Page 29 of George’s Big Day

I had made every effort to keep her at arm’s length. I had been cold, aloof, responding to only yes-or-no questions, and yet…nothing worked. There was no fighting the warm draw of her compassion and charisma once you were taken by the current. I had told Finn that, my friend and colleague, the guy who protected her when I was deployed. I said, you’re going to like her, you’ll see.

“She’s annoying and bossy, and by the way, I don’t carry boxes. I’m her bodyguard.”

I had kept quiet as he vented, pacing in front of me in my office.

“This is all your fault,” he assured me. “You treat her like a princess, and now she expects that from everyone!”

He had no idea when he started what he was talking about. He didn’t know that someday we’d all be working for her.

It turned out that didn’t matter because he fell head over heels in love with her brother. Like, all the way. Like gone. And so seeing Hannah through her brother’s eyes, and those of her family, that was it. The thaw had begun, and now suddenly he looked forward to spending time with her as well. He still didn’t schlep packages, but that was okay. I did it. He didn’t have to.

Taking a seat next to me, she did what she always did when we were sitting side by side—she leaned in and rested her chin on my shoulder.

“Stop that,” I insisted.

But she didn’t. She never did. And when I turned to check on Kurt, I noted his smile was back.

“Don’t encourage her,” I warned him.

He didn’t listen.

THREE

AUTUMN AT THE B&B OF HORROR

Iwas torn between puking and hyperventilating. Or both. I hadn’t made up my mind yet.

“I have to make a call,” Dante Cerreto said even more calmly than he had the seven times before.

My brain was going to explode. “This is my wedding!” I yelled at him again, as I also had seven times before. I then turned and repeated myself to Chris Mancuso, whom I was glaring at as well.

Chris was my mentor when I first became an Army Ranger, taught me everything I knew, and had always stressed that a good day was when you came home alive. When I was still on active duty, I was surprised that even though he was out—without resigning; one day there, one day gone—that sometimes when my sat phone rang or my comms went live, it was still him on the other end. How did that happen? More importantly, how could it?

Once my clearance was high enough, I understood. He moved from the Army to the CIA, killing for the good of the nation until he knew where enough bodies were buried—as he’d been the one who put them there—and could finally step away completely. Much like with Darius Hawthorne, killing them only opened the box and closed nothing. They had contingencies atop contingencies, and the glut of secrets coming to light was not survivable for too many people. Easier to let Chris go where he wanted and do as he pleased, especially since he just wanted to live a quiet life in Spain and take the occasional contract to kill someone the world would be better off without anyway. Better to leave him be.

All that flew out of the window at the moment as again, my mentor—and nowadays my friend—squinted at me.

“This is so not my fault,” Chris said defensively, pointing at the man tied up and gagged, sitting on the floor between us with the wall at his back. “Carmello Ortiz sent this guy after Dante, not me.”

This wasn’t helping anything.

“We don’t know that he’s after me,” Dante chimed in. “Besides, we have no idea if he’s one of Ortiz’s guys.”

But we really did. To point that out, I tipped my head at the tattoo on the left side of the guy’s neck.

“Okay, fine,” Dante amended. “He does in fact belong to the Jalisco cartel.”

“Which means this has nothing to do with me,” Chris averred, pointing at Dante. “He’s the one who sent his boy Garland into Mexico after his asset.”

“I did not. That wasn’t my op. That was the company, not me,” Dante said, then to me, “Why are you looking at me like that?”

My focused regard was because I was supposed to be getting married in three hours, and I did not need a sicario from the Jalisco cartel crashing my wedding. But also, I found myself looking at Dante Cerreto because everything was different now, and that had been a huge paradigm shift for me.

Last year, when I had originally been loaned by my boss, Miguel Romero, as a favor to Darius Hawthorne, to aid Colonel Jared Colter on a clandestine op in Thailand, I was in awe. It was my first contact with Dante Cerreto and Colonel Colter, and as they were legends in the counterintelligence community, to be doing anything with them had been both a privilege and an honor. Added to that was being asked for personally by Darius Hawthorne, which was overwhelming as well. Not only did the man now run the Vault, an organization that spanned every continent, but he had also been a top CIA operative and had forgotten more secrets than most agents knew to begin with.

The thing was, once you spent time with people, talked with them, watched them, and most importantly, had to save them, perceptions changed. Mine had been completely altered. I realized that my skill level and theirs were really not that far apart. What I had accepted as superhuman feats, a lot of times boiled down to the same expertise as mine: observational clarity, hair-trigger reflexes, and speed. Being a sniper, marksmanship was crucial, but so was the ability to remain calm under pressure. Also, the more times you accompanied others on missions, the more opportunities to experience the epiphany of everyone needing the same steely nerves, belief in the reason for the op, and intent to do the best job possible and not let anyone down. And none of this was to say I was better than them, but at the end of the day, they were all as fallible as me. That had been eye-opening. I tended to place people up on pedestals, thinking myself as less than. But the longer I worked special ops, the more I understood that I too could be counted on to perform as well as the others.

All this meant that the buffer of hero worship had thinned. There was this familiarity now, which was great nearly a hundred percent of the time, except at this very moment. Because I really needed my wedding to not go off the rails. Marrying Kurt was the most important thing I could do to make my life complete.