AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She’s trusted me with everything—her grief and her tears, her life, her dreams, her brother’s list, her body, giving herself over to me completely and without reservation. The least I can do is give her this.
I press her head back down so her cheek is resting against my chest. It will be easier to tell without those expressive blue eyes betraying every emotion she feels for me. Even though it’s been almost four years now, I still don’t want pity. Especially not hers. I’m long past wanting sympathy; I just want revenge.
“I’d always wanted to be a Navy SEAL, ever since I was a kid. I went to college because my dad made me, but I signed up for the navy the day I graduated from Penn State. The weekend before I left for BUD/S training, I saw my girlfriend, Sarah, for the last time before I shipped off to basic training. We’d dated since I met her right before our senior year in college, and I loved her, but I knew deep down she didn’t deserve the life I’d have to offer her as a SEAL—here today and gone tomorrow, sometimes too quickly to even have a chance to say good-bye, unable to talk to her about work, missing her birthday, or simply holding her when she’d had a bad day. And she wasn’t the kind of girl who could hold her own very well, so I broke up with her.
“She cried, but she said she understood. And she asked me to make love to her one last time before I left.” If there is one single moment in time that defined the rest of my life, that was it. “So I did. And then I kissed her good-bye and stepped into my future without a backward glance. After I completed BUD/S training, I went back home for a few weeks before I got my first assignment, and Sarah told me she was pregnant.”
I remember the day like it was yesterday. Her big eyes scared, her voice wavering as she broke the news to me. “Sarah was fragile, and not very independent or resilient. Back then, it was what attracted me to her. There’s one thing that makes dominant men tick—and Iwasdominant, even though I didn’t know what to call it then—and that’s that we want to be needed as much as submissives need to be wanted. And Sarah definitely needed me. She aroused my protective instincts.” I trail my finger along McKenzie’s jawline. “Now I know what’s truly intoxicating is a woman who’s badass enough to hold her own but chooses to rely on me and put her trust in me.” I feel the curve of her cheek as she smiles.
“At any rate, not acknowledging the baby or taking responsibility for my actions was unthinkable. Sarah and I got married at the justice of the peace office two weeks before I shipped out on my first assignment as a Navy SEAL. I served a couple of tours in Afghanistan, and my little girl, Maggie, was born while I was gone. The first time I laid eyes on her, she was three months old. Sarah handed her to me, and she immediately curled her little hand around my pinkie finger, studied me for a solid five minutes with her serious gray-blue eyes, and then smiled. I swear, I lost my heart that day. No one told me being a father would be like that—that I’d spend that moment on with my heart living in someone else’s body.
“I didn’t get to see her nearly enough, but I loved every damn minute I had with her. I’d typically be gone for three to four months at a time, and then I’d come home for six weeks and play dad. I’d take Maggie and Sarah to the beach, and I’d read Maggie books and give her piggyback rides and watch her play. Then I’d have to say good-bye and go back to what felt more and more like my real life with my team.
“After a year or so in the Middle East, my unit was sent to Mexico to wage the war on drugs. Mexican law prohibits foreign military and law enforcement agencies from operating on Mexican soil,so even though our mission was to take down El Jefe, the head of the Nuevo Leon cartel, which was the most powerful drug cartel at the time, we couldn’t plan a strike to actually go in and take him out like the team that was assigned to take out Bin Laden.The ‘official’ U.S. position was, and still is, to provide technical, logistical, and training support to the Mexican government.
“So that’s what we did. We trained the Mexican military and created a force to take down Francisco Dominguez, also known as El Jefe. But it was a losing battle. The drug cartels rule with fear and own everyone—including most of the local police and government officials—and they’d often pay the vigilantes we were training to come work for them, or they’d kill them or their family members if they didn’t.
“It was pretty clear if someone was going to take out El Jefe, it was going to have to be a special forces team, and we’d never be able to admit to doing it. A couple of years into my tour there, my commanding officer told me that because of my skill as a sharpshooter, I’d been chosen as the guy who was going to take down Dominguez. We had intel on where he was hiding, and it was planned down to the letter. SEALs leave nothing to chance.
“I’ll never know how Dominguez found out, but somehow he did. Just a testament to the drug cartel’s reach, I guess. He was waiting for us, and by the time it was over, I’d been taken prisoner. I was blindfolded and left for a good day or two in some hellhole up in the mountains. When they finally came to get me, I figured my time was up. They took me to Dominguez. He was shorter than I expected, and oddly polite. But the thing I remember the most about him was his eyes. They were completely dead. He said he had Sarah and Maggie.”
McKenzie inhales sharply, but she doesn’t move. I continue, my voice flat as I relay the rest of the story.
“He took me to some crumbling shack of a building and showed them to me. It was hell seeing them in a place like that. Maggie was three, and her eyes lit up when she saw me, but Sarah stopped her from running to me.” I scrape a hand over my face. “As long as I live, I will never forget the look in Sarah’s eyes. I wanted to assure her I would save her and Maggie, but I couldn’t say anything. I was handcuffed with a gun sticking into my ribs.
“Dominguez dragged me back to the cement building that was apparently his temporary headquarters, uncuffed me, poured me a shot of tequila, and told me what he wanted. He offered me fifty thousand dollars to take out Victor Sanchez, who went by the name of El Gato and was starting to make inroads in the drug trade business, taking a lot of business from Dominguez. He said if I’d come work for him, he’d send my wife and child back home and let them live. If I chose to continue working with the opposition, he’d kill them. It was my choice.”
“What did you do?” McKenzie stiffens in my arms, and I regret tainting her with this story. With the truth about me. But it’s too late to turn back now.
“It was inconceivable. I wasn’t sure if he was serious about me working for him—unfortunately, it’s not unheard of for drug cartels to recruit highly trained military personnel—or if he was just playing cat and mouse with me. But I was a Navy SEAL, and a damn good one, and neither of his options was palatable, so I went with option C. I told him to go to hell and took out the goons guarding him with my bare hands. Of course, El Jefe didn’t stick around to see what was going to happen. But he wasn’t high on my list of priorities at that moment.
“With an AK-47 in each hand, I ran back to the shack, shooting anyone who crossed my path. When I burst through the door, the whole building exploded.” I pause. I still remember every second as if it were yesterday…the chirp of crickets, the air so thick and muggy you could barely breathe, the bluer-than-blue sky overhead. And then the chaos—the explosion, the soot, the soldiers rushing around like tiny ants whose nest had been stepped on. “He’d rigged it with explosives. I was knocked back half a dozen yards, but other than some scrapes and bruises, I was fine. But Sarah and Maggie were dead because of me.” My voice sounds as flat as I felt for years after that happened. Until I met McKenzie. I let out my breath in a deepwhoosh. “Now you know why I can’t get close to anyone. I can’t take the chance on anyone being used to get to me again. I killed my own wife and daughter. I have enough blood on my hands to last a lifetime.”
McKenzie keeps her head on my chest, but I can feel her tears, hot and wet against my skin, and they soften something hard and unyielding inside of me, something I thought was dead forever.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
I stroke her hair. The two simple words mean more to me than an entire speech. She knows loss as intimately as I do.
“The hardest thing was knowing I’d killed them.” It’s a confession I’ve never made before, but here on the ocean half a world away from everything real, with a girl I’ll never see again but who, regardless of what happens, will always be an integral part of the fabric of my soul, it suddenly seems imperative that I acknowledge what I did.
McKenzie doesn’t say anything at first. Then she tells me, “At the end of my mom’s life, it was bad. She asked my dad to let her go…to give her enough morphine to kill her so that she didn’t have to suffer any longer. She said if we can treat our pets humanely at the end of their lives, we should treat humans the same.”
She pauses, and I can’t help but think about her father and how he must have felt faced with that decision. If the woman I loved was suffering and begged me to end it and I had the power to do it, would I? Hell yes, I would.
“And?”
“We were all there to say good-bye. When she gave him the go-ahead, he administered the morphine, and we held her as she slipped away. It was heartbreaking, but it was also beautiful. And sacred. But I never felt like my father killed her.”
“That’s different.”
“Not really. Who knows what that drug lord or his men would have done to her? You and my dad may have physically ended the life of someone you loved, but you didn’t kill them.”
I think over what she’s saying. I’m not sure I completely buy it, but it eases my pain a little.
“Thank you,” I say. I tilt her chin up and wipe her tears away with the pad of my thumb. “It’s water under the bridge now. But if I try to shut you out and keep you at a distance, that’s why. It’s not safe to love me.”
“Too late,” she says under her breath.
