Pete looked back at them. “No. Of course not. I have a GPS tracker on your phone, and your passport pings, but . . .” His mouth tightened. “Mostly, you belong to a small handful of people connected to our ops group who we keep an eye on.”

“You called Jones, Inc. to extract them.”

“I did.”

“Are the others in danger too? Selah and the doctor? Fraser?” Noemi asked.

“Maybe. They’ve been warned. But I had to see if you were okay myself.”

“What else do you know about me?” Noemi asked.

He looked at Ranger, back to her. “I know you’re married.”

“You know we’re married.”

“I talked with your uncle in Nigeria.”

She just blinked at him. “When?”

“A couple weeks ago.”

“And were you going to tell me that you were alive? Or were you just going to peek in the window, watch me eating cornflakes, then leave again?”

He folded his arms. Looked at the floor.

“Perfect. That’s just beautiful. Wow. How little I must mean to you.” Her voice broke on the tail end. “I don’t know why you bothered to cut off the vest. After all, my heart was already in tiny, shattered pieces.”

He looked up, and even Ranger felt for him, a little.

“Noemi, take a breath,” Ranger said, his mouth close to her ear. “He was trying to do what was best.”

“No.” She rounded on him. “What is best is not disappearing from your daughter’s life, making her think you’re dead.” Her golden-brown eyes sparked. “And by the way, what’s also not best is trying to take down a couple of assassins on your own.”

“Hey!”

“No. You could have been killed. Your dad could have missed—he has the same eyesight as you do—and I would have watched you bleed out on the floor.”

Since when was this about him?

“It’s bad enough that you look like you’ve done all fifteen rounds with Drago!”

“Drago?”

“Rocky IV,” said Pete. “We were big Rocky fans.”

“That explains a lot—”

“No.” She turned back to her father, stepping away from Ranger. “There will be no bonding between you two.”

“We’re not.”

“No laughing. No old SEAL stories. No buddy-buddy talk. None of it. The last thing I need is you putting ideas in Ranger’s head. I get that you have a need to save the world.” She looked at Ranger. “And you’re certainly not good at sitting on your hands.” She took another step away. “But if I find out that you’re recruiting him, and he suddenly ends up missing in some training accident”—she finger-quoted the last words—“I swear I will hunt you down and you will wish you had actually gone to that big ocean in the sky.”

She visibly shook and, despite her words, Ranger didn’t smile.

“Honey,” Pete said.