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Seventeen

They were back in Alaska by early afternoon the following day.

It was pouring rain in Juneau, the clouds so low and tight they blocked out all but the faintest suggestion of mountains or sea.

As homecomings went, Bethan found the gray, soggy weather perfect. It matched her mood.

They’d left her parents’ house at 0600 hours, swinging down into Goleta to rendezvous with the rest of the team. And then they’d been on their way to the airfield shortly thereafter to board the Alaska Force jet for a few hours’ direct flight north.

For the first time in a long while—maybe ever—it was hard to pull on her usual version of casual tactical gear. To wear a deliberately restrictive sports bra, cargoes, and boots, rather than a sundress. To secure her hair in her preferred ponytail, low and tight, instead of letting it fall past her shoulders.

As if the soldier were the costume.

Or at least as much of a costume as the version of herself she’d been playing all week, and Bethan didn’t know quite where to put that. It was easier to march along with the rest of the team, pretend Jonas was nothing more to her than the leader of this mission, and sit quietly during the little jumper flight back to the island, counting down the minutes until she could finally be alone to decompress.

Landing in Fool’s Cove took her breath away, the way it always did. First the cheery lights and bright-colored buildings of Grizzly Harbor, then the hidden bit of water carved into the rocky base of the cloud-shrouded backside of the same mountain. She felt her whole body relax as they came in for their landing.

And by the time Bethan made it to the top of the wooden stairs that led up from the dock, she felt like herself again. It was something about the air. The moody Alaskan spring. And the pleasing slap of the lodge doors as she opened them, like the old fishing camp was welcoming her back.

Isaac came out from the offices in back as they dropped their gear, all smiles. Because he might be the leader of Alaska Force and therefore one of the most dangerous men alive, but he liked to pretend he was nothing more than an average, relatable boy next door here in his hometown.

Maybe these masks they all wore were as much to protect themselves as anyone else, Bethan thought. Because they were all lethal. They were all at or near the top of their games. If they walked around showing all of that all the time... it would make this place a battlefield, not a refuge.

“Oz has some thoughts,” Isaac said. “Jonas, Bethan, come on back.”

That cut the rest of their team loose, so Bethan took a moment to say the usualgood op, good jobgood-byes that followed fieldwork. Jonas did not. Bethan caught up to him and Isaac in Oz’s lair, where the team’s technology wizard was going back and forth between his series of huge monitors and only glanced at them quickly as they came in.

“Dominic Carter is clean,” he said without preamble.

As usual, Bethan took a moment to reconcile herself to the fact that most computer nerd types did not look the way Oz did, as if he could win wars as easily with his own two hands as he could online. But that was one more thing to tuck away.

“But that’s not surprising,” he was saying. “He would have to be to maintain such a public profile with so many government ties. The mercenary group we think was responsible for what happened to you two in that convoy back then, though, is another story.”

Bethan repressed a shudder, because it was one thing to make that connection and know it was real. It was another to stand here with the colleagues she admired and have that connection treated as fact. It made her stomach feel a little fragile.

That only made her stand straighter.

Oz typed something, and one of the monitors filled with photographs of men. Pseudomilitary men posing with various weapons, tanks, and backgrounds. “This particular outfit had a bunch of different names but distinguished itself pretty quickly. Mostly by doing things no one else would touch. That means we’re talking about scraping a pretty low barrel.”

“That sounds right,” Bethan said, cool and professional, which was her preferred method of self-soothing. “There are certain hits you take and accept that’s just how it goes. That’s what being in a war is, like it or not. But this one wasn’t strategic or necessary from an enemy perspective. It was mean. Punitive.”

In the doorway, Isaac shifted, though that cool, assessing gray gaze of his didn’t come to Bethan. It moved to Jonas instead.

Who said nothing. He might as well have been a slab of granite.

“We lost the whole convoy.” Bethan heard her voice change as she spoke, becoming less civilian by the syllable.She handled the things she’d done, the things that had happened to her while she was doing them,becauseshe’d been a soldier. That was how she made those things intelligible. Palatable.

Or that was how she tried.

“The irony was that it was an aid mission,” she said. “Or maybe that’s not ironic at all. Maybe that was the point.”

Oz moved in his chair, turning from one monitor to another. “The group we’re talking about wasn’t official in any capacity. Just a group that liked killing people and blowing stuff up, as far as I can tell. They took no sides. No loyalty at all. It was all about the money.”

“Men like that are always the same,” Jonas said quietly, and Bethan was certain she wasn’t the only one in the room startled that he had said anything at all. “They serve war. They like chaos. And they particularly like it with a body count.”

Bethan bit her tongue, because she knew it would serve no one if she lashed out at Jonas for what sounded a lot to her like another one of his appallingly self-lacerating autobiographies. Especially not if she had to explain how, why, or when he’d told her more details about his past. That would be even worse.

“There was a core group of about eight individuals,” Oz was saying.