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“That means all of us need to go out and hit the tripwires—make sure they’re all working. Ray, is the secondary location ready?”
Ray pushed his glasses on top of his head and stared at Cap. “Yes. We have provisions and weapons stocked on that upper pass in the storage shed.”
“I didn’t see a storage shed up there,” Ava said.
He looked at the woman who’d stolen the biggest part of him. “You weren’t supposed to see it. It’s hidden.”
“The pass is crisscrossed with caves. The shed is a cave set deep into the mountain. It’s somewhere to hide and hunker down until help arrives. I’ll show you tomorrow,” he told Ava.
“Got it,” she replied.
“All right, I’m going to take first watch. Then Ray, Marshall, and Scope. Kyle, I really need you monitoring with Tex.”
They all nodded and beat feet, leaving him alone with Ava.
“I want you to rest. I’ll be up in about four hours, and if you’re awake, we need to talk,” he told her plainly.
“Okay, I’ll see you later,” she told him and then she too left.
Cap looked around the room. It had just been full of life seconds before and was now as barren as his life had been when she’d been gone from him. Then he sat down and got ready for watch.
He found Ava sitting in the chair at the window—her favorite place in the room. Well, besides the bed.
“You’re awake?”
She nodded and moved to put in her earbuds. He’d said they needed to talk and she agreed. Things were about to get real and she needed to get some things off her chest in case something happened to her when the Chinese or Russians showed up.
Cap pulled the other chair beside hers and sat down wearily. She could see the fatigue on his face. “You need to rest,” she told him.
“I do, but first we need to talk,” he said in return.
She didn’t say anything, just sat there waiting for him to speak.
He took a deep breath. “When we first took the mission to follow your dad, neither Holland nor I had any idea it would involve you and Olivia. We were told to get as close to the family as possible, and that included doing whatever was necessary to get in with you and Olivia.”
“I didn’t know that SEALs were sent on such missions?”
Cap looked out the window then back at her, his gaze intent. “My team was sent because we are the best at infiltrating. Do you understand?”
Her heart dropped in her chest. She was all too afraid she did. “You’re the best at insinuating yourselves into tough situations?”
He nodded and again she noticed the fatigue riding his shoulders. “Yes.”
“We were told you were there for protection. That was your first lie to me,” Ava said harshly.
He closed his eyes and opened them, spearing her with his navy gaze. “Yes.”
“And the second?” she asked querulously.
“There were no more lies after that one. Everything I told you was truth,” he said emphatically. “When we started seeing each other, when I realized what you could mean to me, I told my commander I was resigning my commission. I didn’t want anymore missions where a lie could destroy something I was hoping to build with you.”
“But you see, that one lie was propagated in so many ways, Captain. You continued that one lie, and it hurts, it hurts to think that you ever lied to me. That we began with a lie.”
Ava didn’t want to hurt him, but she needed to tell him her truth.
He rubbed his chest then. “Your dad began to trust Holland and me, and he asked me to watch out for you should anything ever happen to him. He asked Holland the same with Olivia. We had no idea he was selling secrets to the Russians. It wasn’t until our intelligence arm told us that we knew he was in big trouble.
“I’ll never forget that last conversation with your father—he was adamant that we protect you and Olivia, made us swear it. Of course, for Holland and me that was a no-brainer. We were even then trying to figure out how we were going to tell you both about your father but we knew we had to.
