clear. Line in the sand pissed. Claim staked. I get it.” He sipped his drink. “The only question is, does she?”
The wall I’d spent a decade building around my emotions cracked further. Seething with anger that he even mentioned the word fuck in the same sentence as her, I fought to keep it in check. “We’re not discussing her, not now, not ever. This is me giving you your one and only warning. If you spar, fight, train, wrestle, or otherwise engage in any physical activity that leaves marks on her body, I will not hesitate to finish what I started two days ago.”
“Mm-hm.” Vance casually took another swallow. “So are you?”
“Am I what?”
He pointed at the door with his glass in hand. “Going to go after her.”
I glared at him.
“Right. Apparently I’m more interesting.” He took another sip of his scotch.
There was nothing interesting about him, but I wanted answers. “Why did you really come here? Sanaa didn’t need to take that meeting, and I’m not buying the bullshit about being on US soil so you’d have the tactical advantage. AES has more than enough resources. This should’ve been handled already.”
“Believe my reasons or not.” Vance shrugged. “I used every resource at my disposal at the time, and I still couldn’t find the asshole in the chaos of her tour schedule. Besides, this was a two-for. Isolate the bomber and see my brother. What can I say, I missed you.”
The lying fuck. “Bullshit.”
He smirked. “Fine. She missed you.”
“She doesn’t know me.” Not who I was now.
Vance laughed. “You haven’t changed.”
Yes, I had, but he hadn’t. Which made him joining the Marines after me even more suspicious. “Why’d you enlist after I deployed?” Vance liked the easy way out. Nothing about being a Marine was easy except the honor of serving your country.
The pretentious prick raised an eyebrow. “You really don’t know?”
I really didn’t care, but I was giving Sanaa time to cool down and Luna time to run background intel. I wasn’t about to let on to Vance yet that I suspected who we were dealing with. I wanted to see what Luna came up with and know if Vance was directly or indirectly involved in any way before I made a move.
I focused back on the conversation I didn’t give a shit about.
“You didn’t need a Marine paycheck.” Before I’d enlisted, while I was waiting for Sanaa to graduate, I was working construction, but Vance was doing security for a nightclub in Miami Beach. He’d said getting his hands dirty was beneath him, but I was sure he was involved in gun running back then. His fancy rented house with no roommates, the cash he always had on hand, the car he drove back then, none of it was what he would’ve been able to afford with an honest paycheck.
Vance’s laugh was humorless. “No, I didn’t.” He took a sip of his scotch, and his expression sobered. “Let’s just say I needed to stop working for the people I was working for, and the best way to disappear is in plain sight. So I enlisted.”
Right. “Ma found your guns.”
He laughed in earnest. “That wasn’t why I joined the Marines, but as a matter of fact, she did. I came home from work one night at three a.m. to a jimmied front door and the lights on. I walked into my living room and found a fuming Irish woman sitting in front of seventeen firearms I hadn’t unloaded yet.” Smiling ironically, he shook his head. “She’d even lined them up by make and caliber. You know how she was.”
“She never told me.” I couldn’t stop thinking about what Sanaa had said. Had Vance really given her something I couldn’t? Or was she substituting?
“Probably didn’t want to stress out her good son.” Vance shrugged casually like he hadn’t just insulted me. “Anyway, she’d suspected something was off after that party, and she came looking. She thought she was giving me a choice when she told me to enlist or go to jail.” He stood. “And Clodagh Conlon wasn’t a woman you fucked with, so I made it seem like it was her decision, but I’d already spoken with a recruiter.”
He downed the rest of his drink. “Five days later, I traded illegally fencing weapons for legally firing them. The people I worked for never heard from me again, and Ma sent me off to basic with a handful of condoms, one of Dad’s old switchblades and forty bucks. Then she