Page 13 of The Vigilant

Until there was.

“Dammit, Jon,” I muttered and swirled the hot coffee in my mug, taking a big swig of the black liquid, wishing there was something stronger in it to take the edge off.

Even if I had opted for an Irish coffee, it wouldn’t do any good. I’d learned years ago that no matter how many cuts and burns and bullet holes my body had plastered over, the emotional wounds never healed. The pain and regret and guilt I carried festered like an open wound in my soul.

First, we’d lost Ryan; our final mission with him should’ve been my last. But then Jon asked me to go back. Begged me to join his team for one single mission—and Jon never begged. And then I’d lost him, too.

Losing a brother in battle was like losing a limb, and in the span of a year, I’d lost two. How the hell was anyone supposed to function normally after that? You didn’t—couldn’t.

Those emotional injuries came with a phantom pain that haunted me day and night no matter how deep I buried it.No matter how good I was at burying it.The thing they never tell you about killing is that you better be good as hell at burying, too. And living with ghosts.

But Sutton Brant was no ghost. Not anymore.

I might’ve been able to bury the little girl twirling in her princess dress along with the rest of her father’s memory, but I couldn’t bury the beautiful woman who’d been delivered to my doorstep. I couldn’t bury the blue-flamed anger in her eyes, the desperate defiance of her every move, nor the crippling hunger I felt to care for her in ways that were both acceptable and so fucking inappropriate, they should be illegal.

Suddenly, those blue eyes staring out at me looked far too suspicious of what I was thinking. I closed the photo, but before I could return to my work, my phone buzzed.

You know I have eaten in the last four months.

Air rushed through my lips like my lungs were still remembering how to laugh.

The attitude would’ve given her away even if I hadn’t already programmed Sutton’s number into my phone.

I opened the message, only partially regretting my deception. Yeah, I’d left her my number because I wanted her to trust me. Wanted her to be the one to reach out first. But I’d also had a backup plan.

I’d taken her cell out of her bag as I’d carried it inside, and while she was in her bath, I not only entered the number into mine, but also installed a tracker on it.Just in case.

I messaged back.

I wanted you to have options.

Was it too much?I had no fucking clue. But I did know the woman had just been dropped off by her parole officer with a warning that there’d be no more warnings. I did know I had a duty to my fallen friend to make sure nothing happened to his daughter. And most of all, I knew she was keeping things from me.

I was good at reading people—situations. To be Special Forces, to tackle the kind of unconventional missions we took, you had to be obsessively perceptive. Instantaneously discerning. And there were three things immediately clear to me from the first few minutes in Sutton’s presence.

She was authoritatively defiant, offensively guarded, and defensively dishonest.

But even if every trained instinct hadn’t gone on alert from the second she’d given me that story about breaking in for her cell phone, her eyes would’ve drawn my skepticism.

Sutton had her father’s eyes. It was more than the same porcelain blue. It was also the light streaks of his same stubbornness and the dark flecks of his determination. But most strikingly, was their shared, sharp glint of reckless self-sacrifice. That heroic-armored martyrdom was what cost Jon his life.

And now, I saw that same goddamn recklessness in hers.

She was lying to me about the break-in. She was lying when she said she didn’t need anything. She was in trouble, I could sense it. I could fucking taste it. And fuck me, I owed it to Jon to do whatever I could to help her and make it right.

This is the entire deli department.

Again, the foreign sound of a chuckle bubbled from my chest.

The first thing I’d done after coming back to the garage last night had been twenty minutes with the punching bag in the gym, followed by an ice-cold shower and my hand on my cock. The second, an online grocery order to be delivered to the townhouse this morning with all the options for breakfast and abunch of deli meats, cheeses, and sliced bread so she could make herself lunch.

You’re welcome.

You’re assuming I like meat.

I stiffened, and I had to wonder what the fuck kind of short circuit she’d caused in my brain to make me read into things with all the maturity of a teenager.

My thumbs hesitated on the screen before typing.

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