The Price of Valor Read online

  Oh. Her breath caught, his words vising her chest. He too rolled over to one side, facing her. “You’re my best friend.”

  Right. Yes.

  But he kept looking at her, those blue eyes holding hers, and she couldn’t look away.

  He seemed to consider her a moment, then swallowed, and lay back.

  She hated the way her heart pounded in her ears, the deep sweep of disappointment.

  Friends. Yep. The best kind of friends.

  “Sometimes when I look at the stars, I think of my mom, staring down, watching me.”

  She stared at the stars. “You think she sees you?”

  “I don’t know. I hope so.”

  The wind stirred around them. An owl hooted.

  “It sure makes you feel small, doesn’t it? All those stars. All the worlds,” she said quietly.

  “God says that he knows all the stars by name. And if he knows the stars, he knows us too.”

  She liked that about Ham—the fact that even after his mother’s death, he didn’t hate God. In fact, she sort of needed that from him . . . a faith big enough for both of them. It made her feel like God might care about her too.

  “Ham. If you leave, promise not to forget me?”

  “What?” He sat up, looked at her. “Forget you? Signe, you’re like . . . you’re . . .” He stared at her, and she sat up too.

  Then his gaze was tracing her face, a vulnerability in it that swept her breath from her chest.

  “Signe, I’m in love with you.” He touched her face with his big quarterback hand.

  Her eyes widened, and she was nodding even as he wound his hand behind her neck. She might have even leaped into his arms as he drew her close and kissed her.

  Her first kiss. And oh, it was magic. It lit her entire body on fire, moved her heart off its axis and tilted her world. She didn’t want to ask, but she guessed it might be his first kiss too. He kissed her with a tenderness that only made her yearn for more.

  In fact, she could never have enough of Hamilton Jones.

  She made a soft noise, and he moved closer to her, tugging at her jacket.

  Tugging—

  Her eyes shot open and she wasn’t in Ham’s arms, but on a metro—yes, of course—and someone was quietly trying to remove her backpack from her possession.

  She looked up at a young man with dark hair, dressed in a hoodie and skinny jeans, who clearly didn’t expect her to wake up.

  Or to bounce to her feet. “Back off!”

  He looked over his shoulder, and that’s when she realized the compartment was empty.

  Who knew how long she’d slept?

  He cocked his head, grinned at her, and she took a breath.

  Fine. “Don’t do it, pal,” she said quietly, in French.

  He narrowed his eyes at her.

  She glanced at the metro schedule. Forty-seven seconds to station.

  “I’m serious,” she said just as he took a swing at her.

  Really? She moved fast, pivoted, her left arm up to block. His fist whizzed by her.

  She grabbed his arm and sent her right fist into the side of his head.

  Bam.

  He hit the deck.

  “Stay down!”

  The kid jumped to his feet. She glanced at the clock. Thirty-eight seconds to station.

  “Dude, I don’t want to hurt you.” She spoke in English now, just in case he didn’t understand her the first time.

  His hood had fallen back and his long hair flung into his face.

  Then he said something, a crisp French reply that told her he wasn’t so keen on being taken down by a woman.

  Well, get used to it. She hadn’t spent ten years in a terrorist training camp not learning how to defend herself.

  “Last warning.”

  He launched at her. She pivoted and shot the blade of her foot in his face.

  His head snapped back and he howled, holding his nose.

  Yeah, that was broken.

  She looked around for a camera, saw nothing, but kept her head down as she picked up her pack and headed for the back entrance.

  Hoodie was still shouting when they pulled into the station. She got off and didn’t look back.

  Outside, the night was lit up with the fanfare of Paris. She’d emerged just north of her destination, on the far side of Eiffel Park.

  Her memory ticked off a twenty-four-hour internet cafe not far from here, on the way to her rented studio.

  Last time she’d been in Paris, she’d stayed in style at the InterContinental le Grand, just a few blocks from the Louvre in a suite that could house a small army.

  Pavel had nearly imprisoned her inside, but she’d managed to get out and see Notre Dame with Aggie. One of the first times she’d nearly run, disappeared.

  Returned to Ham.

  She’d used the escape to check in with her then handler, Sophia Randall.

  Now she found the cafe open.

  A few patrons were at cubicles, checking email.

  She checked out a computer and sat down.

  Paused.

  Maybe she should still run. Hide.

  Returning to Ham wasn’t an option. Especially since she didn’t know exactly how her cover had been blown, how Martin had found her. She feared it might be through her cell phone contact.

  Yes, it had been foolish—and maybe desperate—to give a phone to her daughter. But she just couldn’t . . .

  “Promise not to forget me.”

  She’d clearly been weak.

  Yes. Maybe she should just run, take the NOC list with her and disappear.

  Except, as long as she had it, Aggie was in danger.

  Especially if she was correct about who had leaked it out of CIA hands.

  But delivering it into the wrong hands could cost them all their lives.

  So she booted up the computer, then logged on to her encrypted email storage.

  One email waited. She took a breath, opened it.

  From Roy.

  It gave a new date, time, and place.

  Catania, Italy.

  Three days from now.

  Twelve hundred.

  High noon.

  She deleted the email. After the last fiasco, she’d be better prepared.

  And then, after she passed off the list, she’d vanish.

  She logged out and closed the computer.

  Headed out into the night for the walk to her one-room safe house.

  Overhead, the Eiffel Tower glittered, bright against the night sky.

  I’m sorry, Ham. It’s time to forget me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HAM’S ENTIRE LIFE was about to change, and he sat on the rooftop terrace of their four-story hotel on the shores of the Mediterranean, in a small town in Sicily, reading the morning news on his phone.

  Cool as a cucumber in July.

  Apparently, Ham’s wife had spent the last ten years in the captivity of a terrorist warlord.

  Or at least that’s the story Ham was going with, and Orion wasn’t going to argue. But he had questions.

  Probably Ham did too, but he voiced none of them as he, Orion, and Jenny packed and hopped on a flight to Paris, then Rome, and finally landed at Catania-Fontanarossa Airport.

  They drove the forty-plus kilometers to a tiny hotel north of the city.

  It looked like it had been a former apartment building, with an antique, gated elevator next to a stairway that circled up four stories. The stairs ended at a terrace with rattan tables and chairs, gardenias in pots, and a view of snow-covered Mount Etna in the background. The volcano rose maybe forty kilometers away. A tuft of smoke gusted from the mountain, as if it might be breathing hard in the autumn wind.

  It had erupted two years ago in a blazing display of fury on New Year’s Eve, but since then had died down to a simmer, still trying to decide its future.

  Orion understood the feeling.

  “The coffee any good up here?” he asked as he pulled out a chair.

  Ham lo
oked up at him, glanced at his cup of dark brown liquid. “It’s moka pot coffee, so it’ll take the hair off your chest. So I guess, in your terms, yes.”

  He motioned to a waitress, a dark-skinned woman with blonde braids, and she came over to them. “Can you get a cup of coffee for my friend Orion, here?”

  Orion read her name tag. Nori. “No, thank you, Nori. I’m going to find a pastry shop.”

  “Very good, Mr. Orion.” Nori headed over to another table to clear it.

  “I found a coffee shop and pasticceria near here—I thought I’d take a stroll and score a pastry.” In other words, let out some of the tension that wound up his neck and kept him from a decent sleep.

  Ham set down his phone. “Afraid Jenny will walk out here and you’ll be forced to sit with her?”

  “Ouch, and now for sure I’m leaving.”

  “Ry. Just talk to her.”

  Orion sat back, stared past him toward the Mediterranean Sea. A number of catamarans and single-hull sailboats were moored in the harbor, the sun bright off their masts. “She was going to leave the hotel without telling me. Us.”

  Ham picked up his spoon, turned it over. “But she didn’t. She got on a plane with us. She’s here. That means something.”

  “Or, it just means she was too embarrassed to leave.”

  “You don’t know if you don’t ask.”

  Orion looked at him.

  “Wait—you don’t want to know why she said no, do you?”

  Orion frowned.

  “You’re afraid that it’s something serious. Something you can’t fix. Or something about you . . .”

  “What? No.” Orion put on his sunglasses. “It was just too fast, maybe. That’s on me. I was pushing too hard to get a little closure on the rest of our lives. But now I know, right? She doesn’t want the rest of our lives. Time to move on.” He stood up. “You might consider doing the same thing.”

  Ham just looked at him. Then, slowly, shook his head. “I made a vow. For better or worse—”

  “She left you. With your child. I’m thinking maybe she broke a few vows on her side.”

  “I don’t know the full story. And even if I never find out . . . well . . .” Ham looked away, toward the sea. “When I was a kid, my mother died. My father married a broken woman who couldn’t love his son. She had a bitter tongue and cruel heart and she hated me. So she would lock me in the coal furnace cellar under our house.”

  He said it so calmly, without ire. Orion couldn’t reconcile Ham’s words with the former SEAL he’d been. Capable, fierce, in control and decisive. Not the kind to be trapped in a cellar.

  “I’d sit there and sing my mother’s hymns to myself until Signe showed up. Sometimes she’d bring me food—Cheetos were my favorite—and feed me through the crack in the door. Sometimes she just sat with me, her fingers in the crack, holding my hand. She was my best friend and I loved her. I still do. I don’t know why she did what she did, but I’m going to forgive her.”

  “What?”

  Ham took a breath. “She asked me once not to forget her. And I never have. I don’t know what she’s gone through, but what if I’m the only one who can show her what real love looks like?”

  Orion just stared at him. “Really?”

  “I was pretty strong in my faith back then. And she knew it. That’s why she agreed to marry me, I’m sure of it. Because she wanted us to be together, and she knew I would only . . . well, that we had to be married first.”

  Ham had never really talked about how he’d ended up married. In fact, the revelation that he had a wife had blown Orion over. But the fact he married someone who didn’t believe the same way he did . . . yeah, Orion was trying to unsnarl that in his head.

  “I might be the only believer Signe knows. And if she just gets anger from me, well, I think there’s more at stake than my feelings. I just know that I want to see her. Because regardless of how I feel, I’ve never stopped loving her. And I guess that’s the part that matters. Besides, forgiveness doesn’t really belong to me. It’s the currency of heaven, and my job is to dispense it here on earth. So, yes, I’m going to forgive her.”

  Orion stared at him. “Is this one of your thinly veiled pep-talk-slash-sermons? Because I see right through it. You think I should forgive Jenny.”

  Ham gave a laugh. “Nope. I’ll come right out and just say that. But I was being serious. How much do you love her? Because the kind of love that God wants us to have for each other—especially our wives—is sacrificial. And sacrifices hurt. Ask Jesus. My guess is that it hurt to hang on a cross.”

  “And now we’re going to turn to hymn 43 and sing ‘Amazing Grace.’” But Orion smiled. “Fine. Listen, I hear you. And I do remember asking God to be in charge of our futures, so . . .”

  “Go get a pastry and think about it. My guess is that Jenny might like one too.”

  “You just can’t stop fixing things.”

  “Just doing my part to keep this team together. Please be back by eleven hundred. I know we ran through the op before, and I don’t expect any surprises, but I’d like to run through it one more time. Meet me down at the castello.”

  “I got your back, boss.” Orion took the outside stairs down and headed through the narrow alleyway to the harbor.

  The rocky shoreline was congested with fishing boats, whalers, double-masted monohulls and a few catamarans at anchor out in the blue. The air smelled of the sea—fishy, humid, the scent of soggy sea grasses mixed with diesel fuel. He passed a group of fishermen unloading baskets of freshly caught mullet fish, their orange skins bright in the sun. He crossed the street at the ruins of the castello covered in sea moss, then cut into the city, away from the harbor.

  In the distance, Etna’s smoke had begun to darken as it drifted off the snowy surface.

  Orion meandered up cobblestone streets, past ancient stone buildings one or two stories tall, many with terraces on the roofs that overflowed with greenery. Some of the windows hosted tiny balconies; a dog barked at him from one as a woman watered her plants in terra-cotta pottery. Buildings painted pink or yellow with ornate doorframes suggested the masonry craftsmanship of a bygone era.

  If only he could erase from his brain the sight of that open, half-packed suitcase on Jenny’s hotel room bed.

  She had been about to do it again—leave him without a word.

  He didn’t know what hurt more, her full-out sprint after his proposal—because that was a knife in his gut—or seeing the truth on her face in the hotel room.

  It was over. Whatever they’d had, whatever hopes he’d still painfully, foolishly harbored died as he spotted her getaway attempt.

  To think he’d been debating actually finding her after the speeches were over, maybe asking her to have a cup of coffee with him and listening to her side of the story.

  Apparently, she didn’t want to tell it.

  Okay, sure, she’d tried to pull him aside more than once over the past several days, but maybe he didn’t want to know why he wasn’t enough for her.

  He should have never gotten on a plane with her to Italy. But Ham had asked Orion to watch his back, and had asked Jenny to join them, just in case, well . . . just in case Signe needed a head doctor.

  He turned down another street and found himself headed uphill toward a small church, the wooden figure of Mary in an alcove above the door. As he worked his way deeper into the city, the fragrance of a bakery directed his steps. Tiny European cars clogged the streets, parked on sidewalks or near central fountains. A cat chased a group of pigeons, and people rode by on bicycles.

  He spotted a bistro with tiny round tables and headed for it, passing a blue truck with fruit in the back.

  The delicious smell stopped him at a large window.

  Yes. Thank you.

  Crisp almond-cookie amaretti and ricotta-filled cannoli, raisin-filled panettone bread and deep-fried zeppole donuts. They even had jelly-filled bomboloni and Italian waffle cookies—pizzelle. But Orion went inside for a
bag of cartocci, deep-fried cannoli.

  The aroma of coffee made him want to weep.

  He stood in the line and let Ham’s words drift back to him. “I’m going to forgive her.”

  Orion drew in a breath. A woman walked by him, eating a round taralli, a bagel-like ring cookie. He nearly followed her out.

  See, this was what happened when you spent three months training in Italy, at the Sigonella Naval Air Station some forty miles away—duty he’d landed before deploying to Afghanistan so long ago.

  “How much do you love her?”

  With everything he had inside him. Or he thought so.

  A man carried a bag of zeppole out, popping one into his mouth. Orion could nearly taste the sugar.

  “Forgiveness . . . is the currency of heaven.”

  Okay, so maybe he’d buy her a cup of coffee.

  After all, she was here, in Italy.

  Not running away to Minnesota.

  He stepped up to the counter and resurrected his very bad Italian, pointing to the cartocci and holding up two fingers. “Per favore.” Then, “Due cappuccino.”

  He paid in euros—thanks to Ham for reminding him to pull money from the ATM in the airport—then waited down at the end of the counter.

  A couple of women were seated at a table near the door, looking out the window. One of them stood up, her hand grasping the front of her leopard-print shirt. “Oh mio . . .” She pressed her other hand to her mouth.

  He frowned, stepped over to see what she might be viewing.

  Froze.

  The dark gray smoke lifting off Etna had turned black.

  What the—

  The mountain convulsed, breathed in, and then, like a bottle cork blowing off, it erupted. The blast blew off the top of the volcano. Bright red lava spewed into the sky like a geyser.

  The concussion rocked down the mountain and Orion had just a second of realization before he yelled, “Down!”

  He yanked the woman away from the window and tossed her onto the floor, grabbed a table and pulled it over her and her friend just as the shock hit the cafe. The windows exploded into the building. Glass rained down.

  Screams filled the cafe.

  “Get down! Stay down! Close your eyes!”

  Then he braced himself on all fours as the sky turned dark and the floor began to shake.