Page 69 of Her Forever SEAL

“No.” Mason said it quietly. “I know what every available looks like, and I know what it sounds like, and I need to see my wife. Right now.” The last words came out quiet. Lethal.

Cruz looked at him for a moment.

“Lieutenant.” She lowered her voice slightly. It was a deliberate shift, that said she was going to be straight with him. “I understand you just got off a transport. I understand your daughter is missing. I have a daughter.” Like that mattered. It didn’t.

“I need you to understand that I am not your enemy, and that the fastest path to us finding your daughter runs through your cooperation.”

He'd been doing this long enough to recognize a good agent. She was a good agent.

He also didn't have the time for it.

“Special Agent Cruz.” He matched her, kept his voice measured. “I've been on a government aircraft for nine and a half hours. I landed twenty-two minutes ago. I don't know what happened here. I don't know what my wife found herself in the middle of, and I don't know what you've been asking her for two hours. What I do know, is that my fourteen-year-old-daughter is not here and every minute I'm standing in this lobby is a minute I'm not doing the thing I'm actually qualified to do.” He paused. “Which is find her.” This time his voice was louder. Not yelling, informing. As he would inform his team during an op and he expected their undivided attention.

Cruz held his gaze. “She told us you didn't know,” Cruz said.

“She'd be right.”

“About any of it. The warehouse, the deceased individuals, any of it.”

He heard what she was actually asking. He'd answered it already and he wasn't going to decorate it.

“I've been in West Africa,” Mason said. “Out of contact. I landed twenty-five minutes ago, now. I’m done talking. Take me to my wife.”

Cruz studied him. He let her.

“She also says she's done talking,” Cruz said finally. “Has been for about forty minutes.”

“Then there's no reason to keep her.”

“There's a reason.” Cruz's voice didn't harden but it got precise. “Two dead individuals who might be related to this kidnapping.”

“Do you have any evidence? Any at all? Any that places my wife at that scene?”

She paused for a long time. “No.”

“Then we’re done here.”

“Do you have any idea what happened to your daughter?”

He looked her straight in the eye. “If I did, I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you. Now release my wife.”

Agent Cruz sighed, then nodded. “Come with me.”

She held the door and he walked through.

The conference room was the second door on the left. He saw her in the window and he pushed open the door.

Sophia was at the far end of the table, her hands folded on the table in front of her. She was not looking at the agent seated across from her. She was staring at a fixed point on the far wall with the particular quality of stillness she got when she was holding herself together through pure force of will.

She heard the door. When she looked up and saw him, something in her face broke open and then immediately closed again, the way it did when she couldn't let go yet, when she had to hold the line a little longer.

He crossed the room.

He pulled her up from the chair and into his arms before anyone could say a word, and he felt her hands grip the front of his shirt as her forehead pressed into his chest. He felt her take one long, slow, steadying breath.

“I’m here,” he said into her hair.

The agent across from her had stood up when Mason entered. Young guy, probably thirty, the particular look of someone who had a follow-up question he hadn't asked yet. He opened his mouth.