Page 71 of Thaddeus

“He didn’t. He just knows me well enough to know I was talking shit.”

The smile faded and I’d had enough. I tugged her hand and headed toward the stairs.

It was time we got to the bottom of what was bothering her.

Emerson

“Tell me what’s wrong,” Thad demanded after he’d pulled me into his bedroom.

I considered doing the typical woman thing and say nothing was wrong, then when he pushed because he’d know that was a lie, get mad. But I thought better of it—we had too much going on. Too much shit swirling around that was more important than my insecurities.

So I laid it straight out.

“This is a lot to take in and process. It’s confusing. It’s scary. I’m sad that Kyle knows you better than I do, hell, your whole team does. I’m mad at myself for making, then continuing to make, bad decisions. It kills me to know you’ve spent your life doing good in the world and still are, and I’ve spent it in the murky waters of committing murder. You’re good, down to your core. I’m not. I’m still freaking out that my dad’s business partner was a scumbag, and praying my dad didn’t know. I’m pissed at my sister for not coming with us, but at the same time proud she’s brave enough to help the women she does. I’m scared for her. Sad for her. And I want to see her again and I’m afraid I never will.”

After that, he went about setting me straight.

“It’s gonna take more than ten hours to sort your head out. I know this, and will put in a good amount of effort to make sure in the end, you understand that the things you’ve done do not make you a bad person anymore than the things I’ve done make me good. Your dad’s partner was a scumbag. He’s dead, your sister made that so, and right or wrong she needed to handle that. So far, your parents are clean. It looks like your dad was oblivious to what Stanley James was doing. If we find out differently, we’ll deal. What we don’t need to do is buy trouble where there isn’t any. And that means you go on believing your dad is clean.

“Can’t say if you’ll ever see your sister again. What I can tell you is, if you do see her, she will not be the same baby sister you knew. Just like you, she’s spent eight years in those murky waters. But unlike you, she’s spent them getting down deep into the mud. We find her, we’ll help her any way we can. But, babe, she might refuse that help. If she does, we deal.

“I know shit is moving fast around you. We’re working multiple angles, our investigation is fluid, and we have more than one target. I’ll do my best to keep you moving with us, and understanding what’s going on as it happens. And lastly, yes I’m tight with my team. We’ve bonded, we have each other’s backs, we can run an op without uttering a word because we know what the other is doing, thinking, what their step will be and the one after that. I would die protecting any of them and they’d do the same for me. And that includes Tatiana.

“But make no mistake, that does not mean they know me better than you do. They do not know me the way you do. They don’t know my dreams, they don’t know my heart, they don’t know who I really am when I don’t have a vest on and a gun in my hands. And that is not because they don’t care. Not because I don’t trust them, it just is what it is. We’re tight, we’ve bonded, we’ve killed together and would die for each other. But not a single one of them knows me better than you did.”

“Okay,” I whispered.

“And I’ll tell you again, it’s gonna take more than ten hours for us to work through our shit. We’re gonna do it together. We’re gonna come out on the other side in a good place. No, a great fucking place. But while we’re working through all of that, what we are not going to do is live in the past. Choices were made, on both of our parts. Let’s not forget I made the choice not to hightail my ass to your parents’ house and demand to know where you were, which incidentally was right there. That was my pride that kept us apart. We were both wrong in how we handled it. It’s over. We now move on.”

“Will you tell me about your job?” I asked, because well, he’d laid me out good and well and there wasn’t much more to say.

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know after we go downstairs, have some lunch, and you get to know the team better.”

Food sounded great, the get-to-know-you part, a little scary.

“Before we do, will you explain what you meant by you gave a pint of blood to save Tatiana?”

“Our last mission was fucked. We were in Saudi Arabia, near the Kuwait border. We’d tracked stolen ancient artifacts and were holed-up in a house near the location we were supposed to hit. Our cover was blown, Leon Brown or Harry Landry had given us up. The house was overrun and, in the firefight, Tatiana almost died—actually she did, three times on the operating table. Me, Kyle, and Brooks donated blood.”

“Holy shit. She almost died?”

“Yep. She was protecting Brooks. She’d pulled him to safety after she’d been hit—when we found them, she was sittin’ sentry with her AR at the ready. She also wasn’t breathin’. Dec immediately started CPR and during the transport to the hospital he refused to allow the medics to take over. Declan kept at her all the way there. So, when I tell you my team would die for me, and I for them, I mean that in the literal sense. That’s something else you’re gonna have to understand. My job is dangerous.”

“I think I get that,” I muttered.

And I had, but holy fuck, that was dangerous, that was hazardous.

“What you also need to know, is that all of us, and that includes Tatiana, are good at what we do. All of us are former special forces, Tatiana is former CIA, and I’ll repeat, we’re damn good at our jobs. But that doesn’t mean shit can’t go to shit. It can and it does. When it does, we know how to deal.”

“Okay, Thaddeus.”

That was something I’d deal with later; the perils of his profession weren’t something I wanted to think about at the moment.

“You ready to go back down now?”

“No, but I’m hungry so I will.”

Thad’s face lit and I watched lips twitch before he mumbled, “That’s my Emmy.”