Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 37793 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 189(@200wpm)___ 151(@250wpm)___ 126(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 37793 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 189(@200wpm)___ 151(@250wpm)___ 126(@300wpm)
No. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t possibly be that much of an idiot.
My friend, Sergeant Errol Wagner, could not have been so stupid as to tell the man I loved, and was about to marry, that on my last outing, when I was working with the FBI HRT team, they had left me bleeding out in a building in Mosul.
It was a small group meant to be in and out without coming up on anyone’s radar.
Everything from hitting the house, to the extraction, had gone perfectly. We successfully acquired our target, the kidnapped daughter of an Iraqi minister. The issue was, we had bad intel and making our escape, ran into heavy fire and had to take cover in a building that had not been cleared. Not surprisingly, a wall collapsed between me and the rest of the team. I’d heard the telltale rumble and shoved one of the agents out of the way, and then got trapped under the rubble. Since their first directive was to get the hostage to safety, I was expendable. I knew that going in, I understood the mission, but I’d been in a lot of pain in those blurry moments and had wanted nothing more than to call Kurt and tell him I loved him. And that would’ve been selfish, to make him listen to me take my dying breath, but the urge had been great. There was also the fear that if I passed out and didn’t die, I would be apprehended and tortured for information. Bleeding to death or taking my own life were the only two options at that moment.
Lying there in pain, finding it harder and harder to breathe with each passing second, terrified that I was being slowly crushed to death, I heard someone say my name in my comm.
“Wags?” I whispered.
“Yeah, he’s there,” he said over the comms to others, then to me, “What did we say about going out with the fuckin’ Feds?”
“Never again,” I rasped. “Are you close?”
“We’re close. Two clicks down the road. Stay put.”
“Can’t do anything else. Building came down on me.”
He was quiet for a moment. “You hurt?”
“Yeah,” I barely got out.
“Well, hold the fuck on. We’re coming.”
I didn’t remember him and his team arriving. I had passed out by then. There were bigger issues than my ankle then. I was bleeding inside and out.
Later, during transport, I opened my eyes with the oxygen mask over my nose and mouth. I was rocking back and forth, and Errol had a death grip on my hand. When he looked down and found my gaze on him, he tried to smile.
“Just stay, all right?” he choked out. “Don’t go. I can’t…and you don’t want this to be the thing. I mean, not with the FBI.”
I nodded.
He exhaled sharply, then looked forward. “Make it go faster, Ruiz!”
“I’m taking these turns on two wheels, Wags,” he yelled back. “Shut the fuck up and let me drive.”
Wagner did just that.
“Hang on, Hunt! Don’t you fuckin’ die. I can’t take any more of this shit!”
Wagner took a shaky breath and looked at me. “What he said.”
They were both stateside at the moment. All the guys from my unit, including Steven Ruiz, were coming to my wedding. Wagner being the sole maybe, as he was overseeing something in Damascus he couldn’t tell me about. When you were working with the CIA, that was how it was.
And now I wished he’d stayed there because he’d outed me to Kurt, letting him know I lied to him. Not a good start to our wedding day.
“Where did he go?” I asked Thomasin.
“He said he was going for a walk down by the lake.”
Fuck.
“I’m sure he’ll be right back,” she said confidently.
I wasn’t so sure.
Leaving her, I took the flight down to the first floor and turned the corner at the base of the stairs quickly so no one saw me—I didn’t want to get stuck talking when I needed to find Kurt—then darted toward the rear exit when I heard him laugh.
I knew all his sounds, and well. I could pick out a chuckle or a sigh or moan without question. When I heard it again, I spun around and nearly ran into Hannah.
“Oh,” she gasped, laughing at me. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, fine, I just need to find Kurt and—”
“He’s with my father.”
I shook my head. “I was with your father and—”
“No, with my pa,” she apprised me. “Kurt looked upset, and I know what to do when people are upset.”
“And what is that?”
She shrugged. “Take them to my pa.”
I had no response to that.
“Come on.”
Walking beside her, I saw men I knew, friends, some of Kurt’s and some of mine, wave at me, but more importantly, I noticed how they looked at Hannah. I didn’t love it. Couldn’t they tell she was a kid?