The cabin had filled with murmurs of relief when the plane finally trundled down the runway and lifted off.
Now, half a world and ten hours later, he was in a place where passengers bitched if a flight was delayed by an hour.
Man, he was not in a mood fit for humans, but why would he be?
And it wasn’t only what he’d lived through during the past ten days; it was the bitter knowledge that the Director had, after all, been right.
“You can leave The Agency, Castelianos, but it won’t leave you.”
That was what he’d said when Zach had marched into his office, tossed a one-line letter on his desk and said, “I quit.” Then he’d leaned forward, his green eyes fixing on the Director’s mild hazel gaze. “And you’re wrong. I’m done with you. With this place. This life. You got that? I’m done!”
A truth when he’d said it, but a lie when he’d tried to live it.
The question was, why? How come he couldn’t leave it all behind? The Director was so goddamned smug, so certain, so full of anecdotes about all the boys and girls, as he called them even when they were in their thirties and, hell, their forties, all of them who learned they needed The Agency, its discipline, its purpose…
“Stop it,” Zach muttered.
A white-haired woman standing nearby looked at him. He worked up what he hoped was a polite smile. Evidently not. Her gaze swept over him, she went a little pale and moved away.
Great. What wonderful claims to fame. Scaring old ladies and doing dirty jobs D.C. would never acknowledge.
Zacharias Castelianos, unsung hero.
Where was John, goddammit?
Zach stepped off the curb and checked the oncoming cars.
Why had he accepted that first mission? He was not an egotistical man; he was a practical one, and that meant that six months later, when he got the first call that said there was a job to be done and only he could do it, he’d laughed off the attempted flattery and disconnected while the Director was still speaking.
After a couple of hours of pacing, while he went over and over the few details he’d been given, he’d called himself a name that was not respectful of motherhood, reached for the phone, dialed the number and code he’d never forgotten and said, OK, he’d take the assignment this once. Only this once.
Right.
He should have known there was no such thing as once.
A pair of suits, busy talking to each other, jostled him. One of them looked at him as if to say the mild collision had been Zach’s fault.
And changed his mind.
“Sorry,” he said quickly, grabbed his pal by the elbow and hustled him away.
Zach bit back a laugh. This time, he hadn’t even had to talk to himself to rate that reaction.
Maybe there were advantages to smelling as if you hadn’t showered in weeks, or to having days of stubble on your jaw, or needing a haircut badly enough that your hair curled on the nape of your neck. Maybe it wasn’t a terrible thing to wear a grimy shirt, stained jeans and ankle-high work boots splattered with dried mud and probably worse, at least if you wanted people not to bother you.
Or maybe it was just him, six-three of leanly muscled male with what was probably a do-not-fuck-with-me look on his face. That was what they’d called it in his Special Ops unit and then in The Agency, that been-there, done-that, definitely-do-not-want-to-talk-about-it glacial stare that glittered in a man’s eyes like frost on a window pane after he’d seen things better left unspoken—and done some of them, as well.
Zach felt a muscle knot in his jaw.
OK.
Maybe it was time to
give this life a rest. Hell, time to give it a bypass. What had sent him fleeing The Agency was his growing inability to keep his assignments at a mental and emotional distance. Getting involved, feeling somebody’s pain sounded good if you were into playing acoustic guitar. In the real world, getting involved ended up with you making mistakes or lying awake nights playing the “what if?” game or, even worse, wanting something you could never have.
No fucking more.
He was done with playing the Lone Ranger. It was time to grow up. Stop trying to change the world, and—