Page 46 of Handcuffed to the Bear

“I know you were kidding.” He smiled faintly. “But in all seriousness, Averyissomething I’d need to discuss with you if we decided to, you know. Have a relationship. To warn you, at least.”

“Now you’re making me nervous.”

“It’s not that bad. It’s just ... well, first of all, Avery’s the reason I’m no longer a merc. He didn’t mean to get me out, but he did by accident. You want to hear the story?”

She cast a glance at the mouth of the cave. “Maybe we should get where we can keep a lookout. Just in case.”

“Good point.”

They shuffled around in the moss a bit, until their moss nest was more of a large heap at the back of the cave, and both of them were propped up so they could see anything coming before it got there.

“Lookout kept,” Casey said. She took his hand under their moss blanket, lacing their fingers together as they’d done when they were still cuffed together. The cool metal of the cuff brushed against his wrist. “Okay. Tell me about Avery.”

Jack rested his head on her shoulder, eyes forward toward the front of the cave. It was easier to tell the story without looking at her, he found. He hadn’t told very many people.

“Okay, first of all, this about a decade ago. At the time, I was with a branch of my company in Afghanistan, doing guard duty mostly. Like I said earlier, the U.S. military relies on guys like me—like I was then, I mean—to do a whole lot of different stuff so they can concentrate their manpower elsewhere. Less so than it used to be, because they’re tightening the regs in a lot of places, and the Afghanistan government’s kicked a lot of ‘em out completely. But this was back when it was more of a Wild West kind of mentality. They had us doing basically everything from base security to guarding convoys to going into combat zones. Whatever needed doing.

“I wasn’t kidding when I said it was a whole lot of boring punctuated with occasional moments of excitement. Being a security guard is pretty similar anywhere, whether you’re guarding a mall in Des Moines or a warehouse in the desert. Bear shifters tend to do well at that kind of thing, though. We’re big and tough and don’t get bored easily. Send us out to the middle of nowhere with just a few other guys, and that’s where we’re happiest.

“So this time, me and a few other guys were pulling guard duty on this fuel convoy. And the worst-case scenario happened. We got hit. RPG blew up the front truck, and then it was just a mess, bullets going everywhere, black smoke from the trucks that had been hit, all of us scared to death that the rest of the trucks were gonna go up and blow us all to kingdom come. There was nowhere to go. My boss called the nearest U.S. Army base to send some help to pull us out. That’s what we did if we got in trouble: call the Army to pull our asses out of it.”

He hesitated. All these years later and suddenly he found it hard to breathe, as if the cloying taint of oil smoke and burning flesh had seared itself so deep in his lungs that the scar tissue would always remain.

“And they did. Two Black Hawk helicopters and a handful of guys. Young guys, all on their first deployment. Even their C.O. was younger than me. Hardly a one of ‘em could’ve walked into a bar back in the States.

“It was an absolute mess. I can’t really describe it except to say it was like being in Hell. Smoke everywhere, so you couldn’t see or breathe. People shooting at you, people screaming, shit blowing up. Insurgents took out one of the helos, the Black Hawks, didn’t shoot it down but knocked out the rotors while it was on the ground so it couldn’t take off. The whole thing was a God damned shitshow. I tell myself, now, that there wasn’t much anyone could’ve done once it started falling apart. The only thing we could’ve done, really, was not be there in the first place. But even that wouldn’t really have settled it, because that convoy was going through. If it wasn’t us, it would’ve been somebody else.

“I was doing my best to coordinate evac on the ground, rounding up stragglers that’d taken shelter behind some of the trucks, because it wasn’t my first rodeo and I was keeping my head better than a lot of people were. Two of those Army kids got blown to hell right in front of me. One of them died instantly—”Ripped in half,he almost said, before catching himself. He’d gotten so caught up in the moment that he’d forgotten he was talking to a civilian, a young woman who knew nothing more of war than what she saw on TV.

Except, Casey had been fighting her own private war for the last two years. He had to remember that.

And she was watching him with those big eyes, listening with rapt interest. He hadn’t even noticed, until now, that she was holding his hand again, swiping her thumb gently back and forth across his knuckles.

“The other kid was knocked down, ripped up, took so much shrapnel he should’ve died right then. And he was yelling atmeto get out of there. We were both pinned down and there was nowhere to go. I just tried to stop the bleeding with my shirt and my hands because I didn’t have anything else.

“And it’s funny but that’s what hit me the hardest, out of all of it. Here was this kid—I figured he was nineteen tops, found out later he’d just turned twenty-one, but still just a goddamnkid—hurt and terrified and bleeding out in my arms. Becausewefucked up.”

“Avery,” Casey said softly.

“Avery.”

He gazed off into the distance. Into the past.

“So yeah, that’s what made me get out. The money was good, I didn’t mind the danger, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. This wasn’t what I wanted my life to be. Wasn’twhoI wanted to be.”

He pulled himself back from the quagmire of the past and looked at Casey, making himself meet her eyes. “So now you know what I am, or at least what I was. I’m a guy who went to other countries and killed people for money. And don’t fool yourself, Ididkill people. Not for home and country, but because it was a job and I was getting paid for it. I may have tried to do something better with my life, but that guy is still me.”

Casey touched the back of her hand lightly to his face, rasping over the day’s growth of stubble. “You’re also a guy who quit because he felt guilty over other people getting hurt and killed in an incident that wasn’t even his fault. You said it yourself, you wanted to be better than that. And that guy is you, too.”

Her praise twisted something inside him; outright condemnation, he thought, would have been easier to take. “I wasn’t sure ...” he began, and trailed off, not knowing where to go from there.

A soft laugh. “You know, a few days ago, I might’ve ... no, maybe I should say two years ago, back when I was still an average girl with average-girl concerns. Jack, I have a handgun in my apartment. I keep it loaded. I always thought that maybe the Fallons would figure out what I was up to, and—well, I don’t know. I might not have been prepared for what I found, but Iwasprepared to find out for sure they’d killed Wendy and ... I don’t know, then, what I would have done. But I was ready to do whatever I needed to do.”

He wanted to tell her that fantasizing about murdering her friend’s killers wasn’t at all the same thing as looking down the barrel of a gun into the eyes of a living human being and pulling the trigger. But he also knew that anyone, under the right circumstances, could be a killer. It wasn’t solely the province of those who traded in death.

“So now we know each other’s deep, dark secrets,” she went on. “And somehow I still like you, Jack. I like you a lot.”

“Well, that’s not my only dark secret.” He grinned at her nervous look. “I own every one of Katy Perry’s albums. Avril Lavigne, too.”

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