“Jesse?” Simon’s head had come up.
Jesse turned slightly, keeping his voice calm. It was easy since he felt hollow. He wasn’t sure how much emotion he had left inside him. Phoebe had done this to him, though at the end of the day she was just doing her job. But Phoebe had shown him that there was no going back. He would always be under suspicion because he’d survived and they had died. “I got the same text. I’m sure he’ll be here soon.”
Jesse was used to waiting. When he got an order to be somewhere, he got his ass there and then he waited. He didn’t complain or get restless. He just waited.
How could he change his nature? Because he needed to. He needed to walk away from McKay-Taggart. He wasn’t sure what he would do, but he had some land back in Wyoming and maybe it was time to shut himself off from everyone.
“It’s all right, Jesse. No one blames you for biting that bastard. I just wish you’d taken a bigger chunk out of him.”
He was such a joke. He really was a dog without a leash sometimes. “I think I should hand in my notice.”
Simon’s chair turned. “No.”
Just a flat denial and no explanation. “You don’t get a say in this. I’m going to tell Tag when he comes in. I can be on a plane to Laramie by tonight.”
He didn’t have much to pack. Almost everything he owned had been picked out by Charlotte and the other women. He would grab his duffel and pack his clothes and make arrangements to ship his guns. He had a couple of pictures he wanted to take, but not a lot else.
Simon leaned forward, his eyes going to his cousin who suddenly seemed deeply interested in his punch glass. “We can talk about this later, but don’t think for a second I’ll let you leave.”
Jesse really didn’t care if Malone was listening in, or Deke for that matter. Hell, apparently everyone had been listening to his private humiliations for months. “You don’t get a say.”
“I bloody well do. I’m your partner. This affects me, too. You can’t just quit.”
“Watch me.” He knew he was being stubborn, that he should have just slid his resignation onto Big Tag’s desk and walked out, but somehow he couldn’t leave without having it out with Simon. Everyone else, he could handle. Simon and Phoebe had been his people. God, he thought he’d had people again but he needed to always remember that moment in the Humvee. When he really thought about it, his life had ended there and he was just a walking shell now. It was just that for a moment, he’d felt alive again.
His mind suddenly went back to Jimmy, the new guy. He’d only been in the unit a few weeks when they’d been caught. He remembered how stoic the man had been. He’d just had one request—that whoever survived take his wife a message. Jimmy had been messed up when he’d given Jesse the message and it hadn’t made a lick of sense to him, but he’d promised.
Jesse had failed in that, too. He hadn’t been able to find the wife of the private. He’d fucked up and gotten the name wrong because no one in Army personnel could tell him anything. Hell, after all the crap he’d been fed, maybe the man had never existed at all.
He kind of deserved what he got.
“Jesse, I will not allow that woman to break you,” Simon hissed his direction. “Do you understand me? She lied. She fooled us all.”
“And what about you? Did you lie, too?” He had to know. Even though he was still going to walk away, he needed to know if Simon had ever been his friend.
“About what?” Simon asked, his voice low.
“He wants to know if you were watching him, too,” Malone said, his eyes grave. “He thinks because my team was monitoring him that maybe you guys were doing the same. You know you aren’t the only one who spent time in a prison over there, Murdoch.”
“I’m the only one with a set of videos devoted to how I watched my team being killed. I bet the Agency’s played them over and over.” Many soldiers had been guests of the jihadists but not many had gone through what he had. They hadn’t been a guest of the Caliph, as he called himself.
“I got captured,” Deke said, settling into a chair. “I still have the scars. I was tortured for almost nine weeks they tell me. I lost track of the days. My team found me, took out the little prison I was in. I still think about it a lot. Ace was taken for longer. I think that’s why he keeps to himself a lot. Not me. I wasn’t allowed to do that. I got home and my damn sisters wouldn’t leave me be. They covered me in babies. Yeah, five sisters can make a lot of damn babies. I tried to tell them I wasn’t safe, that I could hurt them, but they just kept handing them to me. One of them would go to sleep and I’d find myself rocking another. Somewhere along the way I figured if I was okay around those tiny things, I probably could control myself enough to work again. You’re not the only one, man.”