Page 123 of Good Enough
“And what would that be?”
He waited, probably trying to make her squirm. When it didn’t work, the napkin in his hand was laid down on the table, and he continued. Elbows on the table, fingers threaded together into a single fist on the table’s surface, he declared, “I wanted to make sure that the woman who’s causing me to lose my best operative is worth that loss. It puts me back immeasurably if it ends up being a mistake. He’s already damaged goods after working with you, but I can’t afford for him to become irreparably damaged to where he is no longer useful to me.”
Kai stared into God’s green cat eyes and stiffened her spine. She could feel the anger pulling up from the soles of her feet to the top of her head. “Taj is not damaged,” she spat at him. “He’s worth more to you than any of the other men just by breathing. How much more will you ask him to give up to make your balance sheet come out in the positive? What is so fucking important to you about him?”
God glowered at her, and he leaned in, hands on the table. “Loyalty, Kubrick. Absolute loyalty. He is, in this world, the right hand of God. By declaring himself to you, his loyalty is now divided.” He leaned back in his chair. “Fuck that, he’s loyal to you first, which makes him compromised. If he is compromised, his team becomes compromised, which in turn means I’m compromised. Our tribe is everything, and I can’t just let him throw that all away over Hollywood pussy.”
“You bastard!” she hissed, shoving herself up and away from the table. “I am done dealing with men like you. Men like Stapleton who think just because they have a dick and deep pockets, they can bully people to do their bidding. Tired of being treated like I’m somebody’s toy. Tired of having to defend every woman who comes into contact with men like you who think that two X chromosomes mean the bearer is weak and controlled by her estrogen levels.
“I didn’t ask Waters to leave the field. If he chose to do that, then he did it without telling me or even discussing it, which is a conversation he and I will be having later when I have room to kick him in the solar plexus. That shit does not fly with me. That decision affects us both.
“And as for loyalty, Taj gives it in spades. His first thought is always to others. Where is your loyalty to him?”
God had watched her entire tirade impassively. He shifted in his seat, one forearm resting on the chair’s arm, the opposite hand gripping the other arm of his chair. “Are you finished?”
She was so angry she didn’t trust herself to say more.
“Sit down, Kubrick.”
She glared at him. Despite wanting to storm away, she did.
“My loyalty, Ms. Serrano, is always to Taylor Miller. I could have left him for dead in Egypt two years ago. Has he told you what happened?”
“Yes. He told me while at the cabin.” She’d been horrified at what had happened to Taj’s sister. Despaired at the decision he’d had to make to go after her alone after God had denied him support. Appalled at what that decision had cost him, mentally and physically. He hadn’t wanted to tell her, but he chose to do it so she would understand why he had let himself push her away rather than fight for her. And she couldn’t blame him for it.
God continued, “I know you feel that my loyalty to Waters is hypocritical based on his sister’s situation.”
“How could you not support him? I’m trying not to judge because I only know a small piece of the puzzle.”
“Understand this, Kubrick. I would do anything for the tribe except put them in a no-win situation. Sarah Miller was a no-win situation. Everyone, including Sarah herself, knew it.
“When she was taken, it was not to sell her into sexual slavery. She was a pawn to be sacrificed to get straight at Waters for interfering in these traffickers’ pipeline. Yes, she was brutalized. Yes, she was raped. Yes, Waters was forced to endure it in person while it happened. But know this. She would have died that way, no matter what. No matter how long it would have taken, she would have been held in captivity until Waters was secured so that he could witness her death.
“So while it killed me to say no, I did because I knew that it would cause me to lose not just Sarah, but Waters and potentially the other five as well. Had Waters not gone off in a heated rush, she would have lived. Not happily, not comfortably, and maybe not safely. But she would have lived, and hopefully, we would have found a better route to get to her in the future.” His voice changed to something broken with his next statement. “It was never my intention to leave her there permanently.”
He looked off into the empty sky as he spoke. “Did you know that he advised another family whose daughter was taken in retribution for an act of theirs of the exact same thing? That’s the cruel irony of the whole situation. He analyzed a similar situation, presented the scenario to the family, and denied the job. Said that it had less than a one percent chance of succeeding. That more information was needed. We wouldn’t give up. We would watch and wait for a better opportunity. They should trust us to update them when it was a viable situation to go in for a rescue. It was not prudent, even for my ridiculously skilled team, to go running off to Egypt to rescue the girl at that time.”
“What happened?” Kai asked, although she was pretty sure she knew the answer.
“The family stormed out. Found another group of mercenaries who were willing to take the job. Waters even tried to warn the men off by handing over our intel. Not a professional courtesy, but because he was convinced that going after the girl then was suicide. Turned out he was one hundred percent accurate. The mercenaries were captured, they were killed, and they were returned home to their boss in a box. In very small pieces.”
“And the girl?”
“No idea. Then Sarah was taken in retribution for a different reclamation assignment that Waters executed. Despite being the same intel he had gathered on the original girl, despite my direct orders not to do it, he went after Sarah anyway. If he hadn’t had a tracker inside him, we would have had no idea where to look for him.
“So we plotted and planned. For two months. He suffered being tortured, watching her assaults, knowing no one was coming to get them, for two long, hopeless months. I knew that if I sent the team in to get them, the odds were zero that I would get all seven of them out of there alive. They thought that if they could free Sarah, whatever happened to the rest of them was fine. That Waters would feel the same. So, knowing it was a suicide mission, those five men he leads went after their boss and their teammate, but this time with my blessing.”
“Does he know?”
“About the mercenaries and the girl? Now, yes.” He turned his angry glare onto her, but somehow, she knew he wasn’t angry at her. “I am so loyal to Waters that I am willing to let him change his paradigm with me. But I had to know that anyone he was willing to fight me for would also fight for him. Even if the odds were zero percent.”
Kai stared at God. “The rule.”
He nodded. “The rule.”
Another fucking test.
“Yes, it is a test.”