Chapter 1

1

Not wantingto do it but knowing it was time, I leaned to the side—ignoring the groan of the rickety hospital chair my ass had been planted in for the last hour—and pulled my vibrating phone out of my pocket. I didn’t have to look at the screen to know it was Cash Phillips. This was his third call of the day. The first two I’d sent to voicemail. So even though I absolutely didn’t want to talk to my teammate I swiped left and put the phone to my ear.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“That’s what I want to know,” he returned, not hiding his irritation at being snubbed.

No, everything was not okay.

My gaze lifted to the man lying in the hospital bed. The man who was the bedrock, the very foundation on which my family was built. The man who had stood tall and steady by my side when I’d lost everything. The man who had loved, provided for, and done his best to protect my mother from all of life’s tragedies. But my father couldn’t protect her now, not when the tragedy was him lying in a hospital bed.

I ignored the breathing tube lodged down his throat, the probes positioned over his chest, the mess of wires, the blood pressure cuff, and the IV in his arm. Instead, I focused on one of the many machines keeping my father alive.

No, everything was far from okay.

“Garrett,” Cash called out.

“He’s still in a medically induced coma until the swelling in his brain goes down.” Unintentionally my gaze shifted to the catheter draining the excess fluid from my father’s brain. “Doc says that might be another day or two. Intramedullary rod, right femur. Plates and screws to fix the left ulna and radius breaks.”

I was well aware I’d rapped out that information like I did when I briefed my team. Emotionless, detached, and cold.

I needed the distance.

I needed to keep the emotions that had threatened to pull me under since I arrived in check. The last thing my mother needed was to see was me falling apart.

“Garrett—”

“I need you to leave it at that,” I cut in.

“Anything I can do? Want me to come out?”

I didn’t have to wait long for the guilt to hit. It was always there, simmering just below the surface. But since Cash, Easton, Jonas, and Smith had come back into my life—and with them Kira Winters and Theo—that constant, unwavering guilt was now lethal. It was a new kind of guilt. The kind a man who had abandoned his friends, his teammates, his brothers felt. I’d given it a fair amount of thought over the months, wondering which was worse; my failure that caused a good man to die, or my deflection.

Since Kira had joined the team, she’d put a fair amount of effort into disabusing me of the responsibility I felt for her brother’s death. I couldn’t say she’d succeeded; I’d just gotten better at hiding the pain I felt every time I saw her.

It was my former teammates—the men I’d left in an extreme example of cowardice—I was struggling with. After Finn Winters’s death I’d hightailed my ass back to the States. Worse, I’d cut ties and hidden from them.

My brothers.

Men I’d stood shoulder-to-shoulder with in battle.

And now they were back, and Cash was offering to drop everything and fly out to Montana to be by my side while my father was laid up in a hospital bed fighting for his life. Once again proving he was a better man than I was.

“No, man, I’m good.”

I heard Cash sigh. It might’ve been ten years since I worked with him but that didn’t mean I didn’t know him. Therefore, I braced—just not enough. His words sliced straight through me.

“You’re not good. You haven’t been good for a decade now. Now’s not the time, but warning—when you get back it’s time we hash this out. All of us.”

Fuck.

“Cash—”

“We were brothers once,” he spat. “We gave you time. That was a mistake, but then other shit happened that meant we couldn’t rectify that. We feel that, Garrett. We failed you when you needed us.”

What the fuck was he going on about?

“You didn’t fail me—”

“We did and it cuts deep, brother. Now you got shit going on in your life that needs your attention. All of your attention. What we need, what I need, is for you to understand all your stubborn ass needs to do is pick up the phone and I’ll be on the next flight.”

I knew that to be true. That was Cash. He was the loudest of the team. The joker. The one who did all he could to make shit times better and he did that by clowning around until it was time to work. But under all of that he was the first one to lend an ear and give counsel.

And I fucked him over.

I owed him a conversation. I owed all of them an explanation.

“We’ll get on that when I get back,” I told him, then went on to give him more. “My mom’s a mess. My aunt, that’s my dad’s sister, is doing what she can to hold herself together but she’s unraveling. After the accident it didn’t look good; the doctors weren’t sure if my dad was going to make it. Since then, he’s taken a turn for the better. The doctors are hopeful; they’ve communicated this to her but she’s holding onto worst-case scenarios and not letting go.”

My gaze moved down from the heart rate monitor to the bag catching the red fluid draining from my father’s brain. Understandably, it was that bag that prevented my mother from believing. That, and her husband of forty years was in a coma. I couldn’t say my mom was fragile, but her whole world was my father. This was a blow of the likes she’d never felt. Not even when she’d woken in the middle of the night hearing her adult son screaming from a nightmare. And not when after that I stopped staying at their house during the rare times I visited. Which also meant she’d had to endure me pulling away. But none of that came close to seeing my father banged up and near dead after a car accident.

“You know you gotta lead her to hopeful,” Cash murmured.

“Not sure how to do that,” I admitted.

“Never met your mom so I can’t say. But I remember you talking about her and your dad. From what you told us your dad gave you your determination. He taught you to never quit, to be strong, to take care of those you love. Remind her of that. And if he’s as pig-headed as you are he’s fighting to get back to her. Remind her of that, too.”

He taught you to never quit.

Christ.

Cash was right; all my life my father made sure I never quit. Anything I started I had to see through to the end even if I didn’t like it.

But I had quit.

And not mid soccer season when I realized that was not the sport for me. I’d quit something important and left my brothers behind.

I swallowed down the lump that had formed in my throat and croaked, “You’re right.”

“You say that like it’s a surprise. When am I ever wrong?”

I didn’t think it was possible while my father was lying in a hospital bed but there was no denying it—I was smiling.

“I can name a few times,” I returned.

“The woman in Belgium doesn’t count. How was I supposed to know she was a prostitute?”

“The first clue was when she asked if you were looking for a date,” I reminded him. “The second clue was when she flat out told you she’d give you the American service member discount.”

“I blame that on the Orval. That and she was hot. Not to mention I hadn’t seen a woman show an inch of skin in over six months. I wasn’t paying much attention to what she was saying.”

What Cash wasn’t saying was he was so trashed his alcohol-addled brain couldn’t process words, period, that night.

“Lucky for you Easton stepped in and saved you.”

“Cock blocker,” he muttered.

“Right.”

I let that hang, deciding not to get into all the other times Easton had stopped Cash from making a fool of himself. And not just Cash, all of us. Easton was the voice of reason when it came to Cash’s crazy shenanigans.

There was a brief pause before Cash came back to me.

“Zane’s calling, gotta take this. Call me if you need something.”

“Tell Zane I’ll check in later.”

“Will do. Later.”

I dropped my phone to my lap, double-checking Cash had disconnected before I slid my ass to the edge, dropped my head on the hard vinyl chair back, and stared at the ceiling.

When the fiberboard tiles provided no answers, offered no solutions to my current or past issues, I closed my eyes.

It didn’t take long for exhaustion to pull me under.

“One, do you have a visual?”

“Negative,” I radioed back.

Something wasn’t right.

There was a certain feel, an undercurrent of fear from the locals when a terrorist was hiding out in their community. A terrorist with a hostage…would bring widespread panic.

None of that was present. There were no women clutching their children as they walked down the dirt streets. There were no men hyperalert and watchful. It was business as usual. A woman was hanging laundry on a line, a child at her feet with a wash bucket. A man loading baskets of potatoes into the back of a truck that would be lucky to make the eighty-kilometer trek to the nearest farmer’s market.

“Two, got anything?” I asked Easton.

“Other than a bad feeling?” he returned.

And there it was. He felt it, too.

“Four?” I called out to Smith.

“Watching six kids kicking a ball around.”

Further proof.

If Yaser Said had brought Finn Winters to this small, remote village, children would not be out kicking a ball around.

The villagers would protect their young. They’d take one look at a beaten and battered Finn and lock the women and children away.

And now five men were set to infiltrate their peaceful existence.

“Drifter One, this is Alpha One actual,” crackled through my earpiece. “Abort mission.”

The ball in my gut tightened, forming a knot I was afraid would never loosen.

“Alpha One, please repeat.”

“Mission abort, Drifter One. Do not engage.”

Fuck.

“Copy that, Alpha one,” I radioed back to command, then gave an order that I knew would forever haunt me. “Fall back to exfil one.”

“Garrett?”

I jolted upright and found my mom and aunt across the room staring at me.

Years of practice allowed me to shove the memory back into the box with the rest of the shit I wasn’t ready to deal with and I blanked my face.

“Hey, Ma, how was lunch?”

Seeing as my mom didn’t have the same practice I had, she couldn’t hide her look of concern.

“Yes, it was nice,” she answered and slid her gaze to my father. “We saw the doctor in the hall. He’s coming in to speak to us.”

My gaze went to my Aunt Betty to find her shaking her head.

Lunch was not nice.

Fuck.

“Ma?”

Slowly her eyes came to me. Eyes filled with so much worry my heart clenched.

“You know he’s strong, right?” I asked.

“Yes, of course I do.” She said the words, but her sorrow-filled tone was a clear indication she didn’t believe.

“Ma, look at me.”

“I am, son.”

“I know you’re scared. I know you’re worried. But right now, you need to remember that dad is strong, and if you can’t you need to remember how much he loves you. You need to believe he’s fighting his way back to you—to us.”

From across the room—since that’s what I’d trained my mom to do, to keep her distance, not touch me unless I initiated it, not to come close—she nodded.

Fuck.

I was such an asshole.

“C’mere, Ma.”

On wooden legs she made the short trek. When she was close I pulled her into my arms and tried to remember if in the last two days I’d hugged my mother.

I’d like to have said yes, but I knew the answer was no.

Such. A. Dick.

“Love you, Ma.”

My mom’s body bucked, and her sob tore through the room.

Jesus.

I was a horrible fucking son.