Chapter 4
Pisa Airport, Italy.
Tyrone stood leaning against the side of a matte-black SUV, his arms folded across his chest.
Does she think we’re crazy? Or that she’s lost her mind?
I should have known to look for her.
Damn, Dwight, you’re an asshole.
You should have fucking told us you had a woman and child waiting at home.
Beside him, Grizzly checked his watch. “ETA three minutes,” he said, his voice deep and resonant. “The bird just cleared the approach from the coast.”
Tyrone’s jaw tightened. A cold knot of tension swirled in his gut.
This was almost as bad as that split second before he swan-dived into a HALO jump toward a hot landing zone.
He almost wished this was a mission against a fortified compound in the Hindu Kush.
Hell, he’d even take patching arterial spray under NVGs over this waiting shit.
This was something far more dangerous than anything he’d trained to do or anything he’d faced downrange.
He was about to look into the eyes of the woman he’d effectively widowed by failing to keep Dwight Jennings on the right side of Valhalla.
He had no fucking clue how to deal with this, with her, or with the knowledge that everything she’d faced alone was his fucking fault.
“Chill, man.” Nemo tossed a set of keys in the air and caught them with practiced boredom. “She’s not going to blame you for shit.”
“She fucking should.” How could she not? “She’s not just any woman, Nemo. She’s Dwight’s widow in everything but the paperwork.” His voice was rougher than he’d intended.
“You aren’t the one who lost her, Ty,” Gunnar said, his tone firm. “You didn’t fucking know about her, or you would have made sure she was taken care of. Don’t let misguided guilt blind you into being your usual asshole self. Control the controlables, Zorro, and the rest will take care of itself.”
Right. Because that’s what you do all the time.
Tyrone looked toward the dark horizon where a set of landing lights had just appeared, cutting through the mist.
“I should have known to look for her.”
“There was more than you on that team,” Gunnar reminded him, “it’s not all on you.”
Dwight’s daughter is in our house. Damn straight it’s on me.
The jet touched down with a puff of smoke from the tires, its engines screaming in reverse thrust as it taxied toward their position.
It was a testament to the resources the Four X’s had at their disposal for staging operations from the shadows of a Templar cloister.
The plane slowed to a halt, the engines whining down into a low whistle.
The stairs lowered, and a shaft of warm, golden light spilled out onto the tarmac.
His heart rate ticked up. He’d seen her DMV photo, and he’d seen her on the video call, but this was different. This was the woman who’d been lost in the ruins of Dwight Jennings’s death, because he and his team hadn’t known she existed.
Glenna appeared at the top of the stairs.
She looked small against the backdrop of the massive jet.
She was wearing a grey tracksuit that hung a little loosely on her frame, her dark hair pulled back in a messy bun.
She looked exhausted, her face pale under the hangar lights, but as her feet hit the pavement, she didn’t look like a victim; she looked like a woman on a mission.
Tyrone stepped forward, and she stopped three feet from him, her head tilting back to meet his eyes. Up close, she was even more like Kelsey—the same fierce, obsidian eyes, the same stubborn set to her jaw.
“Ms. Harper. Glenna.” His voice dropped into that low, calm register he used to stabilize wounded warriors on the field. “I’m Tyrone. But you can call me Zorro.”
“Where is my daughter?”
He reached out, hesitating for a fraction of a second before placing a steadying hand on her elbow. She was trembling, a fine, high-frequency vibration that he could feel through the fabric of her sleeve.
“It’s okay, Glenna. You’re safe. We’ve got you.”
“Where is she?” Her voice rose. “Where’s my daughter?”
“She’s about forty minutes north, at my home,” Gunnar said, stepping forward. He offered a small, respectful nod. “I’m Gunnar McKinley. Welcome to Italy, Glenna.”
Glenna looked at him, then at Nemo, her eyes wide as she took in the size of them and how they surrounded her.
“Is she... is she really here?” Her voice cracked a little. “I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and I’ll be back in the diner, and Bernie will be yelling at me, and...”
“I swear she’s here.” Tyrone caught her hand.
“Come with me. You’ll see her just about the same time as the sun comes up.
” He led her to an SUV, opened the door, and helped her into the high seat.
Once she was buckled in, He climbed into the driver’s seat next to her while Gunnar and Nemo took the second vehicle.
“I have so many questions.” She stared out the windshield at the dark silhouettes of the Tuscan hills. “But I don’t think I have the words for them yet.”
“It’s a lot to process.” He kept his eyes on the road, weaving the heavy vehicle through the narrow lanes with practiced ease.
“There will be time for the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ later. Right now, the only thing that matters is the ‘who.’ You and Kelsey.” He rubbed at his chest, right over the spot where he felt a weird, squeezing sensation.
I got her, Dwight. I’ll look after your girls.
Every fiber of his being hated that this woman, Dwight’s woman, had been through the proverbial meat grinder.
She’d lost her man to war, been abandoned by the country her man died for.
Then, as if fate had been off her meds, Glenna had been destroyed by a system that should have protected her, and her child had been taken from her.
Now she’d had to cross an ocean on the word of a bunch of mercenaries because it was the only way back to her kid.
That shit took guts.
The sound of a stifled sob from the passenger seat made him wince.
She’s crying.
He couldn’t blame her. The shit she’d had thrown at her over the last few years would have brought a stronger man than him to his knees.
Don’t cry, damn it. I don’t know how to fix tears.
He reached into the door pocket, pulled out a bottle of water and what he hoped was a pack of tissues, and handed them to her.
“Here.”
Glenna took them, her fingers brushing his. The contact sent a jolt through his arm—a spark of electricity that made the hair on his neck stand up.
“Thank you.” She took a long drink, and when she finished, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked at him again. “Did he talk about me? At the end?”
The question was a landmine he should have expected, but even so it made his gut twist. He remembered the noise, the screaming, and the smell of burning rubber.
He could still feel how Dwight’s hand had clutched his collar, as he begged him to promise Tyrone wouldn’t let him die.
There was a hell of a lot of shit that he’d done for his flag and country that would haunt him for the rest of his days, but those last moments with Dwight topped every single one of them.
“No.” Because he didn’t want to upset her, he chose his words with surgical precision. “He didn’t have much breath left. I didn’t know you or Kelsey existed. I thought... we all thought he was a loner. He never put you on the paperwork.”
“Because he was afraid.” Glenna’s voice turned bitter. “He saw what happened to the families of the guys who got targeted. He thought that if we weren’t on any official record, we were safe. He thought he was protecting us by keeping us a secret.”
“He was wrong,” Tyrone said, his voice hard. “He should have trusted his team. We take care of our own, Glenna. Always.”
“Well, you’re a little late for Dwight,” she snapped, the grief-fueled anger flashing back into her eyes. “But you found Kelsey. Why? How did you even know to look?”
“We didn’t.” God, he didn’t want to even think of what would have happened to her daughter if Ember and Jules hadn’t been taken, too.
“We were hitting a trafficking cell for a different reason—two of my current team’s kids were taken.
Kelsey was in the same place. We brought her back because we don’t leave kids behind.
Period. It wasn’t until she saw my ink yesterday that the pieces fell into place. ”
“I’m surprised she remembers it. She was barely three when he left for that last tour, but she used to sit on his lap and trace the lines. She called it her ‘magic-bird.’ She told me she was going to fly on it to find him.”
Damn.
He had to swallow past a lump the size of a grenade in his throat.
He looked away, staring out the front windshield as the Italian countryside blurred past. They were hitting the outskirts of La Spezia with its colorful houses and narrow streets.
Sometimes he wondered if the residents of the postcard-like coastal town knew what the residents of Mason del Tempio did for a living.
He wove through the light morning traffic with the aggressive confidence of a man who knew the local Carabinieri wouldn’t pull over a Four X’s Group vehicle.
The tension in the car almost choked him. Glenna was almost vibrating in the seat next to him. She looked like she wanted to kick the door open and run the rest of the way.
Can you blame her?
No. No. I cannot.
Hell, he’d been in dozens of firefights, had held men’s lives in his hands while bullets chewed up the dirt around him, but he’d never had adrenaline spike so fast it drew beads of sweat to his brow. But then he’d never facilitated a reunion quite like the one to come either.
As they turned off the main road and began the climb toward the Mason del Tempio, the ancient stone walls of the compound rose up to meet them.
The sun was just starting to rise over the grey stone of the former nunnery.
He hit the remote for the heavy iron gates.
They swung open with a slow, grinding dignity, revealing the road up to the inner courtyard.