Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 63763 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63763 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Bex’s thumb moved carefully over the flattened metal. “What did the coordinates show?”
“An ambush along our planned extraction route.” I remembered handing the screen to Stryker, seeing his expression change once before he redirected every man without hesitation. “We altered the route, came out through higher ground, and brought everybody home.”
“And this connects to your road name?”
“One of Stryker’s men looked at the recovered coordinates and said, ‘We don’t need a cipher. We’ve got Ralston.’” I leaned back and lost some of my tension beneath the warmth in Bex’s eyes. “It stuck. I broke systems nobody else could read, and most of the men around me couldn’t read me either.”
She glanced down at the round again. “Why do you still wear this?”
“Stryker pulled it from my plate carrier on the flight out and tossed it into my lap. Told me to keep the receipt.” A rough breath left me, something similar to a laugh.
Bex turned the metal slowly between her fingers before placing the chain on my desk. “That explains why you trusted Stryker.”
“He made decisions based on what protected his people, even when changing the plan cost him.” I looked toward the window, not trying to escape the memory, but taking a momentary reprieve from the weight of it. Then I looked back at Bex. “The Navy made it more complicated near the end.”
She picked up one of my hands and threaded our fingers together before I continued. Telling her didn’t feel like exposing a weakness. It was giving her a piece of myself I had kept from everyone else because it belonged only to me. But now that I had Bex in my life, nothing belonged to only me anymore.
“On my final deployment, I recovered information tying a politically useful intermediary to a hostile network. He’d been giving them patrol schedules, names attached to safe locations, and windows when civilian contacts would be unprotected.” My grip tightened around Bex’s fingers as the old fury moved through me with the same clean edge it had carried then. “Good people died because of the information he sold.”
“What happened to him?”
“Nothing.” The word tasted exactly as foul as it had years earlier. “Senior leadership ordered the report sanitized because exposing him would’ve damaged an alliance and disrupted negotiations already in motion. He was silently removed from duty but retained his rank and title until he was honorably discharged a short time later. They called it protecting the bigger picture.”
Bex’s expression turned sad. “The bigger picture had names.”
“Exactly. I refused to certify the sanitized version. Finished my obligation, declined reenlistment, and walked when the twelve years ended.”
“Did Stryker know?”
“He was one of three people who got the full truth.” I rubbed my thumb across her knuckles, remembering the night he found me after I left the teams. “He flew out, bought a bottle neither of us needed, and after the hangover cleared, he told me to stop breaking codes for people who didn’t care whether I came home. Offered me a job at Black Castle and a place beside brothers who did.”
Bex absorbed the story and her gaze moved over my face with quiet understanding. “Trusting a person doesn’t mean predicting every decision they’ll ever make. It means believing that when the choice matters, they’ll make the right one—even if it costs them. You trusted yourself to choose what was right when the institution didn’t.”
She rose from my lap, and stood between my knees, placing her palms on my cheeks so she could kiss me. I wrapped both hands around her hips and drew her closer, deepening the contact.
When she pulled back, her fingers slid through my hair, pushing the stubborn lock off my forehead with a tenderness I’d never experienced.
“I trust you too.”
Her lips curved. “Even though I’m making you disable the remote access to my car?”
“Still going to track your phone.”
“I would’ve worried if you stopped.”
I pulled her onto my lap again, this time settling her astride me while her arms circled my neck. The soft heat between her thighs pressed directly over my cock, turning it rigid beneath the thin layers separating us as my hands slid under the hem of the shirt and closed around her bare waist. She breathed my name against my mouth, and hearing Corbin in that intimate voice tore through the last distance between reflection and need.
I kissed her slowly at first, taking the sweetness she offered while her fingers tightened in my hair. Then she rocked over my erection, and restraint gave way to hunger as I caught her nape and deepened the kiss until her breath broke against my tongue. My hands climbed beneath the shirt, palms spanning her ribs before my thumbs grazed the soft undersides of her tits, and the quiet moan she gave me made my cock throb hard enough to demand we clear the desk.