Page 88 of Steel Vengeance
Sloane’s heart ached for the man beside her.
“My biggest regret is leaving Blade to face the fallout alone,” he said after a pause, his voice thick with guilt. “There was an investigation, and he took the heat. Ended up retiring early.”
Her chest tightened. “That’s awful.”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice rough. “It is.”
The silence between them hung heavy for a moment. She could see it now—Stitch hadn’t run because he was a coward. He’d been shattered, lost, and too broken to face the aftermath. And now, all these years later, the pain of it still clung to him.
She blinked back the sting of tears. “I’m so sorry for what you went through,” she said, her voice soft. “I didn’t know.”
He cleared his throat, brushing it off, but she could see it still weighed on him. “It was a long time ago,” he said. “Everyone’s moved on.”
Except you, she thought.
“What will you do when this is over?” she asked, tentatively.
He sighed. “I don’t know. If I go back to the States, I’ll probably get arrested.”
Her head snapped around to face him. “What? Why? You didn’t do anything wrong.”
His lips curved into a grim smile. “Walking away without an official discharge... the Navy doesn’t care why. It’s still desertion.”
“But there has to be a way to fix it, right?”
He shrugged, his eyes wary. “Maybe. We’ll see.”
“What happens tomorrow at the docks?”she asked, a short while later. The landscape hadn’t changed much in the last few hours, and she was growing bored with the view.
“When theArabian Princesssails, we’ll pass the information on to Pat, who’ll loop in his CIA contact. They’ll coordinate with the DEA and the Coast Guard to intercept the ship when it enters U.S. waters. At least, that’s the plan.”
She didn’t know much about how these things worked, but it sounded familiar enough. She’d seen enough news footage back home of Coast Guard raids and DEA drug busts at sea. It always looked so slick, almost effortless.
“You think the crew has any idea they’re transporting heroin?”
He shook his head. “Doubt it. The cargo will be buried in containers, probably hidden in legal goods—textiles, electronics, food shipments, whatever won’t raise suspicion. It’s the dock workers you need to worry about. They’re the ones who get paid off to make sure certain containers slip through customs unnoticed.”
“You make it sound so easy,” she mused.
He shrugged. “If you know the right palms to grease, anything’s possible. The cartels have it down to a science.”
She let out a low whistle, shaking her head. “Until I came here, I was living in this safe, little bubble. Now that it’s burst, the world is suddenly a very scary place.”
“It can be,” he agreed. “But don’t worry. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
Those words.
That’s what he’d said that night, right before they’d kissed, even though he’d been talking about Soraya. Now he was saying them about her.
A warm flush mixed with something deeper flowed through her. It was heady, intoxicating. A glimpse of what it would be like to be loved by someone like him.
She gulped. Like that would ever happen.
As soon as this was over, she’d be going back to her old life, and Stitch would soon be a distant, but very fond, memory.
“What about you?” he asked, breaking the silence that had stretched out for nearly twenty miles. “You got anyone to go back to? Parents? Siblings?”
She glanced at him, surprised by the question but shrugged. “Not really. My mom died when I was young, and my dad... well, he wasn’t exactly father of the year.”