Boarding parties had managed to attach towing lines and escort the crippled vessel into safer waters, while medical teams tended to the injured.
Watkins’ gunshot wound was healing up quickly, and some of the girls had been treated for illness and malnutrition, but all were expected to make full recoveries. Watkins himself had even grudgingly acknowledged that O’Neill wasn’t as big of an asshole as he’d first thought, which was high praise indeed.
The team had attended a funeral service for Wyatt Richards. As relieved as they all were to have survived the ordeal, there was no escaping the grief of losing one of their own.
They had however gained some consolation from the intelligence provided by Iosif, the one surviving member of Dmitry’s smuggling crew, who had been all too eager to spill his guts in exchange for a reduced sentence. His information had led to a spate of arrests both in Russia and the United States, dismantling a sex trafficking operation worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
O’Neill too had lived up to his word, pulling whatever strings he could to ensure that Nika and her fellow captives were granted refugee status and relocated within the U.S. He didn’t imagine he’d ever see any of them again, but it gave him some comfort to know they’d finally found what they had risked so much to achieve.
And with the endless debriefings and excitement now at last calming down, the only thing that remained was to put his own affairs in order. The resignation email that he’d typed up what felt like a lifetime ago was still sitting on his computer, waiting to be sent. One mouse click would put it in motion.
“So what do you think?” Kate Starke asked, perched on the edge of the desk with her arms folded, a faint but knowing smile on her face. “You going to send that or what?”
O’Neill glanced at her, then back to the screen. A few weeks ago he’d been desperate to leave this place, desperate to escape his past, desperate to get out of the service. But a lot could change in a few weeks.
He certainly had.
Reaching out, he gently moved the pointer to the “Delete” icon, and with a single click, erased the email and the broken man who had written it.
O’Neill smiled, feeling lighter and younger than he had for a long time.
“Thought I might stick around a while longer,” he said, sensing somehow that there was a lot more still to come, for both of them.
And he was ready for it.
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Epub ISBN: 9781786531773
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Published by BookShots 2017
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Copyright © James Patterson 2017
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First published by BookShots in 2017
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ISBN 9781786531766
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