Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84607 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 423(@200wpm)___ 338(@250wpm)___ 282(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84607 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 423(@200wpm)___ 338(@250wpm)___ 282(@300wpm)
After swiping my card once more, I walked past one operations room after another, each containing equipment and technology worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, until I reached the end of the corridor where Coach and a few others had their offices.
I knocked on Shira’s door and hoped she was in. She was supposed to be.
We’d gone through recruit training and selection together, and she’d headed straight for Intel, while I’d aimed for a life in the field.
The door unlocked with a mechanical whirr, meaning it was okay to enter.
I poked my head in and spotted her behind her desk.
The past nine, almost ten months…she’d had that sympathetic smile for me.
“Hey,” I said. “Any updates?”
“You’ll be the first to know, hon,” she replied. “Hyatt is flying in two new operators on Monday. They’ll be briefed first thing that morning.”
“Are they back in Mogadishu?” I asked.
“For now,” she said. “We’re making sure we didn’t miss anything.”
I released a breath and clenched my jaw. We were missing something. An entire fucking container ship couldn’t just disappear. We’d tracked it for seven goddamn months following my brother’s death, and now it was gone?
We had to find it. We had to get on board and look through it. My gut was still telling me we’d find clues about the motherfuckers who’d murdered Vince.
Just get through the fifty minutes.
Doc should have one of those sofas you could lie down on. I was sick of sitting up and staring at the fuck-ugly painting that took up the majority of the wall behind his chair. It was just blotchy squares of blue paint forming some kind of patchwork.
There was nothing else to stare at in here.
Doc had no diplomas or medals on his walls, even though he had plenty to brag about. He was, what, in his mid-forties or thereabouts? A boy wonder who’d advanced quickly through high school, premed, and med school. But then, 9/11 had changed his plans. Coach had mentioned a Purple Heart.
Most of all, Doc had a master’s in being a pain in my ass.
“Are you seeing colors again, Bo?”
I flicked him a glance. “Huh?”
“After your brother’s death, you told me that you’d stopped registering colors, scents, and details around you.”
Oh.
Fuck if I knew.
I scooted farther down in my chair and rested an ankle over my knee.
Half an hour left?
“I’m more present,” I said. I wasn’t gonna let him take away my ready status. “I even pay attention when Alex talks.”
“What about Kristen?”
I made a face and folded my arms over my chest. I’d rather not talk about her. There wasn’t much of a point anyway.
“Same old,” I answered. “She says she can’t feel my emotions—whatever the fuck that means.”
“Could it be that she might feel you’re…closed off? Numb?”
I blew out a breath.
“You’d have to ask her,” I said. Then I eyed him and felt the need to make something clear. “I’m ready to work, Doc. I don’t gotta be 100% blissed out to do a good job. And there’s gotta be a loophole in the whole…you can’t take on more than one case at a time. Coach and Shira benched me from Mogadishu.”
“Well, you’re too close,” he said matter-of-factly. “It was only last week you admitted you’re still angry.”
“Of-fucking-course I am.” I straightened in my seat again and felt annoyance sizzling through me. “You would be too if you’d witnessed your brother getting shot in the head.”
I clenched my jaw and looked away.
God.
I couldn’t close my eyes to take a single breath anymore. Every time I tried to rest or sleep, I was transported back to the docks in Mogadishu. The clammy heat that’d stuck to my skin that night, all the containers around us, the moonlight, and then— I flinched as the shot went off in my head. The sound had bounced off the containers, and my brother had fallen to the ground.
“Bo, your anger is entirely natural and justified,” he said. “And you’re right—if I were in your shoes, I’d be murderous.”
Then…what was the problem?
“There you go.” I shrugged.
He sighed and gave me a patient look. “We don’t put a gun in the hand of a murderous person.”
What the fuck? I sat forward and felt a rush of anxiety settling in my chest. “Are you changing my status? You fucking cleared me, man.”
“I’m making an addition,” he amended. “For the time being, you’ll only get low-risk and domestic assignments. You will have a ton on your plate with the recruits anyway. We can reevaluate in a few months—”
“A few months?!” I yelled and shot right out of the chair. Holy fuck, the anger that tore through me almost set me on fire, but it wasn’t half as maddening as the ever-composed expression on Doc’s face.
Fucker didn’t even flinch.
To put me on domestic bullshit wasn’t fucking fair. We barely handled those contracts anymore. We had a sister agency on the West Coast for that.