Page 117 of Enemy of My Enemy

“I don’t fucking want to.” Doc drowned the rest of his beer, setting the glass bottle down with a hard clink. “We joked, you know. They guys. About you and him. There was this intensity between you two. Like raw fucking lightning. We joked about it, but we’re always joking. I never actually thought you two were…” He shook his head. “’Cause that would be crazy. Insane. Totally whacked out.” He sighed. Turned and squinted at Adam for a long moment. “So. What now, L-T?”

Adam shook his head. “Team checks in in three days. I’ll reach out to Reichenbach and see where we are. I suspect we’ll be on the move again. Probably Russia.”

Doc was quiet, and he turned back to the sea and the lapping waves. “Don’t you want to spend all the time with your lover boy that you can, then?” He squinted at Adam.

Adam swallowed down the hard lump that choked his throat. He bumped shoulders with Doc, his lips twisting into a relieved grin. “In a minute. Right here is good too.”

* * *

Chapter 41

White House

“Mr. President?”

Swallowing, Jack snapped his eyes up to General Bradford, his chairman of the joint chiefs. Heads around the Situation Room were pointed toward him, dozens of eyes staring at him. No one spoke.

They were all waiting for him.

His mind was a million miles away.

No. It was three floors up, stuck in the Residence. And stuck back in Sochi, on a bullet-riddled street.

Jack gripped his pen in both hands and leaned forward. “Could you, ah, repeat the question?”

On his left, Irwin sighed, glaring at the tabletop. To his right, where Ethan used to sit, Elizabeth’s gaze pierced the side of his face.

When they’d all filed into the Situation Room, everyone left the seat to Jack’s right open out of habit. It was Ethan’s seat, and everyone had gotten used to his presence and him and Jack bouncing ideas off each other.

It stayed empty until one of the Secret Service agents yanked it away, tugging it out of sight.

He couldn’t think about Ethan’s absence. Couldn’t think about their last moments together on Air Force One. Everything about Ethan was boxed up tight, an impenetrable fortress of memories in his mind. Ruthlessly, he squashed any veering yearnings wandering toward the aching hole inside him, a hole in the shape of Ethan’s smile.

If he thought about Ethan, for even a moment, he would shatter.

Instead, his mind circled frantically over Leslie. Despite Irwin’s protestations, he’d ordered the White House Medical Unit to move her into the Residence, setting her up with a private care team.

He and Irwin had argued since Turkey, bitterly so, over Leslie.

“We need to be cautious,” Irwin had urged, over and over. “She can recover at Bethesda Naval Hospital. We can have her under complete surveillance. Guarded, for her safety and for yours. We don’t know what we’re dealing with.”

“She’s mywife.” How could he leave her again? How could he ever betray her again? “The safest place in the world is the White House.”

“Sir—”

In the end, Jack pulled rank, and the Navy doctor grudgingly agreed that Leslie wasn’t in any immediate medical danger. She needed rest, recuperation, and a healthy diet. “She will get all of that at home,” Jack growled. “I’ll make sure of it.”

Irwin had glared and then walked away when the doctor leaned in and asked softly what bedroom Leslie’s hospital bed should be set up in. “Would you like her to be set up in the master bedroom, Mr. President? Or another bedroom?”

God, Ethan.He’d almost lost it then, but he clamped down hard on his heart. He couldn’t bring her into the spaces he shared with Ethan, the life he’d lovingly built within Ethan’s arms. They were two black holes in his heart. What would ever happen if their worlds touched? He would be obliterated; he knew that much for sure.

He told the doctor to put Leslie in the Queen’s bedroom, where Sergey had stayed.

She was resting there now. He’d left her—had been dragged away from her by an impatient Irwin—as she was settling in, talking with the doctor. Irwin had taken him to the Situation Room and to the emergency meeting with his entire team.

“Could you, ah, repeat the question?” He squinted at General Bradford, his pen flexing between his hands.

General Bradford smothered his sigh and gestured again to the screens at the head of the table. “Mr. President, we need to decidenowhow to deal with the Russian coup. General Moroshkin has taken most urban centers and the Northern Fleet in Murmansk. He controls Russia’s nuclear weapons and nearly all of the military. Russia’s Pacific Fleet has scattered. Most of the Pacific Fleet were on deployment to the Gulf, and the ones that weren’t on deployment have vanished from Vladivostok. Pockets of resistance have cropped up. Police forces. Some of the rural districts. Some military units. The biggest is in the area around Sochi, and we believe that President Puchkov might be involved in their success. Moroshkin has put out through the media that all resistance will be crushed and destroyed and enemies of the state executed. The country is locked in full-scale conflict.”