Page 26 of The Comeback Road (Leaving #2)
Lexie
August
I couldn’t help but almost scream in frustration as I wiped the soot from my eyes after what felt like the fifteenth failed attempt. The pain radiated from my back to my ribs at being blown a solid five feet into the air and back.
“You okay, Lex?”
“Fuck you, Luke,” I gasped out, still trying to catch my breath.
The chuckle he let out made me think about strangling him.
I lay there, trying to get my bearings and air into my lungs without it hurting.
I closed my eyes and thought of things that made me happy.
Wine, crappy 90s rom-coms and montages, the original Scooby-doo cartoons.
“Need a hand?” I heard Luke ask, and I popped one eye open and used that to glare at him.
“No, I’m good here, thanks.”
“Don’t be a wimp, Lex, let’s go again!” I heard Randolf holler from somewhere else in the training field.
Randolf. The crazy Russian fucker was built like a brick shithouse, and to be honest, he scared the absolute piss out of me.
His hands were the size of my head, and he could absolutely crush me.
Maybe, in a different life, that would have been appealing, but training with him?
That squished all my fantasies when it only took two seconds to realize how absolutely deadly and unfeeling he was.
I just lifted my right arm and gave him the middle finger in response.
His boisterous laughter that suited him perfectly rang out across the field.
“Let’s go, rookie,” Luke said to me again, offering me a hand once I opened both eyes to continue glaring at him.
“I deserve hazard pay for this, and for them.”
I looked over at our makeshift team. When I had first met them all, I jokingly called them the suicide squad , which didn’t get the laughter I thought it deserved—until Luke explained to me that it was exactly what they were.
Private contractors. Best of the best and…
worst of the worst, in some cases. Randolf—the insane Russian, the muscle.
Laurel—weapons and explosives. Zed—a jack of all trades, but wickedly smart.
Luke—team captain. And then there was me—all things tech.
The first month was an adjustment. Everyone was used to working alone, and well, I wasn’t used to it at all.
My muscles ached in places I never thought possible.
I’d been put through so much training in the past few weeks.
I barely had time to eat, let alone sleep or worry about anything but what was going on right there and then.
Luke had kept the worst of it to himself, but when I met the rest of the team and the real debrief started, I ended up tossing my cookies multiple times. Even if I weren’t trained, I’d still be helping. The pictures…the kids .
“How many failed attempts are there now?” Laurel asked while keeping her face impassive. If the girl ever had an emotion, I never saw it.
“Oh, are we counting?” I shot at her.
“Failed attempt 102,” Zed said while he typed away on his tablet. “This time, Lex almost bypassed the firewalls before the failsafe kicked in.”
“Almost isn’t good enough,” Luke chimed in.
“Gee, you don’t say?” I growled at him, and started dusting off the remaining debris that had stuck to me from the blast. Luke held his hands up at me in surrender. “We have time,” he offered up.
“Do we? Every time we fail, we fail them.” I clenched my fists. “Maybe I’m not as good as you think.”
Zed chimed in before Luke could say anything. “According to the data, you’re getting the codes right. You just don’t disarm the failsafe fast enough, causing the blasts. If we can work through that, we should be fine.”
They were able to recover the hard drive and reconstruct it from the last mission before we were called in, and were able to bring it online so we could attempt to figure out the system.
Whoever had made it was good . So good, in fact, I was under the impression their skills were far superior to mine.
“Let’s go again.”
“We can take a break if you need one,” Luke said pointedly at me. I just glared at him.
“Let’s go again.”