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“You trust my instincts in the field, if nothing else, or we wouldn’t be able to work together.”

“I trust you,” he repeated, more darkly. “Whatever else, that’s always been true.”

“Then trust me,” she said urgently.

Something in him seemed to break apart, though he couldn’t have said what it was. More fire. More hand grenades he suspected he was throwing himself. Because like most complicated things, in the end, it was really simple.

He had trusted her before they’d gone off in that convoy that fateful day. He’d watched her work, able to access certain assets through their women because she was more than happy to sit down, get to know them, and figure out who they were. She’d been good at psyops. She’d been an excellent attachment to special ops forces, which for a long time was as close to a combat role as she’d gotten.

If he’d had any doubts about her, or her capabilities, she’d cleared them all up that night she’d saved his life. More than once.

And he might have kept his distance from her since she’d turned up in Alaska, but that had always been about him, not her. He didn’t want any of that intimacy to spill over into his present-day life, maybe, but he certainly trusted her to do her job and have his back in the field.

Who was he kidding? He’d trusted her all along.

The person he didn’t trust was himself.

“I do,” he told her, hardly recognizing his own voice. “I do trust you, Bethan.”

And he knew—the way he always knew—that the same electricity jolted through her then. It lit him up. Because it felt like far more of a vow than it should have.

The quicksand kept sucking him in deeper.

But all she did was nod. “Okay, then. It’s him. You need to call this in. And I need to dance with my sister. Then, Jonas, we need to end this guy. For real this time.”

She didn’t wait for him to respond to that. She swept up that violet dress of hers and charged back into the thick of the dance floor, where her sister and all the rest of thebridesmaids and assorted other friends were dancing to the band’s medley of ’80s classics, entirely unaware that anything was happening but this.

It was as it should be. Civilians were supposed to live without the crap he carted around. It waswhyhe carried it.

But seeing Bethan out there in the middle of a sea of heedless civilians made something in him... break open.

He told himself he had no idea what it was.

Jonas made his way through the reception tent, pulling himself firmly back into character. He smiled and shook hands. He laughed with the groomsmen, who now considered him a buddy. He played his part to the hilt, even when he saw Dominic Carter chatting with one of the generals.

Chatting, when some of the blood on his hands was Jonas’s.

He envisioned about seventeen ways he could take the man out, right now, but he didn’t. Not only because it would ruin the wedding Bethan clearly wanted to go well, but because they still had a scientist to find.

Once he left the tent, he put significant distance between him and the party, then called into command back in Alaska. And braced himself when Isaac answered.

“You sound like you’re at quite a party,” his leader and best friend said, clearly enjoying himself. Which he did a lot more lately—something Jonas supported more in theory than when it was aimed at him. “Now I’m trying to imagine you at a party, Jonas. In my head, it’s a lot like when we’re doing mission breakdowns in the lodge and you stand with your back to a wall, staring blankly.”

Jonas waited.

Isaac sighed. “Fine. Report.”

Jonas broke down what Bethan had told him as succinctly as possible. And when he was done, there was a silence.

If he were the kind of man to close his eyes and sigh deeply, he would have.

“Tell me that again.” Isaac sounded significantly moreintent than he had a moment before, which only boded ill. “You think that Dominic Carter is the individual who blew up your convoy in the desert. Then tried to finish the job, only to be taken out by Bethan, who was not yet an Army Ranger. Is that what you said?”

Jonas glared at the dark night before him, seeing Isaac’s face entirely too clearly even though he was all the way north in Alaska. “That’s what I said.”

If he listened carefully, he was sure he couldhearhis friend’s expression. Of pure and unholy glee.

“And you were doing what, exactly, while Bethan was having a little firefight with this guy who might or might not currently be the CEO of the sort of so-called defense outfit that fights its own wars when they feel like it?”