When there isn’t a thing left for Marco to return to.
Chapter fifteen
Marco: Captain Marco Verus
Cas’s shouts rip down the hallway. Evander’s back slams into the wall with a visceral crunch. “Get him down, Marco!”
“Get your fucking hands off me!” Cas yells. He takes a swing at me, but he’s wrecked and ragged, and I dodge it easily. I strike him in the stomach, once, just to slow him down, then wrench his good arm behind his back, shoving his chest against the operating table.
He screams when his burned arm hits the cold metal.
“Hurry up!” I grit at Evander.
It’s not his fault he’s taking so long; Cas knocked the sedative out of his hand when he hit him.
“Marco!” a guard calls from the door.
“Get the fuck out!” I slam Cas’s head to the table, then kick a leg back to shut the door.
Evander’s got a fresh syringe. He takes hold of Cas’s hand, twisted hard behind his back, then jabs the sharp point into his vein.
“Don’t you put that shit in me!” Cas shouts.
Evander, though he’s breathing hard from the fight, keeps his bedside manner as professional as he can. “It’s for your own good, Caspian.”
“Motherfucker,” Cas mutters as the drugs race to his brain. “I fucking hate you, you fucking bastard. Fucking Doctor fucking Death… fucking… prick…”
His body begins to go limp, his insults fall to a broken slur. He fights it, and it takes Evander’s help to hold him down through the final burst of protest, but eventually, we get him out and on the table.
Evander’s head drops, arms bracing against the table, and the sigh he lets out is soul deep. “‘Doctor Death.’ Did you hear that?”
Evander’s the one good guy in this whole godforsaken place, and this is what he deals with daily. It’s mostly trauma, and he understands that as well as anyone. Men might show it in not wanting an injection, like Cas. They might start throwing punches for the sake of it. They might go so catatonic you could operate without anesthesia. You just never can tell. The only thing that’s for certain is what a guy does after his first game shouldn’t be held against him. Nor should it be taken to heart.
I adjust to a similar stance opposite him. “You had to do it. He’d never have let you clean that wound properly if he were awake.”
The smallest crease at the corner of his mouth says he knows that, it’s nice to hear it, but it doesn’t make a lick of difference. Simultaneously, his eyes scan Cas’s skin, red-raw and ripped from the burn, dirt and brown sand nestled deep in the peeling flesh. “What a mess.”
“If it interferes with his next game—”
“He’ll die. I know that, Marco.”
I know he knows. But I felt the need to say it anyway. I always do. It’s all either of us can do for these men. I get them ready to be torn apart, he stitches them back together afterwards—gives them a chance at surviving the next time they’re thrown in the grinder.
These men—all of us—we’re almost solely held together by the stitches Evander’s put into us over the years. None more so than me.
“I’m sorry.”
His head tilts back, the gleam of melancholy humor that’s never far away twinkling in the back of his deep brown eyes. “He’s a pussycat compared to you when you first came in.”
I chuckle, forever embarrassed about that, my eyes running irresistibly to the scar above his left eyebrow. Only the two of us know it came from a bedpan I almost lodged permanently in his head after the first game.
He catches the glance. “You’ve already apologized for that one. About a thousand times.”
“But still—”
“I know that too, Marco,” he says, turning away to prepare for Cas’s operation. “I forgave you a long time ago. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to strip the flesh from this man’s arm.”
I suppress a shudder when the little silver bowl taps down, awaiting Cas’s broken and discarded skin. “Are you sure I can’t do anything to help?”
