He tensed for the fallout. “Because while my mother is safe, my wife was my mother’s caregiver, and she’s still in the house they were placed in. My family knows where that is.”
7
AUGUST 20, 2024
Steel
The room exploded,with the exception of Waters, who sat stoic at the foot of the table.
“What the fuck?”
“How the hell did I not find this in your dossier?”
“You walked away from your wife for this job?”
“Did you see her when you went to see your mother?”
Sensing the tension in the men, Scheherazade added her own yips from under the table.
A piercing whistle cut off their questions. It was Waters, as usual, reining the team in. “Everybody breathe!”
From his position at the foot of the table, God growled, “You’re fucking married?”
Steel walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked down into the street. “Yes, I’m married. Marrying her was one of the things Ihad to do to prove my loyalty to my father and the cartel. No, she doesn’t know I’m alive, and no, she didn’t see me when I visited my mother. And I didn’t walk away from her when I took this job. The time after our extraction was… exceptionally difficult. We were basically two strangers living in the same house by the time the Navy took me.”
He turned back to the room. “After a couple weeks of questioning, they finally believed they’d exhausted all we could give them. That was when they made the plan that labeled me a ‘domestic terrorist threat’ and sent me to my first black site assignment. A few weeks after that, they reported me to my wife as a casualty of a prison fight. To the world at large, I was a criminal. At least they kept their promises to her by keeping her and my mother in the witness protection program.”
“Unbelievable,” God said with an exhale.
“Pardon the invasive question,” Nemo began. “But why were you and your wife living together like strangers? She obviously knew what was going on prior to Ka-Bar’s shooting. I mean, you were married.”
He took a deep breath. “It wasn’t anything prior to that driving us apart.” He let it out. “During those seven years back with my family was when I was married to Daleyza. Two years into the marriage, we had a son, who was killed during our flight from my father’s estate. That was what destroyed my marriage. Ultimately, we couldn’t survive the loss. I put our child in danger by trying to escape my family’s reach, and he paid for my choices.”
The room erupted again, making Waters work much harder to calm everyone down.
Memories of losing his wife and child swamped him with guilt every time they floated to the surface. He struggled with it daily now because all the children were underfoot. The laughter of the little ones ringing through the halls of Tribe and seeing his friends head over heart made him happy, but it also made him long for his own family.
When the room finally calmed down, it was TB’s tremulous voice that rose first. “What happened to your son?”
Gunfire. Screams calling for Tobias. Ka-Bar falling to the ground, his back spattered with dark dots. His own yells for the guns to stop.
Mentally, he shook himself free of the flashback. “My brothers and father caught us leaving. They opened fire. Ka-Bar…” His voice cracked, and he swallowed before trying again. “Ka-Bar tried to protect him, but it wasn’t enough. Several of the bullets passed through him and hit Tobias. In order to cover their asses, the Navy falsified the report on where the shooting happened. All for ‘the greater good.’”
After a brief silence, God asked, “You knew about all of this, Waters?” He was pissed, and Steel figured he had every right to be.
“Yes. Cherry and I have been keeping an eye on them over the years, making sure she and Livia were safe.”
“Any other secrets you’re keeping from me? And I warn you, Waters, you’d better offer them up right fucking now.”
“No. This is the only thing I’ve ever kept out of reports. Since they were in WITSEC, they were the US government’s responsibility. And since his wife and mother already believed he was dead, it didn’t seem necessary to share it. All Cherry and I did was check on them periodically to make sure they were okay, and we did it from a distance. There was no actual contact with them.” He looked at Steel. He cleared his throat. “Up until last week.”
God dropped into a chair, closed his eyes, and rubbed his forehead. “For the love of fuck, please tell me this is the end of this fuckery. Let me guess. This is why Cherry needed that day off last week.”
“Yes. She met with Daleyza, got the paperwork signed, and arranged for Livia’s movement into the memory care facility.”
“I’m sorry,” Steel apologized. “I kept them a secret to protect them, not to make our lives difficult. Daleyza believes I'm dead. My mother doesn’t know the difference. I’ve accepted that my family was lost to me long ago, but I cannot allow them to be harmed while there’s breath in my body. I know in my heart that if I go back to myfamily, the cartel will not keep its promise to leave them alone, nor will they spare Ka-Bar. Instead, they will use them to get me home, and then they will kill them.”
“We do nothing on our own,” Waters reminded him. “We have my fuckup years ago to prove that solo is never an option, no matter what the cost might be. You did the right thing coming to us. We’re tribe. By extension, so is your family, as is Ka-Bar because he’s Kubrick’s brother.”
