Page 33 of Veil of Shadows

I smiled over at him softly before I continued. “This particular case that fell onto her desk required the best andthe brightest from our blacksite. So, me, Delilah, Brutus, and Jacob?—”

“Who’s Brutus?” Ronyn asked.

I peeked over at him. “Our pilot for the mission. Hell of an enforcer, but an even better chinook pilot.”

“Chinook?” Dom asked.

Voss grinned at me as Ronyn spoke. “A military helicopter that can transport around 10 tons of shit.”

“Ah,” Dom said.

I drew in a deep breath. “Anyway, it was the four of us. Me and my partner, Brutus behind the wheel of the chinook, and Delilah calling the shots. The op was simple: take out the head of a faction in the Middle East trying to gain a foothold in a pseudo-government faction that the U.S. couldn’t seem to topple on its own.”

“Yikes,” Dom muttered.

I giggled bitterly. “Yikes, indeed. Brutus dropped us about six miles from our final destination and we crept in using the shroud of darkness to cover us. The plan was to snake our way through the six miles until we came to the outskirts of the impoverished town, and then it was simply a matter of sweeping homes while people slept until we found who we were looking for. All of our guns had mufflers. All of us had undergone more than enough stealth training to stun a fucking rhino. It should’ve been an easy mission. It should’ve been ‘get in, get out,’ as routine as it got.”

That’s when I felt Ronyn’s hand slip against my right knee, squeezing softly. “What happened, Bex?”

I shook my head softly. “Please, don’t call me that.”

When Ronyn didn’t speak, I looked over at him with teary eyes. “Jacob always called me that. Please, it just… it hurts to hear.”

He nodded slowly, as if to let me digest his understanding. “All right, Bee.”

I snicker softly. “Like a bumblebee?”

Ronyn tossed me a wink. “My precious little bumblebee.”

My heart came alive at his words, and it gave me the strength to press on as I looked back across the table at Voss.

“When we got to the village, Delilah broke off. It wasn’t part of the plan, but she told us to stick to the plan and she was going to run a plan of her own. Now, you can only imagine our shock. We’re decked out in black tactical gear. Everyone’s got masks on. It’s not like we can just blindly communicate with one another. Plans don’t change mid-run.”

“No, they don’t,” Ronyn said gruffly.

I drew in a deep breath. “But she always came back, and I always thought that was so weird. She’d disappear, and then come back. Disappear, and then come back. I finally got her off to the side at one point in time and asked her what the fuck she was doing, but she’d always give me some dumbass excuse like, ‘oh, I heard a child stirring and didn’t want them to wake anyone.’ Or, ‘I thought I heard someone shifting in the other room, can’t be too careful.’”

“Non-answers,” Voss said.

I pointed at him. “Exactly. Just enough information to calm us down when adrenaline is high, but it’s not as if she was really saying anything that justified her abandoning her entire fucking team and the entire fucking mission whenever she felt like it.”

“What do you think she was doing?” Dom asked.

I slowly panned my tired gaze over to him. “Honestly? To this day, I’m still not quite sure what happened. Sometimes, I’ll lay awake at night and replay it over and over again in my head. Like if I look at it from every single angle in the right order, I might just find the missing piece as to what happened.”

“What happened from your perspective, then?” Voss asked.

That brought my gaze back to his from across the kitchen table. “Before I knew it, she fired her weapon.”

“She what?” Ronyn growled.

I barked bitterly. “At least someone understands how fucked up that is.”

Ronyn leaned forward, gripping my knee a bit tighter. “Let me get this straight: she drags your asses overseas, drops you in a fucking village, and then fires off her weapon and wakes everyone up before you can get out of there?”

My face fell flat. “And now you see why I blame her for Jacob’s death.”

Ronyn shook his head. “I’m so sorry, Bumblebee.”

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