Page 19 of Wreck My Mind

“Brains are an asset,

If you hide them.”

~Mae West

Ozma Protocol

Chapter Seven

Three weeks later…

Coop

After shaking three pills from a prescription bottle into my palm, I grabbed a cold drink from the Gulfstream’s wet bar to wash them down. Like everything on the luxury jet, the specially labelled water bottle bore my billionaire boss’s initials—O.Z.

As cool as I was playing it, I was completely unnerved to find myself here. For one, I hadn’t intended to be going to Marakata Cay—or seeing Aziza—so soon. It wasn’t the right time. There were important things I hadn’t put in place. And two, I still couldn’t believe I was alive.

Three weeks ago I’d awoken from a coma. I hadn’t remembered Alvarez or the explosion. Luckily those things had since come back to me. Rey had had to fill me in on the rest. Like how the mishandled RPG had actually taken out most of Alvarez’s remaining men, the others had fled, and I…I had fallen out of my sniper hide in the tree and lost consciousness. Thank goodness Rey had heard the explosion and mobilized. How the little guy had gotten my two-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound ass out of the jungle and back to his village shaman, I still hadn’t worked out. But I was forever in his debt.

What I did know was I needed another concussion like I needed another rock in my head. I couldn’t afford to remove the one fucking mass I had growing there now.

While I knew Beryl Enterprises would provide me the best medical attention available, the last thing I wanted was to be sidelined indefinitely in some sort of pity position. Like hell I’d become another one of OZ’s pampered pets on Marakata Cay. Aziza would do it, too—care for me like that overweight pet tiger of hers. Then we’d both live in a cage.

That first morning waking up in Rey’s remote village, I hadn’t had time for worries or ego. The only thing filling my mind had been the ringing coming from an encrypted sat phone that had been left on my chest. How Aziza had managed that trick, I may never know. I’d just desperately wanted to hear her voice one more time. Maybe if I had, I’d have told her how I really felt about her. But when I’d answered, it had been Zaki.

If that didn’t tell me exactly where I stood in her eyes!

Fuck. Even three weeks later, I still burned from the salt of it.

Of course Zee didn’t want to talk to me, I’d abandoned her. She had the same hard pride I did.

For her to put her stubbornness aside and make the first contact with me, even through Zaki, had to have been a tough pill to swallow. Perhaps even harder than it’d been for her to summon the courage to lay her beautiful, fragile heart out to me when she’d asked me to move to Marakata Cay.

God, if only I didn’t have one foot in the fucking grave…

I shook off the self-pitying thought and replaced it with a mantra from my SEAL days. Never out of the fight.

And this job was my only ticket back in.

I still didn’t understand the sudden need to recover something that had rested on the ocean floor for over twenty years, but I owed it to Zee to listen to Zaki’s proposition.

Little did she know I would’ve taken any job she wanted me to for free. If she’d asked me herself. But for Zaki? My acceptance took the five-million-dollar payday and the assurance I could bring along my old Teammate Nikolas Steele and my little brother, Leo.

Nik and Leo were my best friends. If I was going to die, I needed them with me. And a deep dive with my history of concussions and this rock in my head could easily be a suicide mission. I needed Steele there to ensure the job would be completed. And I wanted to spend some time with my brother, just in case it was the last.

I wanted Aziza by my side as well, but knew better than to ask God for another miracle. Just being alive and getting to see her one more time was more than I deserved.

Originally the plan had been for Nik and me to meet up at Leo’s, then travel to Miami, where we would be meeting the ship to sail directly to the dive site. Which meant originally Zee had no intentions of seeing me at all.

By a literal twist of fate, a tornado to be exact, my boy Nik had fallen heart first in love, postponing our trip several days and strapping Thea Gale and her German shepherd, Titan, to our manifest. This caused us to, also literally, miss the boat. The only option left had been flying into Marakata Cay.

In less than thirty minutes I’d have boots on the ground in the most important battle of my life. The objectives—stay alive and figure out a way to tell Zee exactly how I felt about her.

The odds were not in my favor.

Despite the sudden jostle of turbulence, I maneuvered easily around the executive jet. Sensing I was being watched, I cut my eyes across the airplane’s spacious interior, catching Thea’s stare. The perceptive blonde had been keeping tabs on my every move since I’d emerged smoothly shaven from the luxury airplane’s restroom. After carefully stepping over Titan’s sprawled body, I dropped to sit across from her and next to my snoring brother.

I jutted my chin toward a sound asleep Nik and grunted, “Don’t let him catch you.”

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