SEAL's Honor

by Megan Crane

  But then she heard footsteps behind them and the sounds of men’s voices, urgent and loud. She ran faster.

  Blue kicked his way through a gate at the side of the house, then hauled her through it.

  And then they were running flat out into the backyard. Everly noticed the perfectly cut grass on a lawn that meandered around a sparkling blue pool. There were several different terraces set here and there, all with stunning views of Lake Michigan as it lapped there at the bottom of the bluff.

  That was where Blue headed. Everly had never been much of a runner, but it was amazing what thugs and a firebomb could do. She could never keep up with Blue, but she ran as fast as she could.

  She would worry about breathing later—assuming there was a later. And it involved breathing.

  “Get down to the beach, then get the hell away from here,” Blue growled at her as they ran, but Everly could hear the voices behind them and, worse, the feet pounding into the ground.

  There was a loud crack and a whistling sound, and she couldn’t tell which was which. But something thudded into the grass near her feet, and Blue swore.

  He hooked an arm around her, picked her up, and tossed her farther down the lawn.

  The next crack she heard in midair, but she recognized it.

  It was a gunshot. They were being shot at—

  But then she landed.

  Everly hit the ground hard enough to grunt, then skidded on the grass. She scrambled around, trying to figure out where Blue had gone, gasping for breath, because he could have been hit—

  But if he was hit, he didn’t show it.

  He was running. So swift and deadly that it made her feel dizzy. It showed her how much she’d slowed him down.

  And he was running toward their attackers.

  Everly recognized the faces of the two men who charged him. She’d drawn them, ages ago, after that night in the apartment when they’d killed Rebecca.

  They’d killed her. She’d been right all along.

  Something in her shifted, hard, as if she’d been storing up her grief, holding it like a stone until she knew for sure—

  But this wasn’t the time.

  In the next second, Blue was in the air, launching himself at the bigger of the two men and taking him down with a thud so loud Everly could hear it from halfway down the lawn. The bigger man stayed down, but Blue rolled back up to his feet to face the other man.

  Who lunged at him.

  And for a few moments, the two men grappled, moving closer and closer to the edge of the pool.

  Blue kicked the man away from him, sending him sprawling.

  Everly pushed herself up to her feet again.

  The bigger man did the same, but he came up with a gun.

  Everly started to run, aware that the terrible noise she heard was her own voice, raw and scared and screaming, but none of that mattered.

  She saw the man jerk his arm. She heard the gunshot a split second later.

  And she could do nothing but watch as Blue toppled toward the pool, crashed through the glassy surface, then sank like a stone.

  Twenty

  There was a roaring in her head. As if her throat had done all the screaming it could and had turned it inward instead.

  Everly clawed the air, trying to get to that pool. Trying to get to Blue. Her vision blurred, and when she was suddenly stopped, with a hard band around her midsection, she barely registered it.

  There was still too much damned noise in her head.

  And only a bit of sloshing at the sides of the pool. Just the faintest hint of any disturbance on the top of the water, and less as each second dragged by.

  She kept thinking he would surface, but he didn’t. She counted off the seconds in her head.

  One, one thousand.

  Two, one thousand.

  Three, one thousand.

  But the pool was still and her head was a seesaw, reeling and lurching, and that noise was too much to bear and she—

  Everly felt the crack against her cheek, then a deep stinging. Her head whipped to the side, and there was the bloom of copper against her tongue.

  It was only when she managed to turn her head back, dazed, that she realized the smaller of the two men was standing in front of her. That he’d grabbed her at some point, though she couldn’t seem to recall when.

  And, more important, that he’d slapped her across the face.

  “Keep screaming,” the man invited her without any particular inflection, which made her shiver against her will. “I’ll hit you in the face until you pass out.”

  She believed him. And nothing good could possibly come of being unconscious around these people. It was begging for the kind of trouble her mind shied away from fully visualizing.

  He grabbed her under one arm and hauled her up from the ground, then began to drag her back toward the house. It was instantly clear to her that he didn’t care if he hurt her, and for a moment, she didn’t care if he did, either.

  The pool stayed still.

  And Everly remembered a summer day a long, long time ago, back on the street where she and Blue had grown up. She’d been out playing with the neighborhood kids, but the game had gotten rough. She’d fallen, hard, and had scraped both her knees, her palms, and even her chin.

  She remembered the bright streak of the pain. Her face, gritty where it pressed against the concrete sidewalk. The droplets of blood—her blood. It was the first time she could remember seeing it.

  And then he’d been there. Blue. Her hero.

  He’d run off the other children. He’d squatted down and helped her to her feet, eyeing her as she wobbled there before him, with that steady gaze he’d had even back when he’d been a kid himself.

  You’re okay, he’d told her.

  Not as if he was trying to make her feel better. As if he knew. As if there was no doubt that she was perfectly okay, no matter if she was hurt from her fall. She’d wanted to believe him, but she hadn’t been able to keep her lower lip from shaking.

  You’re tough, he’d said. Believe it.

  He’d waited there, watching her in that same sure, steady way, until she’d stopped crying.

  And then he’d walked her home.

  The thug was still dragging her, but Everly managed to get her feet beneath her so she could walk. She couldn’t do anything about the grip he had on her, or the bruises she knew he was leaving on her skin. She couldn’t do anything about Blue. She couldn’t change what had happened. She couldn’t do anything—

  But she could try to live a little longer.

  She could try to make it out of here.

  She could try.

  Believe it, a voice said inside her, the way Blue had long ago. You’re tough.

  And that was better than lying down and letting these people kill her the way they’d killed the first and last true hero she’d ever known.

  The man dragged her up the stairs and into the house, and even though she wanted to so badly she could taste it, Everly didn’t look back. There would be blood, maybe. Or floating. Or—

  She couldn’t go there. She couldn’t bear it.

  This was the end of the road. She understood that with every cell of her body. The stalking, the break-ins, the bomb—that had all been a sick appetizer for this, the main dish.

  But Everly was the same woman who had jumped in a car and driven all the way to Alaska to find a boy she’d once known who was supposed to have turned into a warrior. She could stand tall. If she wasn’t going to live to see the sun go down, she could do the next best thing.

  She could go out the way he would have if he’d had a choice.

  Because she’d just discovered that on the other side of terror, when there was no time for grief, there was something else. It was tough and it was hard. It felt impervious to anything and everythi
ng—the aches and pains in her body, the anguish sitting heavy on her chest, every step she took with this gorilla wrenching her arm.

  She couldn’t quite feel it. And that was just numb enough.

  Everly had a confused sense of big rooms as she was marched through the house, lined in marble with dramatic chandeliers. There were portraits on almost every wall, every single one of them featuring Annabeth in a different pose. At any other time, it might have creeped her out, but she had other things to worry about, like her swiftly approaching death.

  She concentrated on the stone inside her, granite and dark and blessedly numbing. She didn’t try to move it.

  She tried to become it.

  The man at her side dragged her into a room on the ground floor. It boasted lovely French doors that opened to a terrace set high above the backyard, but before she could try to see if she could spot Blue in that pool, he shoved her forward.

  So hard and abrupt that she tripped over her own feet and landed on her knees.

  She caught herself on her hands, thinking it was too much like that memory. Her palms stung. Her knees felt stiff through her jeans, like they were roughed up, too.

  “The boyfriend’s dead,” the man was saying.

  “About time.”

  Everly looked up. Annabeth was lounging on an ornate chair, a pot of pungent tea at her elbow and a small plate with a selection of berries fanned out across it. She was eating the berries with a sharp cocktail fork, one by one.

  Blue was in that pool, and this psycho was eating berries.

  The unfairness nearly tipped Everly over.

  But if he was gone, if he was really and truly gone, Everly couldn’t break down now.

  He wouldn’t want that.

  Blue had taught her how to fight, and that’s what she would do.

  Using whatever weapons she could.

  For as long as she could.

  “You can stay right there,” Annabeth said, her cold blue gaze on Everly. The goon who’d manhandled Everly in from the backyard went to stand beside Annabeth’s chair, facing Everly with the sort of blank stare that made her knees feel wobbly.

  So it was a good thing she wasn’t standing up.

  Everly shifted her weight so she could sit back on her heels and look her death in the face.

  “Why?”

  “Why can you stay where you are?” Annabeth pursed her full lips, then popped another berry between them with that sharp little fork. “Because you’re vermin. And I don’t like vermin on my furniture. Everything in this house is perfect. And mine.”

  She sounded completely at her ease. Almost bored, in fact, which made it even scarier that there was a thick-necked man standing beside her, still holding on to his gun.

  “You killed your own daughter, didn’t you?” Everly asked, and was distantly amazed that she kept her voice so calm. But then, she was nothing but stone inside. It helped. “Why would you do that?”

  Annabeth blinked. “Are you trying to make this about you? Don’t bother. All you are to me is more collateral damage.”

  “I don’t get it,” Everly said, because she had nothing to fight with here but this. Time. If she could keep Annabeth talking, maybe something else would come to her. “Is it because she was younger? Prettier? What?”

  She didn’t know which of those hit the mark, but something did. Annabeth dropped her cocktail fork against her plate with a loud clink.

  “Rebecca didn’t know her place. You don’t seem to know yours, either. I despair of your generation.”

  “Millennials,” Everly commiserated. “We’re the worst.”

  Annabeth tilted her head slightly to one side, as if Everly didn’t make sense. And as if she was as curious as she might be about a fly that had gotten into the house in the moments before she squashed it.

  “I want to know why,” Everly said before any squashing could take place. “Don’t you think you owe me that?”

  “I don’t owe you anything, you egregious little bitch,” Annabeth said, conversationally and sounding something like merry. And then she smiled. “You were supposed to be working late that night. Didn’t you have some presentation or something? You certainly shouldn’t have been running through the streets of Chicago, telling stories to nosy policemen.” She giggled at that, as if she’d told a joke. Everly supposed it would have been a chilling sound, but she was already chilled straight through. And that was without allowing herself to think too much about the fact that this awful woman knew her schedule. Her whole life. “Rebecca knew better. That’s the beginning and the end of it. I raised her here, not that she appreciated it. I sent her to the finest schools. She knew better than to ask for more than what she was given. But she went ahead and did it anyway.”

  Everly was kneeling there on the cold floor. Annabeth’s henchman was standing beside her, his arms crossed but his gun still visible in his hand, as if he were just waiting for the order to shoot. She looked past them, through the French doors someone had pulled wide, out toward the yard.

  And the pool she refused to let herself think about too closely.

  She could see the summer sky. She could see the branches of the trees, full of green, dancing in the breeze. She could see Lake Michigan, stretching out toward forever.

  It was so hard to accept that this was the last time she would see any of those things. Or anything at all.

  “Does that answer your question?” Annabeth asked. “Because I have a Pilates instructor coming in an hour. I need to move this along.”

  Everly reached up to feel her swollen cheek where the gorilla had hit her. Her skin was hot and puffy, like a blush gone wrong. But the burst of pain when she touched it was good. It reminded her not to surrender too easily.

  No matter how tired of all this she was, she didn’t want to make it easy.

  “I wouldn’t want to interrupt your schedule,” she heard herself say. “I don’t know why you brought me in here in the first place.”

  Annabeth’s carefully plucked eyebrow rose, or looked as if it might have moved in an upward direction if it hadn’t been frozen into that smoothness.

  “You said you knew everything. I want to know what that means.” She reached over for her teacup and cradled it in her soft hands, her silver-tipped fingernails glinting in the light. “What do you think you know?”

  Everly looked away from that empty, evil stare, trying to wrestle together something she could throw out there in place of any actual knowledge. Anything to buy a few more minutes.

  Out on the terrace, a man eased into view. One moment she was staring at the tops of potted plants and the sky beyond, and the next, he was there.

  Everly assumed she was hallucinating. Seeing exactly what she wanted to see to distract her from the grim reality unfolding in front of her. She blinked. Once, then again.

  But he was still there. Sopping wet, no sunglasses, and, better still, no bloodstains on his T-shirt. No gaping wounds. Just what looked like an ugly cut on one arm.

  She figured that was what a man like Blue would call a graze. And he was a SEAL, after all. She could come up with all kinds of scenarios where he simply . . . held his breath until Annabeth’s goons made the mistake of thinking they’d handled him.

  But what mattered was that he was alive.

  Alive.

  His dark eyes met hers. And blazed so hot she could feel it, like the touch of his hands. Like his mouth over hers.

  Blue was alive.

  Everly looked down to conceal her face, because she didn’t think she could control the tidal wave of emotion cascading over her. Her heart flipped over inside her, threatening to expose her. She wanted to cry. She was afraid she was already crying. She waited for shouts from the man outside, but when none came, it occurred to her that Blue must have handled that, too.

  When she raised her head, his gaze dropped
to her cheek. And she knew he saw that it was puffy. She wouldn’t be surprised if there was a handprint.

  And then she knew there was, because when Blue lifted his eyes to meet hers again, there was nothing in them but murder.

  He nodded at her, slow and steady, and she understood.

  She didn’t know how she understood, only that she did. Only seconds had gone by, but she felt as if she’d aged a decade. She could feel everything she’d shoved aside, and a lot of it hurt, but she didn’t care, because he was alive.

  But it still wasn’t over. She had to keep going.

  Everly focused her attention back on Rebecca’s psychotic mother.

  “I knew Rebecca,” she made herself say, and she was sure her voice gave it away. That Annabeth and her goon would turn and see Blue and she would have to watch him die all over again, and for good this time. But Annabeth only stared down at Everly, as if she were a very boring experiment. And the man beside her looked like he could stand there like a statue for days. “What did Rebecca do to you?”

  Annabeth took a sip of her tea. “Nothing in this house comes free,” she said, in that same easy, conversational tone. Everly fought back a shudder. “I live here thanks to the kindness of a certain . . . friend. This friend has no interest in children, of course. He has his own.” She shrugged. “He didn’t care if I had one as long as I kept it out of his sight and it in no way changed our arrangement.”

  “Your arrangement,” Everly echoed.

  Annabeth’s gaze turned condescending. “My friend has a very demanding position, a frail and needy wife, and four grown children, who can’t seem to stop giving him grandchildren. I’m his escape. When he can get away, this house is his oasis. And the rest of the time, it’s mine.”

  “And Rebecca’s,” Everly supplied. “Since she lived here, growing up.”

  Behind them, Blue moved soundlessly. He came in through the French doors like a shadow, his face set and that intent, murderous gaze of his trained on the goon with the gun.

  Everly had to force herself to look away from him before she gave the whole thing away.