Page 41 of Her Forever SEAL

Drake was cleaning his weapon. He did it the way he did everything, efficiently, almost aggressively, with the focused attention of a man who needed his hands occupied so his brain could work.

“You got a few minutes?” Mason asked.

Drake didn't look up. “What I've got is time I can't spend sleeping. So yeah.”

Mason sat down across from him. Kept his voice low. “This mission.”

A pause in the cleaning. Subtle. “What about it?”

“The intelligence came in fast.”

“Faster than usual,” Drake agreed. He resumed cleaning. “I noticed.”

“The location was confirmed in eighteen hours. We had guard rotations in twenty-four. The extraction was textbook.” He watched Drake work. “Nothing snagged.”

“Not once.” Drake set down the piece and looked at him. “You thinking about that?”

“I've been thinking about it since the first night.”

Drake was quiet for a moment. He picked up the next piece. “You want to know who the intelligence came from.”

“I want to know the whole chain.” He looked at the perimeter. “We got deployed fast.”

“We always get deployed fast,” Drake noted.

“Black Dawn was supposed to be up, but we got pulled in instead.”

Drake set down his gun. “Yeah, that’s fucking weird.”

“Clint might have channels.”

“He might.” Drake picked up a piece again then held it up to the light. “You know what I keep coming back to?”

“Tell me.”

“The aid worker. Hartley.” He kept his voice flat. Professional. “Gets grabbed in a very specific location. In a very specific window. When his usual security detail had a gap.” He paused. “Who knew about that gap?”

Mason looked at him. “Are you asking because you have an answer?”

“Nope,” Drake said. “I'm just asking the question.”

Mason thought about patterns. He thought about three clean pieces of intelligence. He thought about an extraction that had gone exactly according to plan in a part of the world where nothing ever went exactly according to plan.

He thought about a call window, and a woman's voice, and the particular quality of a half-second silence before the phrase it’s nothing.

“Get some sleep when you can,” he said.

Drake picked his weapon back up. “Mase.”

He stopped.

“Something going on at home?”

He didn't answer right away. Just long enough.

“Get some sleep,” he said again, and walked away.

He found a quiet spot and opened his notebook. A physical one, paper, an old habit that had saved his life twice in circumstances where a phone would have gotten him killed. He wrote for ten minutes. The intelligence chain as he understood it. The timeline from deployment to extraction. The specific circumstances of Hartley's kidnapping that had triggered their orders.