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I suddenly didn’t want her to leave. I wanted to hear her soothing voice. I wanted her to ease the pain. The devastation. The guilt. The fear that sat like an anchor in the center of my chest.
But I deserved to feel all those things. I needed to feel them.
The little girl turned to me. “Don’t forget my birthday.”
I didn’t state the obvious that even if I wanted to come to her birthday, which I didn’t, I had no idea who she was or where she lived. Although it wouldn’t be hard to figure out considering we were in a police station.
But I wasn’t going to her birthday. And she was just a stupid girl who was oblivious to the cruel world we lived in.
She waved at me. “Bye.”
They were halfway down the stairs when I noticed the Yoda doll sitting on the bench beside me. I picked it up and thought about running after her to give it back. But I didn’t. Instead, I squeezed the thing.
Then I counted to five.
Present Day
Vic
My windshield wipers squeaked as they hastily swished back and forth, barely able to keep up with the torrential rain. The pelting on the roof of my truck sounded like volleys of gunshots. But the sound of gunshots didn’t bother me. No, it was the raindrops.
I hated the goddamn rain. And if I believed in divine intervention, I’d swear it was God’s tears as he laughed his ass off at me.
Since I wasn’t a believer, it meant the weather guy fucked up, because I sure as hell wouldn’t have left the city if I knew it was going to rain. Especially when the pounding in my head was like a bloody freight train roaring down the tracks. An out-of-control freight train that threatened to launch itself into the air, then plummet to the ground and explode into a fireball of burning metal.
I slowed to take the ramp off the highway, and the volleys eased for a second before picking back up as I pressed on the accelerator.
Two hours of this shit. Two hours listening to the constant pings hit the metal as if they were drilling through my skin and slowly filling up my lungs.
It was suffocating. Debilitating. And yeah, there was that familiar prickle of fear that ate away at my sanity.
Moving to Arica, Chile, where it hadn’t rained in the last fifty-nine years, just skyrocketed to the top of my list of things to do in life. Not that I had a list. Only people who thought about the future had those lists.
I wasn’t one of those people.
I only thought about the next target. The next extraction. The next motherfucker I was going to torture, and if they were lucky—kill.
Because there was nothing pretty in my world. But somehow it made sense to me.
Until Moldova. What a shit show. Sure, the mission was considered a success. We managed to extract the hostage, but not without damage.
Damage to my already screwed-up head.
I let them in. The demons.
And they didn’t just pop by to remind me that they were still there on the other side of the wall. No. They crashed through the wall riding a goddamn bulldozer.
Normally, I was fast enough to decapitate them before they did any serious damage, and they’d fall back into their cage.
But I wasn’t fast enough this time, and I nearly ended up in a body bag, which I would’ve if Deck, my ex-Special Forces buddy, hadn’t jumped me. We landed hard in a half foot of sewer water just as a barrage of gunshots flew over our heads.
Mistakes like that get you—or someone on your team—dead.
It was a complete clusterfuck. My clusterfuck.
Now I had downtime. An undetermined length of time off the grid to get my head straight. No, it was more than getting it straight. It was building back the stone wall that had been pulverized in one second flat.
I drove for another hour, and the rain finally eased to a stop when I reached the private road.
