Hawke
You know what?Fuckelves. Seriously.
I clicked off the television and chucked the remote across the couch, cursing myself for getting sucked into that sappy holiday movie bullshit…again. Another two hours of my life I’d never get back, and to top it off, now my beer was warm.
I tipped the bottle back anyway, pouring half of it down my throat, the rest dripping down my chin and onto my bare chest. It hardly registered. I was numb from the inside out, and the six-pack I’d already polished off had done nothing to improve my mood.
That’s what I got for grabbing the “Holiday Harvest” brew by mistake. Holiday Harvest my ass—more like Merry Marketing Scam. Suck out half the alcohol, sprinkle in some pumpkin spice, and jack up the price for all the suckers willing to pay double for anything with a cartoon reindeer stamped on the package.
Add it to the long list of things I fuckinghatedabout this time of year.
Far as I was concerned, Christmas was played out. It wasn’t always like that—as a kid, I’d loved waking up with my little sister, racing her down the stairs to find our mom cooking up a big-ass breakfast, our meager tree lit up like Rockefeller Center. Never knew our dad, and we didn’t have much in the way of luxury items, but I never felt like I was missing out back then. Mom had always made damn sure of that.
But seventeen years ago, my mother and sister died in a wreck, and with nowhere else to turn, I threw myself into the darkest, most shadowy corners of the U.S. military, volunteering for missions so dangerous, so horrendous, the CIA told everyone else they didn’t exist.Ididn’t exist.
I was a good soldier. A good mercenary, if you want to real truth of it. Did my job, kept my mouth shut, collected the cash. But then? They fucking turned on me.
And in a matter of weeks, I went from a good soldier to a fucking lab rat, every forced injection another notch on some corporate stiff’s belt, all part of some big bullshit dream to engineer the perfect fighter.
Yeah, right. Should’ve done a little more fine-tuning on that formula, because what they got instead was a fucking mutant wolf. A lab-created shifter with no pack, no family, and—by the time they were done with me—no heart.
At some point without my permission, while I’d faced off with assassins half my age and drank my own piss in the desert just to stay alive, while I’d suffered through those first few uncontrollable shifts from man into raging beast with an unquenchable lust for violence and bloodshed, most of my happy holiday memories turned into ghosts.
And now, even though I had the wolf under control and my military career was six months in the rearview, I still hated this time of year.
Christmas? Nothing more than an industry designed to make you feel like you didn’t have enough—presents, money, food, friends, family, love. All of it.
It pissed me off.
Of course, if Santa ever stuffed his ample ass down my chimney again, I wouldn’t think twice about making a few requests. The first? Give me a soft, warm place to bury my dick—preferably a woman who knew how to be handled. A feisty redhead with just a pinch of nice wrapped up inside a naughty-as-hell package.
Perfection.
I’d take my time with a woman like that, running my tongue along every curve of her flesh, savoring the taste. Or maybe I’d tease her first, making her beg for release as I fisted her hair and slammed into her from behind, my balls smacking against that round, ripe ass as she arched her back and screamed my name…
I closed my eyes, teeth grazing my lower lip.
Fuck, yeah. Just like that…
It was a familiar fantasy—redheads were myabsolutekryptonite—and my cock was already standing at attention. I unbuttoned my jeans and shoved a hand inside, gripping myself hard, wondering if I should drag my imaginary girlfriend into the shower to take care of business. But after a minute of serving up the usual play-by-play, my imagination stalled out. The redhead faded from my mind, and when I opened my eyes, reality came crashing back into my lap.
Nothing had changed, and nothing ever would. I was a fucking cartoon nightmare, a used-up science experiment sitting around with my dick in one hand and a bottle of booze in the other, hiding out from a world that’d chewed my ass up and spit me out hard.
I was utterly alone. Alone in my head. Alone in my pain. Alone in my beautiful but secluded cabin on the outskirts of Rocky Mountain National Park, eight thousand feet above sea level and a million miles away from anything that’d ever mattered to me.
And that’s how I’d die.
“Go fuck yourself, Santa. I hope you and your reindeer get buried in a fucking avalanche. And you can take the entire months of November, December, and January with you, because I’m done.”
Not bothering to zip up my pants, I got up from the couch and dragged my ass into the kitchen, rooting around for the bottle I’d been saving for more than a decade.
It had no label, and the glass was so dark and dusty it looked like an antique. I pried off the homemade wax seal with my pocket knife and yanked out the cork, letting the stuff take its first breath of American air.
I’d received it as a Christmas gift during my first mission in El Salvador from a wiry, coked-out arms dealer named Kiko, and for some shit-ass reason that escaped me now, I’d promised myself I wouldn’t open it until—and unless—I survived. The mission, the month, the year, the mission after that, the orders, the threats, the bribes, the experiments, the transition, the hunger… Every fucking minute until all that shit was behind me and I finally had a place to call home.
I’d carried that bottle around all this time, smuggling it from one shithole of the world to another, in and out of every kind of nightmare imaginable until it finally ended up here in Colorado.
The end of the line.
