Page 97 of Collateral Damage
The jacket isn’t.
He takes my arm and guides it through the sleeve, careful, steady. No fuss. No comment until we’re done.
He steps back and looks at me. “Better,” he says.
He picks a single stray thread off my shoulder, his face a mask of practiced stoicism. "Now," he says, "go look them in the eye and tell them they still have jobs."
The transition from the plush, climate-controlled silence of the main house to the harsh reality of North Dakota starts the moment I step onto the wraparound porch.
My boots crunch as I descend the porch steps.
The walk to the machine shed is three hundred yards of exposure. To any satellite or long-range lens, I’m just a man in a high-end suit walking across a snow-dusted yard. But I feel the eyes of the perimeter cameras. I know where they are: tucked into the shadows of the hay barn, perched in the roof, their thermal optics tracking the heat signature of a man who looks like he’s about to yank the rug out from under the people he brought here.
I reach the small steel "man-door" at the side of the shed. I don't knock. I press my thumb to the disguised scanner hidden behind a rusted junction box. There’s the dull clunk of a heavy magnetic bolt retracting.
Inside the shop, I walk past the smell of diesel and cold metal toward the back wall, where the massive tool rack looms.
I don't hesitate. I reach for the heavy pneumatic wrench hanging on the third peg and pull.
The hiss of released air is the only warning before the ten-foot section of the wall grinds inward.
My team is assembled. Every one of them. Caleb, Delilah, Zack, Reese, Verity, Luke, Axel, even Jake and Samantha have shown up. Which means whatever I'm walking into, it's worse than I thought.
I do a fast sweep the way I always do—threats, exits, who's standing where, and why. It takes me two full seconds to understand that none of my training applies here.
Fairy lights. Candles. Flowers.
No tactical gear. No tension in anyone's shoulders. My father is standing to the left with the expression of a man who has been sitting on something and is deeply pleased with himself.
The dread in my gut doesn’t evaporate—it recalibrates. I’m still trying to figure out what’s up when movement from behind the reinforced ballistic glass partition draws all the air out of my lungs.
Ava.
A vision of lace and light, shimmering against the dark walls of the ready room.
And beside her, an old friend turned army chaplain, I haven't seen since our last tour in the desert.
The realization hits me like a physical strike to the chest. The "Board." The "bad news." The suit change.
All misdirection.
I’ve trained my team to slip past the most impenetrable defenses unnoticed.
I just never expected them to turn those skills on me.
"Silas Hightower," Ava says, her voice steady, cutting through the silence of the room. "Will you marry me, right here, right now?"
I’m at her side before she draws her next breath.
THE END
Epilogue
Six months later…
Silas
August in Baltimore is humid, relentless, and entirely indifferent to the fact that I grew up in the dry, unforgiving cold of North Dakota.
