Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75478 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75478 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
It didn’t matter though.
Those were my brothers.
I couldn’t just walk away if there was even a chance that one of them made it.
I’d like to claim that you got used to seeing gnarly shit. And maybe, in some ways, you did. But when it was the limbs of your own men, familiar tattoos etched in their skin, little bracelets on their wrists from their babies back home, yeah, there was no getting through that discovery with your mental health intact.
I barely remember getting back to the Humvee. And I must have blacked out from the blood loss at some point because I had no fucking idea how I’d gotten from the Humvee and back to a hospital.
All I knew was I was in that hospital without any of my men. None of them had made it.
I had. Just because I was further away. Because I hadn’t been leading them into that building like I should have.
I’d spent weeks in that hospital, recovering from the head wound that had done some weird shit to my ability to communicate, lying flat on my back because of a compound fracture to my leg. I’d seen the pants sometime later that I’d been wearing, a big bloody hole in them from where my leg bone had been poking out.
There’d been the subsequent infection, then a shit ton of physical therapy to learn to walk again.
And, yeah, the mental shit.
The mental shit that meant I was never going back into the field again. The kind that had some higher-ups somewhere going ‘Yeah, let’s let that one go.’
Then that’s what they did. I left the only life I’d known for my adulthood, left to flounder in an unfamiliar world with a mind going dark places.
That was why I’d worked so hard to seek the light, to find the good, to have fun. Because I never wanted my mind going back there, wondering why I’d been the one to make it. I, who didn’t have a wife and kids at home, who didn’t have parents who would sob over my casket, who didn’t have anyone who would really give a fuck.
I shouldn’t have been the one to make it.
And there were times when… I didn’t want to keep making it. When I wanted to clock out, to right a wrong the universe made.
“Sully,” Bonnie said, reaching out for my hand, giving it a squeeze, pulling me back out of my memories. “I know a lot of people who are really glad you didn’t ‘clock out,’” she said, blinking back the wetness in her eyes.
“Yeah,” I agreed, squeezing her hand back. “Know that now. Things were different back then, though.”
“Well, this really narrows it down,” Chris said, turning to look at one of the women sitting at a desk. “Friends and family of the guys who died in that explosion. Most likely family. Brothers.”
“On it,” the woman said.
“Why?” Bonnie asked.
“Because Sully survived when their loved one didn’t. That can fuck with the head. And, I’m assuming, somewhere along the way, they concluded that your brother was, for lack of a better way to put it, at fault. So they want you both to suffer. Maybe they would have gone after your parents, but it sounds like they make their own lives miserable enough.”
It was fucking psycho behavior to target someone as innocent as Bonnie. But, if someone lost a son or sibling they were close to, there’s no telling what they’re capable of.
At least it was a direction.
Somewhere to look.
Even though I didn’t exactly feel great about offing someone who was acting out of grief for something I had a lot of my own survivor’s guilt about, even all these years later.
But then Bonnie was moving closer, wrapping her arms around me gently. “I’m sorry you went through that,” she whispered to my chest, so only the two of us could hear. “And I’m really glad you’re still here.”
My arms went around her, feeling that same spreading sensation in my heart, knowing it for what it was, even if I hadn’t said the words yet.
She was why I could do whatever I had to do to the man who’d strapped a bomb to her chest, whose actions still gave her nightmares I had to shake her awake from, who would likely always panic at the sound of any type of explosions.
She deserved the peace of knowing no one would ever come for her again.
“How about you two go take a walk?” Fischer suggested as some of the men and women started talking to each other, tossing out names and ages, relations to the men who I’d served with.
“Yeah,” I agreed, reaching for Bonnie’s hand, lacing my fingers through, and leading her out of their war room.
I had no fucking idea where I was going. But I figured it didn’t really matter. No matter where we were, this place was safe. And there would be someone, somewhere to lead us back to the war room when we were needed. Everyone around the place carried around comms, so the communication thing wasn’t an issue.