Page 73 of Brawler
From the helo, the SEALs erupted.
“Give ’em hell, Shortcake!” Easy roared.
“Pixie power!” Dagger bellowed, laughter half-wild.
Shark’s rumble carried over the rotors. “No one puts our Shortcake in the corner.”
Even Bondo leaned forward, baring his teeth. “This isn’t over.”
Beast lunged at the doorway, a wall of snarling fury, barely checked by Brawler’s iron grip on his harness.
Brawler, damn, Brawler was nuclear. Fury ripped through every line of his body, his hand flexing like he meant to tear through all of them. Only Tex’s arm across his chest kept him from storming down the tarmac and saving her from government bureaucracy. But that would end his career.
“Bondo’s right,” Tex barked, but his eyes burned hotter than his voice. “This isn’t over.”
Emily twisted, locked on Brawler, her throat tight with rage and raw need. “Christian! I’ll be all right! Lock that Neanderthal down.”
His roar carried across the distance, rough and savage. “We have your back, Emily.”
The agents corralled her toward the plane, and she held up her hands. “All right.” Cooperation would be better than antagonizing these guys. They were really just the messengers.
The jet loomed like an open grave. Emily stumbled, voice ragged with fury and heartbreak. “I’m going,” she groused. Then the jet swallowed her whole, leaving only the echo of her outrage on the tarmac and Brawler’s eyes, storm-dark and murderous, locked on the space she’d been torn from.
The cabin was sterile, cold leather and steel, the air humming with recycled chill. No one spoke to her. Not the agents who bracketed her on either side, not the man across from her with the tablet in his lap. When she asked where they were going, silence. When she demanded news of Flash, of Brawler, of the team, silence.
She wrapped her arms around herself, knees tight, trying to hold the pieces of herself together. The last thing she’d seen was Brawler’s face, fury and anguish locked behind the restraint Texforced on him. That image seared into her, replaying until her chest ached.
Hours later, they landed in DC. She was taken to a hotel room where she was given thirty minutes to shower and freshen up.Decent of them, she thought sarcastically.
Then, on the dot, she was whisked away to a building she never expected to see in her life, escorted through hallways that smelled of wax and bureaucracy, past security checkpoints and frosted glass doors until she sat in a windowless conference room at the State Department. The walls hummed with fluorescent light.
A man came in. Another suit, but this one was different…with an overinflated way about him.
He sat down with a file in his hand like he was about to interrogate her for war crimes.
His tone was clipped, official, clinical. “I’m Kevin Hall. I’ll be debriefing you.” He leaned forward. “Miss Shade, what happened in the jungle is classified. You will not speak of it to anyone. Not colleagues, not family, not friends. If you do…” His eyes locked on hers, cold and implacable. “You will be prosecuted for treason.”
Her pulse spiked.Treason. The word gutted her. She opened her mouth, desperate, reckless. “Are you serious? Treason? I turned over everything I had. The footage, my notes, my laptop. Why would I then go around spouting all of that to anyone? I love this country. I did it for my country. So, you can take your file and your threats and shove them up your ass. I’ve never been treated so poorly by my own government for doing the right fucking thing.”
“Regardless, supermax is waiting for you if you step over the line. Have a good day.” He rose.
“Wait! The SEALs I was with. I want to know?—”
“We don’t give out information regarding our special operators. Suffice it to say that they did their job, and you can forget you even met them.”
The room spun. “That’s not fair.”
He never even turned around, just let the door shut on her frustrated words. Defeated, heartsore, exhausted, she slammed her palms against the table. What else could she do?
Hours later, she was put on a commercial flight back to New York, alone.
Her apartment felt hollow when she unlocked the door, the silence pressing in. She dropped her pack, leaned back against the wall, and slid down until she was sitting on the floor. The city hummed outside her window, indifferent.
Brawler was out there somewhere. Delicious, upset, hers. Dammit, he was hers, she told herself. She had no confirmation that he felt the same. Just a heart that ached like it had been ripped out of her chest and left in the jungle.
At first therewas only silence.
Not the kind of silence that comforted or soothed, but a suffocating blankness that pressed against Flash’s chest like weight, like water filling his lungs. His SEAL instincts screamed hypoxia, drowning, but his chest rose, his body lay still. He was trapped somewhere between breath and no breath.
