AllFreeNovel
Share Us
PROLOGUE
SWEAT DRENCHED EVERY surface of his body.
It poured from places he didn’t know produced sweat.
Between his toes. His earlobes. His eyelids.
His T-shirt and military-issued underwear were beyond soaked and smelled like a decomposing animal. He’d shed the uniform days ago. Too goddamn hot. Hell, even his internal organs had to be swimming in perspiration inside his overheated and starved body.
The heat intolerance came as a surprise. He’d trained in the desert hundreds of times for this very situation. SERE training wasn’t for the faint of heart, and he’d not only survived it but rocked that shit. Sleep-deprived, dehydrated, and roasting in one hundred fifteen degrees of burning Texas sun. He’d taken it like a champ.
During the torturous training, he’d been able to disassociate. To crawl inside a hidden corner of his mind and ride out the discomfort. It was how he’d muscled through all the near barbaric training exercises during his military career.
Wasn’t fucking working in real-time.
Five days ago, he’d been taken hostage in enemy territory. Their helicopter, flown by one of the best pilots he knew, had been shot out of the fucking sky like a skeet target. Only two of the team survived—Scott and one other.
How? How the hell had it happened? How had the fucking low-tech terrorist group known they were coming? Was it shit dumb luck that had his unconscious body dragged from the helicopter and shoved into a box somewhere in a Middle Eastern desert hellhole?
“Fuck!”
He was literally baking to death inside a four-by-four wooden box, crate, whatever the hell. Everything hurt. His knees ached like a motherfucker from being curled for the past twelve hours. His neck killed him from half a day bent at an unnatural angle. Both shoulder blades burned with a searing agony that threatened to overtake the heat for the worst discomfort. Though he had no way of seeing or reaching behind himself to check, he was pretty sure the skin over his shoulder blades had been abraded down to the bone after so many hours of pressure against the wooden planks.
Twice a day, the terrorists opened his prison. Someone would drag him out by his feet and toss him in some kind of shack. There, his captors gave him one cup of cloudy water and what amounted to a slice of bread. The first few days, he’d fought like an animal, but weakness eventually won, and now he could barely lift the water to his cracked lips.
Every day he thought of upending that cup and refusing the meager bite of food. If it’d hasten his death and end the torture, it sounded damn good at this point.
Two things kept him from choosing that route. First was the notion of ‘returning home with honor.’ The goal of every POW taken hostage. What his team stood for. What he’d trained for. Resisting the enemy and staying alive until he could return to US soil, having not disgraced his country. Though no one would ever find out, he’d know if he failed that mission by not trying his damnedest to stay alive until he could be rescued.
Secondly, he wasn’t alone. As long as another team member suffered alongside him, he’d never abandon them. It didn’t matter that the man captured with him was his closest friend in the world; he’d do the same for any other soldier.
The fact it was his closest friend did ramp up his mental anguish to an unbearable level. Thankfully, their captors were unaware that Scott and Deke were tighter than some siblings. If they knew, they’d use it to their advantage, making the torture worse than it already was. Scott worried his psyche couldn’t handle more than he’d already been forced to endure.
So much for being a badass Army Ranger.
Footsteps crunched along the sand nearby his box, growing louder each second. Time for his daily mind fuck. His heart rate ramped up, as did his breathing in the parched, dusty air. Even though he lacked the energy to freak the fuck out anymore, his subconscious still panicked and tried to get his body ready to fight or flee. Unfortunately, he’d fall flat on his ass if he tried to swing a fist and wouldn’t make it ten feet running before they shot him dead.
Besides, he’d endure this torment for the rest of his life before abandoning Deke.
“Wake up, shithead,” the guard shouted in heavily accented English, pounding his fist on top of the box.
As the wooden box jostled beneath his captor’s heavy fist, pain rippled through Scott. His raw shoulders rubbed across the rough wood. He bit down on his lip to keep from crying out and giving his captors any ammunition to use against him. The dry skin of his lip ripped open further. Blood seeped into his mouth and coated teeth he hadn’t brushed in ages.
