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Chapter One
Gideon
"I have a cousin."
"Since when?" I ask, cutting my eyes at Bryant Denver, who is spotting me at the bench. It's not even six in the morning, but the gym is already packed with guys just like us…those who spent far too much of their lives getting up at the ass crack of dawn for God and country.
Bryant and I are both out of the Navy now, but old habits die hard. They do for most of the guys in the gym.
"Always, I guess. Gia had me do one of those goddamn DNA tests," he says, smiling when he says his wife's name. For a hard motherfucker, he's soft as silk when he talks about his wife. It's always been the same story with him. On our last deployment together five years ago, he told me that he met the woman he was going to marry. As soon as we made it back stateside, he followed through.
He's been living in domestic bliss ever since.
It's nice to see, even though I don't want the same shit for myself. He's never had family or stability. He deserves it. I've had a Ma and two brothers driving me up the fucking wall my whole life. I'm good on the family front.
"Her name is Maya."
"You met her?"
He nods, his grin growing. "She's sweet as hell, man. It was always just her and her mom, but her mom died about a year ago, so she's been on her own since then. She just got married."
I heave the weights back onto the bench, grunting. "Fuck me. I'm too old to work out like this."
Bryant laughs. "You're in better shape now than you were when you were deployed, Gideon."
"That's called hydration, motherfucker. I'm better hydrated now than when I was deployed."
"Shit. You ain't lying." Bryant laughs again. "I do not miss dying of thirst in the goddamn desert."
I haul myself into a sitting position and swipe my towel from the floor. "Facts," I mutter, wiping sweat from my brow. "So you like your cousin?"
"Yeah, I do."
"That's good. You deserve to know where you came from, man."
"Yeah." He clears his throat and then grimaces. "That's not why I brought her up, though. I need a favor."
"I'm not looking into her for you." My brothers and I run a private security firm. We spend our days protecting people who pay us far too much money to do it. But we all have military backgrounds. We know how to find information and tail people when necessary.
Bryant shoots me a dirty look. "I don't want you looking into her. She has a sister-in-law, Kenna Maxwell, who needs protection for a charity event. There have been some…issues. Her brother wants to hire your firm."
This surprises me. Bryant does security, too. He mainly works for corporate clients but has been known to take on a private client now and again. He's just as capable of protecting his cousin's sister-in-law as we are.
"Why can't you do it?"
"Because my wife is going to have a baby any day now."
"Shit. I forgot." He and Gia pop out goddam kids like they're trying to start a baseball team. "What kind of trouble is she in?"
"She's a musician playing at a big charity concert with a fuckton of big stars. Someone has been sending her some sketchy, threatening shit lately, and she's afraid something may go wrong with the event. She wants to ensure that doesn't happen."
No offense to Bryant, but this already sounds like a pain in my ass.
"What kind of sketchy, threatening shit?"
"Dead flowers, a creepy ass poem. Two days ago, a dead songbird was delivered to her front door."
"Jesus Christ. Did he go to movie villain school?"
