“No way,” Rachel said. “Let me guess, you were named for Fort Knox in Kentucky.”
He nodded. “Bingo. My little sister was born at Fort Riley in Kansas. And my brother at Fort Gillem in Georgia. If you ask me, Gil got the short end of the stick on that. I still don’t know what my parents were thinking when they named him.”
She laughed. “If you come from an army family, how’d you end up in the navy?”
He shrugged. “After being around all that olive drab and living on all those bases in the middle of nowhere, there was no way I was going in the army. Dad had a cow, but the first time I boarded a ship, I knew I’d made the right decision.”
That earned him another laugh. Man, he was really starting to like that sound.
“I can definitely understand wanting to go your own way,” she said. “I grew up in an army family, too. My dad is retired, like yours, and my older brother is a major in the Special Forces assigned to Fort Campbell, which now that I think about it, would suck as a first name, so I’m glad he and his wife didn’t go that route when they named my nephew.”
“Big time,” he agreed, helping himself to another serving of casserole. “Did your family have a problem with you becoming a cop instead of going in the military?”
Rachel shook her head. “Not really. Law enforcement is an acceptable alternative in the Bennett family. Although my two sisters didn’t go in the military or become cops.” She glanced at him as she spooned some more pie onto her plate. “Now I know why you joined the navy. What made you become a SEAL?”
He grimaced. “You’ll probably pick up on this as a recurring theme soon enough with me, but it turns out I have a habit of making impulsive decisions. In this case, I saw a video at the recruiting center about SEALs doing all this badass stuff and decided that was the job for me. The recruiter tried to talk me out of it, saying the SEALs weren’t something to jump into on a whim, but I told him it was the SEALs or nothing.”
“Ever regret that impulsive decision?”
He grimaced. “I have to admit, there were a few times during training when I was so exhausted I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to move again and thought for sure I’d gotten in over my head, but I kept going. I’m stubborn that way.”
“And then after eight years, you decided you didn’t like it?” she asked. “What, are you a slow learner or simply a glutton for punishment?”
Knox laughed, loving her sharp tongue and even sharper wit. “Neither, I hope. Honestly, I loved the job, even if the nonstop deployments didn’t leave me much time for a life.”
“But?” she prompted.
He cursed silently. Sometimes, it seemed like he had a sign stuck on his forehead that readI have a screwed-up backstory. Ask me about it!But the day he’d walked away from the SEALs, he’d made the decision to leave all that shit behind. He hadn’t talked about it with anyone, not even friends or family. He didn’t want to dredge it up for Rachel, either.
“But,” he said, taking a deep breath, “things happened, and suddenly, my perspective on life changed. So, I made another of my famous impulsive decisions and got out of the navy. It was as simple as that.”
On the other side of the table, Rachel studied him like she didn’t believe a single word he’d just said. He braced himself, expecting her to press for more information, but instead, she took another small bite of food.
“Okay, so you bailed on the SEALs and then what? Stumbled across a recruitment poster for the hunters?” she asked, her voice suddenly sharp. “Let me guess—the offer of all the werewolves you could slaughter was too much to resist.”
Knox’s first instinct was to defend himself, but he stuck a sock in the urge. While the details might be a little off, Rachel was fairly close to the truth. Yeah, he’d been played for a sucker, but he was still the guy who’d fallen for the lies. What he’d done was his responsibility and no one else’s.
“I was in a bar in Tulsa,” he said, looking down at his empty plate and wondering when he’d finished the food on it. “I’d been out of the navy for nearly five months by then with no job prospects and no idea what the hell I was supposed to do with myself. After a few beers and a couple of shots, I struck up a conversation with the bartender. I mentioned I used to be a SEAL and was looking for work, and this guy a few barstools down came over and started chatting me up.”
“He was a hunter?”
“Yeah.” Knox grabbed his glass of milk and downed half of it. The stuff still tasted as good as he remembered. “The guy was prior military, and we did shots and talked until the bar closed, sharing stories about combat we’d been in and people we’d lost.”
He swallowed hard, remembering how close he’d come to telling a complete stranger about why he’d gotten out of the navy. He blamed the alcohol and the isolation of having spent months on his own with nothing but nightmares for company. He still wasn’t sure why he’d held his tongue, but he had and he was glad.
“As we were leaving the bar, he told me about some people he worked for,” Knox continued. “At first, he made it sound like he was hunting down terrorists for a secret branch of the government, but then he started talking weird about fighting an enemy no one else knew about—‘a threat to the existence of the human race’ was the way he put it.”
Rachel let out another snort. Knox silently agreed. He remembered thinking the same thing that night and that maybe he should get the hell out of there before it got any weirder.
“The guy pulled out his phone and showed me pictures of bodies torn apart—violence that even I hadn’t seen before. And trust me, I’ve seen a lot,” Knox said. “Then he showed me a photo of a man with glowing blue eyes and fangs and told me monsters really existed and that they were trying to wipe the rest of us out.”
Knox didn’t dare look at Rachel on the other side of the table, not wanting to see the revulsion he knew was on her face. It was one he was familiar with. He’d seen it reflected in the mirror too many times to count.
“I agreed to help right on the spot,” he whispered, staring down at his plate. “I thought I’d be saving the world from monsters. It wasn’t until a month later, after being pulled fully into the operation, that I saw my first real werewolf—and what the other hunters did to him. I tried to stop it, but I was too late. That’s when I knew I’d made the biggest mistake of my life.”
Rachel was silent for so long he almost thought she’d gotten up and left the kitchen table without him realizing it, but when he lifted his head, she was still sitting there, staring at him with a flat, unreadable expression on her face that made him wonder if she might actually try to kill him.
“How many werewolves died while you stood by and watched?” she asked softly.
