Page 17 of Devil's Due: Sarge

My eyes begin to pull shut when she speaks aloud again. “What made you decide to join the service?”

“I didn’t really have a choice. I was eighteen and my girlfriend – we were high school sweethearts – found out she was pregnant.”

She gasps. “You have a child?”

“No.”

“I don’t…” She lets that thought trail off.

“I joined the Marines as a way to make money to take care of us. We got married, then a week later I shipped off to boot camp. She and my mom made it down for my graduation – I was so damn proud showing off my beautiful wife to my buddies.”

I hate thinking about this crap – the part where everything went so bad. Greer deserves to know, though. “After basic, I went through training while Claire stayed with my parents back in our hometown. I loved being a Marine, finally found something I was good at. The problem was the more I devoted myself to my career, the less I was there for my girl. She moved with me when I got stationed and gave birth to our son, Jack. I wasn’t even there for it. Out on a damn training mission.” The damn tears begin filling my eyes again.Crying means you’re human. It doesn’t make you weak. I can’t count the number of times my therapist made me repeat that during our sessions together.

While I’m reliving all that hell in my head, I don’t even take notice of the fact that we shifted positions and that she’s now using her body to comfort me until it’s already done.

“What happened?” she asks.

“As I got deeper in, I ended up deployed a couple of times, which she understood because we were at war. But I wanted more, craved more, and decided to see if I had what it took to make it into the Raiders. She begged me not to, said that I was gone enough already as it was. They lived well enough on my pay, but Jack only knew me as the dad on the computer screen.” I move my arm to press it over my eyes so she doesn’t see me get emotional.

“What happened, Sarge?” She repeats her question in a whisper. Because she whispers, it somehow makes it feel safer to answer.

“I wasn’t there to protect them. Some guy Claire worked with started fixating on her. She brushed it off, not believing it to be a real threat, because who actually believes that someone has it in them to do that?” I bite my lips to choke back a sob. “She turned him down left and right, told him she was married – but I guess one day his urges got to be too much and the bastard broke into our home. He attacked Claire, and then he strangled her. Jack woke up –” Oh god, can I really tell her this part? She knows I’m crying now like a goddamn baby. My tears are matting her hair, but she continues to hold me. “They told me –” I swallow hard, trying to clear my throat. “Jack must’ve got up because he heard the noise and, I don’t know, little guy was only four, but I guess he didn’t want any witnesses. Hekilledmy son.” Sobs wrack my entire body. “I should’ve been there. I wasn’t there and that fucker killed my wife, and he killed my boy because I wasn’t there to protect them.”

She should push me away. She doesn’t. I feel her arms move to hold me. I feelhertears on my face as she whispers again. “Oh, Sarge.”

Part of me wonders why I would tell her all that. Maybe because she was being so vulnerable with me, I thought she deserved to know the man lying next to her. The other part knows that at least this way, she’ll understand why she doesn’t have to worry while I’m protecting her. Because while I wasn’t there to save my wife and my son, she won’t suffer the same way they did.

As embarrassed as I am for her to see me cry, and mortified that I just unloaded a baggage car’s worth of baggage on her unsuspecting shoulders, I feel like a five-hundred-pound weight has been lifted off my chest and I can finally breathe again.

I can finally breathe again.

7

Greer

When Sarge began unloading that crazy, sad story on me, I got a little tense, I’ll admit that. We’re still new and that’s some next-level guilt he’s dealing with. But something changed between us the moment he called me uptight. For whatever reason, I’ll probably never know, but I didn’t want him, of all people, to think of me asuptight.

Monique, my mother, is uptight—at least about anythingnotrelated to Drew or money. How she is, that’s not me. Therefore, it wasn’t really a decision so much as I opened my mouth and the words just started spilling out. He needed to understand there were extenuating circumstances involved in creating that person. I’m not that Greer.

Does it freak me out?Hell yes.

Am I going to question it?No. Sarge is in my life now, and I have a feeling he’s going to be in my life for a long time to come.

“She fucking puts her life on the line for you and you just keep letting her.”Vlad’s words to me the day Nic was kidnapped. They haunt me most days, but today they’re glued inside my brain and I can’t see past them because I’m still doing it. But now it’s not just Nic I’m using as my shield, it’s Sarge, too.

With what he told me about his wife, about his son – every moment he’s with me while on my protection detail must flash him back. He doesn’t need that. He doesn’t deserve that. And now the Lords and their women are being followed? Am I using them as a shield by keeping silent?

“She fucking puts her life on the line for you and you just keep letting her.”I begin to pace the width of the room wearing a tread pattern into the faded red carpeting.

“She fucking puts her life on the line for you and you just keep letting her.”I know what I have to do. The only way to make this stop is by making a phone call that truthfully, I never thought I’d make again before I met Sarge, and Vlad, and the Lords, and the Lords’ women – and my best friend, Nic, who could have been taken from me. No – no… This all has to stop and I’m the one who can stop it.

While Sarge is at a meeting with his brothers, I pull out the little burner phone that Vlad bought for Nic and me when we first arrived at the cabin. I let out a slow breath, and then I dial my mother’s cell phone number.

“Hello?” My mother’s soft voice answers and I want to cry. I mean, we weren’t super close, but she’s still my mother.

“Mama,” I squeak into the line.

“Greer baby, oh my –” She begins to sob. “Drew, honey – come here. It’s my baby girl, it’s Greer. She’s alive.” Okay, so I’ll admit it’s hard to see the wall across from me with the wetness blurring my vision, too. “Where are you?” she asks. “Where have you been? Your father and I have been so worried about you –”

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