Page 115 of Beware of Dog

Tenny grew serious. It was a subtle shift: a tightening of his posture, a tensing of his facial muscles, a flaring of his nostrils. “Ghost said no new wars. If I’m a government assassin, then the Dogs are my country now. I’m being pragmatic.”

Two strides separated them. Just two strides, and a big swing, and Shep could break the asshole’s pretty little nose. The anticipation of doing it, the eagerness for the crunch, the hot blood across his knuckles, left him breathless.

The knife tricks he’d glimpsed a few minutes ago were all that kept him back. He didn’t want to get married from a hospital bed.

Instead, he snarled, “How pragmatic was it when I helped storm a fucking high-rise to rescue your husband?”

Even through the street-blurring haze of impotent anger, Shep saw a moment when Tenny considered attacking him for that comment. A flash in his eyes; Cass’s did the same thing, but it heralded a snappish comeback or a sock to his arm. Tenny, he knew, would attack in a very different way.

He didn’t, though. His jaw flexed, and then he had control of himself. “I’m going to let that slide because you’re coming from a very emotional place right now.”

“Oh,fuck you.” Shep jammed his hands at his waist, turned, and meant to stalk down the sidewalk.

Reese blocked the way. He was as lean and visibly unimpressive as his counterpart. His hair was shoulder-length, and he wore the top half pulled back in a little bun. He looked like a soft runway model.

And Shep knew that he could jiu-jitsu his ass into next week.

He halted, and snorted through his nose in an attempt to dispel some aggression.

Behind him, Tenny spoke calmly, and plainly. “You’re in love. Possibly for the first time in your life. It makes you want to disembowel people who even look at her funny, right? I understand that feeling. Intimately. And that’s why it’s up to those around you with clear heads to make the decisions.”

Shep had never liked him less—mostly because he agreed with everything he was saying. He turned. “Oh, and you think you’re the one with the clear head?”

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, yes,” Tenny said, and he wasn’t even bragging, just stating a fact.

~*~

Tenny said he would call Maverick, and Shep was too wired to bother arguing, even though Mav was his president. Tenny made the call on the way back, still in the back seat, and Shep tuned him out; watched the city flash past the window and thought, for the first time in a long time, of his deployment.

He'd joined up right after 9/11, like so many of his classmates, of his peers across the country. He’d then joined the Rangers, because he wanted to level up, to go on moredangerous missions, to be in the thick of things. It had been grueling, but was like summer camp compared to being boots-on-the-ground in Iraq.

The big black dog tat on his ribcage covered the shrapnel scar there, the one from the wound that had gotten him discharged. He’d been bleeding, woozy from it, while he fished a bullet from another Ranger’s leg, gunfire cracking overhead, and outside, sweat pouring into his eyes, barking orders at the fumbling kid trying to help him. His hands kept slipping in the blood, the bullet sliding again and again out of the grip of the forceps. He still remembered the welcome whump-whump-whump of the evac helo rotors; the sharp rattle of the suppressive machine gun fire that offered them a path to the Black Hawk. Those phantom sounds woke him from nightmares sometimes, even all these years later.

“I know she wants to help her friend,” he said to the window, to the ghost of his own reflection there, heavy-browed with anxiety. “She’s stubborn. And noble. But.” He sighed, and it didn’t ease the tightness in his chest. “I just wanna grab her, and run away upstate, and forget all this shit.”

He didn’t expect a response; Tenny was still on the phone, and Shep had mostly just been venting, trying to turn the handle on his internal pressure valve.

But Reese said, “She wouldn’t want you to do that.”

Shep glanced over, and found him watching the road with a placid expression. “Yeah, well, she’s twenty-years-old. What does she know?”

Reese hummed. “She knows you don’t really believe that.”

Shep sent him a narrow look that he of course didn’t see, because he was, despite Shep’s initial fears, a very good and safe driver, and didn’t take his eyes off the road.

“You’re scared,” Reese continued. Before Shep could deny it, Reese added, “Ten’s been shot twice. I was there both times.”He darted a glance over, eyes very blue in the interior of the car. “I’m scared all the time.”

Shep found he had nothing to say to that. He nodded, and the rest of the drive passed in silence, save soft snores from the back seat; Tenny’s call was over and he’d put his head back and shut his eyes.

Some of the spiky tension in Shep’s chest eased when they reached the building and found it still standing. No smoke, no police tape, no gathering crowd. Was he really that spooked? That he’d started to envision impossible, worst-case scenarios?

Yeah. Apparently.

He didn’t wait for the boys. Climbed out of the Rover the second it was still and went into the building, managed to snag an empty elevator car. His pulse ratcheted up with each floor, and by the time he let himself into the apartment, his heart was pounding.

But Cass was right where he’d left her, perched on her art stool in an NYU hoodie and a pair of his ratty old sweats. Feet bare on the stool rungs, sleeves pushed to her elbows, wrists streaked with bright cuts of paint: blue, and orange, and purple. Her hair was falling down out of its hapless knot, and he had a momentary glimpse of her profile—her cute little snip of a nose, soft cheeks, delicate throat—before she turned to him, and smiled, beatific.

He let out his first deep breath since walking out the door earlier.

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