“It was credible enough for you to shut down my restaurant claiming salmonella!” Vi flared. Vibrant, passionate.
Thank you, Jesus. Chase was not very religious. But there were moments when he just simply did not know what else to do with all the feelings he had.
When her body had gone limp like that, terror had surged up in his, ghastly, clammy. He’d seen too many people die.
Not Vi, not Vi, not Vi.
Vi was life.
Passionate, impulsive, risk-loving, overconfident—insanely overconfident—hot-tempered, fighting for her space, her paths, her choices…alive.
He loved civilians. They were soft-bellied and incomprehensible and sometimes it was like loving his stuffed animals when he was a kid, but he still absolutely loved them. They gave him a reason for being. As a five-year-old, he’d piled those stuffed animals up in a fort made of brush and gone out to fight for them against imagined foes or sometimes his cousins and siblings. He’d made up conversations with them, pretended they could connect.
Vi was a civilian, too. She had that innocence. Or she’d had it. But she wasn’t soft-bellied. She’d never felt fluffy and made-up. She, too, was a doer, not someone who talked about what other people should do. He’d always felt as if, underneath the battles they had, they understood each other. From the very first moment he’d met her, life force had reached out to life force and just surged.
They’d had to tell him over and over and over again that she was okay, as they were loading him and Vi in separate ambulances. But he’d known that all they were really trying to do was get him to calm down enough so that they could follow their best practices for torso wounds and transport the victims to the hospital as fast as they could.
Because torso wounds were shitty. That was why men expecting combat wore body armor, but Chase hadn’t, of course, floating on the success of his mission and the assumption that he’d made the world safe again, going to see his girlfriend so she could admire what a hero he was.
“You’re an international hero now, Ms. Lenoir,” a male voice was saying. “I think you’ll find that salmonella story has been buried under a much more fascinating one.”
“I’m a hero?” Vi sounded startled. “My whole team brought the first one down. And Chase got the second one.”
“Your whole team are heroes. But yes, you and Lina Farah have become the superstars in the world’s eyes. We’re keeping Mr., ah, Smith’s identity secret.”
Silence. Wow, Vi must be stymied.
“Once we got Al-Mofti, we found that he was producing ricin, so I think we were right to shut down your restaurant until we got a better idea of the threat. Of course, we shut the ricin operation down, and we thought we had stopped any attempts at terrorist attacks coordinated around the U.S. president’s visit, but we still had a couple of people staking out your restaurant and every single other possible attack site in the city just in case.”
“Hundreds of men,” Elias said. “Throughout the city. Some openly, some more discreetly. It’s not that we weren’t taking seriously the random mention of your restaurant that we had picked up, it was just that it seemed a least likely target among many likely ones, and we thought Al-Mofti’s death would disrupt any plans. Plus, with regards to your restaurant, we’d been very focused on the ricin threat and knew we had eliminated that one. I guess we miscalculated the influence of a personal grudge and erratic personality on your pastry chef’s cousin’s actions, on his willingness to substitute one style of attack for another and avenge Al-Mofti.”
“See, if you’d talked to me I could have told you all about that jerk,” Vi snapped. “Lina could have told you about him. I could have told you that if anyone ever gave him a gun and explosives to play with, he’d probably go try to use them on some women he hated.”
Chase fought men who hurt civilians all the time. And yet he would never understand them.
He pushed away from the wall and eased himself into the hospital room door.
Since both Elias and the CIA case officer had positioned themselves with a view of the door, they both saw him immediately, of course.
Washed out, hair limp, Vi had the head of the bed elevated enough she could half sit as she argued with Elias and Brandon Miller, and in addition to the expected wrappings around her ribs, she had gauze all over her left hand. Right hand in a splint, left hand in gauze, their motion more limited than usual, but both still gesticulating to make her point.
Until she saw him and her hands dropped in her lap.
“Hey, honey,” he said, low. His chest felt so shaky. “Mademoiselle Gorgeous.”
Her eyes grew very red. She grabbed a stuffed animal from the huge pile of them filling a chair and threw it at him. High up, far from his wounded side. Where it would sail over his shoulder and not touch him if he didn’t catch it.