Page 3 of The Vigilant

I hardly heard Dare’s response before I blasted through the door and pushed my friend to the side.

“I’m here.” My voice was stern as I towered over the man who was much smaller in person, or maybe it was just the way he cowered at my tone that made him seem to shrink. “What do you want?”

“I’m here about Ms. Brant.”

Every muscle in my body hardened. My eyes hadn’t been fucking with me.Sutton Brant. My old mentor’s daughter.

“I can handle this, Dare.” It wasn’t an assurance, it was a dismissal. I didn’t want Dare around for this. For her. Not until I knew what the fuck was going on.

“Are you?—”

“Go.” My fist balled at my side to keep from reaching out and dragging him over to his bike so he could leave.

The man knew how to take an order, but he sure did take his damn time walking over to the motorcycle and getting on. And there was no preventing him from looking inside the car.

“What about her?” I clipped with a low voice.

The first time I’d met Sutton Brant, she was six and begging for a piggyback ride.

Jon and I had just come back from twelve months overseas, right in time for Thanksgiving, which I was content to spend at the local diner, but Jon wouldn’t hear of it. He took me home with him to meet his daughter and off-and-on-again girlfriend, Angela.

Angela was a little bit of a disaster. She came from a conservative Filipino who’d wanted her to become a doctor. Instead, she’d dropped out of art school when she became pregnant with Sutton at nineteen. The relationship between her and Jon was tenuous…tumultuous…but while they sorted out their shit inside, I’d been entertained by the six-year-old with bright pink streaks in her smooth, black hair, who sauntered around in her sparkly blue princess dress demanding my name, how I knew her dad, what I did. At twenty-four, I didn’t know if soldier was a good explanation for a six-year-old, so I told her I was a white knight. At that, she’d promptly requested a piggyback ride to chase the fire fairies—which turned out to be fireflies—around the fenced-in perimeter of the small yard.

After that, I only caught snapshots of her life through Jon’s photos. When we crossed paths, I saw the photo of her Mulan Halloween costume when she was eight or nine, her toothy smile making the entire photo. A couple years later, when I was with Harm’s unit, I’d caught up with Jon again in Iraq, and he’d clapped me on the back, his smile bursting with pride when he showed me Sutton receiving her black belt in tae kwon do; she was maybe fourteen. It was that photo when I really saw how the two of them had the same smile. She had her mother’s full lips but her father’s smile. Jon was so fucking pumped that she was this kick-ass kid, boasting that it wasn’t the only martial art she excelled at and how he’d given her strict instructions to break any fingers of boys who touched her.

The last time I saw him—that last mission—all he talked about was getting home to surprise Sutton with a car for hersixteenth birthday. He said she’d asked first for a motorcycle, which he immediately shut down. After that, it was a Jeep Wrangler she had her heart set on. One with a soft top.

He hadn’t made it back to give her that car.

The second and last time I saw Sutton in person was at her father’s funeral. Then, she’d still been thin as a rail, her dark hair cut into a bob. She looked physically younger than fifteen, but her face…her demeanor…was of someone much older. The firm set of her mouth seemed etched in stone, no trace of the wide smile I’d always seen in the photos. Her almond eyes were heavy with the loss of one parent and left with the craze of another. Angela had spent the majority of the funeral sobbing and cursing Jon’s casket for leaving her, and I had the sense Sutton was used to this kind of behavior. But what did I know? More importantly, what the hell was I supposed to do about it?

They were fine. Set. The military would take care of them for all of Jon’s service.

“She violated her parole, so I’m remanding her to your custody.”

Parole?The word was like a grenade levied at my feet.Custody?

“What? No.”My voice cracked like lightning across the pavement.

“Either that or I report it and she goes to jail—real jail this time, Bates, not juvie.”

Juvie? Jesus fucking?—

“Dammit. What the hell did she do? I’ll fix it.”And where the hell was her mother?

“You need to fix her,” the small man snarled and violently motioned at the car.

Everything stilled—silenced—as the door opened.

It was the eyes I’d recognized from the video feed. Not the bright color or shape, but the heaviness was still there. Likethis girl still had the weight of the world on her shoulders at…twenty-one?

Fuck.

She was no girl.

And the rest of her was nothing like I remembered. In six years since the funeral, Sutton had filled out into a full-grown woman. Her midnight hair was long now, down to the hourglass shape of her waist. She was dressed in all black—straight black jeans and a loose black tee that hung off one shoulder, but even those couldn’t hide the curve of her hips or the fullness of her chest.

Something stirred inside me—something I thought was long dead and buried.

---