“I can see why you were taken with her.” Luna reached for a second beer for himself. “She’s a beautiful woman.”
“She was a beautiful girl, but she was vulnerable.” With a shit upbringing. “Which is why I waited two years to enlist.”
Luna glanced at me with surprise. “No shit?”
I nodded once. “I waited until she graduated high school because I didn’t want to deploy and leave her alone. Knowing I was putting my life on hold for her, she took extra classes and graduated a year early.” I was proud of her for that, but she’d always been determined. She deserved every ounce of success she had.
“Then you deployed?”
“Then I enlisted, went through basic and came back here before deploying. She arranged a party to send me off. Invited everyone we knew, including my brother.” My jaw ticked, and my hands fisted around the bottle. “Halfway through the party, I found her in my bedroom naked with my brother.” I drained the second beer.
“Jesucristo,” Luna muttered.
Grabbing both bottles, I stood.
Luna shook his head. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have taken Vance’s call.”
“Yes, you would have.”
He eyed me. “Trefor’s maybe. Not Vance’s.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She was in trouble. “Neither of us would have ignored the call in the end.”
“You’re probably right,” Luna agreed.
“Not probably.”
Luna stood. “The only easy day was yesterday.”
“Trefor rubbing off on you?” That was a Teams saying.
Luna snorted. “Never.”
“Thanks for the beers.”
“De nada.” Slapping me on the shoulder, he glanced at the night sky. “Storm’s coming. Tropical depression winds.” He shook his head and smiled. “Gotta love Florida.” He stepped off the boat, but then he looked back at me. “We’ll catch the pendejo.”
Instinct hit, and I glanced up the dock. Scanning the shadows, I looked for anything out of place. “Plan on it.”
His hand going to his piece, Luna followed my glance. “Trouble?”
“Don’t know about tonight.” I scanned the marina. “Definitely the coming week.”
Luna’s gaze cut to me. “I got your six.”
“I know. Ditto.”
He nodded, but then he stood there a moment.
I waited.
“That video of her, the one of her on a porch step when she was younger, singing that sexy song—you took that, didn’t you?”
I’d long since deleted any trace of myself online, but that video had never gone away.
I nodded once.
Luna asked the one pertinent question in all of this. “How’d it get out?”
I told him the truth. “I made both the biggest mistake of my life and best decision ever.” I’d sealed her fate. “I uploaded it.”
“Love.” Luna shook his head as if it were a dirty word. “Hasta mañana.”
I didn’t bother pointing out it was already tomorrow. “Oh eight hundred,” I confirmed.
Luna walked up the dock and got in his Escalade.
Unable to shake the feeling that I was being watched, I scanned the marina one last time. Seeing no one, I locked up and headed below.
My phone where I left it was buzzing with unread alerts.
I picked it up. Three texts.
Songbird: You can’t be angry forever. That is a game no one wins.
Songbird: I blame myself more than you could ever know. Every day I regret my actions, the mistakes I made.
Bullshit.
Songbird: If you don’t want to respond anymore, fine. But know the woman you used to love, not the famous singer, she is sorry.
Anger drove my thumbs across the screen.
Me: The woman I fell in love with is gone.
Her reply was almost instant.
Songbird: You wanted me to be someone I wasn’t.
Me: I wanted you to be safe.
Songbird: You never wanted me to be famous.
I could hear the accusation in her voice as if she had spoken, and I only got angrier. I was never going to hold her back. Not intentionally.
Me: No, I never wanted you to sign a contract with an asshole who would’ve taken advantage of you.
He would’ve raped her, then passed her around.
Songbird: And now we’re here.
Something about her response, her choice of words, it pricked at my conscience, but I was too pissed off to pay attention as I self-righteously typed a reply.
Me: You got what you wanted.
The whole world knew her name.
Songbird: The man I knew was never petty or cruel.
Me: Nothing petty or cruel about what I said. I stated fact. You wanted to be famous. You got there, and you would have gotten there whether you signed that exact contract ten years ago or not.
Songbird: Says the man who knows nothing about the music industry.
Me: I didn’t need to know about the industry. I believed in you.
What fucking part of that did she not understand? I couldn’t be any more clear, not now, not ten years ago when I said the exact same thing to her.
Songbird: You wanted me for yourself while you left and gave everything you had to a military that saw your life as disposable.
Tired of a decade-old argument, I tamped down my anger and typed a reply.
Me: I gave you what no one else had.
I’d given her my heart, but it hadn’t been enough.
Songbird: Promises weren’t going to keep you alive. How did I know if you were going to come home?
Me: You were my home. I was always coming back.
One way or another, I would’ve come home to her, but she was missing the point.
I’d never left her.
She still owned me as much as she did ten years ago. Not even infidelity, my horrible mistake, a war and a groundbreaking career changed what was etched into my fucking being. One look at her fourteen years ago and I’d fallen so deep, I still hadn’t surfaced.
Songbird: Alive or in a box?
Did it matter?
Me: Go to sleep, Sanaa.
She downed her third drink.
Two fucking days of rotations with all of us on edge and nothing. No notes, no suspicious activity around the hotel, no suspect passengers flying in from the UK or anywhere else, and no personnel had left the tour. Trefor even had management up the practice sessions to keep everyone engaged in London.
But there’d been no movement.
No movement except the dance Sanaa and my brother did around each other.
Two hours into my first post when Vance had come and gone out of her suite three times to argue with her behind closed doors, I resigned myself to the fact that they fed off each other.
Then I’d shut everything down except the mission.
She hadn’t sent any more late-night texts, and I hadn’t spoken to her unless absolutely necessary. Vance kept a watchful eye on her, she stared at me, and I kept the perimeter secure.
Luna came and went. Trefor had left yesterday, and Ty, Harm, Tyler and I rotated on twelve-hour shifts. Except for today. We were all onsite because she had the bullshit meeting with some executives about a charity concert that she’d used as the excuse for coming to the States. The meeting was taking place downstairs in one of the hotel’s event rooms, and even though I’d protested at the stupidity of her showing her face downstairs, she was going through with it. And Vance and Trefor had agreed with her. They wanted her seen at least once in the hotel.