Page 68 of Exit Strategy
I couldn’t sit and listen to that.
Just thinking about it had my blood boiling, and I was ready for a hell of a scrap. I wanted to bring their shiny building down on their heads and then leave the ground red with their blood. The people who would do this deserved it.
They were monsters, and that was half the reason for joining the Royal Marines – get out of North Yorkshire and to make the world a better, safer place. The first half was done. I was out of North Yorkshire. There was almost no chance I would ever get to return to England, never see my hometown or my family again. That was amission accomplishedright bloody there. The other half, well, that was in the bog. Afghanistan had been a horror show clusterfuck, but at I still had all my fingers, toes, and appropriate limbs.
Kyle came out somewhere between the third and fourth smoke.
“You alright?” he asked, leaning against the rail of the balcony.
“As much as can be expected,” I answered.
“She’s doing okay,” he said after a long pause. “But, yeah, it’s fucking ugly.”
“I know some, at least a little. I’m guessing that if this is going to be, what, a bloody deposition, she has to go into detail?” I half-asked. He nodded, almost sensing that what I wanted was silence, peace from this entire ordeal, but to protect and care for Callie as well.
“When did you start smoking?” he asked.
“Year eleven,” I said. “You know how when you’re a teen, you have to do everything you can to fit in and be cool.”
“Year Eleven?”
“Three years from graduation. Year thirteen you get your diploma and either join the military or go into the colliery.”
“Roan hasn’t mentioned what those terms are,” Kyle said.
“I don’t know what you call the third year from graduation, and the colliery is the coal mines, literal coal mines,” I said. “Not a lot of prospects. Lots of kids in school smoked, dressed like we were badasses, and generally were a bunch of dirty-faced chavs.”
“Sophomore,” Kyle said, ticking fingers off, counting backwards I reckoned. “I get that. I remember what a bucket of hot shit that time was.”
“The two worst places I ever served was in my last few years of school and in-country,” I said. He nodded. He had been there too. Not someone I really knew or served with, he was a Yank after all, but he had been close to the captain before the IED took his leg. Lots of co-op back then. We were all in the same shit.
“Do you love her, or are you just infatuated?” he asked, gesturing for a smoke. I tapped him out one and then handed him the lighter.
“Sorry, I only light pretty girl’s smokes for them,” I said.
“When the situation comes up, I make a point of lighting it, and then handing her the lit cigarette,” he said.
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I don’t. But sometimes a cigarette is the perfect social icebreaker. Answer my question.”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted after a long pause. “But I think so.”
“Is that why you’re out here?”
“It is. I can’t stand to sit there and hear what these people did to her. These were the people who hired me, and I thought they were bloody gits and silly wankers, playing at pretend church with their god of green land and blue skies.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over that. They fooled a lot of people. I didn’t know they were like that, and I can promise you Roan didn’t either. If we had known, there is no way we would have lined up an interview with them.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. “And here I thought that working security for a heroin cartel was going to be the low point of my career.”
“Your career isn’t over,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Look, it took a seriously level head to extract Calanthe from that shitshow without turning it into a media disaster. If you had handled it wrong, an hour after the fact, it would have been on the celebrity news and a dozen state and federal agencies would have been on your ass like angry hornets.”
“My career is a series of unfortunate events,” I said.
“You got her out, and youstillhaven’t really answered my question. Do you love her or is this some bodyguard infatuation?”
“I don’t think it’s an infatuation, it feels too real, too serious. I would and will do anything for her, to keep her safe. Even if that means me giving up my life.”
