Page 6 of Twister

They would have to wait a whole cycle before they could deploy in the deepest dark of night. That meant they had some downtime. He was going to turn in and get some rest before the mission. His teammates had the same idea.

He entered the large showering area, specially designed for divers with access to warm water to raise their body temperatures and a drying space for their wetsuits. Continuing with his breathing, he got wet, turned off the water, got soapy, rinsed off, and finished. After drying off, he donned a pair of navy blue shorts and a gray T-shirt, towel-drying his hair as he walked back to his bunk.

Dagger, his hair still wet from his shower, came up to him, having taken a bunk over from him.Twister could see him frowning.

“You still worrying over Quinn and your nephews?” Twister asked, draping his towel over the top bunk. Dagger huffed out a breath, then gave Twister a tortured sidelong glance. “Ought-o? What’s wrong? Have you heard from her?”

Dagger scoffed as he turned down the bunk. “Like she would contact me for anything,” he growled.

Twister pulled down his own bed covers and sat down. “Kade? What’s up?” Twister was concerned about Quinn. She looked haggard, too thin, and stressed. He could easily understand Dagger’s worry. He certainly didn’t want to add to it, but he wasn’t one to pull punches. They were part of the same frog family, forged by a personal bond when men faced adversity as one, and Dagger had risked his life for him countless times.

Twister had to work on his own interpersonal issues. He’d learned to moderate his actions and reactions as he often cameon too strong at times and ended up intimidating people instead of helping them. He’d worked at his listening skills in order to be a better teammate and corpsman. “You know your secrets are safe with me.”

Dagger sat down on the opposite bunk and nodded. “The same goes for you,” he said firmly, his gaze unwavering. Twister ignored that look. He wasn’t ready to talk about anything to do with what he was feeling right now. He often had trouble identifying emotions and understanding how he often denied them to keep doing what he was doing. Being a warrior didn’t leave much room for the softer side of a man’s personality, but that softer side often warred with his warrior ethics. He accepted the hard fact that his priority as a warrior was to take lives, and healing was secondary unless it was focused on one of his guys.

He’d resolved the one difficult edict in the Hippocratic oath—do no harm. He was a medic for his teammates and anyone who was wounded, including the enemy, even if he was the one who had inflicted that wound. He often had to reconcile that mission when Easy was drowning, needing his aid, and he had been commandeered to save one of the terrorist’s lives. Which he did. Easy thankfully survived, and Twister didn’t have to carry that tragedy on his heart.

“Noted. You can only do so much for someone, Kade. If they aren’t willing to reach out for help, when you offer it—multiple times—then you have to give them some space. Nothing you say or do is going to make an impact.”

“I wish it was just that kind of problem I was facing. Quinn—you know she faults us for Brian’s death—more so me, for being his brother and seemingly allowing him to die.”

“That’s not what we did. She should know that, Kade, but I can’t discount how much she must have grieved over his death. I’m clear thatwedidn’tlethim die. It was a fast action that wasout of our hands. We had no idea the warden would go off the rails and torture him for information.”

“I know all that,” Dagger said wearily, hunching over and stacking his forearms on his thighs, narrowing his gaze. His tone firmed and got hard as rock. “Don’t you think I’ve been going over and over that mission in my head and my heart repeatedly?”

“What is it then?” Dagger stilled. That tortured look was back, and an uneasy feeling unfolded in Twister’s gut.

Keeping his voice low, he said, “I didn’t want to admit it to myself, let alone utter it out loud. It feels like a betrayal to Brian’s memory.”

“Oh, fuck,” Twister said.

“Yeah, I think I’ve had feelings for her from the beginning, but I denied them and pushed them down because she was dedicated to my brother. I attended the wedding but drank myself into oblivion.” He took a breath, then an even harder one. “Those boys?” He raised his head and looked at Twister. “They’re mine…well, I gave my seed to Brian when he asked for the donation. He’d sustained an injury in training that made him unable to father children, but Quinn wanted them desperately, and I couldn’t say no to her. Maybe it was a way to validate my feelings for her. I always thought of them as Quinn’s kids. They were my gift to her, and because of that, I’ve never allowed myself to think of them as anything but my nephews.”

“That’s some heavy shit, man. Especially now that you’d be the last person on the planet she would consider suitable to fall in love with.” When Dagger winced, Twister felt immediate remorse for being so painfully blunt. He tried to temper that. “I’m so sorry, Kade.”

He nodded. Even in the dim light, he could see him react, and his fists clenched. He was clearly shaken, but he held it together, a bleak, determined set to his profile. “It doesn’t matter how Ifeel. I won’t abandon her or her children, no matter how she treats me.” His voice dropped, and his tone went uneven. “Brian is counting on me to keep them safe, healthy, and happy. I can’t let him down…”

He trailed off and Twister was aware that he’d omitted the word “again.” The guilt he was carrying must be heavy with the loss of his brother and the feelings he’d had for Brian’s widow.

It wasn’t until he heard Dagger’s soft, even breath that his own mental pain and history started to pile up on him.

His father was a renowned heart surgeon, and from as far as Twister could remember, he’d hammered it into his children that service was the most important aspect of life. His father had dedicated himself to service his whole life—Doctors Without Borders, charity work, pro bono operations, and his dedication to the needy on the speaking circuit.

As a young boy, Twister found the suffering of others to be overwhelming and made him feel powerless in the big scheme of things. He’d always been a loud person and considered that, with only one life, it was something to be lived to the fullest. He believed that taking a risk and making the most out of his time on the planet was a priority. His father didn’t mean to be neglectful of his family. It was just a result of his selfless acts that he spent more time with other people than he did with his family. As a result, how could Twister or anyone in his family complain about it? It just got stuffed down with all the other shit most people didn’t address.

That left his mother mostly alone with four children, his older brother and his two younger twin sisters. He often helped his mom cope with all the stresses of being basically a single parent.

He had no romantic relationship, and to be honest, ever since he enlisted in the SEALs, it had been easy to keep his personal relationships superficial—fast, uninvolved sex that wasnothing but physical in nature. He had always thought sex was about action, physical urges, and less about self, but maybe he was completely looking at it from a skewed perspective. The evidence was his four brothers who had found something special with truly special women: Nora, Tex’s wife, strong, capable, and courageous; Cameron, Bondo’s wife, another capable and strong woman who wasn’t afraid of standing up to Bondo; Astraea, Easy’s wife, who had overcome her own personal demons to give Easy everything he needed and allowed him to be reciprocal to her own needs; and sweet, funny, and outrageous Maddy, Shark’s fiancé. It all slapped him in the face every time they were together socially.

He liked to keep his fights clean and the sex dirty and gray areas made him wary. There was no time for his needs when there was so much injustice in the world. The very nature of his job kept him in that mindset for most of the year. But he couldn’t help the longing that bled into his consciousness. Ever since Haiti, he wondered what he was missing, especially now that Tex, Easy, Shark, and even stoic Bondo had found such fulfilling relationships. It made him feel hollow, and that kind of thinking made all his deeds and actions seem hollow, even when he knew they weren’t.

What was he truly missing? And would he ever allow himself the chance to find out?

The next morning,Twister was up and doing PT before he ate breakfast. He wanted to keep busy so that he didn’t overly think about how enclosed the spaces were and especially how tight the submersible would be tonight.

The USSMontanawas about to get close to China’s territorial waters, although staying about twenty miles out. TheMontanawas running silent and was submerged, but the Chinese Navy was active in the area, especially along the boundary of their border and international waters, and they were already prickly about United States vessels in what they considered their territory—they had claimed the whole of the South China Sea.

The plan was that China wouldn’t be alerted to any Naval action at all. They would insert to shore with their DCS, do their surveillance, then extract the same way.

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