They all stayed crouched over Cale, applying pressure, doing everything they could to save him until an ambulance rushed toward them, lights flashing, siren shrieking.
She’d been taken away in an ambulance before. Cale had stayed with her, every moment.
I love you.
It hadn’t been about duty for him. Not about a mission.
It had been more. She’d been more to him.
Did he realize that he was everything to her?
“Cassidy!”
That was Mercer’s voice, calling out to her. There was emotion, fear, in the cry of her name.
She didn’t look toward him. She couldn’t look away from Cale.
When he was loaded into the ambulance, she was right there. From now on, wherever Cale was headed, she planned to be right there with him.
She didn’t even look at her father. She couldn’t—her gaze was on the man that she loved.
Mercer was still calling her name when the ambulance sped away.
* * *
MERCER WATCHED THE ambulance vanish. Another ambulance. More blood. More death.
Always more.
Cassi
dy had been crying. Her clothes, her hands, had been stained with blood, and tears had poured silently down her cheeks.
The EMTs were crouched around Genevieve Chevalier’s figure now, but there wasn’t anything that could be done to save her.
“She’s the one,” Logan Quinn told him as the agent approached. Other EOD personnel were fanning out, searching the scene. Logan had been clear about where their enemies had been hiding.
Mercer gazed down at Genevieve’s form. In all of his years as an agent, he’d learned that evil could hide beneath the most deceptive of surfaces.
It was a lesson his daughter had now learned, too.
“She was going to shoot Cassidy. At the end, she was pointing her weapon at your asset.” Logan’s voice hardened as he delivered that barb.
He knows. Mercer glanced up. Saw that Gunner stood just behind Logan. Gunner was bleeding from about a dozen cuts, but he acted as if he wasn’t even aware of the injuries.
“You took her out?” Mercer asked as his gaze stayed on Gunner. Gunner was one of the deadliest snipers that he’d—
“Cale did it.” From Logan. Hard. Cold. “Even with a bullet in his back and another bullet driving through his side, he protected Cassidy. He saved her.”
And Cassidy had been desperate for him. Those tears...
Mercer swallowed.
“You didn’t count on it, did you?” Logan pressed.
Mercer’s breath eased slowly past his lips. “I knew Cale was a good agent. The minute I assigned him to Cassidy’s detail, I realized he’d put his life on the line for her.”
Logan shook his head. “No, that’s not what I meant.” A pause. “You didn’t realize that they’d fall for each other, did you?”