Page 43 of Radar (Iniquus Certified Cerberus Tactical K9 #2)

Elyssa

Sunday

Washington, D.C.

Xander shoved his carry-on into the bin above and then swung into his seat. “You seem to be doing okay.”

“First class, a girl can get used to this.” They were just words to say. Social convention.

“First class, yes.” Xander looked around.

“Did they put us up here because the team was afraid I was going to die back in coach?” Elyssa asked.

“Bunch of reasons: last-minute flight, seat availability, Radar.” He sat down and reached for her hand. “A lot has been thrown at you in the last couple of hours.”

“Yah think?” Her brows went up to her hairline.

“I was checking in because outwardly, you seem to be handling it pretty well.”

“I was betrayed,” Elyssa said, liking that they were holding hands, liking the warmth and gentleness amongst the cold and cruel. “I feel betrayed. I’ve been in therapy since I got sick to deal with that subject.”

“And that’s helping you through this?” Xander asked.

Radar jumped down from his seat across the aisle and pushed into the space at Elyssa and Xander’s feet, where he lay down and curled up.

Elyssa thought that Radar wanted to be with Mom and Dad and immediately pushed the thought away.

“Help me draw the parallel, here,” Xander said.

“I was angry at my body for betraying me. My strength and my physical abilities were things I always counted on and believed were core parts of me. If my body could turn on me, then so could everything and everyone else. I took my butt to therapy because I was spiraling. There, I came to the conclusion that every aspect of my life that I perceived as solid could suddenly shift without warning. If I can’t manipulate circumstances to make myself safer, what could I do?

I have to own my responsibility for what my life looks like on the other side of the betrayal.

I have to believe in my core that whatever gets thrown at me, I can handle it.

It doesn’t matter what the betrayal is, I can survive it and find a new way to thrive within the boundaries of my new reality.

Orest Kalinsky is a betrayal of my love and esteem.

I am pretty damned angry at the manipulation.

And I hate this topic, so I’m going to change it to something else.

” Elyssa drummed her fingers on her knee.

“Okay, got it. Let’s play a get-to-know-you game, so I can be distracted from the takeoff.

I want you to know that I’m being incredibly brave by getting on another flight in D.C.

on the same day as the tip-over. We both are. ”

“Without a doubt. You’ve been brave for days on end.” Xander lifted the back of her hand to his lips and kissed it. “How do you play your game?”

“You get a question, then I get a question. It has to be open-ended, and it has to feel intrusive if not downright embarrassing to ask.”

“Wow. You really are a rugby player at heart. You grab the ball and drive it down the field, huh?”

“I said you get to go first,” Elyssa shifted in her seat so she could better see him.

“Okay, today strangers came in and upended your life. Has it ever happened to you before that a stranger made a difference in your trajectory?”

“Yes. I left my husband because of a woman at the gas station,” Elyssa said without hesitation.

“He was having an affair?”

“Not at all. Glenn was a good person. Good enough. But the scientific team I was leading had just received this major award. Huge. Something I had dreamed of and worked toward for years. And my team won. This is the article that White put on the table earlier.”

“Congratulations! I read the article. That’s amazing.”

“Thank you.” She smiled, then took a breath.

“I told my family, and they did not say congratulations. They said nothing at all. When the article came out, I searched all over town trying to find the paper, which wasn’t that easy.

I finally found some at a gas station. And in case the other members of my team had trouble finding one, I purchased all five of the available papers.

The counter lady pointed out to me that I had purchased five of the same paper, and I told her that that had been on purpose, because my name was in an article.

She leaned forward and said under her breath, ‘Uh-oh. What did you do?’”

“She thought you’d committed a crime or something?”

Elyssa shrugged. “I opened the paper and showed her my picture, then pointed to my name. ‘That’s me!’ I told her.

” Elyssa’s gaze fell to Radar as she remembered the scene.

“This woman at the cash register picked up the paper and held it over her head, announcing my award to everyone in line. She said, ‘This calls for some dancing.’ And then she started singing. What a beautiful voice she had. As she danced behind her cash register, and the whole line of strangers was dancing too, all in celebration with me.”

“Wow,” he whispered.

“It was very wow. I was sobbing, I was so grateful. I am still so grateful.” She pulled her hair to the side, tucking it neatly behind her ears.

“But as I drove home, I realized that strangers lifted me up higher than my husband did. And I couldn’t undo that in my head.

As much as I love that woman in the gas station for her generosity of spirit, I guess I was also grateful to her because I was tired of trying to get Glenn—my then-husband—to tell me I was enough.

That he was proud. I kept working for it, striving for it, and it was a waste of energy. ”

“What did you want to happen?” Xander asked.

“Honestly? I wanted him to sweep me into his arms and spin me around, throw back his head, and laugh with joy. I wanted him to set me on my feet and gaze into my eyes and say, ‘You are amazing. What you’ve accomplished is incredible and will change lives.’”

“It is, and it will,” Xander said with conviction. “What did Glenn say instead?”

“He said, ‘Okay, good. I’m going to mow the lawn.’”

Xander just sat there and imagined what a gut punch she’d taken.

“Don’t look at me with pity.”

“This is incredulity with an overlay of aghast,” Xander countered.

She pursed her lips and nodded. “The end wasn’t a bang, it was the hum of a shutting garage door, and the buzz of the lawn mower.

I went into town, found the newspapers, had my dance party, and then went home to pack a bag.

That was pretty much that. Now, I live a poorer but very rich life with friends I love, doing things I love, both at work and for fun. ”

“Tell me about the fun things.”

“No. It’s your turn. I told you my sad story. You owe me something of equal weight. Or I am left as the pitiful one.”

Xander laughed, and Elyssa read that laugh as nervous, maybe a bit bewildered, but he was definitely uncomfortable. She raised a questioning brow.

“I gave you a much narrower choice of topics,” Xander said.

“Fair.” Elyssa reached for her bottle and took a swig. “Got one. Tell me about your most excruciating dating fail.”

He looked at her in silence, then rubbed his thumb over his chin. “I go out for dinners more than I date. When you say date, do you mean in a deep relationship?”

“Whatever you want to tell me about,” Elyssa said.

“I have a group of friends, and the women in the group set me up for a dinner. They thought they had found this really great match for me.”

“Checked all the boxes?” Elyssa asked. “Intelligent, attractive, interesting hobbies, successful career.”

“Seemed so. But there weren’t enough boxes on that survey.”

“Uh oh. Not just a bad fit.”

“Good fit actually.” Xander was brushing a soothing thumb along the side of her hand.

“I enjoyed myself on our one date. She suggested Chinese food, and then we went to the Capital because they were having a free concert, featuring buskers, and it was a lovely evening weather-wise. Yeah, all good. But by the end of the date, she was telling me that we were meant to be and started asking what I thought about where we should live when we moved in together. She thought we should consider the school districts. She wanted her parents to meet me.”

“That’s a lot for me to take in as someone hearing the story. I can’t imagine what that felt like from your point of view.”

“It felt like a win at first, to be honest,” Xander said.

“From the start, I was grateful to my friends for introducing us. Things were going well, and I could see that we had the potential for future dates. Then the red flags popped out in quick succession. It would have been so much worse had I been months in when I discovered that she wasn’t—” He held his hand up, then let it drop.

“‘Sane’ was what I was going to say, but since I don’t want to misuse psychological words, I can’t say that. But in my world, she’s delusional.”

“Present tense?” Elyssa asked.

“That I can’t say. I haven’t seen her in about six months.”

“Go back. You haven’t seen her, does that mean you decided to date her?”

“No. I told her I had a nice time, but I didn’t feel like this was heading anywhere romantic.

Best wishes. She smiled at me and said I’d change my mind, because she could feel it in her heart.

It was just a matter of timing on my part, and she was patient.

This was years ago. I was interviewing with the DIA. ”

“Okay. I’m stuck on the words ‘I haven’t seen her,’ and I’m stuck on how your muscles contract when you talk about her.

The way I’m reading that is that you’re conflicted because you feel like you have to defend yourself against this woman, and at the same time, you were raised to never hit a girl. ”

“You’re good at this.”

She lowered her chin and raised a questioning brow.

“She never put me in a position where I felt defensive.” He shuffled around in his seat. “She had a way to get under my skin because you’re right,” he turned to catch Elyssa’s gaze, “if this were a guy, I’d have known how to handle things.”

“ Mano a mano .”

“We’d both understand the boundaries,” Xander said.

“Yeah, well, picking out a house with a good zip code for schools on a first date says she’s not great at understanding boundaries, even if you did know how to navigate them. What happened after that? She started calling you every fifteen minutes for days on end?”

“I told you we went out for Chinese on our date. Every time I was in that area, I’d see her out and about, which wasn’t frequent, maybe every few months or so.”

“A random ‘we’re at the same diner’ kind of thing or ‘she’s hunting you down and stalking you’ kind of thing?”

“Random.” He looked over the tops of the seats, then scowled, paused, and shook his head. “Had to be random. Yeah, random. But the next night, say around ten o’clock, the doorbell would ring, and there would be a Chinese deliveryman delivering egg rolls. My address. Her name paying the tab.”

Elyssa sucked in a long gasp. “What? From the date night restaurant?”

“Always a different place. I guess it was so I couldn’t call and put my name on a do-not-disturb Chinese take-out list.”

“Yeah, if some guy did that to me … And you’re right, that doesn’t seem to break a law. That would be hard to use in court to get a restraining order because you’re not endangered. It is creepy. But this stopped months ago? Do you think she’ll pop back on the scene?”

“I moved to my condo since then. So it might be the person at my old address who is receiving random egg rolls.” He grinned at the thought, then let it fall off as his face grew serious.

“Up until that point, I’d had zero interactions with someone like her.

I didn’t know the ins and outs of it. But I was hired by the DIA. ”

Elyssa shook her head. He was making a point that she didn’t get.

“They do an extensive background check. I have to disclose everything in order for them to move me through my security clearance. I know they looked into her because they look into every nook and cranny of your life. They have security to maintain.”

He rubbed his thumb over her “little bit” tattoo.

“It’s not my turn, but I told you about my tattoo. Would you tell me the significance of yours?” Elyssa asked.

Xander slid down in his chair, so he was talking right near her ear.

He had a way of speaking that seemed to hold the sound waves in tight, so that nothing said would drift off to some other interested listener.

It felt very spy-craft to her. And it reminded Elyssa what this trip was all about.

They were depending on her to remember which tree she stood under almost two weeks ago to save the Western world.

Her heart vibrated.

“It’s the symbol for the AWG, the Asymmetric Warfare Group,” Xander said.

“Our job, before the group was disbanded, was to find the dangerous ideas that put our national defense at risk. We were looking for the ideas that pushed the envelope and were off the radar. And in that way, we found the Zoric plot years ago. But we didn’t understand it.

We still don’t. We have pieces. We basically know the how and some of the ramifications.

But we don’t know the end event. We don’t know what they’ve planned or why. ”

Elyssa shook her head. She couldn’t contemplate that. Instead, she asked, “Finding dangers that were off the radar, is that how you named your dog?” She put her hand down between the seats to scritch Radar.

“Radar came pre-named,” Xander said. “But I took it as a sign.”

“Ender was your AWG name because that was your job to find the off-the-books kinds of dangers and end them?” she whispered.

“It was,” Xander whispered back.

She squeezed his arm. “Will you end this one?”

“Me?” he shook his head. “I don’t think so. Not alone. But for the world’s sake, I hope like hell that together we can.”