But to him, it always felt like she was throwing down.
Maybe you wish she would, something in him suggested. He ignored it.
“Do you have something you need to talk to me about?” he asked coolly as he came to the bottom of the stairs. He hated that blank look. Those cool, assessing, green psyops eyes of hers that, thanks to her years in Army Intelligence, saw too much.
That always had.
Her chin lifted a fraction. Just a fraction, but he saw it.
“No,” she said quietly. “I don’t.”
And again, there was a moment, just a moment. The same rabbit hole. The same memories.
The same problem he didn’t know how to fix, when it was his life’s work to get out there and turn problems into solutions.
He hated it.
She did something with her mouth, maybe bit her tongue, and then she turned around again. Then ran up the long staircase a lot quicker than necessary.
Jonas took his time following.
And when he made it to the top, he took another moment to look around. To remind himself that he was not only glad to be alive, he was glad to be here. Right here in Fool’s Cove, doing things that mattered. Better still, knowing that on this side of his murky, highly classified years in the service, he was on the right side. Always.
The only quagmires he faced these days were in his own head.
He’d met Isaac when they were both in what was called Delta Force by some. They’d found themselves on a mission together in a city dancing its way toward a crisis. And while they’d waited for the inevitable crisis to happen, they’d had all kinds of discussions. Nothing like a shared foxhole to inspire a lot of gallows humor. But the usual talk about nothing in particular had shifted into more personal territory, which was how they’d found out that they’d both spent time in Alaska. Isaac had grown up here. Not in the family lodge but in Grizzly Harbor, the fishing village on the other side of the island. He even had an uncle here, living off the grid in the woods.
Jonas’s family hadn’t been quite so settled, to put it mildly. They’d spent a winter in Ketchikan, then a much colder summer out toward Nome. Then a couple of years north of the Arctic Circle in Fort Yukon. All of which paled in comparison to the time he’d spent in the Alaskan interior, after that final, terrible mission. After the Washington, D.C., nonsense was finished and the threat of court-martials had flipped to employment offers and commendations, Jonas had needed to go sit with himself. Alone.
Alone except for his gun, that was.
He hadn’t quite gotten there, despite more than a few nights that skated pretty close to that permanent eject button. But Isaac and Templeton had come and found him, then knocked some sense into him. Or tried. They’d convinced him that Alaska Force wouldn’t simply be an opportunity to keep doing the things they were trained to do. It would be more than that, Isaac had said. It would be an opportunity to heal. To be their own masters, for one thing.
And most important to Jonas, to make absolutely sure they never found themselves fighting on the wrong side.
All things considered, this iteration of Alaska was a lot better.
He had his own place in the dark forest on the hill. Unless Jonas was inside the lodge, actively involved in mission prep or monitoring, he could simply melt off into the woods. Sit in his own cabin, where he had a generator and access to electricity, though he rarely used it.
He knew the rest of the Alaska Force team liked to call him hard-core. He wasn’t. He’d been in a battle for survival for the whole of his life. Now he was safe, physically. But that only gave the ghosts inside him more opportunity to make their move—and if he yielded to any softness, he knew that was when they’d win.
Jonas couldn’t let that happen.
“I thought the mission was a success,” came a voice from behind him, but Jonas didn’t flinch or jump. He’d heard the exact moment his friend and leader Isaac had come out of the main part of the lodge and headed in his direction.
“Objectives were accomplished.”
Isaac came to stand next to him at the rail, looking out over the cove as the blustery March wind slapped at them both. There was a storm coming in, currently hunkered down over the mountain, so it smelled like rain and the deep tang of low tide.
Sometimes, if Jonas stood right here and breathed deep enough, he felt clean.
“How did August do?” Isaac asked.
“Excellent. As expected.”
“No concerns about performance? Or team integration?”
“He performed well. I almost forgot he was new.” Jonas looked at Isaac. “How are the others doing?”
Things were changing in Alaska Force. Isaac was settling down. He now split his time between Fool’s Cove and the house he kept in Grizzly Harbor that was more convenient for his woman, Caradine Scott. She ran the only decent restaurant in town, and therefore on the island: the Water’s Edge Café. Templeton was going back and forth between Fool’s Cove and Anchorage with the Alaska State Trooper’s special attachment to Alaska Force, his woman, Kate Holiday. Even ice-cold Griffin was domesticated these days, over in Grizzly Harbor with his no longer on the run Southern steel magnolia of a woman, Mariah McKenna. Blue Hendricks, former Navy SEAL and all-around badass, had gotten married in September. He and Everly, his wife, lived here in Fool’s Cove, but the balance had shifted.
All four of them had more reason to go home than to go out on an op these days. Unlike Jonas, who had spent years on certain missions in his time and sometimes thought that was the only time he was really, truly himself.
When he was playing someone else.
But that was an identity crisis for another day.
Isaac was looking into more permanent outposts in the middle of ongoing operations abroad. And while he never recruited for Alaska Force, because it wasn’t a good fit for someone unless they came and found it on their own—and he only took on about one in ten of those who made the trek—he’d found a crop of decent new members over the last six months.
August was one. A few weeks after Isaac had returned from a long few weeks in the Amazon last summer, Benedict Morse had shown up, maybe or maybe not a former member of the highly secret Task Force Black. Two more men had joined that fall: Jack Herriot, former Air Force Weatherman, and Lucas King, former ANGLICO Marine, among other things.
Isaac had a good eye. All the new men were distinguishing themselves on and off the field.
“Everyone is settling in great,” Isaac confirmed. “In fact, Jonas, there’s only one area of tension in the ranks, as far as I can tell.”
He didn’t sigh, because that was a tell. “Don’t.”
But Isaac ignored him. “Are you ever going to sort that out?”