CHAPTER ONE
RYDER
I’m staring at the blood soaking through the bandage on my hand. It’s seeped along the fold of my palm, tracing the lifeline beneath the wrap, black in the desert light that strips everything of its color. It’s from a deep slice where the blade slipped while cutting paracord an hour ago. It should throb, but I feel nothing except this tremendous, terrifying calm.
“She’s dead,” my uncle is saying, his voice cutting in and out on the sat phone, stuttering with delays. Across the room, my platoon sergeant watches me, shoulders square but eyes soft with a pity that tells me he already knows what this call is about.
“You need to come home, son. For the funeral.”
My mother is resting, my uncle Rob tells me. It’s been a shock for her.
I stare at my hand, noticing the fine shimmer of sand sticking to the edges of the dried blood.
“Home?” I repeat. The platoon’s running lean. Half our guys are sick, two are on rotation out at the wire, and the idea of getting on a plane while they stay here feels backward and obscene. People die here.
I look up at the platoon sergeant, and he nods.
“The funeral is on Sunday,” Rob says, ignoring my question.
The funeral.But she’s just a kid.
“She was fine,” I hear myself say, although she wasn’t, really. I just don’t know how to come to terms with this. Mom had been telling me that she was worried. Late nights, the boyfriend with the bike, dropping out of school. I said I’d talk to her, but Samantha was never home when I called.
Rob clears his throat and keeps talking, but I can barely hear him over the pressure building behind my eyes, the wordless scream that’s whistling between my ears.“The Sunset Motel…overdose…”
What would a kid be doing at a motel?
Pictures of Samantha run through my head like a carousel, spinning faster and faster: riding her pink Huffy with the streamers, knees scabbed from crawling on the grass; stormy nights when she crawled into my bed because Mom was working late; the county-fair goldfish she made me eulogize when it died.
The last image is of a scrawny teenager in a hoodie waving at the bus, pretending she wasn’t crying.
The pictures keep looping, the colors bleaching out until there’s nothing left but white. Sunlight so bright it hurts.
No—moonlight.
I blink, recentering myself, and the memory recedes.
The desert’s gone. The air is different. Damp instead of dust.
The ringing in my ear fades, replaced by the slow slap of water against rock and the creak of the rocking chair beneath me. A breath, and I’m not nineteen anymore. I’m thirty-six, on a porch miles and years away from Kandahar.
My hand is in a fist, fingers moving over the thin ridge of a scar in my palm.
And Max is beside me.
Maxwell
It’s that in-between hour—too late to be night, too early to be morning. The sky is silvery and thin, not fully dark anymore. Just light enough to turn the edges of the trees gray.
Ryder and I have fallen into silence after so much talking. I can’t think of a single other thing to say. My eyes are swollen, the skin on my cheeks tight from the dried salt of my tears, but at least I’ve stopped crying. Now we just sit here, rocking quietly, both staring in the direction of the lake as the hint of dawn lifts fog off its surface.
I can feel Ryder without looking at him, the way I’ve always been so attuned to him, the pull of that heavy strength its own gravity. He’s dressed absurdly in a paramedic’s uniform—polyester t-shirt leaving his forearms bare in the cool autumn night, navy pants stretched tight over thick thighs. His hair is pulled back in a rough knot, a few strands escaping around the sides of his face. I don’t have to look at him to know that his brow is still pulled together, his jaw tight.
I’m in nothing but the t-shirt I was rescued in and a blanket wrapped around me that I kept from the ambulance before we set it on fire.
Wyatt was a wreck when we got him to the medic. So was I, even though Damian had administered Narcan—my stomach churning, cold sweat, sounds too loud and lights too bright. I only remember it in a cacophony of senses. Ryder’s fist hammering on the frosted glass door, the way it smelled like iodine inside. How confusing it was to pull up to a veterinary clinic in an ambulance when Wyatt was a real, human patient who clearly needed medical help.
“Do you need anything for her?” the vet had asked Ryder, jerking his chin toward me. His build was all muscle, toohardened for this line of work. I knew immediately he was military.
