Page 79 of Mariposa
This. Fucking. Hurts.
“Tell me something, darling. Were you wearing the wedding ring I got you while you fucked him?” I slant my lips, take another massive swig of my beer, and narrow my eyes at her hand.
Did she fuck him while I was getting shot at? Or did she fuck him while I was carrying out a dead child from a bombing attack?
“Did you fuck him while my face got slashed in half?” I lift the bandage off the side of my face and launch it to the ground. My newest injury makes her grimace, as if I’m a monster. She stands her ground and looks away with no remorse.
“I come back home, bandaged and bleeding, and you don’t want to know if I’m okay or how this happened?”
Silence.
She rolls her eyes.
She’s heartless.
“Where’d you do it, huh?”
She contorts her face.
“Our bed?” A tear rolls down my face.
“Our couch?”
She shakes her head like she wants me to stop talking. She opens the door and takes one step out. I grab my beer and down the rest until it’s empty.
“You were my world, and my son still is. When did I stop being yours?”
She gives me one last glance with no emotion filtered through her brown eyes. She brushes her brown hair back over her shoulder and sighs like she doesn’t care that she’s made me feel undeserving of a home…of a family.
“You never were,” she shrugs. “You aren’t husband or father material. You were never married to me. You’ve always been married to your job.”
My heart sinks even further. I furrow my brows and look at the wedding picture of two eighteen-year-olds on the coffee table, Adam in my arms. We got married right after he was born.
Right after I joined the Army, we got married. I stare at the moment captured right after graduation and smile at the memory. A part of me always felt like something was missing between us. Like I knew she wasn’t my soulmate, but I overlooked everything to give her and my son the world.
“I’ve always been good to you...” I look at the wedding band still on my finger, twisting it around…and it hits me. I won’t be able to give my son a complete family.
I’m never going to wear this again after today, and I vow never to let myself be a husband again.
“Goodbye, Kade.”
Pain strikeswhen I accidentally stab my finger deeply, snapping me out of the memory that made me the man I am today. Red immediately pours out, staining the wood with bloody fingerprints. With blinding rage, I chuck the wood into the trash can across the room, and it lands with a loud thud.
Dammit!
It needs to be perfect, but she’s in my head, tormenting me. Standing up, I grab the bottle of whiskey and drink it from the top. I pace the room, getting ready to pick out a different piece of wood to continue.
It needs to be perfect.
Blood continues to drip down my arm from where I stabbed myself. I can’t feel pain; I’ve trained myself not to feel anything. I’m almost twenty years in and can do what needs to be done and not break.
I rip one of the hand towels off the bar and use it as gauze until I can address this correctly, because all my medical supplies are in my room. Wrapping it around until it’s tight, I cut the rest of the fabric off. After a few seconds, the pressure stops the bleeding, and I’m ready to carve again. As I grab my knife, the handle accidentally knocks over a stack of papers.
“Shit,” I mutter, dropping my blade to the ground and kneeling to pick it up. As I assemble them back in order, it’s the faces of soldiers and victims of people killed by The Surgeon. This evil monster is responsible for a lot of death and misery. There was only one person to escape him, and he was a Navy SEAL, call sign: Creature.
Everyone else was tortured until he killed them brutally. Anyone would be better off dead than to be captured by him. We’re closer to finding him. We’re just waiting for Intel to give us his coordinates, and we’ll execute a plan to bring him alive.
After working on my secret project for thirty minutes without another self-inflicted injury, I’m heading to a different building from mine tonight. I need to finish what I started earlier. Every step I take is with harsh purpose, going in the direction that will have me damned to hell, but the magnetic pull she has on me is impossible to fight. The next thing I know, I’m doing something I’ve never done for a woman.
