“That’s horrible,” I said with tears in my eyes. My hand covered my mouth as a lump caught in my throat. I had never been much of a crier, but when you heard stories like that in person, it was hard to not be affected. “Did the police catch him?”
“Cole, Alex’s boyfriend, killed him, but not before he hurt several members of the team.” He shook his head as he stared off into space. He seemed to be lost in his head. “Lola, he was going to scalp her. That’s where that pretty, little scar across her forehead is from. Hunter was in a coma for a while after having his head bashed in with a rock. Derek was shot in the leg.”
I could hear the pain in his voice over the choices he had made and how it affected the rest of his team. He hadn’t wanted to make those choices. He had only been trying to keep his family safe. I reached across the table and grabbed his hand, squeezing it tightly. He looked startled as his head swiveled to our joined hands on the table. Then he looked at me questioningly.
“Sebastian didn’t fire you?”
“He should have. I tried to quit, but he guilted me into staying. Said I owed it to my team to make up for what I had done. He’s right. I do owe them, but they’d all be better off if I walked away.”
“Obviously, Sebastian doesn’t think so. If he didn’t think you were worth having around, he would have told you to leave.”
“He pities me, but he doesn’t trust me, and rightly so. I betrayed my whole goddamned team. There’s not a single person on that team who would want to work with me.”
“Yet he called you in.”
“Because there was no one else.”
“You have to start somewhere,” I said gently.
He looked at me for a minute like he was trying to figure me out. “I don’t understand. Why are you defending me?”
“I’m not defending you, but..as a reporter, I see stories from all different angles. I’ve learned to look beyond what a story appears to be and see it for what it really is. Your story isn’t about betrayal. It’s about making difficult decisions. I don’t know what the right decision would have been. Hell, I don’t know anything about security, but it seems like you were between a rock and a hard place. I don’t think anyone, even your teammates could put themselves in your shoes and guarantee that they would have done things differently.”
He nodded, but I didn’t think that he looked convinced. “Well, it’s over now. I just want to move on with my life. Find something new for myself.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Because Sebastian’s right. I do owe it to my team.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I knew what it felt like.
“I once met with a source that had proof his company was guilty of wrongdoing. He wanted someone to dig into it and he came to me for help. I was so eager for the story that I pushed him to obtain documents however he could. He got caught after he handed over the documents to me. He lost his job and was blackballed from every reputable company. He had to move his family in with his parents in Oklahoma until they could get back on their feet.”
He leaned forward with his hands on his knees. “What was the company guilty of?”
“They were selling drugs that were killing people. The company didn’t want to do a recall because of what would happen with their FDA approval, so they decided to change the drug and not tell anyone. Meanwhile, there was still a ton of medication on the market.”
“So you saved people.”
I nodded. “I did, but I cost one man his livelihood. The last I heard, he was working at a smaller company, just scraping by. It doesn’t matter that I helped save all those other people by exposing the truth. I made one major error by letting my drive and ambition dictate my morals.”
“Still, you didn’t get anyone killed. What you did may have been wrong, but it wasn’t deadly.”
“My point is that we all make decisions in life that will forever change us. There’s no going back once it’s done. We just have to move forward and make sure we don’t make the same mistake twice.”
“And how’s that working for you so far?”
“Well, I no longer ask my sources to do anything they aren’t willing to do. Like this woman that I was supposed to meet? She gave me the information she had and I took it from there. She wasn’t supposed to do any more than she already had. Yet, she was supposed to meet me last night and she didn’t. That doesn’t look so good for her, especially considering that some goons showed up to kill me.”
“And that’s who you think messaged you last night.”
“Yeah. When she called me earlier to ask me to meet her, she told me that she thought she was being followed. She said that she was pretty sure they found out what she had done, and if I’m correct about it being something very bad, they don’t want that information floating around.”
“Well, hopefully we’ll get some answers off your phone when it dries out.”
✯✯✯✯✯
At some point during my talk with Cal, I fell asleep. We had stayed up for at least another two hours talking about our lives. We steered clear of anymore talks of our failures, but instead talked about good times. He was actually quite funny and had a ton of good stories from his time in the military. He had been in the Army and loved it, but left after he realized that he was missing out on his kids growing up. He hadn’t wanted to miss out on any more, and even though the risk was still there with the security firm, he was still home most nights.
Cal was very easy to talk to and I found myself opening up to him about my life and how I got where I am today. He paid close attention to everything I was saying, but he was also watching the monitors closely. He took his job very seriously. He also got up twice and did a perimeter check, making me promise to stay exactly where I was. I wasn’t sure why, but I had no problem listening to Cal. Maybe it was because he already felt so much guilt over what had happened and I didn’t want to add to that by doing something that would get me into further trouble. That being said, I really needed to consider what it would do to Sebastian if I ran off and did something that got me into trouble. All of these guys took their jobs to the extreme and I found myself feeling very bad for what I did to Sinner last night.
Somehow, I had ended up on the couch during the early morning hours. I think I fell asleep at the table, so Cal must have brought me over to the couch. Sitting up, I stretched and let out a loud yawn when the aroma of coffee hit me. Oh, God. I needed coffee so bad. I walked into the kitchen and saw that it was barely seven a.m. I needed some more sleep if my brain was going to process the details of the last few days. At least I had finally gotten a shower last night. Two days of being smelly was not something I was shooting for.
As I walked over to the coffee pot, I saw Cal out of the corner of my eye. After I poured, I turned to see him staring at me, trying to hold in laughter.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He snorted a laugh and held his belly as he tried not to burst into laughter.
“What is going on?” I said as I stomped my foot. When he didn’t answer, I stomped off to the bathroom and flipped on the light. Looking in the mirror, I let out a loud shriek. Booming laughter came from the other room as I turned on the water and scrubbed furiously at my face. Cal had drawn all over my face in what appeared to be marker. He made me look like the joker. My lips looked like they were extended to be wider. When scrubbing with soap and water didn’t work, I dug around and found a washcloth to scrub with.
“What’s going on? I heard screaming.”
Sebastian opened the door and took one look at me before he pulled his lips between his teeth. His nostrils flared as he held in his laughter and his chest shook. Finally, he just turned away and went into the other room. I resumed my scrubbing, finding myself unsuccessful. Throwing down the washcloth, I let out a growl before stomping back into the kitchen. At this rate, Cal would be lucky if I didn’t stomp a hole in the floor.
“I need an internet connection.”
“I’m sorry. Clients ar
en’t allowed access to the internet. It’s a security thing,” Sebastian said.
“If you don’t give me access right now, I will pull a Lorena Bobbitt on you!”
Both men took a step back as their faces paled and Sebastian motioned for me to take a seat at the computer. He quickly pulled up the internet and asked me to limit my searches, not entering anything that could identify myself.
I quickly looked up solutions for getting marker off of skin and then went in search of rubbing alcohol. Ten minutes later, I was successful in my search and marched back to the bathroom where I vigorously scrubbed my face raw. It took a long time and my face was stinging by the time I was done, but I was finally free of all the marker several hours later.
In that time, I missed a call from Becky at Reed Security where they had been discussing my case. I was just about to ask what she found out when she called back. Sebastian put her on speakerphone so we all could hear.
“What did you find out, Becky?”
“Well, I traced the five properties back to Mayor Johnson. They were all bought up years after they went out of business and he never did anything to develop the properties. I can’t see what he would have possibly used them for.”
“Okay, did you find anything on the account numbers?” Sebastian asked.
“What account numbers,” I interjected.
“I went through her whole computer and got all the account numbers that she had been tracing. I also went through the paperwork. She actually got a good head start on figuring out where the accounts broke the money up. The problem was that she didn’t have access to where the money was before that.”
“Excuse me? You went through my things? Who do you think you are? Who gave you permission to do that?”
“I did.”
I spun on my heel and glared at Sebastian, then I walked up to him and poked him in the chest. “What were you thinking? Those were confidential documents and you had no right to go through my stuff.”
“Technically, it’s on my property and since you weren’t exactly being the most forthcoming with the details and then you took off on your own, leaving us in the lurch, I decided to take matters into my own hands so that you didn’t get one of us killed.”
“Going through that stuff is not going to prevent someone from getting killed. It does, however, compromise my investigation to have so many fingers on it.”
“Don’t you think that if we could figure out who’s after you, we could close this case? If I don’t know, how am I supposed to fully protect you from potential threats? I don’t even know who to look for other than large men that feel perfectly comfortable walking around with semi-automatics and shooting at us on public land.”
His voice rose with every word he spoke. Feeling the fight go out of me, I looked at Cal for help. He shrugged and shook his head, as if to tell me that I didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of winning this one.
“Fine, what did you find?”
“We’re still working on tracing the money. It’s gonna take some time because of all the times the money seems to have been broken up. Whoever did this knew what they were doing.”
“Well, obviously it was the Mayor.”
“That may be true, but until we have evidence of that, you don’t have a leg to stand on.”
She was right and I hated that. Becky was obviously very smart and knew what she was doing. I should be grateful for her help, but there was still a part of me that was upset that I wasn’t getting to solve this on my own.
“What I need to do is get back in the Mayor’s office and search for more evidence.”
“You want to walk into the lion’s den after they’ve made several attempts on your life? Are you insane? Besides, after the last time you broke in, I highly doubt he’s keeping anything in there,” Sebastian said. He had a point and as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I was running out of things to do on this story.
“Okay, well we still have that text to retrieve from my phone. Maybe that will give us something to go off of.”
“We still have to wait another twelve hours before we can retrieve anything. Looks like you’re going to have to wait it out here for a while.”
I didn’t mind waiting with Cal. He seemed like a genuinely good man and he was easy to talk to, but I didn’t want to be stuck with Sebastian after last night. Even this morning, my attraction to him was just as strong as it was last night and I didn’t know if I could resist him just sitting around the house all day. And then if I made a move, I would have to hear more about how he couldn’t have sex with me because it would distract him. Personally, I thought a little distraction would go a long way to help loosen him up.
After hanging up the phone with Becky, Sebastian told Cal to go get some “shut eye” and that he would take over the watch. Seriously, these two acted like we were going to have people raining down on us at any minute. I watched with morbid curiosity as Sebastian took out his five weapons. Yes, five weapons, and laid them out on the table and started taking them apart. He cleaned them and then reassembled them with such precision, I could only guess that he had done this most of his life.
“So, how long were you in the Marines?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Well, you take apart all these weapons with such precision, I bet you could do it in your sleep. It just made me wonder about you.”
He stopped what he was doing and looked at me with his steely gaze as if he was assessing me. “Let’s be clear on one thing, anything that I or any of my employees tells you is strictly off the record. Are we clear?”
“Yes.”
“I was in the Marines for ten years.”
“Where were you stationed?”
“Mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“So, how did you become an officer? Doesn’t that take a lot of time?”
“I went to college and in my third year I attended OCS at Marine Corps Base Quantico.”
“What’s OCS?”
“Officer Candidates School.”
He spent the next hour telling me about his time at the Candidate School and then some about his time in the military. It was fascinating to hear first hand about someone’s experiences in the military. Most men didn’t want to talk about it because the things they saw and did were not easy to explain to people. I had yet to find one service member who wanted to tell me their experiences. Sebastian however, seemed to genuinely love his time in the Marines. He didn’t hold back when he talked about things that happened, though he didn’t always give me details. When he got to how he got injured though, his eyes grew distant as he told me about that day.
“We were out doing a security patrol that day. There was intel that of some of the villagers had joined the insurgents. So we went out to check the town for any unusual activity and make sure the town was secure from the rebels that wanted to come in and take over. A kid, maybe nine or ten, ran by me, screaming something in Pashto. I never learned the language, just a few words here and there, so I didn’t understand him. He stood in the doorway of the building we used to have meetings with the leaders in the area. We were trying to build a good relationship with the people and help them resist the insurgents. Anyway, he pulled off this wrap he had on and strapped to his chest was a bomb.”
Sebastian stared off into space for a minute as he relived that moment in his mind. The haunted expression on his face told me how much he wished he could have done more. “He looked so scared. I could tell this wasn’t something he wanted to do, but over there, some kids grow up thinking that if they blow us up, they’re honoring their cause.” He shook his head and continued quickly. “Anyway, I tried talking him down and I kept taking small steps towards him, thinking that I could break through to him. When I was close enough, boom.”
He used his hands to mimic an explosion. Then, he went back to checking over his weapons, even though he had already done it several times since we had been sitting here. I couldn’t help but think about how good o
f a story this would be. Not just the story of the explosion, but his whole experience. People in the United States would never understand what war was like until they could experience it themselves. A story like this would help people understand and maybe not be so judgmental when soldiers came home.
“Have you ever thought about telling your story?”
He stiffened and I knew I was treading on dangerous ground. “I just did.”
“No, I mean, like in a book or something.”
Cold eyes snapped to mine and the menacing look on his face told me not to proceed, but I wanted him to understand that it wasn’t just about sales or recognition for me. He had a story that people needed to hear and understand.
“Look, I’m not saying that you should do a tell all or anything, but don’t you understand what hearing that story would do for the American people? To understand what you went through? I just think-”
“Don’t think. I didn’t ask you to write a book on me. I told you that in confidence and it better stay that way. It’s one thing to tell you, it’s another to have you go out and share my secrets and thoughts with the world.”
“I would never-“
He stood suddenly and leaned over me, causing me to lean back as far as I could in my chair. I could feel his warm breath on my face as he breathed heavily. His menacing glare sent shivers down my spine and for the first time, I saw the lethal man that stood before me. He had been deceptive in exactly how scary he could be, but I fully understood now. Swallowing hard, I nodded. He didn’t need to say anything. I perfectly understood what he was not saying and I didn’t want to end up at the bottom of a river by the Mayor or by Sebastian.
Shoving away from the table, he walked outside, presumably to do another perimeter check. When the front door slammed, I finally took my first deep breath and realized that my hands were shaking. Yeah, I shouldn’t have pushed the man.
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