The Edge of Trust: Team Edge Read Online Free PDF Page B

blinked. 
    Sara.
    The hallway shimmered. 
    His steps slowed, sweat dampened his forehead, and his vision blurred.  Anxiety tightened his chest.  Nausea rolled through him in greasy waves.
    The pressure in his head grew, and he pushed into the men’s bathroom, gulping in great breaths of air.
    Not Sara. 
    Shaken, he leaned against the cool, white tile and scrubbed a hand over his face. 
    Sara was dead.  Gone.  Never coming back.
    He hooked a finger under his collar and loosened his tie and as the truth punched into him, yet again, he slid down the wall. 
    Your fault.  You failed.  Sanchez warned you.
    The pain rose up, deep and raw and stark.  His eyes burned.
    Yeah, Sanchez had warned him. 
    And then one night six months ago the warning had become fact.
    Staring at nothing, he flashed to the night on the pier.  To his shock at seeing Sara.  Sara’s shock at getting caught in the middle of something she’d known nothing about.  Then the explosion.  The huge fireball hurling orange flames into the sky, into the ocean, then the concussion tossing Sara with violent velocity into oblivion. 
    His op had been compromised and his wife, his precious wife, had followed him because he’d been too much of a dick to stay home and make things right.
    He blamed himself, sure.  Sanchez, definitely.  But what about fate?  Chance?  If he and Sara hadn’t argued that day, if Sara hadn’t seen him drive by the restaurant and then followed him to the dock, would she be alive today?  Could he have protected her?
    He just didn’t know.
    Fate wasn’t only a fickle bitch, she was a cruel mistress of chance.
    Sara hadn’t deserved to die.  Not because of him or his job.  Or because of his lies to Sanchez. 
    But she had died, she’d been blown to hell, and he wondered just how much fate had played into it.
    If he’d had a chance to start over, what would he change? 
    Everything.  For Sara he’d have changed everything.
    Now he’d never have that chance.
    Dillon sat, unmoving, unseeing, fighting not to think, fighting not to feel, fighting not to cry, and when the fighting got too hard, he gave up and let the grief take him.
    <><><>
    After being escorted into, and comfortably ensconced in the admiral’s office, Dillon hoped he was going to get a real good reason he’d been called back in, to the Pentagon no less, so he could go the hell home already.  He had plans of his own, murder on his mind, and he didn’t want, or need, another leash around his neck.
    Trim and tall, John Edge’s athletic body moved with starched precision as he strode from the window to take a seat behind a large mahogany desk.  One look from his cold gray eyes could freeze a man in mid-step but today they showed nothing more than the heavy weight of suppressed frustration.
    Which Dillon might actually have found interesting if his head wasn’t about to roll--literally and figuratively.
    John pushed a newspaper toward Dillon across the wide expanse of polished wood.  Dillon ignored the newspaper with a scowl.  “I don’t know what you’re up to, John, but I’m starting to get a real itchy feeling about whatever it is.  I haven’t been reprimanded even once.”  He rubbed his temples and studied the Lalique clock on the admiral’s desk and wondered, why here? 
    The admiral had a perfectly nice office in San Diego.  Dillon had a perfectly nice office in San Diego.  Coincidentally, his office wasn’t too far down a perfectly nice hall from John’s.  All of which were a whole lot more convenient than this.  Albeit, neither office was quite what this one was.  John’s office here had the grandiose only an admiral of long-standing could achieve.  Expensively framed pictures of him in full dress uniform shaking hands with three different U.S. presidents and the Secretary of Defense stood along the back of a mahogany credenza.  A decanter of unblended Scotch sat in front next to a humidor with a burl wood finish.