With Every Breath by Maya Banks Page A

anything but rookies. They had more than proven themselves capable in all situations Dane had thrown at them. He hadn’t been easy. He’d been brutal, pushing them to their very limits, putting them through countless scenarios, many of which he hoped to fuck they never encountered with DSS, but he couldn’t afford to assume anything. Not with all the shit that had gone down over the last year. And he’d made it abundantly clear to the new guys, that while, yes, they worked for DSS and they would be taking missions that DSS took on, their first and most important priority was keeping the women DSS claimed as their own safe. At all costs.
    He was really fucking tired of their women—Tori, Ramie, Ari, Gracie and yes, even Eliza, though she’d have his balls for including her—being targeted, threatened, at risk and being fucking tormented and brutalized by goddamn animals. Every single woman had suffered. Each of them bore the scars, some you could see and some you couldn’t but existed nonetheless, and yet they came out alive, not unscathed, but alive and they were all fierce. Not many women could survive what their women had survived with their sanity intact, and not only survive but kick ass while carrying on. He admired and respected every single one, but Eliza most of all.
    And right now, she had more of his attention and focus than the other four women. Ramie, Ari and Gracie each had a husband who was more than capable of protecting them, helping them work through their demons and soothe the nightmares they endured. Tori had not only her three older brothers but every single member of DSS who’d die before ever allowing her to fall into the hands of a brutal monster again. She was so much more fragile than the other women, but then she had reason to be. Yes, they’d all suffered, but Tori the most of all.
    Eliza had no one except the people she worked with. But every night she went home alone to deal with her demons in private. God knows he’d pushed as hard as possible without pushing her away to confide in him, to let him help her, but he’d hit a fucking brick wall, as had anyone else who’d attempted to get Eliza to talk about the hell she’d endured. At the mere suggestion she might need someone, she’d take your goddamn head off, not to mention your balls. But that didn’t mean he didn’t worry. He worried every fucking day, and instead of that concern diminishing over time, it only got worse when she showed no sign of ever allowing anyone inside her carefully constructed barriers.
    She was more than someone he worked with. More than someone who reported to him. She was his . All the DSS operatives were his, but Eliza more so. He worked more closely with her than anyone else. She was his partner. His equal. He counted on her judgment, her gut. He sought her out on more than one occasion to bounce ideas off her, to get her opinions, because not only was she solid, she was smart as hell, with a mind like a computer. She called it like she saw it, never held back when he asked her opinion or what her gut was screaming. And in addition to being smart and thinking fast and well on her feet, she was tough and could kick ass as well as the rest of his operatives and better than most.
    Her advantage was in being underestimated, a mistake someone made only once before learning they’d been a stupid fuck not to take a small but fierce-as-fuck pretty blonde as anything more than a blonde airhead with nothing between her ears. Dane would never admit it, but he thoroughly enjoyed watching what happened when someone overlooked Eliza or disrespected her. Or worse, didn’t consider her the threat she was.
    He watched as Caleb got wound up again, talking and saying shit that he said every goddamn meeting, shit that as Eliza had so eloquently put, they could recite in their sleep. He had to stifle a smile over the “state of the union” because the name