I glanced down at my vest, splattered in artful bursts of garishly bright paint. “I don’t know…” I raised my gun and shot in his vicinity, somehow nailing him in the foot—likely because he only stood about five feet away. “I’m partial to purple.”
It was a thing for them to fill our guns with our favorite colors for training purposes and scoring reviews. Yolo didn’t necessarily like neon pink—rather a more sophisticated golden rose color, but paintball options weren’t endless. That was why when Aleks aimed and returned fire, a burst of white blossomed in the spread of three pinks instead of a light, powder blue. It’d been his favorite color ever since I picked out a shirt for him and explained through a stammering blush that it matched his eyes.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Brock yanked Aleks’s gun out of his hands. “Don’t shoot her! Why are you here, anyway? Where are the others?”
Aleks clapped his shoulder in a good-natured way that would’ve sent lesser men quaking in fear, but not Brock. “Your leader, Emerson—”
“Isn’t he your leader now too?” Yolo questioned, examining her nails. She feigned boredom, but if either of them gave her half an excuse to, she’d pull out her Agent Romanoff moves and put them in their place. I’d earned quite an undeserved rep just for holding my own against her—despite my insisting that she’d only been playing with me the entire fight. She never once admitted it, and it just fanned the fires the more I protested.
Aleks paused and let out a hearty laugh. “Bah! This is truth. Our leader sent me over to manage tantrum temper.”
I’d opened my mouth to correct Aleks’s mix-up, remembered his scheme about learning in the bedroom, nearly did it anyway before remembering where I was, and bit my tongue—hard. It still didn’t stop the images of a candlelit broad Russian with his blond-tipped waves brushing the masculine dips and planes of his well-defined shoulder muscles—shirtless shoulder muscles—while he spoke in husky, broken English.
I shivered.
Brock had no such qualms about correcting the Russian. The odds were that Aleks had never propositioned him like he had me. In fact, Brock seemed to thrive on the constant corrections as much as Aleks enjoyed calling Brock a boulder. He used to call him a rock because his name was Brock, but then he discovered that his nickname had been high praise considering Brock’s last name was Johnson.
“You mean temper tantrum.”
“Da, is what I say. Do not have tantrum temper on words, Boulder.”
“I won’t, Alexa, if you stop shooting Callie. What the fuck was that for?”
Aleks’s face morphed into indignation. “You see with eyes, da? Little bear shoot first. My favorite boots! You yell for wrong reason.”
“Get over it. You probably did or will do something in the future to deserve it.”
Aleks seemed ready to argue, but then he paused and shrugged his linebacker shoulders. “This is truth.”
“So,” Yolo summed up, “Monsieur Emerson sent you over here to keep Brock in line, oui?”
It’d been my guess too. The two biggest guys at Delta were the only ones who could keep each other in check. Now that they were on the same team, the convenience of it had been too much to pass over for both Emerson and Jace, the new co-leaders of the combined teams.
“We what?” Aleks asked with a frown. “My English is bad, but I know not to use ‘we’ at end of sentence.” He nudged me with his elbow, making me stumble forward three steps. “Tell her, medvezhonok.”
“You know she said oui and not we. She does it all the time. Don’t bait her,” I chided with a shake of my head. “Last time you did that, she had you splayed out on your back in five seconds.”
Aleks’s grin turned wicked. He switched to Russian, knowing perfectly well that Yolo wouldn’t be able to understand him and Brock would. “If I bait you, will you splay me out on my back? Because I have to say I could really go for that a time or two… or twenty. Tell me, little bear, do—”
“Enough,” Brock growled, cutting Aleks off before it devolved any further. He turned to me, crossing his arms over his chest—if they’d ever uncrossed in the first place. “You were having another episode, weren’t you?”
I cleared my throat and looked away, basically blaring at the top of my lungs that he’d hit the nail on the head, but I didn’t want to accept or admit it out loud.
Everything I’d experienced up here had been checked out of reality. I hadn’t seen Andrea since the incident at the airport, let alone tried working with him. Additionally, I hadn’t seen Veseli since Chernobyl, though I’d heard his death.
As expected, the entire incident left me damaged and hurting. The recurring nightmares morphed over the span of weeks from that day until it played out very differently from reality. And now said nightmare had begun invading my waking life.
My continued silence passed as an answer for Brock. His thick brows lowered. He took a step toward me, but Yolo intercepted.
“I’ll take her to Dr. Harper’s office. You should go meet up with your new and improved super team and debrief them.”
“But—”
“Non, I do not want to hear it. You will have your time with her. I wish to walk her to Dr. Harper’s one last time,” Yolo interrupted, crossing her arms and comically staring the large Serbian down—and looking absolutely terrifying doing it. The comedy came from the petite French woman being about half his size and successfully getting him to back down.
To help put matters into even more perspective, Brock had multiple black belts in various disciplines.
If it boiled down to an honest to goodness standoff between the two, Brock could take Yolo on, maybe, most likely. However, she was just good enough that he wouldn’t be able to do anything without harming her, and Brock didn’t harm people unless someone messed with a person he cared about. Then all bets flew out the window as this raging, overprotective beast emerged from the flames.
I’d know. I’d experienced it quite a few times by now.
Brock clenched his jaw before conceding. “Fine, but go straight there and back. No getting distracted or going off course. And don’t make her late.”
I brushed my pants off out of reflex since it was so important to have a clean butt when the front of me resembled a Jackson Pollock painting.
Yolo wrapped one arm around my shoulders and guided us out of the maze of obstacles. She peered coyly over her shoulder at them. “Late for what?”
“I know you’re messing with me,” Brock shot back. “It’s not fucking funny.”
“Am I? Hmm…”
Aleks’s broad grin dimmed as a frown stole over. “Boulder? I think she does not joke.”
A smile tugged Yolo’s lips at Aleks’s speculation. Only I could see it though, much to the added tension of the guys. I felt bad, but Yolo had been right. The guys would all get their time with me. However, moments with the Cardinals were running out. I kept silent, fighting myself from mimicking Yolo’s amusement because now that I knew her sense of humor, I could at least appreciate the situation as a speck of lighthearted joy in an ever encroaching darkness.
Yolo turned us around a corner to the shout of Brock’s voice bellowing, “You are kidding, right? You have to remember what’s happening this afternoon. Yolo? Yolo! Fuck! I swear, you better have her there on time. If this is some ploy you Cardinals have put together to—”