Page 45 of Darkness

I’ll agree what happened to them is fucked up. No man should have to lose his wife and daughter the way he did.

“I shouldn’t have gone-”

“And how was your captain going to feel about that?” I cut him off.

“She needed me here. The threat was here and I couldn’t help them.” Lincoln drinks some of his water before continuing. “He kept telling me I’d pay for not having his back. I just never thought he would kill my family.”

On duty abroad, he was with his team when they got ambushed. It wasn’t his call to get off in that area, and one of the guys with him injured his back, lost a leg, and his left arm. His head was all over the place, and no matter what people told him, he blamed Lincoln, because he was the one who was standing next to him. There are times when even Lincoln thinks it should have been him.

The guy with him was in the hospital. The doctor told his captain he was not mentally stable enough to leave, but they didn’t care. It was the Captain’s fault, and he knew it, so when the guy said he wanted to leave, they let him leave.

And that’s when it all started, Lincoln’s wife was getting fucked up deliveries, cell calls telling her fucked up things about Lincoln, or just saying stupid stuff about him, and that they need to watch their back. Lincoln spoke to his captain about it, and they said they will look after his family. But they didn’t.

The guy taunting his family was fucking crazy. Nothing mattered to him but making sure Lincoln was in pain, the same amount of pain as he was.

One night, the man set fire to Lincoln’s house with his wife and daughter still in there.

Losing them both broke him. It still breaks him.

How do you get over something like that? Your family was murdered, and the government did nothing to protect them. Despite others’ assurances that the man would be dealt with, Lincoln didn’t care. There was only one thing on his mind.

Killing the man who killed his family?

And he did it.

He killed the man who took his family from him.

So how did he end up in The Pit? He walked down there himself. The man walked in as if he didn’t have any will to live. Twenty-Three years old, lost the love of his life and his daughter.

What else was there?

He killed the man that took his family. Instead of going to prison, he came to an even worse place. Hell. Fuck, sometimes I think it’s even worse than hell.

“Remember the first time we met each other?” I ask, making him laugh.

“Yeah, some seventeen-year-old kid stopped me from getting the crap kicked out of me.

Still to this day, I don’t know why you did it,” Lincoln asks this question every year, and I answer him too, but he still asks me.

“Because the look in your eyes when I first saw you walk through those metal doors, you had nothing. As the years went on, the time I spent there I had that look. Difference is, I didn’t come into The Pit with it.” I turn to face him a little. “I did it because no man deserved to die without putting up a fight.” I told him you could see he wanted to die. You could see there was nothing in his eyes to live for.

“I was a dead man.” Even after saving him, he walked past me, making sure I felt him knock into me, and said nothing. He walked back into his cell. Back then, he was twice the size of me.

“Do you remember the first word you said to me when you actually spoke to me? For six months you ignored me, even though I took over your fight. You ignored me for months and months, and I used to think to myself, what an asshole. But what did you say to me?”

“You’ll never be alone again. I’ve got your back.”

“And what did I say to you?” I ask him.

“That I’ll never be alone, and you’ll always have my back.”

“Almost, what, fifteen years later? I still have your back.” And until I die, I’ll have his back.

“Doesn’t get easier, does it? It gets harder as the years go on.” All I can do is nod, because I know how it feels to lose the woman you love, but to lose a child, I have no fucking idea, and I never want to know.

“You got pretty fucked up this time. How did the neighbor get in here? He called me-”

“Who?” God, he was fucking high, and drunk.

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