defense comes with publicity I don’t desire. I have to hand her a reason to call the whole thing off. To look at Callen and see a man not worth the risk of one more body.
And I’m looking at the reason right here on the screen.
The book. If Salisbrie is afraid of the truth getting out, then I show her a truth that can’t touch her.
Look, I’ll tell her. I’ll get the black box and destroy it. Then, this is everything he has. An old man’s sad little memoir. Your word against his and we both know your mouth is bigger. Your candidacy’s safe. There’s nothing here worth the exposure of another dead body. Let it go. Let him go.
It’s thin. Some cold operator in the back of my skull knows it’s thin, but it’s what I’ve got. It’s the only leverage I can find that gets Callen out of this alive, and I will bend the truth into whatever shape it takes.
On his old machine, I find the full manuscript he downloaded tonight, and I attach it to an email and send it to myself. Then, I respond to Belai’s email from Callen’s computer:
Belai,
I changed my mind. I want to see you. Bring the black box, but don’t email me back here. It’s not secure. Text me at 555-403-2989. Send nothing but the time and location to meet. Doesn’t matter the date, I’ll be there.
-Jeff
Wait, I double-check Callen’s prior email and read his signature line. Oh.
-J Callen.
I delete the email from his inbox and clear the metadata just like Dani taught me to do. Callen won’t know I sent this.
Quiet. Fast. Two minutes, start to finish to engineer an entire new plan.
I’m sorry, Belai, but I’m going to bury your truth.
He won’t ignite a public outrage or civil war over this.
But he gets to live. His son gets a full life, and maybe one day he’ll hold grandchildren.
That’s a fair enough compromise. Maybe he can still publish it safely if he rewrites it a little.
De-fang it. Pull her name. Build Salisbrie a version gentle enough to talk her off the ledge.
Focus on the people, not the politics. Surrender the proof.
I can find the black box and retrieve it peacefully as soon as I get Belai’s location.
I sit at the coffee table for a long while after, dwelling in the quiet before the storm. I came here to say goodbye, and instead I fell the rest of the way, and then I stole the one thing he swore on his brothers to protect: justice. But I’m doing the right thing. I’m saving lives.
That has to be the story I convince myself of. It’s the only way.
From the bedroom, thick with sleep, Callen calls out, “Sylvie? You still here?”
I go still at first. Then, I close the laptop, gentle, the way a considerate person would, and I stand in the dark with my heart going like a hunted thing.
“Right here,” I call back, softly. “Just got water. Coming back to bed.”
“Bring me a sip?”
“Of course.” I snatch up the water cup, wiping the condensation ring away with my elbow.
I go back to his bed and hand it to him. He takes a few glugs. “Thank you, baby.”
Oh shit, the way I love how that sounds.
I slide under his arm and let him gather me back into his chest. He sighs and settles and is gone again in seconds—trusting, warm, wrecked, mine. The man I just betrayed to save him. The only person alive who ever made me want to be something other than a weapon.
He holds me all night.
And I don’t fucking sleep at all.