Page 85 of The Woman Left Behind

She pulled the trigger.

Levi hurled himself back and to the side, the move catching the other guy by surprise because neither direction was exactly what he’d anticipated.

Joan Kingsley stumbled back a step, then went down on her knees. A look of massive shock spread over her face. Jina wasn’t accurate enough to try for a head shot so she’d gone for the torso, but it was a hard hit, right through the sternum and heart. Kingsley was dead there on her knees, and the knowledge was in her eyes.

Her mouth twisted, and very deliberately she lifted the pistol she still held, aimed it at the back of MacNamara’s head, and took the shot. Jina shot again, and again hit her target, but she was too late.

The shot jerked the other man’s attention toward Kingsley, a mistake she saw him realize right away, but it was too late. Levi was on him, death on the attack, one steely arm lacing around the man’s shoulders while the other gripped his chin. Panic flared in his eyes, one brief second, then Levi jerked the guy’s chin and it was over. A pop, and it was over, a life extinguished with one movement.

Levi let the body drop, gave Jina a sharp assessing look, then strode to MacNamara where he lay in the overturned chair. Jina let her arm drop to her side and stood frozen. She didn’t need to check. She’d seen the shot, knew it was over.

She felt numb. She leaned against the door jamb, then slowly sank to the floor. Four people were dead; she didn’t know who the other men were, but Joan Kingsley was a member of the House of Representatives, and Axel MacNamara had run the GO-Teams with ruthless efficiency and savage loyalty. There wouldn’t be ripples of effect from this; there would be tsunamis. Congress would go on, but the GO-Teams—Joan Kingsley might have killed them, too, when she’d killed Axel MacNamara.

Jina covered her eyes with her hand. She’d risked Levi’s life. She’d analyzed the situation, and done what she had to do, what her intellect and training told her to do. Levi wasn’t dead, but it was because of his training. She wasn’t dead, either; the Syrian desert hadn’t beaten her... because of her training.

She’d risked his life. She’d assessed the situation, and made the call.

Exactly as he had done.

She heard him approaching, then both hands closed around her and jerked her up. His expression was hard, still set in battle mode, but his assessing gaze raked down her to satisfy himself she was okay. He put both hands on her face and tilted it up, studied her, then he pressed a kiss to her forehead.

“I risked you,” she said, her tone raw.

“It was your only call,” he replied, and gently tugged her in close to rest against him.

It was different.

With MacNamara dead, the hierarchy at the GO-Teams was in flux, but on a different level things continued as usual. Maybe the teams would be disbanded. The decision would be made by some unknown higher up, maybe even in the Oval Office, but they had no way of knowing. Until the orders came down otherwise, training continued, and missions continued.

Crutch and Voodoo returned to duty, but neither of them could rejoin the teams; their injuries had left them with impairments that, while they could lead normal lives, precluded them from the strenuous and specialized training and missions being on the GO-Teams required. Ace Butcher’s team would rebuild, but with other recruits. They stayed close, though, because career-ending injuries weren’t friendship ending. The bonds forged on the teams weren’t so easily broken.

The miserably hot summer faded, and the cool pleasantness of fall began edging toward winter, the days getting shorter, the mornings colder. Jina concentrated on the drone program, and some days she managed to forget those awful few minutes, and what it felt like to pull a trigger and end another human being’s life. Joan Kingsley’s dying muscle spasm hadn’t ended MacNamara’s life, she had very deliberately shot him during her own last seconds of life, but Jina knew part of that was on her. If she’d taken the head shot—but she hadn’t. She’d been afraid of missing. She’d made the decision to go for the torso, and though it had been a killing shot, it hadn’t been one that caused immediate death. Because of that, Axel MacNamara was dead. Four people had died in that awful little house, and some nights she woke up to stare blindly into the darkness, wishing those memories would fade but knowing they wouldn’t, because they were now branded on her psyche just like the run through the Syrian night.

Levi, being a man, didn’t try to talk to her about her feelings, but he’d been through combat and firefights, he’d made pretty much the same call regarding her life that she’d made about his, so he knew, and accepted. Whatever he read on her face, occasionally he’d simply lift her onto his lap and hold her, offering her the solidity of his presence.

If he was at home instead of on a mission, he was mostly with her at her condo, though occasionally he’d spend a night at his place. More and more, though, having two places was seeming like a waste of money. Jina hadn’t said anything about that to him, yet; they’d been together a few months, not long enough for her to completely get accustomed to the idea. Too much had happened, too fast, and for her own sake she needed to slow down and let things settle down. She’d killed a woman. Life couldn’t pick up the way it had been before that.

The team was the team. They all got together to socialize the way they always had. Crutch and Voodoo almost always came, though Voodoo—of all people!—had somehow attracted a serious girlfriend and sometimes they had other plans. Two replacement team members, nicknamed Irish and Palooka, had joined the team. Jina liked them well enough, but she hadn’t gone through events with them the way she had with the original group of guys; as far as they were concerned, she was Ace’s girlfriend and a drone operator trainer. Her replacement with the drone was a lanky, laid-back guy named Kelvin Grant, but they called him Ichabod, and he was cool with that. Their group had grown, but nothing remained the same.

They were all at Snake’s house; the two-year-old hellion was now a three-year-old hellion, and he showed no signs of slowing down, so if the whole group was together it was deemed safer to keep him at home. Ailani mentioned what she was cooking for Thanksgiving, and Jina froze.

“Thanksgiving?” she croaked.

Jelly hooted. “Yeah, you know, that day with all the turkey? Comes around once a year, always in November? We got together a while back and decided to call it Thanksgiving.”

She threw a pickle at him, then guiltily looked around for the little hellion, because if he saw anyone throwing food he’d be doing it for the foreseeable future. He was running through the house with the rest of the kids, though, so she was safe. Jelly scooped up the pickle and ate it.

“I forgot about it,” she moaned, and rubbed her forehead. “How on earth... never mind. I’ll call Mom and make arrangements.” Then she stopped and her eyes got big, and she turned toward Levi. “I... oh, wow. Uh-oh.”

“Forgot to tell her about me, didn’t you?” he asked, smirking.

“No! She knows I’m dating you.”

“If by ‘dating’ you mean ‘living together,’ yeah.” But he didn’t look upset, just amused.

“You could have been dating me,” Jelly pointed out for about the millionth time.

“No, I couldn’t.”

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