“Oh, sorry,” she said apologetically.
I looked up at her, half-relieved and half-disappointed, some small part of me still hoping for the impossible to be true.
“Not a problem,” I said, forcing a smile to my lips.
Only it was.
Mack had his fill, spending a solid week with the Polish girls. I was happy for him, but I had zero desire to fuck anyone else - she’d ruined the entire thing for me.
Except that she hadn’t.
As the doppelgänger continued on, my mind drifted back to that night of bliss. I remembered the faraway look of ecstasy in her eyes as I claimed her. The waves tumbled and crashed below, roaring like I had when I came harder than I ever had in my life.
“What in the hell is wrong with you?”
The question was meant for my ears only, but I said it loud enough to turn every head my way. I didn’t fucking care. Instead, I looked out the cabin window and into the distance, searching for the reason I couldn’t seem to get her out of my thoughts. Once we were airborne, I fired up my laptop, determined to return my focus where I needed it the most.
The cursor mocked me, blinking on the blank page.
Get a fucking grip, Maxwell.
“Fuck!” I hissed. “Godddamn it!”
The ricocheting fire singed my quad, searing through my gear like a flamethrower and sending me to the dirt. With both of us hit, this was about to get much fucking harder. I glanced down at the fresh wound, relieved it wouldn’t bleed me out.
Grimacing, I took a couple of steps and hunkered down over top of him. I could see the terror in his eyes but there was no way in hell I’d let him see it in my own. I got to work and triaged as best as I could, all the while trying not to become a casualty myself.
The rest of it was out of my hands.
“Hang in there, Wolfy.” My breath came hot and fast. “You hear me?”
The mission wasn’t supposed to be anything more than a simple cleanup. Our trusted informant turned out to be anything but, and before any of us realized what was happening, all hell had broken loose. The doublecross sent the crew scattering, leaving the two of us hemmed in and taking heavy fire from the Northeast.
To make matters worse, the whole area was a festering hotbed of illicit arms. The erratic pop-pop, pop-pop-pop of the gunfire had me thinking it was probably some fucking Soviet-era M16s or possibly Chinese knockoffs with sketchy optics.
But whatever they had, they had it in overwhelming numbers, leaving us not only outmanned but outgunned. Now the only thing standing between us and our Maker was a crumbling five-foot wall of handmade, baked bricks and a shitty latticework of lime plaster.
“Destroy—Dalton.” Wolfy clutched me in the center of my chest.
I looked down again. The deep crimson aftermath of the entry wound continued to spread across his midsection.
“What, man?”
He opened his mouth, but no words followed, only a sickening gurgle.
Fuck.
I leaned in close, angling my ear toward his mouth.
“I’m not gonna make it… My boy.”
“No.” I pulled back a fraction. “You are! Don’t fucking say that! As soon as we get outta here, you’ll be back home in a few days, a week tops.”
I’d seen enough men die in God-forsaken wastelands like this to know his time might be up too. It was too impossible to believe. I’d come up with him, and until this very second, he’d always seemed invincible to me.
Daniel “Wolfman” Wallace, aka Wolfy.
He had a rep for blacking out in dive training. The instructors are supposed to report that shit, but most of the time they look the other way. I was fucking terrified the first time it happened to me, but Wolfy was a goddamn savage. He lost consciousness more than anyone else in my class, but each time the sonofabitch came to, he howled like a lunatic - the instructors loved his grit, and the nickname stuck.
Christ, it wasn’t twenty-four hours earlier when we’d celebrated.
His wife would give birth to their son, and after this operation, he was to be on the first flight back to the States. He’d been with her since high school. They’d had some real knock-down dragouts over the years, but ever since the pregnancy, things had changed.
During a brief lull in the enemy fire, he pinched his eyes shut and groaned, rolling to one side. I snatched him by the arm and looked skyward.
What the fuck is taking so long?
“Wolfy.” I gave him a shake. “Come on, man. Look at me. Listen.”
His lids grew heavy as consciousness slipped from him.
“Wolfy!” He went limp in my grasp. “Come on!”
At that instant, the drones swept in and rained their arsenal of hellfire down on the enemy nest. I groaned under his dead weight, scooping Wolfy up and throwing him over my shoulder. With my wound hemorrhaging, I extracted him, and within the hour he was back in the care of the medics who’d sworn he’d make it.
Only he didn’t.
“Fuck!” I jerked myself awake with a gasp, sitting up and scrubbing my eyes, trying to erase the horror from my mind.
I thought I’d shaken it.
Yet, when I looked down at the blanket I’d thrashed loose, the discolored swath across my right quad was quick to remind me. The same ambush that’d taken Wolfy’s life spared mine but left me with a lifelong keepsake. Even though it’d long since scarred over, sometimes the wound still burned.
“Shit.” My breathing slowed.
It’d been a while since I had the nightmare. In my newly awakened haze, I couldn’t recall exactly when though.
I exhaled and my head hit the pillow as I fell back and stared up at the ceiling. The years of study and therapy got me a long way after my discharge, but there were still times when the lingering dread resurfaced. I wondered if there were some crevices so deep that once a trauma had burrowed its way inside, it might take decades to come to terms with it, if ever.
While it wasn’t the only reason I lived alone, moments like these brought prying questions with them. They were ones I didn’t want to answer or worse yet, whitewash over with some half-assed version of the truth just to make someone else feel comfortable.
But anyway, I was fucking awake now.
After a slow start on the flight, I’d caught up on most of my work, finishing just ahead of my arrival in NYC. I didn’t get home to my condo until after midnight though and within thirty minutes, was dead to the world.
I’d bought the place just after my discharge, mostly as a refuge, a retreat.
Aside from that, what I enjoyed most about it was its simplicity - it was plain, clean, and quiet. Most of my gear had shipped out a month ago, already waiting for me at my ultimate destination. All that remained were some odds and ends, remnants of a former life that kept me on the path in my current one.
The best thing about being deployed was always having an excuse to not go home. I still went there for the odd holiday or the funeral of some random, blue-blooded relative. I could have just as easily bunked upstate with Martha and Emery, aka Mom and Dad, but after the last run-in I’d had with her before my Italian retreat, I thought better of it.
If she had something to say about it, she’d have to come to me to do it.
All the more reason I dreaded what was to come.
I got up with a growl, and after climbing out of bed, I hit the shower and got dressed. A little later, I’d barely put my first pot of coffee on when the doorbell chimed. I clutched the mug handle with a white-knuckled grasp as my breath stuck in the center of my chest, cementing my rib cage in place. I eased the mug down on the counter and stood straight, pinning my shoulders back.