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Before he left, he’d been the bastard everyone thought he was and had been on a fast track to self-destruction. It was why he joined sniper training; it was why he worked without a spotter; it was why he had become one of their most proficient killers. Because life didn’t matter to him—not his, and not those he was sent to kill.
To the man he had been, happiness was something others felt. All he had felt then was the rage, the bitterness, the knowledge he was tainted by the blood of an incestuous, child-beating son of a bitch. And the fear that somehow, part of Dayle Mackay lived inside him. And then, he had seen true strength. He had seen a woman who should have been weeping in horror, in fear, and she had stood strong. She had lifted her chin defiantly and she had kept fighting.
And in those two weeks of recovery, she had let him hold her when she cried, when she learned the husband she thought she could trust had betrayed her and his country. He had teased her into laughter days later, and stolen a kiss. He had watched her eyes sparkle and his soul had claimed her.
And she had changed him. In that short time, she had erased the man he had been, and shown him the man he wanted to be. A man who was worthy of a woman that strong.
He stood on the deck now, leaning against the rail and staring into the dark water stretching out behind the boat, and realized that he had grown up long before his cousins had realized it. Maybe it had begun before Chaya, but he just knew it had cemented with Chaya.
He had bitched about the sharing that didn’t continue after they came home, but only because to not bitch was to reveal too much. And he didn’t want to explain Chaya. He didn’t want to relive in words what he couldn’t forget in his memories. And he couldn’t betray Chaya by taking another woman.
He’d let others think he had. Hell, he even watched Dawg take a few, but he hadn’t been tempted to join in. He hadn’t wanted to be tempted to join in. Chaya had been so firmly entrenched in his head and in his heart, that no other woman came close to the memory of her.
She loved him silently, as though she was afraid that to love him any other way would break her.
And his heart broke. As wild, as vicious, as his life had been at one time, it was nothing compared to the loss Chaya had suffered in the space of a few seconds. The death of her child, the knowledge that the father of that child had betrayed them both.
He breathed out heavily, tightening as he felt the boat rock, felt a presence behind him.
He knew who it was. He knew Dawg wouldn’t be asleep any more than he was tonight. Not with the events that were beginning to reveal themselves and the knowledge of the danger su
rrounding all of them.
He stood still, staring out into the water until a longneck beer was thrust in front of his face. His lips quirked as he took the bottle and glanced at the man who leaned against the rail beside him.
Dawg. They nicknamed him that for a reason. He never let things go. He chewed and chewed on a problem, worried it and fought with it until that problem either evaporated or bowed before him. He was as stubborn as the damned wind.
Natches took a long drink of the beer and waited.
“You changed,” Dawg finally said quietly. “Others didn’t see it like I did when you came home. You played a good game of pretending you were fucking the girls, of being as wild and woolly as you always were, but you weren’t. ”
Natches stared at the bottle as he shook his head. “No,” he finally admitted. “I wasn’t. ”
“You had no intention of sharing Kelly with Rowdy even if it had been what he wanted, did you?” Dawg grunted. Rowdy would have killed both of them if they had touched Kelly.
“Neither did you unless Rowdy really still needed it. ” Natches brought the beer to his lips thoughtfully. “Your game was just as good. ”
Dawg sighed, the sound rough, worried. “I don’t have a daddy complex,” he finally growled. “What I’ve got is a complex against games. Cranston’s games and Agent Dane’s, especially after what I learned tonight. She almost destroyed you once . . . ”
“She lost her daughter in a missile attack against enemy headquarters in Iraq five years ago. That was the false order initiated by the League. I suspect to keep their own activities secret. Beth was three. Her father was military intelligence and slipped her into the country after he deserted to the other side. ”
Silence filled the void as Natches held the beer loosely between his palms. “It was two weeks after I rescued her from the terrorists who had taken her while she was on assignment. Terrorists her husband betrayed her to. Nassar Mallah raped her with a baton, Dawg. He beat her face until her eyes were swollen shut. He kicked her and beat her until I wondered how she was still standing when I broke into that fucking dirt cell. But there she was. She’d torn the clothes off the guard after I took his head off; barefoot and in shock, she was ready to run. ”
Dawg breathed out a vicious curse. A sound rife with the horror Natches described, the images blooming between them, steeped in blood.
“We hid in a hole I’d made, and I activated the beeper for extraction. My team was waiting not far out, and I knew it, but too far to wait on them to rescue her. I bandaged her feet there, I covered her eyes, and in that dark little hole, I gave her my soul. ” He lifted the beer to his lips and finished it before turning to stare at the cousin that was more a brother, who was almost a father to him. “Cut her again, and we’re finished. As friends, as family. Do you hear me, Dawg? That woman owns me, and she always will. You cut her again, and we’re finished. ”
Dawg stared at Natches. Between them a lifetime of memories and trials, tears and brawling male adventures stretched. He’d have sworn years ago that nothing could come between him and his cousins. But as he stared at Natches, the youngest of the cousins and the one most scarred inside, he saw something he’d never imagined he’d see.
He was used to seeing Natches as the battered kid he was always helping to rescue from Dayle Mackay’s brutal fists. Then as the wild, too charming, troublemaking hellion he grew up to be. Then they went into the Marines.
And he guessed they really had grown up. Except Dawg hadn’t wanted to see it in Natches. He hadn’t wanted to see the horrors his cousin had survived when they were separated. And now, he saw it. But he saw something more. There was a core of pure hard steel inside him. That steel had pulled the trigger and killed another cousin to save Dawg’s heart. That steel faced him now, and damned if Dawg would have blamed him if Natches had already decided to cut him out of his life.
Natches had given him and Rowdy a loyalty that, Dawg didn’t realize until this moment, he hadn’t given his cousin in return.
“Fuck. ” He sighed, wiping a hand over his face. “I didn’t mean to cut her, Natches. Son of a bitch, if I didn’t want to hate her though. And I was wrong. ”
Natches continued to stare out on the water, and it broke Dawg up inside, seeing the pain on his cousin’s face. Hell, he’d have killed anyone else if they so much as thought to cut that little agent as he had. The Mackay cousins stuck together, it was that simple.
