And she was older now, stronger. Tougher. She let go of Sam’s hand and tried not to think about how much she wanted to hold on and drag him into her next incarnation.
Shoulders squared, she walked down the load ramp, dry wind funneling around tan military buildings and whipping her loose pant suit around her. She was ready, damn it. Prepared for anything…
Except the sight of her daughter standing only twenty yards away.
***
Stella’s gasp sent Jose’s protective radar on high alert.
He scanned the troops off-loading from the CV-22 at the airport in Mogadishu, wondering which one was Smith’s new contact and why Stella was so upset. She staggered back a step and he caught her, steadying her with a palm to her spine. Smith had brought them all out here for the arrival of some new intel contacts, but beyond that, the lead agent on this had been damn tight-lipped about where he thought the list of operatives was about to be exposed.
Or why the coded cloth had been draped on the VP’s wife.
Irritation was running high. He’d always been able to stay detached during an operation, but with Stella involved, the stakes for him became all the more personal. Her moods fed his and that was a scary thought.
He wanted to pin Smith and demand answers for Stella. Now. No more jerking her around. If the guy didn’t want to talk, why the hell had he dragged them out of bed?
Jose ducked his head to her ear. “Are you okay?”
Eyes wide and stunned, she shook her head, pointing. “The woman there, one of the last off the load ramp… That’s my mother.”
“Your what?” Squinting into the late morning sun, he scanned the stream of people pouring off the CV-22, a mix of soldiers and civilians.
He followed the line of Stella’s attention to a couple trailing the rest. A dark-skinned man dressed in local garb stood beside a fair-skinned woman in a loose linen suit and a scarf that almost managed to hide her brownish-red hair. “You mean that lady looks like your mother?”
“No. That woman is my mother.”
Stella’s mother was alive? This was Smith’s special contact they’d been brought out here to meet? The implications of this woman’s name being on the list of operatives in the area took on a whole new complexity now.
She pivoted hard and fast toward Smith, anger vibrating from her. “You knew. Why the hell didn’t you warn me?”
Smith didn’t even wince, his craggy face unapologetic. “I was curious to see if you already knew she was alive, if she’d broken the terms of her agreement and contacted her family after all. That information could have provided a lead to how this list leaked out.”>“What did your… husband say?”
She tried not to read too much into the way he seemed to stumble over the word husband. She was overanalyzing, just wishful thinking.
“He told me I was being selfish. That I was screwing up our family, that I was breaking the agreement we’d made when we got married.” That awful argument, the rage in his voice, the pain she’d caused, all came back to her as real as if she’d just walked out the door of their little red brick house. “We’d promised each other we were a team. Where one went, the other would go.”
“Yet you left anyway.”
After all the angry—but logical words—he’d shouted at her, it was the strangled pain in his final question that haunted her most to this day. Who the fuck’s gonna braid Stella’s hair?
“Freelancing was our compromise.” A brittle peace settled between them. “I wouldn’t take it on as a full-time job.”
“He was not happy.”
Not by a long shot. “Neither of us was, but we made it work until Stella was fifteen.”
“And then you ‘died.’”
There was an implied question in his tone she couldn’t miss. How did Sam manage to get her to share so much so quickly when by all rights she should still be reeling from the hurt of how he’d played her? Maybe a part of her believed she deserved any and every bad thing that came her way as retribution for the pain she’d caused her family.
“You’re wondering if I used my faked death as an out to abandon my family.”
“I did not say that.” But still the hint of a question remained.
Although oddly, she found no condemnation. Either he really didn’t blame her—or he was that good of an actor. With nothing to lose anymore, she kept on talking, needing to pour out the words she’d kept bottled inside for so many years.
“But you’re thinking it. Believe me, I’ve questioned myself on that more times than I can count. In my head I know I didn’t have a choice. My identity had been compromised in a major way in southern Africa, and I needed to assume a new life to keep my family safe.”