Page 101 of What I Should Have Done

“Well, Rachel doesn’t get any death benefits if that helps,” Dom muttered, and then he quickly walked away. Leaving me alone, clearly not wanting to talk about things anymore.

And the swarm of hate that ached in my heart flew back in, crowding every corner of blackened death my soul succumbed to. Dom could make up whatever excuse he wanted to in order to justify what happened, but that didn’t change the facts of what happened.

We still didn’t have the Black Box. Reyes was the mole, had somehow figured out the route we were taking despite going dark, and most likely gone AWOL. Karim knew who we were and would be coming after us at some point.

Mikey was dead.

In other words, we lost.

We’d not just lost, but we’d been absolutely annihilated.

Crinkling my nose to fight back the tears, what little of my heart was still beating shattered in my chest as the final fact scored my bones: We would not be returning for Mikey’s body either.

We couldn’t.

In a single moment of destructive fate, I’d lost my friend and lover, before I’d ever accepted him as either.

Chapter 34

SCOTTIE

Dom was right. Reyes had gone AWOL before we’d even been ambushed, and Karim al-Jabari never showed up to the location the fake coordinates would’ve led him. Which made me hate the situation even more.

No one spoke as we dragged ourselves back to the tent, minus Dom, who remained behind with the colonel. I wasn’t even sure what had happened during the debrief; my mind and heart were occupied elsewhere. Part of me wished Bernie would say some stupid shit, but I was mostly grateful that even he remained silent.

Ducking beneath the tent flap, I nearly ran into a frozen Duncan. His eyes stared at Mikey’s bed.

His stuff. His pillow. The perfectly folded blankets. Everything he’d left expecting to return to. Violence was too much of a reality. Even the devil had to have shed a tear as the bullet ripped through Mikey’s body.

Uncontrollable tears slipped down my cheeks, hot and wet. I closed my eyes, almost expecting Mikey to appear in front of me and wipe them away.

But he never did.

Slowly prying them open, I found the rest of the team sitting on their own bedrolls. Nobody was doing anything. Nobody was moving.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to rip through the seams of the Earth and tear my way to the underworld where I could retrieve Mikey and have him hold me just one more time.

“He’s…” I muttered, choking on my tongue.

Bernie nodded once, but that was it. Nobody else moved. Mindlessly, I wandered to my bedroll and dropped my gear haphazardly on top of it. Slowly turning, I stared at Mikey’s bed, that awkward distance from mine.

Fuck this, he’d said the moment he saw me.

Oh, how I wished I could rewind time and go back to that day. To hear those two words again. Only in order to relive everything else, and for a chance to do things differently before the end.

I inhaled deeply, swallowing the exhaustive tears crashing down my cheeks. I should have simply laid down on my own bed. I knew I shouldn’t have done what I was about to do, but I couldn’t stop myself.

Stumbling forward, I collapsed on top of Mikey’s bed and curled up in a ball. Burying my nose into his pillow, I wailed into the darkened abyss. It still smelled like him. That familiar sweet scent I’d never been able to quite place. Wrapping my arms around his pillow, I scrunched up as tightly as I could and sobbed.

Something brushed against my back, and I pulled my face away, briefly breaking the pain tattooed upon my heart. Ford tipped his head and then laid down beside me. Suddenly, three warm bodies wrapped themselves around me.

There we laid. No one spoke. No one moved.

Even when at some point, I could’ve sworn I heard the bristling of plastic being moved.

Time wore on.

Day and night blended together.

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