Page 11 of Never Enough

“Nope. She called me Mr. Funderful. I heard joy and happiness. You, Mr. Nonfunderful, are so negative you heard sarcasm. You gotta stop hanging around with the Cyclops and start hanging out with me more.”

Steel grunted. “I wanna be there when you call TB ‘Cyclops.’ He’ll kick your ass back to mythological times.”

“Pfft. TB doesn’t scare me. As soon as he balloon-dropped three hundred red balloons on me in the armory, I knew it was over. He’s all domesticated now.” He pretended to be annoyed, but he loved TB’s woman, Flame. She was perfect for His Royal Grumpiness, all sunniness and cheer.

“My cheeks still hurt from blowing those fucking things up. I think I collapsed a lung.”

“You idiots are such amateurs. For ten bucks, you could have gotten a chargeable air pump.” They lay on the hillside shelf looking down into the village of Sallum. “Now quit stalling and answer the question,” Nemo prodded.

For several moments, Steel was silent. Nemo thought that his teammate wasn’t going to play along, but he should have known better. They all gave in eventually.

“Mierda.” He sighed in capitulation. “I hate shower sex. Table.”

Nemo twisted his torso to face his partner, raised his NVGs, and looked at Steel with an expression of absolute horror. “That’s not possible. No one hates shower sex.”

“I do.”

“Why the hell do you hate shower sex?”

Sighing, Steel asked, “Are we really going to get into this now?”

“Yes, we really are. It’s not like we have anything else to talk about.”

Nemo lowered his NVGs and rolled back into his previous position on the ground. It was quiet for about thirty seconds before he twisted back, raised his goggles, and asked, “Seriously? You really hate shower sex?”

Muttering something in Spanish, Steel rearranged himselfon the ground. “If I explain it to your dumb ass, will you shut up and do your job?”

“Swear it on my sister’s grave.”

Steel looked at him, his cold silver eyes revealed after raising his own NVGs. “You don’t have a sister.”

“Details. Avoidance. Start talking.” Nemo twirled his finger in the universal get-going sign.

Steel grumbled again in Spanish, lowered his NVGs, and went back to watching the village. “One, I have terrible knees from jumping out of too many planes. Kneeling on the shower floor to eat someone out is hell on them. Two, I can’t stand water in my eyes. Three, one too many violent thrusts can send both of you crashing to the floor in a tangle of very embarrassing broken limbs. And four, and most importantly, I go for a while, and the water always goes cold before I finish. I detest cold water.”

“There is so much wrong in that answer; I can’t even begin to unpack it. But I’ll address the stupidest one—you hating cold water. You were a goddamned Navy SEAL. You should thrive in the water.”

“Was,compadre. Iwasa Navy SEAL. Besides, cold showers are a choice. Cold ocean water is natural. Very different, believe it or not.”

Shaking his head, Nemo grumbled about slapping Steel on behalf of men everywhere, pulled down his NVGs again, and turned to refocus on the building in the distance.

The two men lay side by side on the ground in silence for the next thirty minutes. The building they were watching was a typical rustic structure for the area. A few weeks ago, their teammate, TB, the group’s Information Specialist, had made first contact with a trio by the names of Loki, Gilgamesh, and Medusa. The two men and the woman passed veiled information that they had witnessed what appeared to be an AmericanNavy SEAL being kept in Sallum. When the trouble was resolved with TB’s woman being kidnapped by her former abuser and a sex trafficker, their boss sent Nemo and Steel to the location to find out what they could. So far, what they’d found was a big, fat zero. Ka-Bar was still out there somewhere, and there didn’t seem to be suspicious activity of any sort when it came to this tiny village.

“It’s been three days, and we haven’t seen jack shit. We’re not going to, either,” Nemo complained.

“Probably, but we should wait a couple of hours, then head down and take a closer look. The same guy has locked up and left at twenty hundred the past three nights, and no one has come back until oh-seven-hundred the next day. We should be safe to take a peek.”

“And if we find nothing?”

“If we find nothing, we call the boss and see what he says.”

At oh-three-hundred,the two men crept down from their hillside hideaway. Traveling through the side streets, they worked to stay in the shadows as much as possible. Both men were experts at this, given their previous lives. Nemo and his fraternal twin had been master thieves, getting in and out of some of the world’s most famous museums, banks, and other sites, never getting caught. Plus, Steel had escaped from four separate Black Sites in the years before joining Tribe. If they wanted to be invisible, they were.

Well, technically, you were caught by Waters, but that’s different. And then there was the kitty cat. Different kind of caught.

Nemo tried to shove that memory to the back of his brain. All it did was make him itch like it always did. And that itch needed scratching, which wasn’t happening until they got home… unless he could find himself a flight attendant on her break on the airplane out. The itch turned to a pang in his chest. He rubbed the spot, then refocused.

Arriving at the back of the building, Steel took the watch position while Nemo picked the lock on the back door.

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