Chapter 1

Chapter One

Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story

Virginia Beach, Virginia

June

Six Months Later

T eaching a bunch of soldiers, sailors, and marines nearly half her age that it was a bad idea to loot the countries they were deployed to was not how Kira Hanson had expected to spend the last Tuesday in June. She was supposed to be heading to the airport, embarking on her first-ever trip overseas. This kind of gig usually went to an in-house Army or Navy archaeologist. After all, the Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab was only a few hours away from JEB Little Creek-Fort Story, but CHML didn't have anyone to send at the last minute when Dr. Diana Edwards, who had a contract to conduct these trainings through Friday Morning Valkyries, had been hospitalized with appendicitis requiring emergency surgery yesterday.

Kira owed Diana her life, so when the archaeologist needed a pinch hit, Kira would always step up to bat. Even if she had to bump her flight a day. Thank you, changeable tickets.

Now here she was. She'd driven down from DC in the wee hours of the morning to give herself time to review the presentation materials before she faced her first classroom of fifty or so students. Three sessions today—one in the morning, two in the afternoon, and she'd be done. Then the long drive home. She'd catch her rescheduled and rerouted flight to Malta at seven a.m. tomorrow.

Six hours of teaching. She could do this. Or, given her anxiety, she might vomit on her shoes and spend her lunch break crying in a closet somewhere.

She'd liked teaching when she was in grad school. But that was at a university where, in theory, at least, students wanted to be there. They took art history courses because they liked the subject, or they thought it would be an easy A, which it wasn't.

She had a feeling these students wouldn't be so keen on the subject, but at least there was no tuition, no tests, and no grades. Kira was way more nervous than her students would be.

She took several deep breaths as she sat behind the steering wheel and stared at the building. She'd made it through Pass and ID with the help of a civilian Navy employee who'd met her at the gate. She'd cleared the first hurdle.

Social anxiety was nothing new for her, but she usually managed it with careful planning. It helped that work was one thing she had confidence in. She was a recognized expert in her field. But this wasn't her usual environment, and there'd been little time to brace herself for standing in front of a room and teaching 150 total strangers for six hours.

It was an equation for an anxiety attack.

She took a long, slow breath. Today, I am a Valkyrie.

Well, except she wasn't a Valkyrie. Not really. She was a consultant for Friday Morning Valkyries, but she'd never taken Morgan's defense classes, or Freya's tradecraft training. She didn't have the security clearance of all the real Valkyries. She didn't travel abroad and run down artifact traffickers. Her fieldwork was limited to archives on the East Coast.

Until a few weeks ago, she couldn't get either the security clearance or passport necessary for being a Valkyrie. But with help from the State Department, she had finally obtained a little blue book of freedom. The security-clearance part would come later. It was enough to have an actual passport.

And tomorrow, she'd get her very first stamp.

That thought centered her. Eased the queasiness in her stomach.

I am going to Malta.

She climbed from her car and smiled at the NAVFAC—Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command—employee who'd escorted her onto the base and then politely waited in the parking lot for her to get over her minor panic attack before entering the building.

"Sorry. Got a text I needed to reply to," she lied. Hopefully, he hadn't been watching her and seen she wasn't using her phone.

"No problem. We've got an hour before the first session."

It took fifteen minutes to get the projector to work with the prepared presentation Diana had sent her. She then ran through the slides and accompanying notes. It was familiar information, but she was glad Diana taught classes on the regular, because the notes were detailed enough that Kira wouldn't get stuck wondering why there was a slide of Indiana Jones in a refrigerator without the accompanying point that was being made, even though the joke should be obvious.

She smiled at the silly meme. She didn't expect it from Diana, who always seemed so serious. But then, Kira and Diana met over serious circumstances, so it might be their brief history and not the woman's personality.

Students filed in minutes before the start time. They all wore fatigues of one kind or another. The slightly different patterns and cut probably indicated which branch of the military they were from. Little Creek was part of a joint base run by the Navy, but the other part, Fort Story, was Army. Plus, Norfolk wasn't far, and, for all she knew, personnel from there had also been assigned to one of these training sessions.

This was the kickoff for a series of trainings Diana had proposed to the Department of Defense. Her depth of experience in the Middle East and knowledge of the artifact trafficking world—and recent acclaim for identifying and taking down a terrorist leader—would be a big draw for students who might otherwise grumble at being forced to take the class.

They'd be disappointed when they learned they were being taught by an understudy. Hence, Kira's nerves.

As expected, there were grumbles when she introduced herself, but they dissipated when she explained Diana was recovering from an emergency appendectomy.

A student in the front row raised his hand. She hadn't planned to take questions until after each topic was covered, but she hadn't begun yet, so she nodded for him to proceed.

"Are you the same Dr. Hanson who was abducted in connection with Dr. Edwards and the terrorist leader Makram Rafiq?"

Her throat went dry. She should have expected this. It was strange that she hadn't. The trial for the two men who'd abducted her would likely begin in the fall and was surfacing again on the news as legal dominos lined up. Her abduction had been a side story to the bigger, horrific crimes committed by the terrorist leader and his American accomplices, but she'd had her share of media attention, especially back in December and January.

She nodded and said, "I'm not able to discuss the events of last December any more than Diana could if she were here. Trials are pending, and we won't do anything to jeopardize the prosecution." She picked up the remote to start the presentation. "We've got a lot to cover, so let's begin."

The first session went well enough. During her lunch break she texted Diana to tell her things were going fine and ask how she was feeling.

The reply came from Diana's boyfriend, Lieutenant Chris Flyte.

Chris

Thanks, Kira. D is sleeping but doing better today. So thankful you could step in.

Kira

Of course.

It had been an ordeal to arrange these workshops. A last-minute cancellation for the very first session could have doomed the contract, and Diana had moved to Virginia Beach to be with Chris. Any work she could get locally was a bonus.

Saw some posts in the base chats that tagged you and the news reports from Dec. Hope that wasn't an issue.

Everyone was so careful around Kira's mental state. With good reason. She'd just been starting to process what had happened in December when her dad suffered a massive stroke. He was hospitalized for nearly a month. Three weeks after returning home to Kira's care, just when they thought he was through the worst and had a good chance of recovering most of his speech and mobility, he died suddenly in his sleep.

She gave Chris the same answer she'd been giving everyone the last few months.

I'm fine.

And she was. Now. She fully expected to fall apart later. After Malta. After she had answers.

Then the grieving could begin.

She stared at the phone for the awkward moment of wondering if the conversation was done or if she needed to say "bye." The joys of group chat with people one didn't know well.

Her stomach growled. She had only forty-five minutes for lunch. She'd figure out the rules of texting with one of the SEALs who'd saved her life another day.

She didn't know if she'd ever quite be comfortable around Chris Flyte, and he wasn't even the SEAL who'd found her lying on the floor, battered and at her worst.

She still shuddered at the state she'd been in when Lieutenant Commander Randall Fallon had found her. She knew she'd regained consciousness. If it could be called that. She was pretty sure she'd said something to him, but had no clue what.

Later, she'd told her father to send him and the others who waited at the hospital home. She couldn't face anyone.

By the time she was ready to face Rand again, he was gone. Then he was deployed. Or maybe he'd been avoiding her. She'd never be sure.

And then her father had the stroke. Still, two weeks after he'd returned from the hospital, with her father's encouragement—some might even call it nagging—she decided to leave him home alone and attend the baby shower for Morgan's second child.

She arrived more than an hour late, and as she parked her vehicle, she spotted Rand up against his car with a petite, gorgeous Latina woman Kira had met once at FMV's offices. Staci was a grad student in cultural heritage preservation who'd been a coworker of Morgan's when they both waited tables at Double D, a restaurant known for its busty, scantily clad servers.

Staci was beautiful and bold and everything Kira wasn't.

She wasn't sure if Rand and Staci had kissed, but regardless of whether or not lips were involved, there had definitely been a moment between the attractive couple. Then Rand opened the passenger door, and Staci climbed inside. Kira ducked in her seat as Rand drove by. She'd waited until they were gone, then she started her engine and drove home to her ailing father. She did not have the energy for peopling after witnessing that.

She'd missed her shot with Lieutenant Commander Randall Fallon when she turned him down that fateful December day, but she couldn't regret it. He'd accepted her no, but he'd left the door open by entering his number into her cell phone. That act had probably saved her life.

She'd texted Help to Rand in the seconds before she was kidnapped. Without her message, no one would have known she'd been abducted, and Diana wouldn't have taken an enormous risk that led to her being found before the man who'd paid for her abduction had the opportunity to rape her.

She'd done the right thing in turning Rand down then. It was just a shame that by the time she was ready to maybe give him a yes, he'd met someone better.

She let out a sigh. Of course he was on her mind today, given she was teaching on his base and had just exchanged texts with one of his teammates. Thankfully, no SEALs were slated to take these classes. Diana had another series of lectures just for special operators that would begin next month.

Kira locked the classroom and headed to her car. She'd grab lunch at a drive-through. The car line was long, however, so she parked and went inside the fast-food restaurant.

A young Black woman in front of her in line did a double take, then smiled and said, "Dr. Hanson. I enjoyed your class this morning. You won't believe how many times I've had to tell some dumbass on deployment to leave artifacts on the ground or that buying an artifact from a rando on the street is funding the very terrorists we're there to stop."

Kira smiled. "It's an endless battle. Thanks for taking it on. Many choose to look the other way, especially when the person doing it is a friend or peer."

"I'm planning to study archaeology when I'm out of the Army. I want to specialize in Black history."

"There are a lot of opportunities in programs focused on decolonizing archaeology and anthropology."

"I'm two years out, but I'm already searching schools and programs. Any you recommend?"

"I'm more familiar with art history programs in general, and when it comes to anthropology, I'm disappointed to say that efforts to decolonize the profession at the university level began after my time, so I'm not current with the most effective professors and schools."

"But you're so young!"

Kira smiled at the familiar refrain. "I'm older than I look. I got my PhD ten years ago."

"When you were what, twenty?"

"Closer to thirty."

"Wow. What moisturizer do you use?"

Kira didn't want to say it was probably more about a life spent indoors and out of the sun than a good skin regimen, so she smiled and said, "Just good genes, I guess."

At least the too much time indoors thing would change with the trip to Malta. She was going for family research, but she'd have plenty of time to wear a bikini and swim in the Mediterranean. She'd walk along the walls of forts that were nearly five hundred years old and would feel the warm Mediterranean breeze on her skin as she looked across the water and tried to imagine what the sea had looked like as the Ottoman Empire attacked and eventually captured Fort St. Elmo during the Great Siege.

She would visit the Blue Lagoon on the island of Comino and hike to see the megalithic temples on the island of Gozo. And she would drink fruity cocktails and be bold and flirty with handsome strangers. She would do all these things outside, in the searing Maltese sunshine. Starting tomorrow.

The line moved forward, and the young soldier got her food. Moments later, Kira had hers and nodded to the woman as she headed out the door.

She had just survived an unplanned social interaction. Good practice for her trip.

The next session went better than the first. No one asked awkward questions about her abduction in relation to Makram Rafiq's arrest. She got into the groove with Diana's presentation materials now that she had one session under her belt. The third would be a snap.

She only had a fifteen-minute break between sessions two and three. She dashed to the ladies' room. There was a line when she got there, but thankfully, it moved quickly. By the time she was done, the room was quieter.

She washed her hands and checked her makeup. After reapplying lipstick, she stared at her face in the mirror and breathed deeply. The scar on her forehead stood out in bright red on her pale skin. Over time, she imagined it would fade to white, but it was still fresh six months later.

Even with the scar, she looked so much like her mother.

After her mom died, her father would cup her cheeks, smile, then say, "It is my greatest joy that your mother lives on in you." But in the weeks before his stroke, he would scowl as his finger touched the ugly red wound, the only visible evidence of her abduction. He didn't say his thoughts aloud, but she knew him well.

"It's not Freya's fault, Dad."

"She—and her whole family—were always trouble."

Considering what had happened to Freya's family, his words were downright cruel, and she had to wonder at what had made her once sweet father into a man with such a mean streak.

Maybe it was triggered by facing his own mortality. It was certainly fueled by fear for her.

She closed her eyes and took a final deep breath.

Today, I am a Valkyrie.

When she returned to the classroom, it was nearly full. She glanced at her watch and gave a small sigh of relief to see she had two minutes to spare.

She kept her head down as she traversed the center aisle to the front of the room, wading through a sea of camouflage.

One more class. Two hours. Then Malta, sunshine, and answers.

She fiddled with Diana's lecture notes, hearing the low buzz of conversation as the last students filed in.

Her throat was dry, and she was glad to see the empty water bottle on the lectern had been replaced with a fresh one. She pulled up the spout and raised her head as she squeezed the bottle to fill her mouth.

That's when she saw him. Sitting in the front row, just feet in front of her. Blond, blue-eyed, muscled perfection. Lieutenant Commander Randall Fallon.

The water hit her throat, and she choked, involuntarily spewing a geyser in his direction.

She coughed and clapped a hand over her mouth.

Drops of water dripped down his handsome face as he grinned. "Hello, Kira."