Page 49 of Own

Lunchbox gave me a gentle nudge and nodded to the stew. He’d decried what we had in the kitchen, but then served up a thick meaty stew and crusty bread. It all smelled good, but it was also heavy.

Still, I dunked some bread into the stew then took a bite. Oh, god, it tasted better than it smelled. Moaning in the middle of Bones’debriefwould be wholly inappropriate so I fought to contain it.

“Regardless,” Bones dunked some of his own bread, the guys did too. I guessed they’d been waiting for me to eat. “When assignments to train came up for special forces, we were once again in competition. I made the first cut. He didn’t.”

“So, he doesn’t like you cause he’s a sore loser?” Essentially, that was what it sounded like. I was no stranger to competition. I’d endured my share of it and participated in far more. Frankly, I thrived in those circumstances, but fighting for a top contract couldn't remotely be the same as what these guys did.

“More or less,” Voodoo answered rather than Bones. “What Cap won’t tell you is that Reznik had a hard-on to stick it to him from the day Cap got his first team.”

“It was a strike team,” Bones offered by way of explanation. “This team.” He motioned to Lunchbox and Alphabet. “Along with a couple of others.”

A couple of others.

“Doc was one,” Alphabet told me and when I glanced at him, he gave me an encouraging nod. “You met him—well actually, he’s the reason we met you. It was his people that pulled you out of the truck.”

“I remember, he was nice.” He’d been very kind. “Who is the other?”

Lunchbox remained mute, but Alphabet just lifted his shoulders. “O’Rourke.”

The man who…I jerked my gaze to each of them in turn and every single one wore the same expression. Twisted anger, darkness and rage. “Hewas one of you?”

“He was never one of us,” Bones said slowly. “Looking back on it, I can see it. Arrogance prevented me from understanding just how far Reznik would go to prove he was superior.”

The self-loathing in his cool, clipped tones was impossible to ignore. My stomach clenched. “What did he do?”

“Betrayed us,” Alphabet delivered the two words in a matter-of-fact tone rather than the sucker punch it had to have been. “He and Reznik went back. They set us up, we went in on a mission with bad intel. It cost me the lower half of my leg and Doc got burned to hell and back trying to save me.”

“Burned with my explosives,” Lunchbox said.

“That you built on my orders,” Bones corrected.

“And deployed on mine,” Voodoo added. The complex tangle of guilt and grief choked all four men. Well, three, because Alphabet touched two fingers to my knee when I would have said something. At his gentle head shake, I covered his hand with mine.

“We’re a unit,” Alphabet said, looking past me to Lunchbox. “All of us. What one does, we all do. I don’t care which of us built the explosives, we all did it.” He shifted his attention to Voodoo and Bones. “We trusted the intel because O’Rourke was supposed to be one of us. I would have bled for him the same way I would any brother. Taken a bullet for him. If any of us had to take that hit, I’m glad it was me.”

Pain twisted up inside of me, because the sober declaration wasn’t bravado or bullshit. He meant it.

“My only regrets are that Doc got hurt so damn much saving me.” Nothelping, but saving. I closed my fingers around Alphabet’s and squeezed his hand.

I swallowed back the tears that clawed at my throat. The suffocating pressure around me seemed to contract. Not for me, but for them.

“I’m glad he saved you, AB.” The words seemed far too simple to encompass the depth of emotion overflowing the dam inside. “And going by you four now—I’m going to guess, he doesn’t regret saving you in the slightest, no matter what it cost him.”

“What she said,” Voodoo stated, his own voice thick. “So don’t be a dipshit.”

A snort of laughter escaped Alphabet, but it was Lunchbox who sighed. “Too late. We’re all compromised.” Alphabet gave my hand another squeeze then set it back next to my bowl. An action Lunchbox hadn’t missed because he said, “You stopped eating.”

I made a face, but I dunked more of the hard crusty bread into the thick stew. “You gave me enough for two of me, but I’m eating.” I even took a bite and finished it before I asked, “So, O’Rourke was part of your team, he set you up and then what?”

“Then I buried him alive,” Bones said in a brusque, almost business-like manner. “Set him up. He had no idea we knew.”

“To be clear, we didn’t confirm the betrayal immediately.” Voodoo had finished eating at some point and set his empty bowl to the side. His expression came across more circumspect. “He’d done a damn good job of covering his tracks.”

Bones merely nodded. “We got Doc and Alphabet packed off to the medics, then they were both eventually taken Stateside. The four of us went back and finished the mission. When it was done, so was O’Rourke. He should be dead.”

The bitterness in those last four words leaked through the arctic tempo of his tone. Bones was not unmoved by those events. Far from it. Whether I was getting better at reading him or he was letting me see it, Boney Boy had more than just an axe to grind with those that betrayed him.

Betrayed his team.

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