I downed my whiskey. “If they come, we’re ready,” I said. “If not, we live like normal people.”
Burke snorted. “You don’t know what normal looks like, Steele.”
Maybe not. But for the first time in my life, I wanted to try.
When the rain started, it was gentle, almost polite. We sat and drank until the bottle was empty and the storm drowned out everything but the promise of tomorrow.
By midnight, the house was a fortress.
Burke took the attic room, Macon staked out a guest suite with a field of view on the approach road, and I prowled the halls, double-checking locks even though every door had been reinforced twice since dusk.
The rain had found its stride. It battered the roof, drove sideways through the eaves, and pooled in the gutters like a time bomb waiting to freeze. Every so often, a gust would rattle the old windowpanes, and I’d catch myself reaching for the pistoleven when I knew, rationally, that the only thing outside was a hell of a storm.
I made a last perimeter check, the motion lights flaring in sequence as I walked the grounds. In the laundry room, the chick box glowed under a red lamp, Jojo’s careful handwriting labeling each with a dumb name: Midnight, Plum, Biscuit, Gunner, Little Mac, and so on.
Upstairs, his bedroom door was ajar, light from the hallway limning the edges. I paused, listened for the telltale rhythm of his breath. He was asleep, but even in dreams, he guarded his stomach with one hand, the other flung wide as if to catch me when I came to bed.
I watched him for a minute. He looked so fucking young like that, all bones and hair and soft, unguarded mouth. The kind of vulnerability that would have terrified me once, because it begged to be protected, and I’d failed too many people before to trust myself with anything fragile.
But that was the past. I was building something different now. I was going to protect it even if it killed me.
I stripped off my shirt, climbed in beside him, and spooned my chest to his back. My arm curled over his ribs, hand flattening over his—our—child.
For a long time, I just breathed him in. The storm outside was a war, but the bed was a foxhole, and I’d be damned if I let anything breach it.
Jojo stirred, muttered something that sounded like “honey” or maybe “hungry,” then settled. I pressed my lips to the nape of his neck, let myself hope that maybe, just maybe, there was more to life than the next battle.
I closed my eyes and, for the first time in years, prayed. Not for myself, but for the strength to keep this. To hold it together without turning into the weapon the Navy had spent a decade forging.
Somewhere out there, beyond the circle of porch light, I knew the enemy was watching. I knew they’d try again.
Let them come.
I’d be ready.
* * * *
On the far edge of the property, headlights flickered once, then went dark.
A figure in rain gear raised night-vision binoculars, sighting on the farmhouse. He watched the windows, counted the shadows moving through the upstairs rooms.
He spoke low into a satellite phone: “They brought in reinforcements. Military types. Yeah, three, maybe four. The target’s locked down tight.”
A pause, then: “No, sir. Not yet. But I’ll keep watching.”
He clicked off the call, shifted his weight to keep from sinking in the mire, and settled in for a long, cold wait.
The storm did its best to drown him out. But the figure watched, and waited, and never looked away from the lighted window where two shapes pressed together in the dark, perfectly still.
A promise, if you knew how to read it.
Chapter Sixteen
~ Jojo ~
Three weeks is long enough for chicks to go from peeping yellow fluffballs to awkward, greasy-feathered velociraptors. It’s also, apparently, long enough for a pair of goats to turn a ranch from a fortified bunker into a petting zoo with delusions of grandeur.
I woke to the gentle, insistent baaa of the morning shift, the window cracked so the sound of the barn drifted into the bedroom before my alarm even buzzed.
