The Price of Valor

by Susan May Warren

  He dropped his phone just as one of them rushed him. The man put a fist in Orion’s gut, bent him over, and slammed him into the wall.

  Jenny screamed as the second man advanced on her. She took a step between her and Luna and Gio. “Stay back!”

  The third man through the door looked American. A scar traced his forehead, looking relatively fresh, and he wore a suit. As if he might be the one in charge.

  Orion rebounded, rolled, and sent his fist into his attacker’s ear.

  He howled, and Orion got behind him and cranked his arm around his neck.

  The man tried to headbutt him, but Orion held on. Smaller but wiry, he hooked his legs around the Russian’s waist, wearing him down.

  Until Russian thug number two jumped in. He pulled Orion off, then hit him so hard Orion spun and hit the bookshelf, fell against a table, broke a lamp.

  Then the man aimed a kick at Orion’s knee, and he hit the floor.

  The thug stood over him, grabbed his shirt, pulled back his fist.

  “No!” Jenny took off and launched herself onto the Russian holding Orion. He elbowed her in the gut and she fell off, but rolled and picked up the broken lamp. Swung it at the first thug, now finding his breath.

  Luna screamed.

  “Stop! Or I kill the kid!”

  Jenny froze.

  Gio had run at the closest man with a kitchen knife. Now, the man had Gio around the neck, a gun to his head. He’d dropped the knife.

  Orion had found his feet, picked up a shard of the lamp, and gone after the Russian. Blood dripped down Orion’s face, his lip broken, his nose bleeding.

  For a second, no one breathed. They just stood there looking at each other, and then Orion dropped the lamp shard and put his hands up. “Don’t hurt him.”

  Gio was kicking at the man, so the American pushed his head against the wall and shoved his gun against his spine. “I said stop.”

  “Don’t move, Gio,” Orion said.

  Maybe it was the calm in his voice, but Gio stilled, just a whimper emerging from him now.

  Luna stood frozen, her hands glued over her mouth.

  Orion shot a look at Jenny. “It’ll be okay,” he mouthed. Or at least that’s what she thought he said. Maybe it was just her heart hoping the words.

  “Get down on your knees, both of you,” the American said.

  Orion obeyed, and that’s when she noticed his wince. She caught his tiny groan as he went down.

  She got down beside him, her heart pulsing in her throat. He was really hurt.

  “Who are you?” Orion said.

  “Where’s the woman?” the man said.

  Orion looked at Jenny, back at the American, and raised an eyebrow. “What woman?”

  “The one you came to find. The woman married to Hamilton Jones.”

  “Oh, that woman,” cheeky Orion said. “Hate to tell you, but she’s gone. Ditched us. Buh-bye.”

  He was making the man angry. What was his game?

  The man said something to the Russians, and one stepped up and picked up Orion’s cell phone.

  “Call him,” the American said. The Russian held out the phone to Orion.

  “Call who?” Orion asked nicely.

  “Your boss. Jones.”

  “He’s not going to answer.”

  “If he doesn’t, she’s dead.” And he turned the gun to Jenny.

  Orion took a breath, and all the fun and games vanished from his face. He looked at her, and she saw his words in his eyes—everything he’d said on the roof last night, when he’d found her. “I love you and I don’t have to marry you—we can just . . . whatever you want.”

  “I want you.” She’d said it then, and she meant it now as she stared back at him.

  “I’ll do it,” Orion said quietly.

  “Make it snappy,” the American said.

  Orion dialed. Waited. It must have gone to voicemail because, “Ham. It’s me, Orion. So, some friends are here looking for Signe. Do you suppose you could come back around when you get done with whatever you’re doing? Perfect.”

  He hung up. “We’re all set.”

  The man spoke again to the Russian and he ripped the phone from Orion’s hand.

  The American checked the phone. Looked up at Orion.

  Then he took the gun off Jenny and advanced to Orion, pressed the gun to his forehead.

  “Who did you call?”

  “My boss.”

  The American hit him across the face.

  Jenny closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, the man was scrolling down Orion’s speed dial contacts. He pressed a number and handed the phone to Jenny. “Let’s try again. And no funny stuff because I promise, I’ll shoot him right here, right now—”

  “Fine!” She grabbed the phone. The man had put it on speaker, and Ham’s voice came on the line. “Ham here.”

  She kept her voice even. “The guys that are after Signe are here. They want the list. Can you come back?”

  He didn’t even hesitate, his voice cool. Quintessential Ham.

  “We’ll be right there.” He hung up.

  The man swiped the phone from Jenny’s grip. “On the floor, both of you, face down.”

  She lay flat, and a foot came down between her shoulder blades. Hands pulled her arms back.

  Her wrists were taped, and she turned her head and saw that the other thug was doing the same to Orion. His face was to hers.

  Orion’s breathing was even, as if he was thinking, but all she could think about was the fact that he’d never know. She’d never told him why she’d broken his heart.

  Last night simply hadn’t been the right time. Not with rescuing people from the coffee shop, taking care of Marcello, finding the school, and then of course Ham arrived and there was the joy of knowing that he hadn’t perished. None of it felt like the right time to talk to Orion, to say the words that might derail their future.

  She wanted a quiet moment. A moment when he could ask her questions and she could tell him the whole story. And then tell him that he could walk away if he needed to. But at least he would know that she loved him.

  Now. She had to tell him before . . . well, before Ham arrived and who knew what happened. “Orion.”

  The men had stepped away to tie up Luna and Gio.

  “Orion.”

  He was looking right at her so she didn’t actually need his attention. She just had to figure out how to say the rest. She cut her voice low. “I need to tell you something.”

  He just looked at her, clearly listening.

  Okay. Deep breath. “I know I should have told you, but . . . okay, so when I was nineteen years old I met a guy who—never mind. The short of it is that I had an abortion. And when I did . . .” She swallowed. He hadn’t even blinked. “I’m not sure I can have kids. And I just didn’t want you to marry me without knowing that because you love kids and—”

  “Shut up over there!”

  Jenny closed her mouth.

  Orion was just staring at her. Didn’t frown. Didn’t add a look of concern or disgust or even anger. Just stared.

  Then, quietly, “When I tell you, I need you to roll away and get small, okay?”

  Huh?

  “Just wait for my signal.”

  Um . . . “Okay.”

  “I said shut up!” The American came over and kicked Orion, right in the face.

  Jenny screamed. “Stop!”

  He ignored her. One of the Russians grabbed Orion’s collar and moved him away from her, shoved him against the sofa.

  Orion sat there, his back against the sofa, his knees up, his warrior face on.

  And did not look at her.

  Not even once for the next twenty minutes as they waited in silence.

  That’s when she decided to actually use her head—stop worrying about herself and start figuring out how she could get them out of this mess.

  She had no idea what was going on with Orion, but he seemed to be disconnected from the worl
d. Clearly he’d taken a severe hit to the head with that kick.

  Oh, God, make me brave. “My name is Jenny,” she said quietly. “What’s yours?”

  She wasn’t talking to the Russians, of course, but the American, and he looked at her and smiled.

  “Martin,” he said, surprising her, really.

  “You’re an American,” she said, not a question.

  “I am.”

  “So, I don’t understand. We’re Americans too. What’s going on?”

  He picked up a chair and sat down, leaned his arms against the back of the chair.

  “Well, here’s the problem, Jenny. You’re working with a rogue CIA agent who has sensitive information, and we’ve been tracking her across Europe trying to secure it. She keeps eluding us. We tracked her to this house and realized that the only way we were going to get close to her is to ask her to come to us.”

  “Us too!” Jenny said. “We’re clearly on your side. Just let us go.”

  Martin shook his head. “Sorry. We don’t know who to trust. We’ll get the information, take you back to the US, and you can sort it out with the CIA.”

  Jenny glanced at Orion. He still hadn’t moved.

  She looked back at Martin. “There’s been some misunderstanding. We were sent here by the CIA to retrieve the very information that you’re talking about. So, like I said, we’re on the same side.”

  Martin got up and looked to be walking away.

  Jenny closed her eyes. Think negotiation techniques. Empathize with him. Make him believe you’re on his side. She opened her eyes. “I’m not actually in the CIA but I can imagine it’s really hard to be able to trust people.”

  Martin turned around. Folded his arms and rested his hip against the kitchen table. “You think so?”

  “I used to be a profiler in Afghanistan. My job was to vet our sources. But sometimes that’s not easy, is it? I got it wrong once and it cost lives.”

  Martin raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s hard to have so many lives at stake. You can’t afford to get things wrong.”

  Martin studied her.

  “What if you’re wrong about this informant?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Martin said. “She killed her husband and another man on a boat in the Mediterranean. And she left two of my men dead in Germany. She’s lived the last ten years in a terrorist training camp. I don’t think we can trust her.”

  She hadn’t known all that about Signe. Just knew that Ham trusted her. Loved her.

  Maybe he didn’t know.

  “What are you going to do with us after she comes back and after you get the list?”

  Martin stood up and went to the window, looked out. “I told you we’re going to bring you back to the US.”

  He was lying. Classic technique—don’t look at the person while delivering the lie, and they can’t see your telltale eye shift.

  Stay steady, Jen.

  “So you’re going to kill me and Orion. I get that. What about that boy right there?” She looked at Gio. “He’s done nothing. You’re just going to kill them and walk away?”

  Martin glanced at Gio, who was tied up with his mother, and lifted his shoulder.

  Deep breath. “What if you let them go right now. Put them in the back bedroom? They don’t speak English. They don’t know what’s going on.”

  Martin shook his head.

  C’mon, Jenny. You can do better than this. She was a licensed psychologist. Knew how to counsel, even interrogate people.

  Orion still wasn’t moving.

  “You know it’s going to cause a ruckus when you shoot us. Orion is not going to go down easily, you’ve already seen that.”

  And maybe she shouldn’t have said that because that’s when Orion came out of his catatonic state for a moment. She couldn’t decipher the look he gave her.

  Then he looked away again, head down. At least his nose seemed to have stopped gushing.

  “Listen, you come at us and we’re all going to start screaming. You can’t kill us all at the same time. People will hear you. But if you let Luna and Gio go, Orion and I will sit here quietly. We won’t make a problem when Ham returns, and we’ll tell him to give you the information. Then, we’ll let you do whatever you want to us.”

  Martin looked at her.

  “Put them in the back room,” she said. “By the time they get to help, you’ll be gone. And you won’t have had an international incident to clean up. Just us Americans. Isn’t that what you want?”

  Martin glanced at Gio. Back to her. Then he said something to the Russians.

  Jenny let out her breath as they walked over, grabbed Luna and Gio, and shoved them into the bathroom.

  The door locked.

  And maybe she and Orion would never get out of here. But at least she’d told him the truth.

  Now she just had to tell him that she loved him. So, she looked at him and said, “Orion Starr, I love you. I was afraid that you wouldn’t love me because I can’t give you children. But I give you my heart. You are my hero, now and forever.”

  For the second time Orion lifted his head and broke his catatonic state. He looked at her, smiled, and shouted, “Now!”

  Huh?

  The glass broke in the big window behind her, and she huddled into a ball as a soldier came through it. Two pops and the Russians went down. The door burst open and another soldier came in.

  She got small.

  But just in case she didn’t, Orion, his hands free, launched himself over her, his body encasing hers. “Stay down!”

  So not catatonic, apparently. Cunning, freeing himself.

  And planning some sort of stealth attack.

  Martin had flipped over a table, and she saw him darting through the flat, toward the back.

  One of the soldiers went after him.

  The other spoke into an earpiece. “He went out the back.”

  Right about then, Ham appeared in the door. “Hey!” He headed inside. “Did you get them?”

  Orion rolled off her. “I need a towel. My nose is broken.”

  The first soldier crouched beside her, ran his Ka-Bar under her taped hands, freeing her.

  She rolled over. Looked at him, her eyes wide.

  “You okay, Jenny?”

  “Jake?”

  Jake Silver grinned at her under his helmet. He wore head-to-toe protective gear, but his blue eyes glimmered. “That’s the last time I stay home and babysit.”

  Hope was not a strategy.

  But so far, it was working, and Ham wasn’t ready to abandon it quite yet.

  He sat on an examination table in the medical clinic of the Sigonella Naval Air Station, his leg draped, a male physician’s assistant about to sew his leg back up.

  Gio and his mother had been taken to a hospital not on base, but Lt. Shelly Hollybrook from the naval base had cleared Ham, North, Jake, Orion, and the rest of the team to be treated at the medical clinic.

  Ham now sported a less-than-convenient plaster cast on his hairline-fractured wrist—something he’d call overkill.

  Hooyah, his team had shown up, just like he’d trained them when he set up their private group-messaging system.

  Although reading his mind hadn’t been an upgrade he thought he’d chosen.

  “How’d this happen, exactly?” Jenny sat on a chair, an ice pack to her bruised rib where Igor One had sent his elbow into her side. “One second I’m on the ground, Orion is staring at the floor like his brain is scrambled, the next he’s on top of me and a handful of Rambos—”

  “Ex–special operators,” Jake said from where he held up a wall with his shoulder. “We still got it.” He bumped fists with North Gunderson, who seemed in a surly mood after losing Martin in the tiny alleyways of Librino, Gio’s suburb.

  That sat in Ham’s craw too.

  This wasn’t over.

  Signe’s words about White hadn’t helped. He needed to buy himself some time and do a little investigating.

  “Blame
Orion,” North said. “He’s the one who called in the text. We have a voice-to-text system that sends the message, along with a GPS location, to everyone’s phone.”

  “So that’s the call he made,” Jenny said. “But—”

  “We were in-country,” Jake said. “As soon as we heard about the volcano, and Scarlett couldn’t reach Ham on his cell, we got on a plane for Italy. We got to Palermo and had to drive the rest of the way. We figured even if you were okay, there might be others who needed our help.”

  “And you brought weapons?” Signe said. She was standing away from them, her arms folded, staring out the window at the activities on base, as if she expected Navy MAs to kick in the door and take her down to the floor, haul her away.

  Over his dead body. But the thought sat in the back of his brain, along with her words—“I’m chained to a wall eating soft foods in a black site until the end of my days.”

  She hadn’t been kidding.

  He hadn’t either when he told her he’d find her.

  Please, let it not come to that.

  But his chest still burned with the hard punch of realizing she had betrayed him.

  And the fact that deep in his gut, she might be a little right. He had come to Italy to confront her.

  And maybe a part of him did hate her for choosing the mission over him.

  He shook the thought away. “We always bring tactical weapons.”

  “On a commercial flight?”

  “Who said we went commercial?” North said. He leaned up from the wall. “I’m going to call Selah, tell her we’re okay.” He patted Jake on the shoulder as if that might atone for the fact that North was dating Jake’s kid sister.

  “You own a plane?” Signe said, looking at Ham.

  “No. But we have a contract with a private charter company when we need it.”

  “Chief, this is going to hurt,” said the petty officer. Ham looked at him. Young guy, blond hair worn high and tight. Blue eyes, and manners. Wore the name Samuels on his badge.

  “Do it,” Ham said and looked away as Samuels administered a needle of novocaine.

  “I need to debride the wound a little—there’s a bit of an infection.”

  “Blame the water. And by the way, did you guys get the location of the school?” He directed his attention to Jake.

  “Orion is taking care of it right now,” Jake said. He looked at Jenny. “He tells me you were amazing. Talked the guy into letting the family go.”