“I know. But no one can send out his distress beacon other thanhim, so the fact that he’s minus his tracker and asking for extraction is disturbing as fuck.”
Quiet fell while the men finished eating.
After a while, another blond, this one covered in tattoos and piercings, broke the silence with his Afrikaans accent. “Since we’re stuck here with nothing to do… Would you rather…?”
A chorus of groans and comments on the speaker’s parentage bloomed, and TB threw a half-eaten protein bar at him. “Steel! Shoot him, please!”
Steel turned his quicksilver eyes to where Nemo sat feeding the remains of the bar to an Egyptian street dog at his side. It was tempting. He loved his teammates, but Nemo was a trial on the best of days. Today wasn’t one of them. Drawing his actual weapon and aiming it at the man, even with the safety on, would be asking for the dog to attack him. Instead, he pulled a tube of peanut butter from his pocket and sent it like a missile to bounce off Nemo’s head.
The company started laughing, the offender included.
Nemo crumpled up the protein bar wrapper and threw it back at TB, hitting him in the chest with it. Then he opened Steel’s offering and fed it to the dog as well.
“You’re gonna kill that dog feeding it that shit,” the giant grumbled. He put the wrapper in his pants pocket. None of them would leave trash behind in the jungle, not only to prevent the animals from getting into it, but so no one would know they had been there. “Aren’t they allergic to some of that stuff? Like, toxic-allergic?”
“You think I’d hurt my girl by feeding her something that would poison her?”
There was no heat behind the question, mostly because these men knew each other better than siblings did. They’d been together a long time. Knew each other’s quirks and loved each other despite them.
Nemo grinned at the dog and gave her a vigorous scratch between the ears. She returned his affection with a big, sloppy lick across the mouth.
“Eww.” TB grimaced. “Make sure D gives you a shot of penicillin or something before you kiss Gem when we get back home.”
“Dude. Have you forgotten that you ate a cookie that your son sucked on without eating?”
Steel just shook his head. Nemo wasn’t wrong. They had, in fact, seen TB do that at Axel’s birthday party. The interrogator’s son had turned one a few days before they left on this project, and Tribe’s women required a big production for the occasion. Nothing against Axel, but…
He closed his eyes, as if that would somehow stop the memories.
Balloons. Cake smeared across the little boy’s face, somehow into his black hair, and onto his baby-sized suit. The smile so wide, his baby teeth displayed, tinted blue and yellow from the frosting.
His eyes snapped open. When they did, Waters was staring at him. Instantly, he locked down the emotions coursing through him. With effort, he shoved aside the insidious memories. It was the only thing that saved him. Every time they surfaced, it was as if he stepped on an emotional IED, and that was dangerous.
Since the announcement of Axel’s unexpected, impending arrival, life at Tribe had become more difficult for him. Then, the sudden appearance of children around them after rescuing Mouse in Egypt earlier this year made it torturous. He’d been escaping to his crash pad more and more, taking as many projects as possible to avoid the chaos the kids brought. They were great kids, but… it was too much sometimes.
Refocusing his attention on the here and now, he found his former teammate was still trying to rope everyone into his antics.
“This is a good one. Trust me!” Nemo promised. “Okay. Would you rather…” He scanned the faces of the team. “Have a pause button for your life? Or a rewind button?”
There was complete silence except for the jungle’s night noises.
After several minutes, a tall, dark-haired man whistled. “Yeah. That is a good one,” Demon agreed.
Several more minutes passed before Nemo prompted them. “TB?”
“I’d want a pause button,” the man admitted. “With my kids growing up, it seems like milestones happen, and you don’t get any time to enjoy them before the next one hits. First words. First steps. First birthdays.” There were smiles all around, remembering all the moments they’d watched happen over the past year with the boy. “I want more time to savor those things before they’re gone.”
Waters spoke next. “I want a rewind button.”
Steel held his breath.
“I want to go back to the moment I encouraged God to take my sister on board. Don’t get me wrong. She was good at her job. Better than anyone else would have been. But if I’d left her behind like I left everyone else, she wouldn’t have died the way she did.”
The men were silent. Sarah had been kidnapped in retaliation for the damage Waters had done rescuing victims of sex trafficking. He’d gone after her, but that choice had caused him to be captured and tortured, then forced to watch her be raped and murdered. While his team had rescued him, they had not been quick enough to save Sarah, and it took a year for Waters to recover physically so he could return to work, and another year of physical therapy to return to active duty. Painful on so many levels.
“And yet…” he seemed to rethink his response. “There were an awful lot of factors involved in Sarah’s kidnapping. Given the Salieri’s reach and all their intelligence on us, maybe nothing would have changed that outcome.”
Nemo looked at Demon. “D?”
