“I haven’t been in to see him yet, but from what I understand, you’ll both be discharged within a few days.”
“What about Onyx?”
Razor ran his hand through his spiky ink-black hair. “That news isn’t as good.”
Should I confess the nurse had just told me our friend and colleague wasn’t expected to live?
“As soon as he stabilizes, we’ll make arrangements to transport him to a hospital in the States.”
“Is that a possibility?”
“He made it through surgery but hasn’t come out of the coma he’s been in since he was brought here.” Razor looked at something on his phone and stood. “I’ll be back a little later.”
If whatever he read was something about Onyx, I didn’t want to know. My mother would say I was a classic Libra—I dodged confrontation and bad news like a champ. I didn’t believe in astrological bullshit, but I would be the first to admit that avoidance was my coping mechanism of choice.
“I’m going to tell as many people as I can that I love them,” Halo said to me a few days later when we buckled into our seats on the private plane that would take us home.
“Me too.”
“Even my extended family. My aunts and uncles will all think I’m nuts, but I don’t give a shit.”
“Huge wake-up call,” I muttered.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“You ever think about settling down, getting married, having kids?”
“I didn’t before.” I mean, I did, but only when my mother reminded me that as an only child, I was responsible for giving her grandchildren. Those reminders came more often after I’d turned twenty-nine.
“It’s different now, right?”
It occurred to me that maybe Halo had a specific reason for asking. “Is there anyone you’ve been, you know, seeing?”
“Negative. What about you?”
“There’s someone.” What the fuck? Had my life almost ending in a plane crash given me a death wish? If I told Halo the woman I’d been fantasizing about was his sister, I wouldn’t live to walk off this plane.
“There is? Who is she?”
“That isn’t important right now. If or when that changes, I’ll let you know.”
“Seriously?”
“She might not feel the same way I do.” That was an honest response, considering Sloane would have no way of knowing she even crossed my mind.
“Is it someone I know?”
Shaking my head felt like less of a lie than saying the words out loud. Why hadn’t I just kept my stupid mouth shut? I felt a barrier go up between Halo and me, and it was of my making. We’d known each other long enough that he could easily sense when I wasn’t telling the truth. Like he just had.
We were quiet the remainder of the flight; I feigned sleep for most of it.
2
Sloane
I bolted upright, drenched in a cold sweat, and covered my face with my hands. The door to my bedroom flung open, and my mother raced in. She sat on the edge of my bed and gently pulled my hands from my face. “What’s wrong? Did you have another nightmare?”
I nodded. “How did you know?”
“I heard you cry out.”
“What did I say?”
“Nothing decipherable.”
Thank God. I’d been dreaming about Tackle, not my brother, as I was sure my mother assumed.
She stroked my hair. “Go back to sleep, mija. We don’t have to leave for the airport for a few more hours.”
She sat between me and the clock on the nightstand and my phone that sat beside it. “What time is it now?”
“A little after eight.”
Given that most days I was up by five, I considered eight sleeping in. However, the last few days had been so emotionally draining, my sleep patterns were completely off.
Seven days ago, the day before Thanksgiving, my brother, Knox, whom everyone called Halo, along with his best friend, Landry, whom everyone called Tackle, had been deployed on an intelligence mission on behalf of the US government.
Both my brother and Tackle were former CIA agents who now contracted for the agency through a private intelligence and security company.
Before they left, I’d had a good idea where they were headed. While the information was classified, as a criminal investigator for the US Department of Homeland Security, my security-clearance level was high enough to know the op they’d been hired to carry out involved apprehending a suspected terrorist with ties to the Islamic State.
I’d been tracking the same man’s—Abdul Ghafor—communication with known terrorist cells in the US for months. His last confirmed whereabouts were outside Bagram in Afghanistan, but sources had recently spotted him in Colombia.
Thanksgiving Day, twenty-four hours after I watched my mother say a tearful goodbye to her son, my father, a foreign service specialist for the State Department, received a call, informing him that the plane Knox, Tackle, and two other private intelligence agents were traveling on had disappeared from the radar.
A few hours later, he received word that the plane’s wreckage was believed to have been located in Columbia’s Macuira National Park, and the DEA agents who found it, reported there were survivors.
An agonizing twelve hours after that, we were told that my brother had been airlifted to a university hospital in Magdalena. His injuries were not believed to be life-threatening.
“What about Tackle?” I asked when my father’s call ended. He shook his head and walked over to where Nils and Alice—Tackle’s parents—sat with my mother. I held my breath, waiting for him to speak.
“They’re reporting two survivors other than Knox.”
“Meaning one fatality,” said Nils.
Alice gasped and covered her mouth to stifle her keening sobs. My eyes met my mother’s; both of us were in tears.
I wrapped my arms around my stomach and rushed out the back door of our house, not knowing where I was going, only that I had to get far enough away that no one would bear witness to my reaction to the news that Tackle—my beloved Tackle—may
