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Ransom
She’s Safe From Me
I sat back, my eyes as dry as sand. I’d been poring over Willow’s social media accounts for hours. I’d sent all of her logins over to Aidan and his resident cybersleuth, Poe. She was a wonder, and I was positive she’d come up with more in-depth details than I would, but I was curious.
I really didn’t like questions.
Willow’s online persona wasn’t much different than the woman I knew. A little manic, a lot friendly, and she could toss a zinger like a natural. She was good with people and her mind was a helluva lot more interesting than I’d initially given her credit for.
Mostly because I wanted to slot her into a safe box where she didn’t scratch at my brain. I didn’t want to be fascinated by her. At all.
Regardless of my ill-timed interest, I would do this for her.
Because of Clay and Rachel. She was theirs and indirectly, that made Willow mine.
The fact that my chest tightened at the thought made me dig deeper and harder into the swimming torrent of words in her comment areas. Poe would have some fancy way to sift through the data and I was all for it. I’d go out of my mind if I had to do this sort of thing every day.
I’d been at it for five hours and I had a new appreciation for the former hacker, now white hat. Was that still a term? Whatever. I was more of a gun and Taser sort of guy. My prowess with a keyboard was limited at best.
Instead I focused on the overall feel of the reactions to Willow’s social media. I’d gone way back to the beginning, watching her clips and videos with the most hits first. It was a lesson in the iterations of Wil’s Way. Her earlier videos were all over the map, but even then, she’d been remarkably comfortable in front of the camera. She flirted with creating meals and do-it-yourself hacks, but it was pretty obvious what themes got her excited.
I could see why people were drawn to her.
In the end, she’d found her niche—figuring out how to break down a recipe into layman’s terms. Sometimes she broke up her videos into a few parts. It was surprising what she could jam into three minutes.
Her groupies were impressive. There were a few different levels there as well. When it came to the more friendly types who replied again and again, she happily interacted with then as if they were her friends. Maybe even some of them had become a bit more than acquaintances.
Then there were the troll types—and there were an alarming number of them. Most were harmless, but some had me reaching for the legal pad I kept beside me on the couch. I’d flag them to dive into their accounts and find out if they were just jackasses in general, or if they were more fixated.
I swung my legs up onto the couch and stretched out my back. My old knife wound twinged a little from hunching over my laptop. Instead of stretching out the muscles, it just made me want to shut my eyes. I rolled off and crossed to the corner of my living room. I’d installed gymnast rings into the stone when doing the renos.
My physical therapist had pushed me to use them after my last injury. It had taken me longer to heal from my last mission with my team. I’d caught a stray bullet while carrying Jones out of a warehouse we’d been sent to blow up.
The whole assignment had gone to hell. Just like the last five missions we’d been on in five weeks. Each one more dangerous and inching into the gray area I couldn’t live with.
Being a Night Stalker wasn’t as glamorous as the SEALs. Hell, we were the ones who pulled SEALs out of the shit more times than I could count. But my last mission had been such a clusterfuck that if I hadn’t been injured, I’d have filed my papers to get out of the Army anyway. I’d given more than ten years to them.
I’d been disconnected from my family, flown in and out of sinkholes of depravity, and spent more hours in a Blackhawk than anyone in my unit. For years, I’d allowed myself to be used for any op my unit chief asked of me.
Until Jones.
Until he’d died while slung over my shoulder.
Most people didn’t even know we existed. We were the last defense in the ugliest rescues. But when I couldn’t even rescue my own partner, I’d had enough.
As I was jumping into the chopper, a bullet had shredded through my ribcage and scraped close enough to my spine to nearly put me in a chair for the rest of my life. And that had put a period on my career.
No one besides my unit knew I’d been hurt.
The Army had dumped me in a off-site health center in Chicago. Even the staff hadn’t known who I was. I’d just gone by my initials, RID. The clinic was well-versed in secrets and happily used the government money for their research and advancements. When I’d healed up enough to go home, my charts had been classified, then redacted and put in a hole as deep as the shitholes I’d rescued people from. No one in the Army wanted to own up to the shitshow we’d walked into.
I’d been done.
The only good thing that had come out of my injury was learning how to rebuild the muscles in my back. Goddamn gymnast rings had saved me. I’d hung them in my house to remind me what I’d had to do to come back to my family.
Not my mother and father, but to Clay and my sisters. I’d run away just like Marigold. If I’d stayed with the Army, I might have ghosted everyone just as effectively as my sister had.
I wrapped my fingers around the warm wood and just hung there, letting all the tension slide up and out of me.
