DESS HAD BEEN WORKING out for the better part of an hour. Even though the house didn’t come with our typical exercise equipment, she’d gone through her usual circuit of floor exercises twice, jogged in place as if she had a treadmill whipping away beneath her feet, and worked through several sequences of combat moves.
None of that was particularly out of the ordinary, but the pace she’d set struck me as closer to frantic than focused. Sweat shone on her forehead and arms, but she didn’t stop to so much as gulp water before throwing herself into the next set of exercises. Her eyes were glazed, focused on thoughts that had nothing to do with the house around us.
Seeing her like this sent a quiver of apprehension through me. Dess was usually nothing if not controlled. She could rival the best of us with her discipline.
When she started pushing herself this hard, it meant there was something she was trying to escape. Something she couldn’t outrun by any normal means. I could take a few guesses at what that might be. The number of catastrophes in her life had been adding up for a while.
I got up from the sofa. “Dess,” I said, but her head didn’t so much as twitch in my direction. She just kept bobbing up and down in her whirlwind of stomach crunches.
“Dess,” I repeated, a little louder, walking over as I spoke.
That time, her name sank in. She spun around and onto her feet in one smooth movement, then stayed crouched there, panting as she stared up at me.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
I folded my arms over my chest. “That’s what I was going to ask you. You look like you’re trying to tackle a monster ten times your size.”
She bit her lip, the gesture sending a flash of heat through me at the thought of taking that lip between my own teeth. I shook myself out of the memories of last night’s epic encounter between the five of us.
She didn’t need me lusting over her right now. She needed a confidante.
“It’s nothing really new,” she said.
I wasn’t going to let her dodge the subject this time. “It’s bothering you enough that you’re going to dehydrate yourself with all that sweat. Why don’t you grab a glass of water and then tell me what’s bothering you? Even if it can’t be fixed right now, there are other ways of letting it out than working yourself into exhaustion.”
Dess let out a huff, but she got up and walked over to the kitchen, lifting the bottom of her shirt to wipe her damp face. I couldn’t say I minded the brief view of her taut stomach. I had plenty of control too, but I wasn’t any kind of saint.
She threw back the glass of water in a few long chugs, filled it again, and drank the second one more slowly. Then she set down the glass with a rap against the granite countertop. Her shoulders slouched just slightly.
“You know I had brunch with my dad this morning,” she said. “There was a purse thief at the restaurant, just a teenager—I saw how Damien treated the kid, how he talked to him… I know this was obvious all along, but it really drove it home that I can never be who I really am with him.”
“You can’t tell him about the Decima part of your life,” I filled in.
She nodded. “Even though I’m his daughter… I mean, he broke a kid’s bones for trying to snatch a purse. Even if I switched over to the straight and narrow right now and stayed there from this day forward, if he ever got a whiff of the jobs I carried out before, he’d never look at me the same way again. He’d see me as a monster—the kind of monster he thinks he’s fighting.”
I hadn’t thought that Dess would ever consider going entirely straight, but now that she brought it up, I realized it was an obvious option. It would certainly give her a better chance of integrating into the life she’d been meant to have. But imagining her walking away from us, saying good-bye to not just our company but all the skills that had made her famous among the most hardened of hitmen, wrenched at my gut.
She wasn’t ordinary, not at all. She deserved to have that part of herself celebrated, not crushed.
And, damn it, I wanted to be there celebrating it with her.
“Would you want to go straight?” I asked, trying to keep my tone even and impartial. As much as I hated the thought of her leaving, it was her decision, and I needed to give her full rein to make the choice herself.
If I pushed her in one direction or another, she might end up resenting me later. After all the ways she’d had her life decided for her in the past, I didn’t want to manipulate her now.
She sighed and clenched her jaw. “I don’t want to, now. I’m not even sure I could if I decided it was worth trying to so that I could have a more open relationship with my birth family. I’m good at this. It feels good, pulling off a job, knowing I took one more prick out of commission who can’t do any more harm…” She paused. “Now that I get to pick my jobs, I’m going to stick to the same code as you do—no one who doesn’t deserve it. I can’t quite believe that’s wrong.”
“There are a lot of those people,” I muttered.
“Yeah. But there are also a lot of people like my father who can’t imagine that anyone stepping outside the law could be anything other than a horrible villain.”
Something about those words struck a chord in me. Maybe there was something I could say that would help after all—not fix the struggle she was going through, but give her a perspective she hadn’t had before.
I’d never talked with Blaze and Garrison about my history. I never even discussed it with Talon—he only knew because he’d been there. But the past existed for a reason: to inform the present. If I could use it to give Dess more tools to figure out the right path for her, then it was worth dredging up those terrible memories.
I motioned her away from the kitchen. “Come with me? There are some things I can tell you that might help you sort through this.”
Dess cocked her head curiously and followed me over to the sofa. Talon and Garrison had gone off on a grocery store run, and Blaze was adding a few more surveillance cameras to his network in the neighborhood, so it was just the two of us. Still, my skin tightened before I spoke as if I had an audience of thousands.
The most important part had been my time in the military, but it was better to start right at the beginning, the incident that had set me on this path well before then.
“Dealing out justice was important to me from an early age,” I said as Dess settled onto the sofa across from me. “When I was fifteen, I found out that my little sister—she was in middle school—was being abused by a teacher at her school.” Even though Christy had gotten through that and no longer showed any lingering scars, just mentioning it brought a fresh wave of anger into my chest. “I didn’t trust the authorities to deal with it properly. I was furious, and all I knew was that I had to protect her, so I got rid of him pretty much the same way I would a target now, just without quite as much finesse.”
Dess’s eyes widened. “You murdered him.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “Don’t look so shocked. You were carrying out assassinations when you were, what, eight? By your standards, I was a late bloomer. I’m lucky I managed not to get caught.”
She swatted my knee. “I was trained for it. You weren’t.”
“Don’t underestimate the power of protective rage,” I said with a small, wry smile. “Dealing out justice that way… It was more satisfying than I’d ever expected. So maybe I was always a little unhinged. I leaned into those impulses the best way I could, by joining the military. I figured I’d get the opportunity to defend our country through violent means, keep my appetite for brutal justice sated and do good at the same time.”
Dess studied me. “But it didn’t turn out that way,” she said.
It wouldn’t have been hard to guess that, considering she knew I’d started the crew more than ten years ago, when I still could have had an excellent military career if I’d wanted one.
I shook my head. “It didn’t. I gave it a solid shot. Rose through the ranks and was recruited into a special ops team. That’s where I met Talon. We were in the same squad, going out and working operations the regular forces couldn’t have stomached.”
“And then?”
I exhaled slowly. “And then we were sent on what was supposed to be just an information-gathering mission. We were tapped for it because it was in an area with a lot of hostile activity from unfriendlies. It was a small town, people who didn’t have much but were willing to work with us because they thought we could get them out from under the thumb of the local insurgents.”
I paused to swallow and then went on. “You have to understand that in the military, everyone’s expected to know their role and stick with it. And you don’t question anyone who ranks higher than you—you just follow orders. So I was focused on carrying out my part of the job, but I couldn’t help noticing that the commander seemed to be dropping the ball… not sending out as many sentries as I thought the situation warranted, directing us all into the same part of town instead of having us spread out…”
“So you spoke up, and he told you off?” Dess said.
I grimaced. “No. That’s what makes this story so shameful. Well, I made a couple of comments to the commander, but he brushed me off and made it clear that he knew best, and it didn’t seem worth arguing about. I thought maybe I was being overly cautious. It was my first year in special ops. He had way more experience than I did.”
“But you weren’t being too cautious.”
“Exactly.” The memories rose up, just as horrifying as they’d been fifteen years ago. “A contingent of insurgents swarmed the town. There weren’t enough sentries to send out a warning quickly enough for us to be prepared. They shot several of us before we even realized what was happening, and then we spent the rest of the day and night locked in a bloody stand-off… Talon and I barely made it out alive with several of the townspeople we managed to help escape, but it was a near thing.” I tapped my earlobe. “That was when this bullet came just a few inches from lodging in my brain.”
“Just you and Talon out of the whole squad?” Dess murmured.
I inclined my head. “Everyone else with us, including the commander, died.” A couple of cocky nineteen-year-olds who’d just started integrating into the squad. A woman who’d notified the command of her pregnancy earlier that morning. “As well as a hell of a lot of the civilians we should have been protecting.” Elderly men and little kids, sprawled bleeding in the streets. I closed my eyes against the barrage of images.
“That’s horrible,” Dess said, reaching to squeeze my hand.
“It was,” I agreed. “And it made me determined not to find myself in that position ever again. But that meant that I had to talk back when I disagreed with higher ranking officers. Thinking they knew what was right wasn’t good enough. It had to be backed up with a plan where every piece was totally solid.”
“I guess they didn’t like the criticism very much.”
I chuckled darkly. “No, they did not. I got written up a few times and then officially discharged. It wasn’t the right fit. But I still had the urge to fight those who needed to be taken down. So I started the Chaos Crew with Talon, where I’d get to operate our missions according to my principles. And one of those is to surround myself with other people I trust—other voices who can help me see different perspectives. I don’t want to ever start thinking that I always know better than everyone around me.”
“That makes sense.” Dess squeezed my hand. “I’m not sure I see how it relates to my father, though.”
I held her gaze. “When I hear about men like Damien Malik, they remind me of the commander in the field that day. You can mean well and believe you’re doing your best—and still be so caught up in doing things your way that you can’t see when you need to adjust course. It’s never wise to end up on a crusade like your father’s where there’s no room to pivot or notice the nuances of the situation. He’s got tunnel vision… and that leads to people getting hurt who don’t deserve it.”
Dess nodded, worrying at her lower lip again. For a long moment, she was silent, and I started to worry I’d laid too much on her all at once. Then she rubbed her mouth.
“Thank you,” she said, gazing back at me. “I’m sure it’s not fun thinking or talking about all that. I hadn’t looked at the situation quite that way before, though.”
“I’m happy to both listen to other voices and be one when someone else might need it,” I said, turning my hand so I could grip her fingers in return.
“You know, it’s probably good for me to keep that idea in mind for myself too,” Dess went on. “I need to keep an open mind and listen to everything people around me are saying if I’m going to piece together the evidence about my past and my family into a coherent picture. I can’t get too stuck on assuming that one thing or another I haven’t actually proven is true.”
My smile came back. “That’s very wise indeed. I’ll give you full credit for that part.”
She laughed, and her phone pinged with an incoming text. She fished it out of her pocket casually, but the second she glanced at the screen, her brow furrowed.
“What?” I asked.
Dess drew in a breath. “It looks like it’s time to get some more of that evidence. Anthea just sent along the results of her soil analysis.”
