“I don’t have a clue.” Andrej rolled the beer bottle between his hands, watched the sunlight turn the piss-yellow liquid into something almost pretty. “He’s a good guy, but he’s a nobody. I checked his background myself. No connections to our business or the military, no suspicious money movements. He once spent a night in jail for drunk and disorderly.” He snorted, still amused by that one, then thought again of the mess in El Paso.

That took the funny right out of it.

“I don’t know how he managed to survive,” he huffed. “Three grenades in an enclosed space that size? We should’ve been peeling his remains off the walls.”

And the ceiling. And the floor. Probably pick bits and pieces of him out of the debris. Burnt bits and pieces. There couldn’t have been much cover in there. It bugged Andrej. He didn’t believe in miracles and Riley surviving that blast with barely a scratch had been nothing short of one.

Riley should’ve been dead. At the very least, he should’ve been severely injured. The shrapnel should’ve cut him to ribbons. The blast wave should’ve destroyed his eardrums and done serious damage to his internal organs. Maybe it had. There’d been no sign of it, though, not even a nosebleed, nothing but a bump on the head and some minor bruising.

“Huh,” J.C. said, but didn’t voice his thoughts on the matter beyond that. Wouldn’t, until he’d acquired more data. J.C. might be a suspicious ex-spook digging bunkers in the desert, but he wasn’t prone to spinning wild conspiracy theories. “Want to see what we’re doing here?”

Used to his friend’s penchant for mental zigzagging, Andrej merely nodded and climbed to his feet with a soft grunt. It had been a long day, and it wasn’t over yet. J.C. patted his shoulder in passing, kind enough not to tease.

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

Andrej glanced at the house once more before he followed. He wondered if Riley had woken up yet, if he was going to be all right. Hoped so for Riley’s sake, but mostly for Misha’s, because he was worried about what Misha would do if Riley wasn’t okay. Or if Riley rejected him again.

He suspected that either way someone was going to die messily. There was nothing to do about it, no way Andrej could help except to try and get

Misha through the aftermath, so he tore his gaze away and loped down the dirt path to catch up with J.C. instead.

“You know what the difference is between you and me?” J.C. asked conversationally when Andrej fell in step beside him.

“I dress better?” Andrej hazarded, only half kidding.

J.C. shot him a look from under dark brows that worked just fine as a rejoinder.

Andrej smiled sheepishly. “No?”