Jonas (Minnesota Marshalls #2)(5)
Author: Susan May Warren

 

“I have no idea what that means,” Jonas said, but he was grinning, even as he took a moment to breathe. The rain ran down into an array of light-brown whiskers, dripped off his jaw.

 

“It means you’re doing great,” Sibba said, and offered a return smile.

 

So, maybe not quite as arrogant as she’d first thought.

 

They finally reached the hut, the place dark, just the glow of the stove illuminating the main room, with tiny lights flickering on the tabletops as they came in. A few people stood in the room in front of the fire, most of them silent, eyes wide, morose.

 

Some of them got up when Jonas came in and set Ina on a tabletop. When he untied her, his hands shook. Maybe from cold. Poor man was soaked through. “Anyone here a doctor? She needs her ankle looked at.”

 

When no one moved, Sibba translated.

 

One of the women moved away from the stove and came over, identified herself as a doctor and asked for details as she then worked off Ina’s shoe, her sock.

 

Sibba noticed how Jonas walked over to the fire, held his hands out, then began to peel off his thermal shirt.

 

She spotted a hint of a washboard stomach as his thermal shirt rose before he tugged down the inner T-shirt over it. He draped the shirt by the fire.

 

He was shivering, his arms wrapped around himself, staring into the fire with a tight jaw. As if reliving something.

 

Or just, suddenly, overwhelmed.

 

She glanced at Ina, but the doctor was busy examining Ina’s injury, so she joined Jonas by the fire. “You okay?”

 

He exhaled, swallowed, nodded.

 

“Not a fan of storms?”

 

“Not a fan of nearly dying in storms.” He glanced at her. “But no, the storm doesn’t scare me.”

 

Interesting clarification. Then Nixon brought over a cup of hot cocoa, and Jonas slid onto the top of a table to blow on the cocoa and sip it. He was handsome in the light, with his light-brown hair twining out of his stocking cap, a hint of whiskers. She liked his hands, the way he gripped the cup, and for a moment, her mind went to his hand in hers.

 

So maybe she didn’t dislike all Americans. “Thanks for coming for us. I know I should have gone for help, but I just couldn’t leave her—”

 

“Hey. I get it.” He met her eyes. Yes, blue, although when she let herself look, they had shades of green in the center. His gaze fixed on her. No smile, just a grim set to his mouth. “I wouldn’t have left my friend behind either.” Then he glanced at Nixon, who made a face, then looked away.

 

Jonas took another sip of cocoa.

 

Ina made a sound behind her, and Sibba turned to see the doctor probing her injury. She should get back to her—

 

“It’s okay to be scared, you know.”

 

Sibba turned back to Jonas. “What?”

 

“Back on the mountain, you said you weren’t afraid. But…it’s okay to be afraid.”

 

No, it wasn’t. Not for her. Not ever for her. Fear made mistakes. Fear got people killed.

 

“I wasn’t afraid.” She gave him a smile. “Thanks again.”

 

Then she walked over to the doctor examining Ina’s injury.

 

Jonas and his friend were gone to bed by the time Ina’s ankle had been wrapped. Sibba checked the roster of rooms in the hostel, then helped Ina down the hall to their bunk room.

 

She opened the door. No electricity for lights, but in the darkness, she found a cot and set Ina down on it.

 

A grunt made her still. Oh. No.

 

She turned on her torch. Faced it toward the ceiling.

 

In the dim light, Spidey and his buddy Nixon were mostly dead to the world, wrapped in blankets, sleeping on the two lower bunks. She’d nearly set Ina down on top of Nixon.

 

Perfect.

 

But for a second, her gaze landed again on Jonas. He had long lashes that gentled his face, turned him peaceful and sweet in sleep.

 

“Where are we going to sleep?” Ina said quietly. “I’m not sure I can climb to the top bunk.”

 

Sibba walked over to the bunk and pulled the mattress off the top. Put it on the floor, then added the other one. She gathered up the blankets and pillows and tossed them on the mattresses. Helping Ina onto the floor, she tucked her in. Then she lay beside her and closed her eyes, listening to the breathing of the men in the room.

 

And realized, suddenly, that for the first time in months, her own breath spilled out, full, even, unhindered, the ever-present grip of fear in her gut gone.

 

Keep your eyes on me, and you’ll be fine. I won’t let you get hurt.

 

This, she hadn’t seen coming. But maybe, just maybe, it was all right.

 

“Good night, Ina,” she said.

 

And then she was dead asleep.

 

 

 

 

 

Two

 

 

 

 

 

One Month Later

 

 

Another day to live.

 

Please.

 

If she didn’t sweat to death first.

 

“This is unnecessary.” Sibba adjusted the chest plate in the Kevlar suit from where it landed on her hip bones and tried to see through the steamed-up visor.

 

Not a hope.

 

She took off the hood. Set it on the table in the house where her kit, along with a handful of uniformed police and one particularly nervous rookie bomb disposal expert, watched her.

 

Or maybe their gaze was on the tractor in the middle of the yard that still sat, as if frozen in fear, after plowing up history.

 

Dangerous history in the form of a fifty-kilogram German iron bomb with a transverse fuze. It still stuck halfway out of the dirt, having been churned up with the other debris while cleaning the yard after the storm that whipped down from the mountains and through the small town of Železniki. Nestled in the craggy foothills, the town was a relatively recent development, with newer houses sprouting up in the washes and valleys.

 

“Is this your first callout since the storm?” The question came from the director general of the Hazardous Device Unit out of Ljubljana, a bear of a man named Vlasic.

 

“No. Had two in as many days. This is the third. But it’s the biggest.”

 

Aka, the one that could get more than her killed. She pulled off her gloves and set them on the table.