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There comes a point in every person's life where the past comes back to bite them in the ass. An ex reappearing at the most inopportune moment, embarrassing photos from a misspent youth, or someone finding that thing you buried a long, long time ago and calling the cops.
None of those things compares to the blast from my past staring me in the face. The face of my best friend. The man who was once my rock, my support, and my family all in one.
It's a good thing I'm sitting down in this moment, otherwise I'd be on the floor of our war room along with my jaw.
I lost Jesse Hazard twenty-two years ago. Twenty-two years and ninety-eight days, to be exact. It was a mission gone awry, a moment in time I've relived over and over again in my dreams, my thoughts, and the folder in my brain labeled “Regrets.” I watched on helplessly as he broke orders and intervened in a situation on foreign soil. I also watched, frozen in fear and under strict orders not to move, as he was gunned down.
My mouth dries and fills with the metallic taste of blood. I'm brought back to the present by my teeth breaking skin in my cheek.
I try to blink Jesse away, because he can't be here. He's my past. He needs to stay in my past.
It's not until my boss says, “Everyone, this is the new guy, Haz,” that I realize, no, I'm not hallucinating. No, Jesse didn't come back from the dead. And no, the man standing in front of an entire room of elite badasses is not Jesse Hazard. But Little Haz has grown up to look exactly like his father right before I lost him.
When I came into HQ this morning, I was excited to meet the new team member. We've needed someone for a while, ever since our last 2IC left, but him?
No. Flat out, nonnegotiable no.
Something primal echoes in my throat. A scream, a command, a protective war cry. Something.
“Haz?” the smartass, Zeus, says beside me. “As in, has he even graduated high school?”
As the shock of seeing a ghost wears off while my brothers in arms bicker and joke, I can spot the subtle differences between Jesse and his son.
I haven't seen Corey Hazard since he was about nine months old. Right around the time his mom told me to get out of their lives forever. After that deployment, when I came home, Sharryn was my support, and I was hers. That lasted all of three months until she read the official report on Jesse's death. Even with most of the information redacted, she could read between the lines. Jesse was on his own out there, and I did nothing to help him. I couldn't save him, and I was the reason she had become a widow.
Haz can't be here. My chest hurts just looking at him. Not only that, but there's something deeper there. The urge to take him in my arms. Hug him like I used to hug Jesse. Look at him like I used to look at Jesse.
My draw to him is instant, but my overwhelming need to protect him is stronger.
When I speak, that primal echo makes my voice gruffer than usual. “His name is Hazard. As in, hiring him is a fucking hazard.”
Iris snarks something at me about not having enough coffee. And even though he might be right—I've never had enough coffee because the limit for coffee doesn't exist—his words merely buzz around me like annoying flies. The same goes for the other smart-assed remarks from others.
I'm laser focused on my best friend's child, who's now smirking at me.
“This has nothing to do with coffee,” I say. “Haz is too young, and this job is too dangerous.”
“Come on, old man,” he says. “Why don't you tell them exactly how you know me?” His words are confident, laced with attitude, and if I wasn't sure whether or not he knew who I was, it's obvious in his tone that he does. And if I know Sharryn the way I think I do, there's no way she would allow her son to be anywhere near me. Grown-ass twenty-three-year-old man now or not. That means she either doesn't know or has sent him here to take me out. And not on a date.
If he is here to kill me, I might not even try to stop him. I'm the reason he grew up without a father.
“It doesn't matter how we know each other because you're not working here,” I growl.
Trav barks something, but like the buzzing noise of snark, his authority is drowned out by flashbacks of Jesse's blood being splattered all over the dirt road, memories of me not moving an inch from where I lay hidden in tall reeds, and the images of the woman and child he tried to save as they were slain next to him.
“Decaf.” Trav's voice finally pulls me from the darkness. “My office. Now.”
Good. This is what I need—to tell Trav exactly why Haz is not going to work for Mike Bravo.
Only, as my feet charge toward the doorway, so do Haz's. We get to the door at the same time and stop where we are, standing toe to toe. Haz is a couple of inches shorter than me, but he's stacked. Muscles for days. They probably only took a week of training to look like that too. It's that easy when you're in your twenties. Up close, his blue eyes shine in the same way his father's did. Like he knows all my secrets.
I wonder how many of my secrets Little Haz has uncovered.
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