Fuck!
Jed rolled, extinguishing the flames on his shoulder. He tried to get up, but nothing happened. He was frozen, caught in a haze of blood and agony.
Shit.
“Jed!”
Jed followed the sound of Paul’s voice, and there he was, running across the smoke-filled battleground, paying no heed to the carnage around him.Damn. Even in the sickness of war, he looked like a quarterback. A quarterback looking to get himself killed.
New pain flared in Jed’s heart. Stop, go back. Get your head down.But the words stuck in his throat. He watched Paul dodge the hail of bullets sweeping the convoy and thought of Paul’s young family waiting for him back in Phoenix.Don’t do it. Not for me.
The aircraft roared again. Another explosion shook the ground, and Paul disappeared. Jed waved the smoke from his eyes, but the wait for the air to clear felt endless. Vehicles burned around him. Another voice yelled his name, but he ignored it. He felt nothing. Saw nothing, except the crumpled form of his best friend, facedown on the ground.
Jed scrambled to his feet and ran, his broken body moving on instinct. He reached Paul’s side and hauled him up. He dragged him toward an embankment before his leg gave out, and they fell together into the ditch. The radio on Paul’s shoulder crackled. Jed reached for it and called for help, but even as his voice fell away, he knew whoever came would be too late.
Chapter One
October 2006
JEDDOZEDon the plane, plagued by dreams and flashbacks. He’d rarely dreamed before he’d gotten shot. On operations, sleep was so rare and short, he’d blink and it’d be time to move again. Even on leave, he’d been too busy to find much rest. The dreams had begun as he lay on the dusty ground in Kirkuk and watched a syringe of morphine disappear into his leg. Since then, with a lifetime of bullshit to draw on, his subconscious had never looked back.
The plane had reached Oregon airspace when he started awake for the final time. He glanced around, his blood pounding in his ears, but the seat beside him was empty and no one was looking his way.
He shifted, stretching his injured leg as familiar discomfort began to bloom in his body. The pain was like an old friend. Exhaustion swept over him, but he fought his heavy, drooping eyes. He was weary and sore, but the relentless throb of his broken body was better than the bloody images his mind couldn’t shake. He let himself drift, floating back to a time when war had been a distant, innocent ideal. Not the devastating reality it turned out to be.
Jed’s story was typical, a cliché of the worst kind. He’d joined the Army at eighteen, on the run from a life left behind but never forgotten. His mom was dead, his… father couldn’t have cared less, and with his kid brother set to apply for college on the East Coast, there’d been nothing left for him in the sleepy hometown he’d grown to hate.
He’d never looked back. Who needed the dysfunctional life he’d left behind when he led a crew who called him brother? Where he was, in any given moment, became his home, and the languages flowed as naturally as his native tongue: Arabic, Swahili, Kurdish, in all its forms. Sometimes, it was all too easy to forget where he’d come from.
The plane began its descent, but the change in altitude passed Jed by. War could make or break a man. Ordinary men did extraordinary things, but others ducked and ran. Reading a man became the difference between living and dying. Violence became fluid, like water or blood, a constant motion he couldn’t escape. Doors closed, faces vanished. Buildings blew up.
He thought he knew life when he packed all he could carry into a backpack and boarded a bus. Turned out he didn’t know shit.
THEPLANEtouched down in Portland. Jed disembarked and collected his Army-issue duffel from baggage claim. His whole life was in that damned bag.
He scanned the crowd, searching for a face he wasn’t sure he’d recognize. Nick was his younger brother by a mere twelve months, but Jed hadn’t seen him since he’d left home fourteen years ago, not until he’d woken up to find Nick crying over his hospital bed in Boston. Disoriented and in pain, Nick’s tear-stained face had been enough to convince Jed that life as he knew it had well and truly come to an end. In a moment of drug-addled weakness, he’d packed Nick off home and agreed to follow as soon as he was able, a decision he regretted the moment he caught sight of his brother across the bustling airport terminal.
Jed was tall, with blond hair and his momma’s green eyes. Though slimmer than he’d been in years, his cut, defined muscles coiled like wire around his lean frame. Nick Cooper was a different man altogether. Half a foot shorter, brown hair framed his dull gray eyes—eyes he kept on the ground as Jed approached.
The gravity of Jed’s mistake hit him like a stone, but he forced his reluctant legs to keep moving, thinking back to a time long ago when his kid brother had admired him, worshipped him. Nick had him up on a pedestal so high, it had been a long way to fall when he’d discovered the truth.
“This is a joke, right? A dare or something. There’s no way you’re a fucking faggot….”
Nick looked up as Jed trailed to a stop in front of him. “You look like hell. Where are your crutches?”
“My what?”
“Crutches,” Nick repeated. “Or a walker or something. The doctor told me you couldn’t walk unaided.”
“That was weeks ago.”
“Oh.”
Jed suppressed a grumble of discontent. He’d sweated blood to rid himself of any walking aids. A doctor in Boston had given him a cane for days when he was tired, but he’d ditched it in Colorado, when he’d detoured to Fort Carson to put his discharge papers in. He’d ditched his dog tags there too. He had no need for them anymore.
Jed steeled himself and followed Nick out of the airport.
Nick led him to a gleaming black sedan. The kind of sedan yuppie douche bags drove.