Page 5 of Her Wild Warrior

“Jerrod, it was my fault. I was the one who had them come pick me up to spend the night during Carmen’s softball game. I knew all of you would be gone cause she was in the playoffs so I could get my surfing gear. I pushed them into this.”

The backs of his eyeballs were burning.

“I don’t care if you arranged for that girl from the comic book movie to blow me, there wouldn’t be a chance in hell I’d take you out to the fucking Wedge!”

“Tone it down, Jerrod,” their dad said quietly.

“How the fuck can I tone it down? Eddie’s dead! It could have been Ryker! Goddamn Larry has always had shit for brains.”

A sob shook Ryker. He couldn’t stop it, or the next one that came out.

“Nice job, fucknut,” Derek muttered.

Ryker knew he was talking to Jerrod, but he was trying to block them out. Trying to block out everyone since he’d gotten that call.

Eddie was supposed to have been okay. They’d taken him away in the ambulance, and they were giving him oxygen. Ryker had known that meant he was okay. Then he’d gotten the call from Lacy Armstrong whose mom was good friends with Mrs. Gilder. Eddie had died at the hospital that night. Something about a pulmonary edamame. Or something that sounded like that. Not that it fucking mattered. Cause. Eddie. Was. Dead.

He felt his dad’s arms gather him close.

“It’s going to be all right, son.”

Ryker grabbed on tight. His dad was wrong. It wasn’t going to be all right. Nothing was going to be all right ever again.

“You’re wrong, Ryker. As much as you hurt right now. As angry as you are right now. I understand. And the one thing I know. The one thing I can promise you is that your anger and hurt will fade.” His father stooped down so that he was staring right into Ryker’s eyes. “Are you hearing me? This will fade.”

“Won’t I lose Eddie?”

“You won’t lose him, you’ll just lose all this pain. Instead, you’ll begin to remember the good parts of being his friend,” his father reassured him.

Ryker looked over his shoulder at his brothers. He met Derek’s eyes. Derek, who could have died just as easily yesterday.

No, he didn’t want the hurt and anger to fade. He wanted to remember. He wanted to make sure nothing like this ever happened on his watch ever again.

1

“For the love of all that’s Holy, what the fuck did I ever do to our lieutenant to deserve this?” Ryker whispered after picking himself up out of the second sinkhole that he’d fallen into that day. His teammate—and now former friend—could barely catch his breath because he was trying so hard not to make noise by laughing out loud.

“You know,” Ryker hissed softly, “this M4 A1 is supposed to shoot just fine even when mud has been shoved all the way up its barrel, and at this point, I’m willing to test it on you,” Ryker finished.

“Jesus, Ryker,” Jase Drakos whispered back, “why Kostya thought you could ever be a tracker is beyond me. Even Landon or Mateo would outperform you.” The incredulous look that Jase gave him rankled, even though he knew his friend was teasing.

“Fuck you, Drakos,” Ryker muttered. “You’d be so busy trying to muzzle Landon when you were five yards from your target, you’d go crazy. Meanwhile, Mateo would be too busy admiring his muscles to notice a footprint, let alone a broken twig.”

Jase smothered a laugh again. “You have a point,” he agreed quietly. “Still, I don’t think both of them would have ended up in a sinkhole a second time in fourteen hours. For fuck’s sake, I know you’ve trained here before; did you suffer amnesia since then, or what?”

“Last time I was here at Camp Rudder we were concentrating on small boats, snakes, and stream crossings. The takeaway from that sentence is that we got to use boats and we crossed the streams, we didn’t spend hours slogging in the water. I’ve heard you talk, Jase. You grew up in Vegas, don’t go all high and mighty now, like you know about swamps. Never bullshit a bullshitter.”

“I spent two years in Vegas, I did not grow up in Vegas. I slogged around the Pantanal Swamp in Brazil, my friend, for almost three years when I was a young teen. Two of my adopted brothers grew up there, and they ran away from home so often that Mom just started having me go with them to keep them safe, then after a few days, it was my job to haul them back to Curitiba. She was pragmatic like that.”

Ryker stared at him. “Brazil?”

“Dad was a construction manager. He was in charge of building an airport in Curitiba, so we stayed there for two and a half years. I think Mom was intent on adopting half the country. When we left to go to Indonesia for a bridge project I had two more brothers and another sister.”

“What the fuck, dude, are you shitting me?”

“Eu não mentiria sobre isso,” Jase said easily.

“That’s not Spanish. Portuguese?” Ryker asked.