Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 70607 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70607 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
-Logan to his dog
Logan
I paced but tried to be quieter while doing it.
I’d even contemplated going outside to do it, taking the stairs a few hundred times, but those stairs were just as loud, if not louder than my inside pacing would be.
I’d thought about walking out in the parking lot, but it was sprinkling lightly, and I didn’t want to get wet.
Which led me to now as I tried to quietly pace the floors.
God, would this ever get any better?
I’d been out of the Army for going on eight years now. I’d been married, divorced. I’d gone to the doctor as well as the psychiatrist like I’d been fucking forced to, and yet my nightmares still persisted.
Though, that was likely due to the fact that what I’d experienced was never going to let me free of its clutches.
I’d seen so much, but it’d only been that last act of terror that pushed me over the edge. And it hadn’t even been military related—which one would think would’ve been the reason that I’d finally gone over the edge. It’d been the accident that had taken my father from me.
The day after it’d happened, I decided when the time came, I wouldn’t be extending my contract with the Army.
Within four months I was no longer an active military member of the United States Army, much to everyone’s—friends and superiors—annoyance.
I’d been a good soldier, I’d been told.
I could be a fucking five-star.
I could be…what the fuck ever.
It didn’t matter.
Every time I closed my eyes, I woke up from a nightmare that took me in its grip and shook me until I couldn’t fuckin’ breathe.
Just like tonight.
I’d gone to bed at eight and had been awake by one am, gasping for breath and sweating so badly that I’d had to change my sheets.
Some days it was the sounds. Other days? The smell. Or the feeling of lying on the ground, helpless, while I watched one of my fellow soldiers be tortured with me helpless only a few feet away.
She wasn’t in my company.
In fact, she’d been a nurse.
I’d done just about everything I could think of to get her to acknowledge me, and she’d done just as much on her end to avoid me.
I could tell that she liked me. Hell, she’d even admitted it. However, she’d been focused on her career, and she hadn’t wanted to test out the waters with a fellow soldier while we were deployed.
Giving her the space she’d asked for, I’d backed off…and it’d gotten her killed. She’d done the deed herself.
***
I woke up to shouting.
Shouting of curses, ‘oh my God’ and ‘get her down!’
It was only after getting outside that I saw what everyone was so upset about.
There was a woman hanging from the tree.
A woman had hung herself.
A woman. Had hung. Herself.
What the fuck?
It was only as I got closer, that I saw all that beautiful hair, that I realized just who that woman was.
A sick knot of dread filled my stomach, and until I saw her face, I tried to pretend that the distinctive red hair wasn’t who I thought it was.
But the confirmation of seeing her face was the final nail in the coffin.
The woman that’d killed herself in the middle of an Iraq desert was the woman that I’d been full-on crushing on since I’d arrived in this hell hole.
“Oh, fuck,” I whispered, mostly to myself.
“What do you think happened?” the kid next to me asked.
The kid was on his first deployment, and other than a few hiccups here and there, he was mostly a good addition to the team.
His brother—his literal brother—wasn’t. Where this kid was solid, his brother was liquid.
His brother also had zero tact, didn’t care for authority, and said what was on his mind whether it was appropriate or not.
Which happened right then as he came up, staring openly at the still slightly swaying body.
I swallowed hard and walked forward with a knife.
I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Someone grab the body,” I murmured softly.
Someone did, and I sawed through the rope with my knife, thankful that I kept it sharp.
The weight suddenly was gone, and moments later Sarah’s body was no longer hanging from the tree.
I swallowed hard as I felt bile rise up my throat.
“Hey, Gibbs. Maybe now she’ll give you a chance!” Brownie, the young asshole kid that was a brother to the not-asshole kid, said. “We all know that you like her. She probably wouldn’t mind at this point.”
I closed my fists and stared at the kid who had no idea what kind of danger he was really in.
I wasn’t his captain. I wasn’t his superior. I was a grunt, same as him.
What I was not was a pushover.
Which I let him know moments later when I reared back and punched him straight in the mouth.
The kid fell over like a tree, hit the ground hard, and laid there while he caught his bearings.