Chapter Seventy-Seven

Safiya

G rayson strode back into the living room with his gaze on me, and I did not know if my heart was breaking or being put back together.

For eight years, I had not known a single personal detail about his background. He had known mine. He had seen it. In the beginning, I had wanted to ask him why he had come back for me, why a man like him would. But my English had not been as good, and the moment he had taken me on that private plane and flown me to not just a new life, but an entirely new world, I had lost all courage to ask him anything.

Then he had started training me.

That first week felt as if it were both yesterday and a lifetime ago. Recalling every minute of the time he had given me back then, a memory surfaced.

Barely wanting to breathe over the shiny new surfaces and impossibly soft furniture and bedding, I padded as lightly as possible into the living area with an open kitchen that my mother would have been overjoyed to see.

Pain, suffocating and deep, ached in every corner of my soul at the mere thought of her, but in the next second, the man with almost colorless eyes was coming through the front door with the early awakening sun shining in rays around him.

His gaze found my eyes but not before he had glanced at the borrowed sleeping clothes I had taken from a shelf in a closet full of more clothing in styles I had never seen. "Did you sleep?"

Tentative about my accent and his sparse but sure manner of speech, I did not answer. I nodded.

"You may speak." Carrying a cup that looked as if it were made of paper, he strode toward me with the same strength as when he was in camouflage and carrying guns.

I tried my English. "Yes. I sleep."

Stopping less than one pace away, he looked down at me with no hint at his thoughts in the hard angles of his face. "Slept is past tense of sleep."

Embarrassment heated my skin. "I slept."

"Good. Tea." He held the paper cup out to me. "Black with sugar."

Emotions I had spent my whole life tucking away because that was how I had learned to survive as the village's fatherless daughter with the vulnerable husbandless mother, pushed at my crumbling barrier.

The American Navy SEAL had noticed how I liked my tea on the journey here. A journey I still could not believe had been real. "Thank you."

Without acknowledgment, he pulled a set of keys, a cell phone, and an envelope from the pockets of his pants and set them on the shining white kitchen counter. "You said you had never been in a car, but have you ever driven any vehicle?"

I breathed in the aroma of tea leaves, familiar but different from home, and also the smell of new rain and something crisp and cool that always clung to his skin. Far away from everything I had ever known, holding the warm cup as it heated my hands, smelling the man who had rescued me, I did not know which scent I needed most in that moment.

"Safiya?"

"I am sorry."

"Don't apologize to me." Something in his eyes had shifted, but then it was gone. "Have you ever driven any sort of vehicle?"

"I have not." But I had watched him drive, and I had seen other vehicles plenty of times. Mostly with the bad men when they came through the village, but the man who bought the wool from the sheep also had a small truck. I had never told my mother, but he had offered me rides many times. I had always declined.

"I'll teach you." The American slid the keys aside with a quick, precise movement before he picked up the cell phone. "Have you ever used a smartphone?"

I had never used any phone. "No."

"This is how we'll communicate." He pushed a button, waited until the phone lit up, then he rapidly began swiping his thumbs across the screen with quick, precise movements.

I stared at his large hands that had held a gun and grasped my arm in the pitch-dark in the middle of the night at that horrible place I refused to think about. The same hands that had then driven a car, flown a plane, driven another car, and brought me here—to this palace of glass that sat on the sand in front of an endless ocean with an unworldly color that was so bright, I had no words to describe it.

I could not take my eyes off the hands that belonged to the man who had come for me. "Communicate?"

"Yes. When I'm not in town."

"Is that where you live? In a town?" Is that why he had left last night? Did he have a wife? Children? My mouth turned dry. "You do not sleep in your…." I searched for a bigger word, but I could not think of one. "Home?"

He glanced up from the screen of the phone, and for one heart-stopping moment, those eyes that were neither like the ocean lapping at this house nor the ocean we had flown over stared at me. "This is your house. I do not and will not stay here. When I'm working, I'll be away. Sometimes unreachable. Being ‘out of town' is an expression to convey that. You'll need to learn to live on your own, take care of yourself, protect yourself, and above all else, not draw any attention."

"I…." My stomach twisted. "For how long?"

"Do you know the word protocol?"

I did not. "I do not." He did not answer my question.

"Do you know what a rule is?"

"Yes." I knew the word, but my anne had never given me any rules. We tended to our sheep, our meals, our home, our clothes, and she taught me to read in Turkish and speak in English.

"Protocol is a stronger way of saying rule."

Why would he need another way to say the same word? "They are different, these rules?"

"Yes."

Eager to please him, desperate to please him, I nodded. "I can make rules."

"You aren't going to be making the rules, Safiya. I am."

My heart, the one that had been suffering a loss I could barely breathe through, it made a new kind of beat. "Okay."

"All of them," he added with a seriousness I was not sure he ever let go of.

"I understand. You make all rules." I did not mind. I did not know this world.

"For you, yes, I do. I will also teach them to you, and you're going to follow them." His hand landed on my shoulder, and pressure that was neither gentle nor punishing tingled down my whole arm. "You will always follow the protocols."

"Give me a second."

Blinking out of the memory, I glanced up in time to see a Navy SEAL pick up his mother and carry her to a bedroom I could see from where I sat. After gently placing her down and quietly murmuring something to her as she turned onto her side, he tucked the edges of a worn blanket around her.

A mere three strides later, he was standing in front of me, holding out his hand. "Let's go."

As I placed my hand in his, the charged, intimate connection that always took hold every time he wrapped his large fingers around mine was there, but this time that current, that tie to him, it felt profoundly more deep.

Looking up into his fathomless gaze as I stood, I struggled to remember decorum. "I should say goodbye to Raine." Thank her for her son.

"She's asleep, Safiya."

"And you just leave?" Like he had left me while I had been sleeping?

Cupping the side of my neck, glancing his thumb across my throat with a gentle touch, he softly pressed his lips to my forehead, but he did not speak.

That was when I understood.

He had not left me that night, and he was not leaving his mother now—not in his mind.

This silent ghost of a SEAL, speaking more with his actions than any of his sparsely doled out words, he was intentionally, dominantly protecting us by silently slipping away to slay the Kormos as he left us to our dreams.

Picking up his sister's purse, he turned toward the door.

My hand safely tucked in his, I followed.

But something pushed at my conscience.