Amelia smiled wistfully out the window. “So she’d earn it under her own name and not his?”
I nodded.
“I love that. He sounds like a good man.” She nudged me with her elbow. “A lot like you.”
Frankly, Shane had been more fucked up after leaving the Teams than I had been, but he’d managed to fight his way out of the darkness. I chose to linger in the grayscale, content to live in the bleak haze of numbness.
“Was he in the same . . .” Amelia hesitated and flipped through her mental files to find the right term. “Platoon?”
I chuckled. “Team. And no. He and Cole were on the same team. Hutch medically retired and Cole joined my team.”
“Right. You told me that much.” She stared contemplatively out the window. “I thought the military had fancier terms for groups of people than ‘team.’”
Sweat from my palm slicked the steering wheel. “The SEALs keep it simple.”
Amelia’s eyebrows jumped to her forehead as her head whipped around. “SEALs like . . . likeNavySEALs?”
I tipped my chin in a singular nod.
Realization dawned on her. “That’s why it felt like you were a pawn in a war game.”
I nodded again. “I thought I had made it. Proved myself. Earned the title. The ranks. All the shit that came with making it into the Teams.” The sinking feeling in my gut that happened every time I thought about all I had seen and done was back, stabbing me over and over again. “I wasn’t cut out for it.”
“Why?”
“Because I cared too much.” The pitying sentiment I had been told time and time again by higher-ranking officers had never left the trenches of my mind. “In an . . . existential way. The more missions we ran, the more I struggled to compartmentalize what we were doing. If it would actually make a difference in the grand scheme of things. We were puppets with someone else pulling the strings. That someone never had to grapple with injuries and nightmares and regret. They didn’t lose people. They didn’t see the damage their orders caused. Not like me and my teammates did. They were spoiled brats who huffed when they lost a toy but replaced it like nothing ever happened. We weren’t fighting for freedom and the greater good. We weren’t working to make the world a safer place. We were just tools to carry out the whims of selfish monsters.”
A heavy breath pushed past her lips. “Caring too much seems like it should be a good thing.” Her hand slid into mine, and she laced our fingers together. “But I can see how it would make the job hard.” She stroked the pad of her thumb over the back of my hand. “Is that why you don’t like guns?”
I nodded.
“Seems like not carrying a gun would make it hard to be a mobster.”
I forced a smirk. “Good thing I’m not a mobster.”
Thankfully, she didn’t push anymore. That’s one of the things I loved about Amelia. She didn’t just seek information to know it. She sought to truly understand it.
The rest of the trip back to the cabin was quiet, tense. Both of us felt the impending shift in the dynamic. The challenge that lay ahead. The risks. Though neither of us wanted to admit it, this plan could go very, very wrong.
We could get caught using fake IDs.
Someone could recognize us.
We could lose in Vegas.
Valentine could catch us—if he was ballsy enough to leave his territory.
Or worse.
Much, much worse.
While I went through the pattern of parking the truck beside the cabin and covering it with a tarp and leaves until it looked like it had been there a while, Amelia took the grocery bags inside.
I found her at the kitchen sink, studying the hair color boxes like she was preparing for a test. I moved the bedside table and slipped down into the cellar for the rest of the supplies I needed.
Amelia lifted an eyebrow when she spotted the clippers. “What are you doing with that?”
“Shaving my head.”
