“No,” Georgia said. “And when Wallace drank, things got worse. A lot worse.” His brow furrowed as she stared at him. “You know something weird? I never remember him hitting Cheryl. He’d grab her by the arm. Throw things—probably why it was always paper plates and Solo cups. But never, not once, did I see him hit her.”
Abuse was sneaky like that, though. Could make someone believe it was tolerable, could make someone grateful it wasn’t worse. Until the day the switch flipped and all hell broke loose.
“I still don’t really know what changed. The dialogue that night was the same. ‘You’re a cheating bitch. You’re a drunk asshole.’” She sighed and shivered. “It just started earlier that night. They were already going at it when I got home from school. I’d wanted to just take my dinner to my room, but it was one of Cheryl’s rules.” She rolled her eyes. “Family dinner at the table. No exceptions.” She walked back to him, plopping down in the spot she’d vacated. “I still can’t eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
“Nutella is clearly the only way to go.” He bumped her with his shoulder, loosening a grin as he did.
“Clearly,” she said, amusement releasing some of the tension in her expression. “It’s weird. Those forty-eight hours seem so fluid now. I’m sure they must have felt eternal when it was happening, but I don’t remember them that way.”
“Compartmentalization.”
“Probably.” She picked a piece of lint off her coat. “But some things are crystal clear, just waiting for something to remind me. I keep my nails short because I tore them to shreds trying to pry open the door. I hate New York in the summer because the humid, fetid stink reminds me of that hot Florida summer. I don’t go to concerts or sporting events because I screamed myself raw hoping someone would hear me.” She pulled her arms around her, shivering hard. “No one ever did.”
He couldn’t help it; he slung an arm around her and pulled her into him, dropping a kiss to the top of her head. Jesus.
“And after?”
“After, I just sort of . . . checked out. Let things float by me. I didn’t say a word, not for three months. Every counselor, social worker, and doctor said the same thing. ‘It’s the trauma, the stress, the loss on top of loss.’ Blah blah blah.”
“You don’t think so?” It would have been understandable. A long op, too much time in the office, a bad outcome—all had the power to send Parker running for his loft, locking down his security system and pretending the rest of the world didn’t exist.
“Hell no.” Georgia scoffed. “I was pissed.”
Her mouth curled, pride and stubborn satisfaction transforming her into the woman he knew.
“I made up my mind that I was done until I saw Will. It took time, but once they put us together, things changed. Said we had to be placed together for my health and well-being.” She shook her head. “Morons.”
Parker chuckled. “Things get better after that?”
“Yes and no.”
Georgia leaned into him, letting Parker scoot her farther into his side and share his warmth.
“Foster care is a little like fighting a war on all fronts. You don’t fit in at school. You’re always fighting for resources. Food. Clothing. Whatever. There’s never enough. But at least Will and I dealt with it together. Looked out for each other. I helped him with English. He taught me how to throw a punch.” She shifted toward him. “You have to understand, most placements aren’t violent or abusive. They’re just . . .” She shook her head and sighed. “They’re just not interested. Each kid is a check in the bank, a pair of hands to help around the house. Usually? Usually you’re just flat-out ignored. Without Will, it was like I was invisible. Like I didn’t exist anymore.”
Her hand went to her wrist, fingers looking for a watch she’d sold to protect them. To provide for them. As Parker now suspected just what it meant to her, he couldn’t suppress a flinch every time she repeated the gesture. He hurt for her.
“But yeah, while we were together, things were good. Or close enough.”
“While?”
“Will aged out of the system four years before I did. Our placement at the time threw him out the moment he turned eighteen. No more government stipends. So Will crashed with friends, graduated high school—thankfully he had a May birthday—and then he enlisted.”
“And left you behind.” He couldn’t help the resentment in his voice or prevent the sudden intense dislike for a man he’d never met. It was clear Georgia had worshipped her brother. How could he just leave her? Especially knowing what it would be like. A thought struck, the answer to the question he hadn’t dared ask so damn obvious.
“And that’s why you came back,” he said, voicing his realization. “At the stadium, I mean. You looked over your shoulder, saw me standing there, and you couldn’t go through with it. Couldn’t leave me behind.”
Georgia swallowed. “You looked . . .”
Sad. Scared. Devastated. He’d tried to stand there, convince himself he was better off with Ethan, that Georgia was doing the right thing. But then, he’d never been particularly good at the whole poker-face thing.
“Well, let’s just say I recognized the look. I didn’t want to be responsible for making you feel that way. For making you feel like I’d given up on you, or that it was easy to go, or whatever.” She flicked her fingers, dismissing her decision as if it’d been easy. As if it hadn’t cost her anything. As if it might not cost her everything.
“You didn’t want to hurt me the way your brother hurt you,” he said, anger lacing his tone.
“Don’t say it like that. It’s not like we had a lot of options. He deserved a life. A shot at something for himself. And anyway, we thought I’d be fine.”
“Thought?”
“I did all right for about a year. We checked in regularly, stayed close. But then he was deployed, and I was bounced into a group home. If I’d thought other foster homes made me feel invisible, they had nothing on the group home. Between Will being so far away and the come-and-go nature of the home . . . depression came fast. My grades slipped. I lost the few friends I’d made. I felt invisible, so it was easy to act that way.”
He couldn’t imagine it. For him, everything about Georgia stood out. She radiated energy, drew him in. No question, he was attracted to her, but it wasn’t all physical. If it were, he’d have lost interest the moment they’d hooked up. But with Georgia, every hour he spent with her was one more hour that seemed to exist solely to prove to him how badly he wanted to spend the next hour with her, too.
“Anyway, when I withdrew from him, started dodging calls and stopped answering e-mails, he petitioned for emergency leave and came home.” She reached for her wrist, but this time when her fingers encountered bare skin, she left them there. “He’d been hand-selected for spec ops—one of the youngest ever. But he walked away from it to come home and raise me.”
The way she said it, all incredulous, shocked awe, tore at Parker. To him, Will simply did the right thing. Loyalty. Family. Words Parker hadn’t understood in his youth were sacrosanct now. All because of Ethan.
Ethan, who could be dead or alive. In a hospital or in the ground. With a medical team or with someone much, much worse. He shook away the thoughts.
“The army let him go?”
Georgia nodded. “Only this time, luck seemed to run our way. They worked with us, got Will assigned stateside. And again, things got better. I graduated early, joined up, too. And Will got his career back on track . . .” Her voice dipped, trailing off again. “I almost wish he hadn’t. Maybe if he hadn’t followed through, hadn’t made it to Delta, he’d still be here.”
“How did he die?”
“I don’t know,” Georgia ground out, anguish creasing her forehead. “Ethan won’t tell me, but I’m sure he knows what happened.” She surged to her feet again. “I get it, you know? I get that Ethan shouldn’t tell me. That technically he can’t. Will and I both knew the risks and rules of special ops. But not knowing . . .
it just feels like, like . . .”
“Like you’re quitting on him. Like if you don’t know what it was all for, that it doesn’t count. That he doesn’t count. That he’s invisible again.”
“Yes,” she whispered on a broken sob, jerking her head up and down. “Yes. I’ve asked everyone. Gone through every process, every petition. But no one gets why I have to know. Why I can’t just let it go.”
“You haven’t asked me,” Parker said, leaning in until he could bump his head against hers.
She jerked back, shocked surprise adding a nice flush of color to cheeks that had been too pale. “What?”
Parker smiled gently. “Rebel government hacker, remember?” He used his thumb to brush away a strand of hair clinging to her cheek. “It really never occurred to you to ask, did it?”
She shrugged, her eyes watery but her face clear. “Guess after all that ‘I can ruin your credit, repossess your car, and declare you dead’ stuff, it should have.”
“Um, yeah.” The next words were harder, scarier to say. He needed Georgia on his side; he didn’t want her to look at him differently. But she’d saved his life and trusted him with some of the most intimate details of hers. He could do no less. “But in this case, I don’t need to hack any files.”
“What?” Georgia’s head snapped up so fast she nearly clipped his chin.
“I thought you already knew,” Parker said, swallowing down his hesitation. “Will and Ethan served together, were friends. Did it really never occur to you that we approached him about working with the CWU?”
Georgia’s mouth dropped open in surprise. “I didn’t know anything about the CWU until I met you. I mean, I knew that Ethan was still involved in special ops and that he had the sort of clearance that could get me the answers I wanted, but . . .”
“But nothing else.”
“No,” she said, her breath puffing out of her in a tiny cloud. “But if Will was working for the CWU when he died . . .” She paused, her face falling as the reality of what Parker was really telling her descended. He braced himself for the accusation, for the tears and the blame. If Will was working for the CWU when he died, then you had a hand in it. Your program chose him. Sent him. Killed him. She wouldn’t be wrong, Parker knew. The very idea that he couldn’t save everyone, that he had a firm hand in sending men into dangerous situations, had kept him up more than a few nights. But to have the devastated proof of his decisions, his failures, sitting next to him? It gutted him. So he braced for her scorn and told himself it was no more than he’d deserve.
Instead, Georgia simply said, “Then there’s a file, right? Even if it’s a negative outcome? You . . . you would have made sure that it—that he—mattered in the end. Even if it just improved your program for someone else?”
“Yeah.” Parker nodded. “There’s a file. I pulled it off the server about a week ago. That was the info grab that landed me with you, actually,” Parker said, scratching the back of his neck.
“Oh.” Georgia grew quiet for a moment, as if processing everything he’d just told her. “So then you didn’t send Will . . .”
Parker shook his head, resolving to be completely honest. Even if it changed things between them. “Not exactly. I didn’t know that the operation was a go. I thought it had been scrapped.”
“Can you tell me about it?” she asked quietly.
“How much do you want to know?”
She looked at him for a long time, her gaze steady, her face devoid of emotion. He wondered if she’d ever thought this far ahead. If she’d ever really expected to find her answers.
“Everything you remember, everything you can tell me.”
Georgia fought off a shiver, though she’d grown numb to the cold. She’d waited for this moment, hoped for it, begged for it . . . and to some extent never believed it would ever actually happen. Now, faced with the answers she’d wanted for so long, she felt only a sad sense of duty to listen, to know.
She only hoped it would be enough to finally, finally let her move forward. To put Will to rest and remember her brother for the remarkable man he was—and allow herself to live as the woman he would have wanted her to be.
“At any given time, the CWU is tracking and assessing dozens of evolving situations around the world.” Parker shifted on the warped steps leading up to the trailer, dragging the toe of his Chuck Taylor across the boards. “Even with the benefit of the program, with the edge the assessments give us, we don’t have the manpower, the physical resources to be everywhere, to do everything.”
“So you had to prioritize,” Georgia offered, hoping even a little input from her would make this feel more like a conversation and less like a confession.
“Yeah. A very small percentage of situations we evaluated was given the green light for operational involvement.” Parker laced his fingers together, cracked his knuckles. “It was . . . frustrating. To have all this information, to know people were suffering, dying, and that we had the ability to make a difference—we passed on so many operations due to funding, or lack of resources in the region, or just because we didn’t have anything to gain from becoming involved.” Parker shoved a hand through his hair on a rough sigh. “Doing the right thing never mattered, not really.” He glanced up at her, helplessness written across his face. “It kills me, knowing everything we could do and just how often we didn’t because there just wasn’t anything in it for us.”
Georgia nodded. She’d never really stopped to consider the personal cost for the people who made or influenced decisions. Some, she knew, were good at compartmentalizing, at seeing the bigger picture. But for someone like Parker, who so obviously wore his heart on his sleeve, the burden would be so much heavier. He’d remember every person he couldn’t help—and every person who died in connection with one of his operations. Somehow it made listening to everything he’d said, everything she knew he still had to say, easier.
“Nearly a year ago, I began work on gathering intelligence so we could run an assessment. South American cartels are nothing new, but there was one growing rapidly in several countries. The Vega cartel has fingers in every illegal pie you can think of—weapons, drugs, money laundering—you name it; they’ve done it. But it was their rapid expansion into human trafficking that brought them to our attention.” Parker scrubbed his hands over his face. “In particular they’d become scarily adept at abducting and ransoming foreign executives. The kidnappings were . . . violent. More than a few went bad when governments or corporations didn’t pay up.” Parker shook his head. “It took months—but I was finally able to put together a solid profile and locate what we thought was the cartel’s primary compound.
“But the logistics were a nightmare,” he said, tipping his head back to stare at the cloudless night sky. “Hundreds of miles from any major city, an assault would have been . . . impractical.”
“Why not use a drone? Wipe the compound off the map entirely?”
“We considered it, but our intel suggested the cartel was holding five or six high-value assets on location. Two were children of foreign dignitaries.” Parker shook his head. “Blowing the compound off the map wasn’t an option. Which left us two options. Wait for a better opportunity or send in a ground team.”
“You sent in a ground team.”
Parker looked at her, guilt tightening his face until all trace of the boyish charm he wore so easily disappeared. “I advocated for it,” he admitted. “The kidnappings were escalating, growing a lot more violent. But there was also the human-trafficking side to consider. So many people, so many kids. Sold without a second thought.”
When he grew quiet, Georgia laid a hand on his forearm.
“Anyway, I advocated for a ground assault.” He looked up at her, his expression apologetic. “I thought the risks were worth it.”
“But . . . ?” she asked.
“But no one agreed. Truth is, there just wasn’t anything in it for us—humanitarian concerns just aren’t enough to convince the US government to get i
nvolved.”
“So what changed?” Georgia asked. Because something had. Otherwise Will would still be here.
“I honestly don’t know,” he admitted with a shrug. “The file only detailed what happened; there wasn’t anything in there to indicate why.”
A few days ago, it wouldn’t have bothered her. She’d spent ten years of her life taking orders, learning not to question, not to wonder. Compartmentalization. She used to be good at it. But now, knowing Will might have died so someone else could line his pockets? That was something she wouldn’t overlook.
Parker took the hand she’d placed on his forearm, linked their fingers together. Instinct to withdraw warred with the desire to stay. Comfort, sympathy, care. In so many ways those were so much more intimate, so much more dangerous than sex.
“Will was part of a twelve-man team that went in to extract the hostages and raze the compound.” Parker sighed, his words tumbling from him in a rush. “But from what I read, the compound was heavily guarded. Far more men on-site than the original assessment had indicated.” His shoulders slumped, guilt and questions and frustration writing lines across his forehead. “I don’t know if that’s something I missed or if things had just changed that much in the intervening months.”
“I need to know . . .” She’d never really understood why she had to know how her brother had died. Dead was dead, right? But the void in the last days of his life bothered her; the lack of information made it feel as if Will had just been wiped clean off the board, almost as if he’d never existed in the first place.
“Will was part of the team involved in setting the explosives,” Parker said slowly. “He and his partner took heavy fire—his partner was shot twice, and Will got pinned down defending him. From what I read, Will’s options were stay and be killed or leave his wounded friend behind.”
Defenseless (Somerton Security #1) Page 17