Page 21 of Duty Preserved

That last part bit harder than she intended. She saw it on my face and winced.

“That’s not what I⁠—”

“No, you’re right.” I stood up. “That’s exactly right. He’s here to do his job. I’m here to do mine. We happen to live in the same compound for a short time. It doesn’t have to be a thing.”

Alyson looked at me for a long moment, trying to decipher what was behind my eyes.

“Okay,” she said, softer now. “Okay. Get some sleep.”

She hugged me. Quick and fierce. Then she was gone. The cabin door clicked shut behind her, and I was alone.

I sat on the edge of my bed. The camp was settling in around me. Through the thin walls, I could hear the generator humming behind the operations building, voices too far away to make out, the occasional noise from the dining tent. It must have been the staff finishing their cleanup.

Somewhere in this cluster of cabins, a short distance from where I was sitting, Donovan was in his own. Probably scraping stew off his shirt. Probably telling Andrew whatever version of Paris he’d been telling, or not telling, for the past few weeks.

I pulled my braid out and ran my fingers through my hair. My hands were still shaking, and it had nothing to do with the collision or the surprise or the embarrassment. It was the thing underneath all of that. The same thing I’d felt on a dance floor in Paris when I’d crashed into his chest and my pulse had kicked so hard that everything else in the room had gone quiet.

I turned off the light, lay back on my bed, and stared at the ceiling I couldn’t see.

Tomorrow, I would be professional. Tomorrow, I would be composed. Tomorrow, I would eat my breakfast without incident and greet him like a colleague and pretend that none of this was extraordinary.

But tonight, in the dark, with the sounds of the savanna pressing in through the walls, I let myself feel the full weight of what had just happened.

He was here. And he was going to be here every day.

I closed my eyes and tried very hard not to think about brown eyes with flecks of gold in them.

It didn’t work.

Chapter 6

Donovan

There were supposed to be twelve of them.

That was the number Ethan had flown us halfway around the world to train, and on the first morning of the actual work, seven of them turned up to the muster yard when they were called. Four more straggled in late. The twelfth didn’t come at all, and nobody could tell me where he’d gotten to or seemed to think it was a question worth asking.

I stood beside Andrew at the edge of the packed dirt and took the view of their formation in, that is if you could call the loose knot in front of us a formation. One kid carried his rifle slung muzzle-down, the barrel eating the dirt. Another wore uniform trousers and a faded football shirt. A third had his uniform shirt on inside out, the seams and a laundry tag showing pale at his collar.

“Well,” Andrew said, “they came.”

“Eventually.”

Cole moved out a few steps ahead of Andrew and me and squared up on the group. He didn’t raise his voice or call for quiet. He just held there and let his gaze move over them, one man at a time, until the muttering thinned and went out.

“My name is Cole Braddock, as some of you already know,” he said. “These two are Andrew Volante and Donovan Hughes. We work for a company called Citadel. You’ve all had schooling in English as well as Swahili, so we can do this without an interpreter, which makes it easier on everybody. We are here to make sure you have the necessary skills to protect the wildlife on this reserve and to make it home alive.”

Nothing came back. A couple of them glanced at each other. One yawned and didn’t trouble to cover it. A kid near the back murmured something, and the two beside him laughed.

Cole didn’t rise to it. “You know this land better than we ever will. We know the things that keep men breathing. That’s the trade.”

I read their eyes while he talked. Most of them had gone glassy and elsewhere before he was halfway through, bored by a speech they’d already decided had nothing to do with them.

Two of them didn’t.

The first was the one I already knew about. Zayn Kipsang stood a little apart from the rest. He was twenty, and of all of them, he was the only one who looked like he already knew what he was doing.

The second, I’d seen the day before—the kid with the limp, the one Cole said the others gave a hard time and who stuck around anyway. He hung back at the edge of the group, younger than the others, one foot turned wrong beneath him and the boot built up under it. He was listening harder than any of them.