Page 43 of Delta Force Defender

There wasn’t a single attack she couldn’t fight. Maybeshe’d win or maybe she wouldn’t, but she would fight until she dropped.

She had no idea what to do with the opposite of an attack.

She had no idea what to do withfamily.

Or being claimed by Isaac Gentry in full view of all his friends and colleagues. All hispeople.

Your people, too, she dared to think, but it made her whole body clench down tight, in fear or longing or something else she couldn’t name.

She concentrated on the task at hand. Telling the story so it wasn’t a terrible secret any longer. So maybe she might have a shot at being a little less sick.

“I knew exactly who my father was,” she said into the surprising quiet of so many usually big, loud personalities, all of them waiting for her to get there in her own time. “My brothers were a part of the business, but my sister and I were supposed to obey. Silently. I didn’t always do that and I paid the price.” She made herself meet Isaac’s gaze. “He beat up everyone. Or he had someone else do it. Not only the women in his life.”

“You knew what he did?” Blue asked.

He was sitting across the room, but the intensity of the way he studied her made it seem as if he were a lot closer. Caradine was having a hard time seeing these people who had joked with her, eaten her food, and even claimed to find her crankiness entertaining, for who they really were. She didn’t know quite where to place it. Or the obvious reality that they’d all spent their entire adult lives dealing with situations like this—and men like her father.

Blue kept going when she didn’t answer immediately. “What I mean is, did you know he was a dirtbag or did you know, specifically, that he was an arms dealer with links not only to crime syndicates in the U.S. but across the globe?”

“I always knew he was a very unpleasant man. The details of what he did were something I learned over time.” She shifted in the armchair, resisting the urge to hug her knees to her chest. “I Googled him when I was twelve, and it was eye-opening. But also not entirely surprising.”

“Did your mother know?” Bethan asked from the far door, and when Caradine looked over at her, she couldn’t help noticing the way Jonas’s dark gaze fixed on her, too.

“She must have,” she said, forgetting about Jonas and the brooding way he always looked at the other woman. “My sister and I debated that for years. My mother was... I don’t want to say weak. Because, yes, he beat her up, treated her like crap, and talked to her like she was either a child or an idiot. But there was a part of her that thrived with him.”

Caradine considered the thorny, enduring problem of Donna Sheeran. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and maybe it’s as simple as she never expected any better. My grandfather wasn’t that nice himself.”

“Mario Iannucci,” Oz contributed from behind his laptop. “Rumored to have been behind the hit on Freddy Marinelli that changed the power structure of the Zenato crime family in the mid-Atlantic region twenty years ago.”

“Not everybody gets to use the FBI’s most wanted list for genealogical research,” Caradine said dryly.

“I prefer it, personally,” Kate said in the same tone.

Caradine smiled despite herself. Then pushed on. “There’s no getting around the fact that my mother took a deep pleasure in martyring herself. When my father would go off on one of his rages, she would provoke him further. Not to protect us, because she did nothing to prevent him from coming at us. In fact, when he was done, she liked to get her own hits in, too, and she was vicious.” She looked at Blue. “Sometimes I think sheknew. Sometimes I think she knew everything, and liked it. Other times I think she was another one of his victims. I don’t know.”

That sat there for a moment.

“What happened that night?” Griffin Cisneros asked.

She didn’t ask which night. She cleared her throat, though it didn’t make her throat any less dry. Then she told them all the story. How she’d been ignoring her father and knew there would be a reckoning. That she’d taken her time driving out to Quincy that night. That she’d been well aware that there would be a price to pay, and she’d been afraid she knew exactly what form this particular price would take.

Caradine told them about parking down the block out of habit. About standing outside in the dark, gearing herself up to go in. How panicked she’d been that her father would take her degree away from her and keep her from graduating, not because he really cared one way or the other if she was educated but because she’d defied him.

Then the explosion.

“I didn’t know what it was at first,” she said. “It’s very disorienting.” Then she remembered who she was talking to. “But I imagine you all know that.”

No one smiled, exactly. But the mood in the room lightened a little anyway. And this wasn’t the time to wonder what kind of person trained themselves to know how to react to explosions like that. Caradine had now been through two explosions, one significantly worse than the other, but both horrifying. She would be perfectly happy to never experience a firebomb or Molotov cocktail, or whatever other cutesy name people used to minimize the horror, ever again.

But whatever they were called, they were business as usual for Alaska Force.

She had to swallow past a sudden lump in her throat that she absolutely refused to name. Or analyze.

“I’d been dreaming about a way out,” she told them,pretending she couldn’t hear the scratchiness in her own voice. “But there wasn’t one. My father viewed his children as possessions. Currency, even. He told my brothers to jump, and they asked,How high?He was marrying my sister off because the best way he knew to control someone was to make them part of the family, and he deeply distrusted the man he wanted her to marry. He was really good at playing the long game.”

“What game was he playing with you?” Jonas asked.

“It wouldn’t only have been that he kept me from graduating,” Caradine said. “There was no shortage of brutal, vicious men he could have handed me to, and he would have. And if he was really pissed, he would also have told them I needed a strong hand. Meaning he would turn a blind eye if I turned up bruised and battered.”

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