by Fiona Quinn
Jack nodded but didn’t say anything. Lynx didn’t usually need words to be spoken out loud. He wondered if she was picking up on this whole conversation swirling around in his head.
“Of course, with Hound news creating the falderal about the president and the CIA, we can’t let anyone else know her specific role. We’re going to come up with a story. Dummy down her participation.”
“Roger. We just got cleaned up and are headed to Brazil to the hospital. Suz and I need some stitches. Let me know when you have logistics on our exfil.”
“How’s the knee?”
“We’re not talking about the knee.”
35
Jack
20:20 Hours, Wed., Feb. 23rd
Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil
After the doctors over on the Brazilian side of the river had sewn up Suz’s neck and Jack’s head, and given the boys a thumbs up and lollipops, they were transported under heavy guard to their plane. The boys eyed the AKs resting across the operatives knees in their van and huddled up against Suz. Suz kissed them and petted their hair. She held them closely, pointed out other things to look at – a bird flying past a tree and cloud shapes.
Once they were sitting on the plane and strapped in tight, Suz and the boys fell asleep before the wheels left the ground. The sleep of the dead. Jack had seen it enough times to recognize it for the physical and mental restorative that a body in a long term trauma required to start the healing process. Once the body feels safe, it shuts down and tries to recuperate. They only woke up when Jack shook them gently and called their names, the exit door already open.
Iniquus had a limo in the hangar along with three Panther Force operatives. It was a quick and silent ride back to Headquarters. There, the scene had turned awkward as the boys gripped Suz’s skirt and hid behind her, not wanting to leave her side to go to their parents outstretched arms. The parents were embarrassed and therefore angry and accusatory. Jack got Suz out of there ASAP.
A car drove them to the garage under the Iniquus men’s barracks and the driver carried their packs. Jack was back on crutches. The doctor insisted. There was no infection – but plenty of damage. Suz was still silent and her face was a mask, slack and emotionless.
Jack unlocked his apartment door.
Suz walked in, her gaze sweeping the room. It was built for efficiency. A great room that had a galley kitchen and seating area big enough for him to have his team members in for consult. Then a short hallway with doors that lead to a small office and a bathroom on the right and a bedroom on the left. She went to the kitchen and opened the fridge. It held some beer and some BBQ sauce. There was an unpacked paper bag that Jack knew would have the fixing for a steak dinner, thanks to Lynx.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
Suz shook her head and walked over to the bookcase and scanned the titles. Her eye stopped on each of the framed photos of her. She was hugging her puppies. She was dangling a toe in the water at the lake. She was asleep with a smile on her face. . . a dozen or so photos that he thought caught a glimmer of Suz’s essence. Her brow drew into a scowl, or a thought, or …something. He couldn’t read Suz at all. This wasn’t the same Suz he had left when he went away on his mission. There was a dynamic shift. Of course there was.
Jack’s uneasiness grew.
She moved to the bedroom and stood at the end of the king-sized bed.
“Suz, you don’t have to stay here with me.” He had to stop and clear his throat. “I can arrange something else for you if you don’t want to be here.”
She turned and looked at him and nodded.
What did that mean?
She moved over to the side of the bed he slept on – the right, because Suz preferred to sleep on the left at the cottage in the woods. She picked up the picture of them. They had been dancing, in a moment of pure joy, they had both leaned their heads back to laugh and her friend Emma had snapped the shot. It was perfect. It reflected how he felt every time he came home and Suz was back in his arms.
She set it back down on the side table, and then sat on the mattress. “I killed a man, Jack,” she whispered.
So it was Suz. The thought had crossed his mind out there near the hide. But it had been too hard for him to believe. He felt the blood drain from his face.
She looked up at him. “It didn’t matter to me either. I didn’t care a single thing about him when I pulled the trigger. I wasn’t thinking about him as a person at all. I thought he’s wearing black. He’s come for the boys. If I hadn’t had the gun, I couldn’t have stopped that man.” She bent down and slid her sandals off her feet, spun around and put her back to the headboard, her knees were folded up, and she wrapped them with her arms.
Is she being protective or comfortable? What should I do to help her? Jack untied his boots and tugged them off then moved to sit facing her.
“If you hadn’t told me how to look and shoot, I couldn’t have stopped that man.” She squirmed down the bed until she was lying down and spun to her side, supporting herself on her elbow to look at him. “But at the time you were trying to teach me, I hated the gun you put in my hand. It made me vomit. It was the symbol of violence.”
“I remember.”
“Do you?” Her voice faded off as she plucked at his comforter, a light shade of teal blue, her favorite color, the color of her eyes on a sunny day. “Do you remember how you walked me through it with nothing in my hands? We practiced three times, then you handed me the gun. I lifted it up, and you wrapped your arm around me and said, “It’s not loaded. It’s just to get the feel.” I handed it back. Do you know why?”
Jack had laid down on the bed and mirrored her position, his head rested on his palm. He reached out and lifted one of her curls and rubbed it between his fingers.
“If I knew how to shoot it, and it came down to a bad situation, I’d be obligated to shoot it. Knowledge is power. I wanted to be innocent. And that’s exactly what happened. I knew how to shoot a gun and kill a man, and I did it.” She flipped onto her back and crossed her arms over her chest squeezing herself like she was cold.
Jack reached for the throw at the end of the bed and spread it over her.
Suz didn’t seem to notice, she was staring at the ceiling. “After I shot him, I didn’t go check if I could help him, instead I went to help the boys. Later, as I sat on the rock, looking out over the forest, not knowing what to do next, I realized it wasn’t my greatest fear that I would hurt or kill someone. It was my greatest fear that I would fail someone in their moment of need. If I didn’t have knowledge, then I couldn’t really be held responsible, now could I? I had an excuse for failure.” She swiped at a tear. “I have to get used to the new me. I am such a hypocrite.” She covered her face with her hands.
“What?” Jack followed her reasoning all the way up to that last sentence.
She turned back over onto her elbow. “You. . . you know? You are such an incredible person. I loved every single thing about you, except that you went away from me and put yourself in danger, and I could do nothing to help you.”
Jack caught the past tense of the word. She hadn’t said love. She said loved. Emphasis on the -ed.
“I was frantic every time you left me, and I think that’s why I panicked about keeping my students safe after Sandy Hook. I was afraid that I wasn’t as brave as those teachers who tried to save their kids. It would be my students’ moment of greatest need, and I’d fail them. I was obsessed with it. I thought about it every single day. When I was out by the rock, bleeding, the boys by my side… I had just killed a man. And I couldn’t have cared less about his life, about his family – his wife, his children. That astonished me. I thought that that would be the reason I couldn’t save the kids. I’d be caught up on the fact that there was someone at home worrying for the bad guy the way I always worry about you. I would be hurting someone like me by hurting the person they loved. That thought loop probably makes no sense to you. You’d have to chew on those thoughts for a while like I did to
make them make any kind of sense. But it doesn’t matter anymore.” She sighed and swiped away a tear. “I protected Ari and Caleb, and that was what mattered to me.”
Jack tried to pick through the strands of information. They didn’t line up neatly. He needed to wait, though, before he asked questions. Sometimes Suz needed a second for the next idea to pop up – the one that she really wanted to get across to him. He wanted to know where she was headed with this.
“But I had this other thought while I sat there on the rock. I thought that I failed you our whole relationship.”
“No,” Jack shook his head emphatically.
“I have Jack. You know, moments of urgency and crisis, they aren’t part of my everyday life. They’re part of your everyday life. People in this world need people like you. Not everyone can do what you do. There are, in fact, very few who have your combination of mental and physical attributes and moral conviction. So few. Too few. You have to do what you do. I had no idea how important it was until I felt it myself. Oh dear God, it was, whew. . . and add the responsibility of children in…” she shook her head, making her curls jiggle.
“Sweetheart, please.” He laced his fingers through hers.
She curled her lips in and shook her head again. “Hypocrisy. My dad would be so disappointed in me. I wanted to keep you to myself so I could feel safe and happy. But when I was in danger, and I thought you were in the hospital, I wanted someone like you to rush in and save the day. I wanted a hero to pull us out of our mess even though I knew someone else, someone like me, would be wishing their guy was home mowing the lawn or something. Don’t you see?”
Suz was revved up. That he could see. Her words were all over the place the way she got when her thoughts and emotions collided, when she was overwhelmed with what she needed to say, especially when she knew that what she was going to say would hurt someone. Jack felt his heart squeeze. Was she going to tell him that they couldn’t be together anymore? Was this her breaking up with him?
“I told myself my greatest fear was that I would fail someone in their moment of need. And yet I failed you. For four years, I failed you.”
“What? No. I—”
“It’s true, Jack. When you were home, I should have relished you. I should have brought you peace instead of all the crap I gave you about your job.”
“Suz, you have to stop talking in the past tense. Please.” His muscles bunched like he was taking blows.
“I’m not going to live like that anymore. Forgive me. I’m so so sorry.”
Tears distorted his vision. His breath caught in his lungs.
Suz lifted herself up, and Jack tightened his fingers in hers. He couldn’t let her go.
She turned and swung a leg over his hips, and he rolled onto his back so she was straddling him. She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the lips, anguish in her eyes.
Jack didn’t kiss her back; his lips had pulled tight as he clamped his jaw down.
“I love you, Jack,” she whispered. Tears ran freely down her face. “Tell me you’ll forgive me someday.”
Forgive her. He’d forgive her, but his heart was breaking into bits. He felt it coming apart in chunks in his chest. The shards stabbed him. It was so painful it took his breath away.
“Tell me you’ll forgive me for all of my anger; for not being there for you; for not supporting you. Tell me you’ll let me make it up to you. Please?” She was gripping both of his hands and holding them over her heart, staring down into his eyes. “Give me a chance to show you that I can support you the way you support me. I can be a better person than I’ve been. Please don’t stop loving me.”
Jack sat up and wrapped his arms tightly around her. He tucked his head into her shoulder and sobbed. For the second time in his life since he was three years old, and his mother picked him up off the ground after a fall and said, “Boys don’t cry,” he sobbed. Once because he thought he had lost Suz and now because he had found her again.
He cupped her face in his hands. “Gillian Suzanne, you scared the life right out of me.”
She wrinkled her brow, confused.
Jack kissed the tip of her nose, her eyelids, her lips. He laid her down and found his place of serenity nestled between her thighs. He kissed down her neck, his thumb lightly petting the bandage of a wound that very easily could have ended things so much differently, he groaned at the thought, laying his forehead against hers.
He moved backward and pushed his weight into his elbows as his fingers fumbled to undo the delicate buttons of her dress. He celebrated each success with a kiss. She moaned as he reached her belly. Arching into his hands as his tongue traced along the top of her panties. His hands skated down her hip and under her leg as he pulled her tightly to him, grinding his hips so she’d make that little mewling gasp and sigh. It was the sound of everything good in this life. The sweetest sound he knew.
“Jack,” Suz whispered.
Alright, the second sweetest. His name on her lips definitely came first. He slid back on the bed to rest his head on her stomach, stroking a hand along her beautiful legs, kissing along the inside of her thigh, to make her giggle and swat at him.
“Stop you’re tickling!” She kicked to get away from him.
He held her ankle tight and reached up for her panties, sliding them free.
Jack had had a lot of firsts over the last week and this time he made love to Suz felt like a first, too. They had a wonderful sex life, for sure. But this was different. This was a baring of souls instead of just bodies. And when they were done, they had collapsed in a tangle of utter exhaustion.
Suz had obviously done some soul searching while she was captive. Jack tucked a lock of auburn hair back over her shoulder and kissed the delicate bone under her neck. He’d made his own discoveries. How vulnerable he felt when she was in danger. That was one hell of an eye-opening experience. How he had felt terror instead of fear. You can walk through fear. There isn’t much you can do about moving through terror. He had walked in her shoes and was humbled by her strength. They’d have to come up with a way to deal with that. He wouldn’t ask her to live her life that way. But he felt absolutely certain that together they could figure it out.
Suz was still asleep when Jack climbed from the bed and brought back the engagement ring. He sat with his back against the headboard, looking at it. It was his grandmother’s stone in a Suz setting. His grandmother had raised him after alcohol took over his mother’s life. Grandma was his idea of what a woman should be — smart, caring, strong and gentle at the same time. He thought Suz embraced some of the best of his grandma’s qualities and added some that were distinctly Suz. The whole oatmeal chocolate chip cookie-ness of Suz – warm, sweet, and healthy but never obnoxiously so. That image brought a lopsided smile to his face.
Suz opened an eye. “What are you doing?”
Jack palmed the ring. “Thinking about how wonderful you are and how much I love you.”
“Funny, that’s pretty much all that’s been on my mind for the last week or so – how wonderful you are.” She leaned over and kissed his hip. The only thing in kissing range. She pulled herself up to sit facing him. “How much I love you. How much I am in love with you.”
She was watching him closely and tilted her head. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then focused on her with earnestness as he held up the ring. “Gillian Suzanne will you promise to say those very words to me for the rest of our lives?”
“Oh,” she sighed. “I absolutely will.”
She held out her left hand this time, and he slipped the ring into place. She slid into his lap, lay her head on his shoulder. “This is where I’ve always belonged.”
This is not
THE END
Please follow Jack McCullen and the Iniquus family
as they continue their fight for the greater good.
Would you like a sneak peek at the next book in the Iniquus chronology?
Relic:
RELIC:
Digging
for the truth can be deadly.
Brian Ackerman, AKA Brainiack, was once a member of the Marine’s elite anti-terrorist security team. Now, he works for Iniquus, a para-military group contracted by Washington’s intelligence and security alphabets. His work is fueled by danger and adrenaline. And he loves every minute of it. At least he did up until this minute.
When two women walk into their briefing room, Brian’s heart stops. That’s Sophia, the beautiful woman who spun his world and stole his heart when they met one incredible night in New York City. He’s been looking for her ever since, putting all his high-tech capabilities to work. He’d come up with nada. Yet here she is, strolling into the FBI’s trap.
Sophia and her partner Nadia are archaeologists, fighting to safeguard Syrian relics from being stolen and sold into private collections by ISIS. Their colleagues are being kidnapped and killed. The women’s lives are in danger, kicking Brian’s fierce protective instincts into high gear. It’s his job to keep them safe.
But the FBI doesn’t believe all is as it seems. The Bureau thinks one of these women is committing treason, helping to sell the conflict relics, funding terror, and putting America and her allies at risk.
Iniquus’s newest case will test Brian’s conviction, honor, and courage. Brian loves Sophia deeply, but which will win the war, his heart or his sense of duty?
RELIC
Chapter One
Sophia
Monday
A sliver of consciousness reminded Sophia that this was a nightmare. She was asleep in her bed in the suburbs of Washington DC, waiting for her alarm to release her from the despair of her dream. That dim glow of awareness whispered to her that it was a sweat drenched sheet wrapping her legs and not an astronaut’s uniform. Her bunched muscles cramped from tension, not oxygen deprivation. And that ringing sound was her house phone, not the satellite she chased in her battle to save herself and her two young sons.