Capital Falling Trilogy Box Set [Books 1-3]
again, Dad. You're home now, with me—and I've got school in the morning."I can't help but smile back; my daughter is eleven years old, but sometimes, I wonder who is looking after whom?
“Yes, sweetie, we both need to go back to sleep or neither of us will be up in the morning.” Emily frowns and tells me she will make sure we are up in time.
Emily lies down, cuddling into Sarah, her small ragdoll, her oldest friend. She closes her eyes. Pulling her quilt up over her and looking down at her beautiful face, I instantly think how lucky I am. I lean over, kissing her on the forehead, whispering night, night. But she is silent, already drifting back off to sleep.
Closing her bedroom door to, I sneak one last peek at my daughter and leave a small gap, just the way she likes it. I'm not sure whether this is so I can hear her, or she can hear me, I think.
Going into the bathroom and turning on the light, I go over to the basin, lean down into it and drink cold water straight from the tap, refreshing my dry mouth. Looking up, my tired reflection stares back from the mirror; Jesus, I look terrible.
I'm sure I used to get a better night’s sleep in my cot in the deserts of Iraq or Afghanistan than now, and my thoughts immediately return to my pal, Rick.
Rick and I met on the first day of Royal Marine Recruit Training. I was on the young side of nineteen years and he was a year or so older. When Rick and I met and throughout our training, we didn't get on for the longest time. Rick was definitely the alpha male of our intake and could act like a know-it-all dickhead sometimes. Well, often.
He excelled, it seemed, in every aspect of the training, an outstanding athlete, marksman and tactician—but most of all, he was a commanding leader. He rubbed most of us other recruits up the wrong way, Rick was a perfectionist in every small thing he did.
None of us could deny, however, that he was a top soldier and—don't get me wrong—the rest of us were no slouches, especially me. Being a Royal Marine Commando was the job I had always dreamed of, and I ran him close in most areas, occasionally even beating him. Rick was a natural, however, born to fight.
When we completed our Marine training, we both happened to be assigned to 42 Commando at Bickleigh Barracks near Plymouth in Devon, on the glorious English south coast. After originally cursing my bad luck at being posted with him over the coming years, deployments and tours, Rick and I became mates at first, then friends, then the very best of friends.
We had been through the shit together both on and off operations, and it followed naturally that he’d be my best man when I married Jessica, later to become the mother of my children. And it had definitely been his idea, too, for the two of us to pass selection—not try, but pass—and join the SAS, even though he would swear that it was all my doing.
I look again at myself in the mirror. I had better try and get some sleep, I tell myself as I walk back to my bedroom. Somewhere in the distance, in this sprawling City of London, I can hear a siren howling away—or is it two sirens?
I smile to myself as I get into my still warm bed, thinking of Emily again. Am I Daddy or Dad now? She’s growing up so quickly and I should know how time flies since her big brother is now twenty-three.
My heart sinks, however, when thinking of Jessica, their mother, and of what became of us.
Chapter 2
My phone alarm shrieks into my left ear, rudely ejecting me from slumber and into a deep sense of stress. Who knew that the sound of a Sea Breeze could become so fucking annoying?
I swipe snooze and just lie looking up at the ceiling, the early September morning sun seeping in through the cracks in the curtains. In the back of my mind, I register that the siren I could hear the night before is still whining away somewhere off in the distance, but it’s now been joined by at least one other.
My thoughts, it’s sad to say as I lie there, rest on the daily battle to get through the dreadful London traffic to drop Emily to school and then the rush to get to the office at a decent time. I still find it amazing how mundane, ‘normal’ life just takes over, trying to fill in the gaps of what went before as if it never happened at all.
A year after becoming a civilian, some five-plus years ago now, I joined a private security firm in the city. An old Marine mate of mine—Dan, Dan Atkins—had talked me into contacting them. He was sure that with my skill set, as he called it, I would be a ‘shoe in’ for one of their constantly available security contractor positions, more commonly known as a bodyguard role. As for me, I wasn’t at all sure that security contracting or close protection was the type of work I even wanted to get into, since what had happened with Jessica had somewhat erased the shine from it all. She’d decided she ‘wanted to do something different with her life’, even after I’d resigned my commission from the army in a last-ditch attempt to save our marriage.
That decision had sealed my fate. Suddenly, I’d found myself thrust into the life of a civvy, and what’s more, I was wifeless, aimless, jobless, and, unusually for me, income-less. But there was no immediate time to mull on it all; I had lost a wife and gained responsibility for the kids—in one fell swoop.
I had to become both mother and father to Emily and, to a lesser