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“I have some pictures you might want to see, ones taken by your head guard, ones you wouldn’t want distributed.”
“You have no such thing!” he snapped at me, but his voice was no longer steady.
“Your brother gave them to me right before I killed him.”
He glanced down at his brother’s body and simply snorted. “He was of no use to me.”
“But your reputation is.”
“Leave us,” he ordered his men. Several of them hesitated, but when he glared at them, they turned back toward their camp.
I held out the folder of pictures, keeping my weapon focused on Omar the whole time. “Copies of these have already been sent back to my commanding officer with instructions to share them widely if I don’t return.”
“And you say I know how to be fucking cold,” Darren said. “That was amazing. You faced that man down when you knew he’d likely kill you.”
“I… I did what I had to do. The look of horror on his face as he flipped through the pictures let me know I’d won. Khalil had come through for me. I made it clear that if Omar didn’t want his secret spread to everyone in the region, he and his men would never attack any of the American forces, and he would leave the area as quickly as possible.”
I sighed. “He eventually gave in to my demands. When he started to walk away, I called to him, asking why he wasn’t taking his brother’s body for burial.’ He spat in his brother’s direction, saying, ‘No, he’s a traitor. He belongs to the scavengers.’”
“Oh, Fox. I’m so sorry.” Darren ran his hands up and down my back.
“I don’t know why that bothered me so badly, but it did. I’d killed many times before, but I’d never befriended anyone first, and I felt sick as I walked away. I couldn’t stop thinking about his body lying there, decomposing, being eaten by animals. I wished I could bury him, but I had to get back to camp as quickly as possible. I needed to see if there was a way I could catch up with Blade and follow the orders we’d been given. I tried to stop him from going out on his own, but I doubted he’d listened to me.”
“What happened to Blade that day?” Darren asked. “What made you blame yourself?”
“We’d been ordered to do some reconnaissance. I asked Blade to put it off, to pretend to be sick or whatever it took. I explained I had something in the works, and it might turn our whole situation around. He asked to come with me, but I refused to let him take that risk. If only I had…”
Darren smoothed my hair back for my face. “Blade is okay now, and he cares about you.”
“He wasn’t okay until recently, and that’s mostly because he fell in love with Carlo.”
“Carlo Marchesi? The one you helped save?”
“The very one. Blade was determined to follow through with our original mission. Unlike me, he wasn’t one to defy orders. He went sniffing around the camp of another enemy group, and they captured him. They tortured him for days. He’ll never be the same. He almost died, but we got him out in time. Even Grant doesn’t follow orders when the life of a friend is at stake.”
Darren stared at me, horrified. “You weren’t supposed to rescue Blade?”
“No, Command told us to retreat and leave him, but we would never have done that, and I should never have left him that night.”
“What would’ve happened if you hadn’t stopped that raid?”
“I can’t know for sure, but they could have taken all of us. We had a small camp.”
“Why didn’t you explain that to Grant before you went out that day?”
“Because I wasn’t sure I could pull it off, and I didn’t want to get everyone’s hopes up, but also because I was a selfish fool. I wanted to surprise everyone with what I’d done. I wanted to be a hero, but I fucked everything up.”
He held my gaze. I wanted to look away, but I forced myself not to. “Did you fuck up? Or did you save your team?”
“I fucked up Blade’s life. He was my best friend. I fucked myself up too, more than I’ve admitted to anyone.”
“You never let yourself grieve, did you?” Darren asked.
“I didn’t deserve a chance to grieve. I had to focus on saving Blade, then getting us all out.”
“And once you were out, you just walked away?”
“Fuck, Darren. I thought you were trying to help me.”
“I’m trying to make you see that you do deserve a chance to grieve, that you need to let all this out so you can move past it.”
I blew out a breath and laid a hand on Darren’s chest over his heart. “Are you telling me you don’t have anything bottled up in here from your past?”
