Triple Team: A Military Reverse Harem Romance, page 13
“Well kiddo,” I said as I rose from the table. “If you’re not jet-lagged then you’re coming with me.”
She gave a start. “Where?”
“On a date,” I said sarcastically. “I’m buying.”
20
Juliana
Gregor pulled on his boots and went downstairs without checking to see if I was coming.
“He’s joking,” I said to the others. “Right?”
“You never know with Gregor,” Donovan said.
I went downstairs to the garage. Gregor put on his aviator sunglasses and then tossed a black helmet at me. I caught it in the chest with a grunt.
“Ever ridden a bike before?”
“Of course,” I lied. “But a Harley.”
His laugh was rich as he smiled at me. “Harleys are glorified scooters with high handlebars. This is an Indian Scout, with midnight black paint and Vance twin slash slip-on mufflers.”
“I don’t understand a word you just said.”
“Don’t need to.” He straddled the bike and started the motor. “Hop on.”
I threw a leg over the bike and settled onto the rear seat. It purred underneath me, sending wonderful vibrations through my body.
“You’re gonna have to get closer than that, kiddo,” Gregor said. “Unless you want to fall off the back.”
I wrapped my arms around him tentatively. The black jacket he’d donned smelled like finely-oiled leather.
He kicked the bike into gear and we shot out of the garage. Even just going 15 miles per hour leaving the apartment felt like we were flying. When he turned onto the main road and really gunned it I couldn’t help but let out a squeak.
With my chest against Gregor’s back, I felt him rumble with laughter.
He raced around the corners, leaning into them so sharply I thought the bike would tip over. But it didn’t, and soon I was getting used to the heart-racing sensation of zipping along the road on a motorcycle.
Honestly, I was exhausted from the trip. I was only excited to be back with the team so we could plan our next move. Gregor and Donovan had been sifting through the stolen data from Accola’s computer for almost two days. It was disheartening to learn they hadn’t found anything yet.
We didn’t even have a next move.
We rode south along the James River before cutting east. That was the extent of my knowledge of the Richmond suburbs. 15 minutes later he pulled onto a dirt road with a faded sign that said, Chesterfield Shooting Range and Gun Club.
Our bike was one of two vehicles in the parking lot. I relaxed once he parked the bike and I stepped off. I hadn’t realized I’d been tensing the entire ride, but now my joints were all achy and stiff.
“This is our date, huh?” I asked.
Gregor removed his helmet, took mine, then tied them to the bike. “If I stare at my laptop screen any longer I’m gonna lose my mind. I needed to get away. And you need to brush the rust off.”
“I’m not rusty,” I protested.
He stared blankly. “You’re not rusty.”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Then consider this an actual date,” he said. “Try to have some fun.”
The place looked like it was about a century old, and hadn’t seen a broom in just as long. The range owner didn’t bother leaving his chair behind the counter; he waved at Gregor, who waved back, and that was the extent of their interaction. He led me back to a room with expensive electronic lockers which were completely out of place with the rest of the dump. Gregor punched a code into one and it popped open to reveal drawers full of pistols. He searched through several drawers before finding the one he wanted. He gripped the barrel and extended the grip toward me.
“M9 Beretta,” I said, taking it from him. It was the standard issue service pistol for the US Army. The pistol I’d done most of my training in.
“Figured you’d like something familiar.”
I pulled back the slide to verify it was empty, then examined the chamber. “Not the cleanest service weapon I’ve seen.”
“Donovan’s real shitty about that,” Gregor grumbled. “Grab a box of ammo.”
I followed him back to the indoor range. It was like being deep underground in a fallout bunker, with cinder block walls and an open space extending away from us. We grabbed ear and eye protection and went into one of the stalls. Gregor clipped a target to the rope and then pulled on it by hand to send it down range.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a range without electronic target setting.”
“Fancy perks don’t mean much if you can’t hit the target.”
“I told you I can hit it just fine.”
“Mmm hmm.”
I was afraid he would stand behind me and watch. I probably was rusty. I hadn’t fired a gun since I was discharged. Not that I’d been avoiding it. It just wasn’t something I’d proactively gone out and done. Thankfully Gregor took his own target to the next stall and busied himself with his own practice. He’d still be able to see my target since it was right next to his, but at least now I could pretend I wasn’t being judged.
Why do I want his approval so much? I wondered.
I loaded the gun, chambered a round, and clicked the safety off. I set my feet apart and took an A-frame stance as I looked down the sight.
The gunshot was loud, but muted thanks to my hearing protection. I squinted at the paper target; I thought I hit it in the center mass, but it was tough to tell from back here. The black ink on the target blended in with the darkness downrange.
Once the first one was out of the way I got into a familiar groove. Aim, pull the trigger, kickback absorbed by my arms, then readjusting my aim. Gregor’s own pops from his gun sounded in the stall next to mine. I went through all 15 rounds in my magazine, reloaded, then emptied another 15 rounds before pulling the target back.
16 holes in the center mass. Just over half.
“Not bad,” Gregor said, poking his head around the corner. His voice was muffled so badly that I had to read lips. “Maybe you weren’t rusty after all.”
He was being nice; hitting 50% from 20 yards wasn’t very impressive. But I appreciated his attempt at politeness nonetheless.
We spent a full 20 minutes practicing. I’d gone through a few hundred rounds by the time we were done and my arms were like jelly. Then we spent 10 more minutes cleaning the weapons with bronze bore brushes, residue solvent, and finally lubrication before putting them back in the locker. The gun range owner again waved a hand as we left, and Gregor waved one back.
“Although I wasn’t rusty,” I said when we were outside, “it was good to practice.”
“Figured so.”
I expected to go straight home, but Gregor drove us a different way, and pulled off into a dive bar about a mile up the road from the range. “I always need a drink after firing a weapon,” he said as we dismounted.
“Bad memories?” I asked.
“Yep. That and my brain is still fried from staring at the data you guys stole. I’m a soldier, not a fucking analyst.”
The interior of the bar was dark and smoky. Two men hunched over the bar in the universal posture of exhaustion. The bartender nodded his chin at us, and pulled out two bottles of beer unprompted. It appeared Gregor was a regular.
“Cheers,” he said, handing me one of the bottles. The beer was some cheap domestic stuff, but it was cold and refreshing after being in the hot range. I followed Gregor over to a table against the wall, far from the bar.
“Why not hire someone to analyze the data?” I asked when we sat down. “And before you say you can’t trust an outsider, let me remind you that you trusted me.”
He pulled out a cigar and flashed a silver lighter, puffing gently on the end until it caught. He exhaled a mouthful of smoke and said, “We only trusted you ‘cause we had to. We can figure out the data ourselves.”
“Except you haven’t been able to,” I pointed out.
“Not yet. We will.”
The bartender came over with four shots of brown liquor, placed them on the table, then walked away. Gregor divided the shots into two for each of us, clinked one of his into one of mine, then downed it like he was a pro. He stared at me until I did the same.
“Tequila?” I gasped as the fire ran down my throat.
“If you don’t like it you can choose the next drink.”
“The next drink will be water,” I said, sipping on my beer as a chaser.
Gregor puffed on his cigar. The smoke swirled around him as he fixed me with a concerned stare.
“You can’t burn yourself out, kiddo.”
The change of subject caught me off-guard. “Do what now?”
“You’ve got to be patient,” Gregor said with sadness in his voice. “Slow, cautious steps until we reach JGB. These things take time more often than not. But you’re moving a thousand miles an hour like you expect him to turn up around the next corner. That stress ain’t good for you. It ain’t good for morale. And it ain’t sustainable. Ease back on the throttle, kiddo.”
His easy lecture pissed me off. Not because he was wrong, but because he was right. I didn’t want his pity.
“Look, kiddo,” I said, knocking back the other shot of tequila. “I spent four years convincing myself to forget about JGB. Telling myself lies about how it was a random act, that these things happen, that it was unhealthy to obsess over one man on another continent. And you know what happened? You guys came along with your hacker test and your mercenary group and your mission, this fucking mission to kill the man who killed my father, and poof, all that therapy was gone like that.” I snapped my fingers.
“Yeah,” he said, drawing out the word. “Life’s shit sometimes.”
“No, it’s not,” I insisted. “This is what I want. To get Blanco. So don’t tell me to slow down just ‘cause I’m more enthusiastic about it than you are.”
Gregor took his time sipping his beer and chewing on his cigar. I couldn’t tell if the look in his eye was pain, regret, or sympathy. I didn’t want any of it.
“Revenge ain’t everything,” he said.
I leaned toward him. “You going to give me a sad speech about Michael’s dead wife?”
Gregor flinched like a gunshot had gone off. “He told you?”
“Uh huh. In the context of me letting go of my anger. How dwelling on it isn’t healthy. I’ve already heard it once this week, so spare me the rerun.”
He gestured with his cigar. “He tell you the rest of it? Or just the sappy part about forgiveness and moving on?”
I hesitated. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Our Michael isn’t some angel from the Talmud,” he said. “After Adele was ambushed by Hezbollah, he went rogue. Put on civilian clothes and abandoned his post. Packed some water and protein bars and went out to the West Bank with nothing but a standard issue combat knife. Came back a week later with his body covered in blood and his head full of intel on half a dozen Hezbollah cell locations.”
“Holy shit,” I breathed.
“So when Michael tells you revenge isn’t healthy, it’s ‘cause he knows from experience,” Gregor said. “His advice is good. You should listen.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “You guys picked me because of my history with JGB. That it would make me more motivated than any mercenary only in it for a paycheck.”
“Donovan thought so,” Gregor said. “Michael and I had our doubts. But here you are, so that’s what I’m telling you.”
I chewed over what he said. But only for a moment. I wasn’t going to be derailed now that I was on this path.
“Michael got his chance at revenge,” I said. “I want mine.”
“Oh, you’ll get it,” he said. “Just don’t expect it to make everything better.”
I was getting annoyed at his dismissive attitude. Everyone wanted to tell me how I was or wasn’t supposed to feel. Nobody cared about what I wanted.
“You don’t know what I’ve been through,” I said. “I have to make things right.”
“You’re not the only one who’s lost people,” he snapped. The men at the bar twisted on their stools to look at the commotion, but Gregor continued staring at me, his eyes glowing orange behind his cigar.
“Don’t tell me you lost a wife too,” I said, hoping that that wasn’t the case.
“A father.”
I flinched. “How?”
Gregor waved his tequila glass in the air and the bartender rushed over to refill it. I nudged one of mine forward to be refilled too. Gregor remained silent until we were alone again, tossed back the shot, and slammed down the glass so hard I was shocked it didn’t shatter.
“My pops had a heart condition,” he began, speaking rapidly as if afraid he would lose his nerve. “Something with the valves. When I went into the Army they moved stateside to be near me and our other family, and that’s when the health problems really started collecting. This heart valve would fire randomly, making my pops really tired all the time for no reason. It’d come on fast and end just as suddenly. Sometimes nobody’d even notice, except him, and he wasn’t about to make a fuss. Wasn’t his style.
“It was Christmas when he had a real bad episode. Or maybe the day after Christmas. Point is, I was home on leave, and my sister was on college break. We were all watching a movie in the den when he starts wheezing, having trouble breathing. His pulse was so fast we thought his heart was trying to beat its way out of his chest and run away. We rushed him to the hospital but the specialist was home for the night and couldn’t see him until the next morning. VA hospitals are shit, so we thought seeing the specialist the next day was great news. So while pops was hooked up to oxygen and monitors we hunkered down in his room and found another Christmas movie to watch on the tiny hospital TV.”
Gregor paused to chug the rest of his beer in three long gulps. His eyes were glazed over.
“He had issues all night. The health monitors went off every 30 minutes, alarms that made us bolt upright in our chairs. They were false alarms, the nurse said. But they kept going off like clockwork. We were all exhausted and the monitors made it impossible to sleep. Like sleep deprivation torture. So eventually the nurse, taking pity on us, turned off the internal alarms so they would only register at the nurse’s station.”
He pressed his tongue against his cheek, staring off at nothing.
“It worked. We got some sleep. Until I woke to the nurse shaking me awake, telling us we had to leave the room. Nurses were pouring into the room and examining the monitors…”
“Oh no,” I said when I realized what had happened.
“Uh huh. The nurse made a mistake. She thought she was turning off the room alarms, but she turned them off for the nurse’s station too. Dad’s heart went into palpitations, and then eventually stopped. He died while we slept a few feet away.”
“Gregor…”
“I spent a while blaming the nurse,” he admitted. “Hard not to, right? A few months later they invited us back to the hospital. Put us in a conference room with bottles of water on the table and a friendly woman who said she was the head of nursing at the hospital. I was so angry, kiddo. I was ready to scream at them. I wanted an excuse, any reason, to flip the table and smash the furniture. You know what the head of nursing did? She apologized. It could have made them liable if we ever decided to sue, but they apologized anyway.”
He snapped his finger. “All my anger was gone. Just like that. Their apology meant the world to us. I broke down and cried like a baby with my mom and sister, and the head of nursing cried too. And that was that.”
“I’m sorry you lost your father,” I said. “Especially the way it happened. But how is this relevant to me? Are you saying I should get an apology from Blanco? That will make me feel better? Make everything all right?”
He stared back at me, stone-faced.
“The point, kiddo, is that sometimes shit things happen in life, and sometimes nobody is to blame. It’s just the randomness of the universe, like cancer hitting a marathon runner but not a smoker.” He gestured with his cigar. “You think you need to kill JGB to feel better. I can’t blame you. But kiddo, sometimes you don’t really know what you need until you get it. Like my hospital apology. Don’t pour all your hopes into JGB. When it’s over, all you’re gonna be left with is an empty hole you don’t know how to fill.”
I didn’t want to hear any of this. He was wrong.
“It wasn’t randomness of the universe that killed my dad,” I said, biting off every word. “It was one man giving an order. A man we’re homing in on.”
He examined his cigar as if it was the only thing that mattered. “Just giving you some advice, kiddo. Up to you if you want to take it.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly.
“Hey, you know of any Colombian cities starting with CB?”
“That was random.” Something tickled my memory. “There’s one I heard recently… Ciudad Bolivia? Ciudad Bolívar? Yeah, I think I heard that when we were in Zurich.”
Gregor pulled out his phone and tapped on the screen. He sighed. “Nah, that’s in Venezuela, not Colombia…”
He trailed off. His eyes widened.
“What is it?”
He smashed his cigar in the ash tray, grabbed my head in both of his hands, and kissed me on the lips. Nothing sexual—more of a Bugs Bunny kiss.
“You just broke open the case, kiddo.”
21
Juliana
As we rode home on the motorcycle I held onto Gregor’s body a little more closely. I felt my thighs against his thighs and my hands around his firm chest. I felt closer to him now, and not just because of our current physical proximity. We were both members of the Dead Dad Club. The circumstances might have been different, but the pain was the same.
It also gave me some perspective on my teammates. When Donovan brought me up to his hotel room that night in Boston, all I saw were three military bros full of bravado and demands. It was easier to empathize with them knowing they’d experienced their own pain.
