Time heals, Jennifer had spouted at least a dozen times over the past two days. Theresa felt like she was rooming with someone’s mother. Her own mother would have tracked Wulf down and introduced him to her car bumper, but crap like time heals was what she imagined normal mothers like Jen’s said. As she marched toward her B-hut, the laptop case she’d borrowed from her friend bounced on her left hip. She’d been so immersed in the internet at Camp Caddie’s Burger King stand that she hadn’t realized the midnight closing time had arrived. Now she had to skulk home without her reflective belt. The visibility aid was mandatory after dark. Ironic to worry about being hit by a vehicle in a war zone, but that was the army.
When she picked up her pace, the briefcase strap slipped from her shoulder. She was already out of uniform without the yellow safety belt, so she gave in and slung the strap across her body, another violation of arcane regulations. She found it unusually hard to care about the petty rules when she’d decided to devote the remaining months of her service commitment to shaping her career, nothing else. She could probably get away with screwing the reflective belt, but not the sergeant.
The hassle of issuing orders to change her pay status from on leave to on duty meant she’d been forbidden to step inside her office for two days. Two full days to mope on her bed. Finally Jennifer had ordered her to get a burger and surround herself with people, as if the mere presence of twenty-two-year-olds video chatting with their nineteen-year-old girlfriends would solve all her problems.
Oddly, it had helped, unless that was the three orders of fries she’d scarfed while her glutes were parked in front of the computer. Jennifer would probably initiate psych eval paperwork when the boxes arrived, but before she filed Wulf in her mental cabinet and locked the drawer, she needed to understand. Presumably other women binged on chocolate, drank or got their hair cut to forget about a loser, but at Camp Caddie she had to settle for reading.
She had a lot of reading coming to her. The Beowulf epic had a bewildering 4,146 results at the leading internet bookstore. Some writer named Seamus Heaney had probably made it 4,147 while she’d been researching. With the royalties from her dozens of purchases, maybe Mr. Heaney could take a cruise.
Inside her hut, she hung her holster over a bedpost, aligned her boot toes pointing out with the tongue open wide enough to stuff her feet in if they had to run for the bunkers, and snagged her sleep shorts. The same routine as every other night in Afghanistan.
Tonight her fingertip poked a corner of stiff paper.
“I’ve been waiting two hours,” Jennifer whispered. “I almost got dressed to go find you.”
“What’s this?” Her roommates would probably be able to hear the thump in her chest, but she managed to keep her voice low. The thing felt like an envelope.
“He gave it to me.” The emphasis on the pronoun made clear who.
“No!” She hadn’t decided how to act when Wulf inevitably reappeared, but she’d thought she’d have at least a week.
“Yes! I’ve been dying. Here.” Jennifer clicked a keychain flashlight. “Read it!”
Theresa tried to rip the envelope quietly, but the noise sounded like a fire alarm.
“Well?” Her roommate bounced on the top mattress.
The envelope contained a sheet of paper with a single unsigned sentence: Please join me at the track at 0530.
“I’m still here. Waiting.” Even in the dark, Theresa could see Jennifer’s hurry-up hand-circles.
“He invited me to run.” How would she be able to look at him, at the lips that had said so many things that had sounded like promises, and pretend he hadn’t hurt her? She wasn’t ready.
“That’s it? Nothing else? No I’m-so-sorry-I-was-a-frigging-donkey-dick?” Jennifer’s hand shot from the upper bunk to grab the note and penlight. “That’s in less than six hours!”
Her friend’s panic fed hers. She wanted to see him, and she didn’t. She wanted to talk to him, but she couldn’t. “What should I do?”
“You should SHUT THE FUCK UP!” the transportation officer in the far bunk snapped. “An artillery battery is more fucking quiet!”
The morning was clear and almost cool enough for dew while Wulf stretched at the dirt track around the helicopter landing zone. He hoped Theresa would accept his invitation. To outsiders this would look like a casual encounter, but he churned with his need to apologize. The day after he’d ordered Lorenzo to take her to the airport, he’d stood on his boat deck with the coast of Italy behind him, and his brain had accepted what his heart had been shouting. It wasn’t possible for the woman he’d watched with her patients to be so immersed in the criminal world that she’d plan murders, or kill two men herself, to further a drug-smuggling scheme. Regardless of what his brother said, he knew Theresa. It didn’t matter who her family was, he knew her, and she wasn’t a criminal.
Wearing the black-and-gray army physical training uniform, she loped around the corner of the building. A thousand women could stand in formation wearing the same shorts and shirt and he’d find her in an instant. Images of wrapping her ponytail through his fist to pin her in place while he kissed her against the wall, then removing the elastic and spreading her hair through his fingers, surged from his imagination to his groin. To cover his reaction, he bent to tighten his shoelaces.
Without a word, she stretched a careful six feet away.
“You came.” The line of her calf drew his eyes. “Thank you.”
“I needed a run.” Her voice was icier than the Hindu Kush. “Ready, Sergeant?”
“When you are, ma’am.”
She set the pace. Within moments their steps thudded into a matching rhythm.
“I’m sorry,” he started. “At Montebelli, I reacted without thinking. I wanted you out of there, but I should have spoken with you.” As far as his apology went, it was one-hundred-percent truth.
“Why’d you change your mind?”
“About what?” His breath caught, but surely she’d assume it was from running. She couldn’t know he’d briefly believed she and her family were involved with the heroin.
Next to him, she huffed. “When I wanted to go back to Caddie, you said it wasn’t safe. Then, pfft.” Her hand waved in the air, then dropped to swing loosely at her side. “You ditched me like an express delivery. Why?”
Rocks and sand crunched under their shoes. Not a good idea to admit Ivar had researched her family; women didn’t like that type of thing. Instead he opted for a limited truth. “When I called my brother to tell him about the attack, he told me who runs Black and Swan. I decided you were safest away from me.”
“So who...is it?” Panting, Theresa realized anger had pushed her to sprint through their first two laps, but no matter how fast she ran, he stayed next to her, damn him. “Who?”
“One of us.”
“One of you?” She stumbled on a stone. “A Viking?”
“Black and Swan’s controlled by an immortal named Unferth. He wasn’t part of our crew.” His words echoed the rhythm of their pounding feet. “He was a skald—a bard—for King Hrothgar.” Beside her, he snorted. “Like today’s cable talk show hosts, but with a harp.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Unferth and my brother have a long-standing feud. Seems like I reopened it.”
“Huh.” As they rounded the far curve a third time, she felt better that he’d apologized, but that wasn’t why she’d come. Alongside the blank wall of the hangar, she slowed to walk and linked her hands on her head to open her lungs. “I’m here because...” She had to choke out her rehearsed speech while she had the resolve. “I came to say...what happened in Italy...is over.”