I’m too old for this.
Camping out for weeks in the Afghan deserts, recons on the North Korean borders, and infiltrating insurgents in Pakistan were chicken shit compared to this.
Hell, even Hell Week was nicer than this.
Drake, my buddy, still active in Seal Team Seven, would be laughing his ass off if he knew what I was doing right now. Judging from his call earlier, I could tell he was in the sub, prepping for an Op, most likely somewhere in Libya from the last time I’d heard. Since I’d left, he’d become the first in command and it’s been hard to keep track of him. I was surprised by his call, but he just wanted to check in on how I was doing. Good man, great friend, even better soldier.
I’d been watching her for two weeks now. She was a funny girl. She ate too much candy. She’d pick out all the Lemon-flavored Starburst first, get started on the Lime, saved the Strawberry, and gave the Orange to her tiny Asian friend. She wore the same thing over and over again. T-shirts of different colors and jeans. Her favorite color was blue. She never did anything out of the ordinary – she went straight to her classes, ran the track on the university grounds every Wednesday and Friday, right after her Speech 102 class, and always forgot to bring bottled water so she usually bought it from the vending machine 10 meters from the entrance to the gym.
She never went out to party...until tonight.
I’d seen the tall guy hanging out with her after their class. Even ran a complete profile on him. As the head of this ops, I had access to data at the flick of my fingers. I could’ve asked Tony, my expert IT guy, to run a background check for me, but I had hands, a phone, and a brain – I could do this in my sleep.
Denton Holmes. Age: 20. Star basketball player. Scores an average of 20 points per game. Favors left hand to shoot, drove a BMW with the plates LVBALL, and had one knee surgery when he was 16. He was raised in a Catholic family, had two younger brothers, father passed away when he was 14, and his mother was the governor of California. Overall good kid. His last credit card transaction was a monthly subscription to a porn site. It was none of my business why he subscribed to that site, but honestly, you could get porn anywhere nowadays without a subscription. Plus, this kid could have any woman he wanted, why would he even pay for it?
Somehow this discovery did not settle well with me.
That and the fact that tonight, this girl who I’d been following around for two weeks, this funny girl, had somehow morphed into a woman.
When she came out of the apartment with her friend, I had to do a double-take and had to keep my feet balanced on my bike. What she hid behind those shirts and jeans was definitely not something I should even be thinking about. When she climbed in the passenger side of her friend’s Honda Civic, her skirt had ridden up and the show of those toned legs made me adjust my jeans.
I preferred tall, skinny, and blonde. Any woman that didn’t remind me of her, the one I’d buried with my past.
Athena – even her name was different. She laughed like there were no worries in the world. Her hazel eyes lit up whenever she saw her friend, Dyan. And one time, when the two of them were in their dorm/apartment’s living room, a place I had installed with a top-of-the-line security camera system because let’s face it, college apartments were the least secured establishments, and through the small camera I’d hidden on the small painting above the sofa, I saw her leaping and dancing to Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me, and I just couldn’t look away. Her dark brown hair had loosened up from the pencils she liked to use as hairclips and her hazel eyes looked naked with complete joy.
How did she become so happy? So full of sun?
I’d read her files. It was protocol. I knew her history.
Glück ist nicht überall, ist Traurigkeit.
Happiness is not everywhere, sadness is.
A fact.
The sun comes up, but it comes down just as fast. There are no guarantees in life. In the Bavarian Alps where I spent half of my childhood, even the summer months were filled with rain, so nothing is predictable, but the one thing that was for sure was that you had to be prepared for the worst because shit could hit the fan anytime.
I’d entered the party through the side door after checking the perimeter outside, just in time to catch her legs being pinched by a skinny guy who was wearing the tightest black leather ever made. I passed by the guy and I might have broken his knuckle or two; there was no excuse to disrespect a female, no matter how young or how old you were. Touching another person without their consent was breaking one of the biggest rules in my book. Unless of course, it was in defense.
She’d been looking for someone, most likely Denton. She seemed to like him. She was always looking up at him dreamily and she had the biggest smile on her face the moment she saw him come up towards her. She looked at him like he was the bearer of all great things to come, as if he could erase all her pain, and he’d be the one to fight all of her demons.
A girl used to look at me like that before…
Shut it off, Webb. Keep those memories buried. There’s no point in going back to them. Just shut it off.
Focusing on Athena and Denton’s retreating backs, I stopped by a darkened corner where two kids were making out like monkeys and dialed the campus police. The absolute mess of this place, the skewed staircases, the rotting wood, the unstable foundation of the whole building was not safe. There would be a lot of casualties if someone tossed a lit cigarette on a combustible material or if there was an emergency, the presence of three extremely small exit doors would not be able to handle the surge of fleeing bodies. The burning scent of marijuana was what clinched the deal for me. Drugs, alcohol, and a lot of bodies in extremely tight spaces were not a good combo.
After briefly giving the campus police the location of the party, I followed Athena and Denton to the back, sliding back the piece of shit doorframe that almost crumbled when I kicked the bottom part with my boot.
Passing a couple of guys who were drowning over a keg stand, I sped up my steps to catch up with the lovebirds. This mission, this assignment was one of the easiest tasks I’d ever had to do. Follow Athena around, and once the threat was neutralized, leave her be. This assignment could have gone to Drake since he was usually the one picked for these types of shore assignments plus I wasn’t on Uncle Sam’s payroll anymore but my former commanding officer had asked me personally so I couldn’t refuse. Neither did I want to since I had a debt to settle with Joseph, Athena’s father. What he’d given me was something I would never be able to repay, so if he asked me to guard her for life, I would not hesitate. I would probably ask for a few concessions – that Athena stop attending these stupid parties, and just be the normal girl that she was would be at the top of that list.
Athena and Denton were whispering in each other’s ears, he was gently rubbing her forearms, and time and time again, he would lean over and she let out a giggle.
Shit, now I was feeling like a stalker.
SEAL missions usually took days, sometimes months, to carry out. It involved a lot of time watching, waiting, observing until all the key players were in, the timing was optimal, and the last thing to do was to take out the enemy. When the enemy was unforeseen, as in this case with Athena, where there wasn’t established proof on who we were actually up against, I had nothing to go by except to ensure that she was safe.
Please make sure everything is normal for her. I want her to experience college the way she should.
Her father’s words rang through my ears, connecting with the part of my brain that was trained to attack and strike, letting my hands fall to my sides even when the distance between her and Denton became an inch apart.
I was going to leave them alone. It was none of my business what she did with him. If they wanted to do the horizontal, I’d have to call and change my plans later tonight with Estella because I’d have to wait until Athena was safely back in her apartment before I’d go anywhere.
When the flickering lights from the bulb 10 inches away from Denton’s head hit Athena’s face, an unfamiliar, uncharacteristic wave of protectiveness washed over me. He was a nice guy, but he was subscribing to porn sites. Lame excuse, but it was all I could come up with.
She lifted her gaze away from him for a second and that easy-going smile, the permanent show of freedom plastered on her lips was there…but it was those eyes, the vulnerability in those hazel greens, the show of naked trust, wiped clean of any subterfuge that I thrived on, that did it for me.
I knew she couldn’t see me. I was dressed in a black shirt and jeans that blended into the darkness. However, for that second, a minute max, that she let her gaze linger away from him and her eyes unabatingly caught mine, she’d sealed her fate.
She wasn’t going to be his.
Not tonight.
She was a mission, Webb.
She was.
When she closed her eyes, her lips opening up, waiting for Denton to close it for her, a sense of foreboding crept up my nerves, the kind that warned me, alerted me when something was off, out of the ordinary during an op. It’s the same feeling I had three and a half years ago and I couldn’t just shake it off.
With my mind made up, the unmistaken buzzing sounds of a police radio in the front yard, signaling that they’d arrived, my ears picking up on the chatter, “10-4,” I quickened my steps to reach Denton before he could make a move on Athena, any more than he had, and I lifted him by his shoulders then hoisted him up to the closest place I could dump him.
For the first time in my life, I had no plan for what I was going to do – I was being led by pure instinct. The instinct to protect her, all parts of her, whether she liked it or not, it wasn’t her choice to make.
He was a tall guy, but I didn’t come out of the academy in the top 5% for nothing. Being caught completely by surprise, Denton managed to say, “What the hell?” before I dumped his body on a pile of leaves and pressed on the carotid arteries by his neck, just enough to render him unconsciousness.
He’d be okay, he’d just look like he was sleeping.
The sound of a bullhorn followed by a harsh order, “Everyone out!” had me backing up and reaching for Athena. Her eyes were caught in equal parts fear and wonder. She was trying to scream, but no words would come out. I’d seen it a couple of times before. It’s what happened when the brain hadn’t connected with the vocal words and I knew I had only a few seconds before the actual shrieking started.
I muffled her mouth with my hand and even if I had derailed her romantic plans for the night, the last thing I wanted was for her to be completely frightened of me. To her, I was a complete stranger who had just dumped her wanna-be lover’s body in a messy pile of leaves, while probably looking like a completely deranged man.
I lowered my head close to her ear, the subtle scent of jasmine and rose wafting towards me, my jaw touched her soft cheek and I whispered, “Your father sent me.”