AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He was so fucked.
Fallon was supposed to be promoted out of active ops, and Chris was in line to take the reins.
Zero chance of that now.
Hell, he’d be lucky if he was allowed to retire gracefully.
He’d move to the Pacific Northwest. Maybe get a house near Xavier. His old teammate wouldn’t hold this fuckup against him. He would understand why Chris had frozen in the moment.
Because that was what he’d done, wasn’t it? Frozen when he realized Edwards didn’t want to be saved? He’d braced for her to pull a gun and shoot him and Kramer.
He’d been prepared to take action if she did.
Xavier would get it, but no one else would.
Hell, he couldn’t look at the faces of the men around this table. His new team.
Every man here knew he was a washed-up coward who’d blown the op.
They just didn’t know why.
Morgan Adler sat anxiously at her desk and waited for the link to the secure video meeting to go live. Her business partner, Freya Lange, sat beside her.
The op to rescue Diana had begun hours ago, and she could only assume the SEAL team tasked with the mission was back on the aircraft carrier. That NSWC wanted to talk to Morgan and Freya wasn’t a good sign.
If the mission had been successful, Diana would be doing all the talking.
Had she been injured? Or…worse?
Morgan didn’t even want to think about what worse could mean.
The screen flashed and then the video link window opened, and she could see a conference room filled with men in uniform, including a dozen or so men in dirty combat uniforms—they looked fresh from the desert.
Diana wasn’t among the group at the table, nor in one of the windows of people joining the meeting remotely like Morgan and Freya.
“Thank you for joining us, Dr. Adler and Ms. Lange,” a Navy captain said. “I’m afraid we aren’t authorized to share mission details with you at this time, but we wish for you to review bodycam footage taken during the op and ask if you can offer insight into Dr. Edwards’s…actions.”
“Where is Diana?” Morgan couldn’t stop herself from asking.
There was a long pause before the captain said, “We cannot answer that question at this time.”
Morgan’s stomach twisted. Either Diana’s whereabouts were secret, or they truly didn’t know where the woman was.
She wanted to grip Freya’s hand, but this was very much Freya’s world, and she wouldn’t permit any show of emotion while dealing with the military.
Sometimes she forgot that Freya had once been a stone-cold Special Activities Division operator for the CIA, but in moments like this, she could see the woman Freya had once been, back when her name was Savannah.
“And why can’t you answer the question?” Freya asked in a cold, commanding tone.
“We’ll get to that. First we want to know what Dr. Edwards was trying to tell our operator in this recording.”
The display changed, and a video playback window was full screen on the large monitor. The captain hit Play and the video began.
Diana, backlit by headlights in a halo around her. A man holding a knife to her throat.
This was the stuff of Morgan’s nightmares. She placed a hand on her belly as she watched.
The work FMV’s field operatives did was frequently dangerous. They all knew it. But it was quite another thing to see the woman Morgan had spent months with in preparation for this job with a knife at her throat.
