“It’s a very famous story!” Wyatt protests with a chuckle. He looks at me, seeing my confusion, and explains. “The night before our first mission together I pulled this hand and thought it was a bad omen.”
“Turns out he was right,” Ryder calls from the kitchen.
I glance over, catching the faint smile tugging at Ryder’s mouth before he looks back down at whatever he’s stirring. There’s a shared pulse of amusement among the men, like they all know exactly where this anecdote is headed.
“We were in staging for hours,” Damian picks up the story. “Weather delay, intel delay, command arguing with itself…typical military foreplay. We’d been training together for months, but it was our first time actually deploying as a four-man team.” He gestures to Ryder in the kitchen. “Grandpa over there pulled out a deck of cards.”
Ryder barks out a laugh from the other room.
“So we’re sitting in this damp, freezing tent somewhere on the border of Colombia, killing time, and Wyatt pulls this hand and is like, uh-oh, this is a bad omen.”
Jake laughs. “Right before we went into this highly tense military situation.”
“But,” Wyatt says archly, giving Jake a meaningful look. “Was I wrong?” He turns back to me. “The next morning we’re on a chopper and the pilot clips a tree. Drops us two clicks off the LZ—”
“That means landing zone,” Jake inserts.
“—and there’s a goddamn storm. Mud up to our ankles, rain pouring down.”
“And we landed in a snake nest,” says Ryder.
I look up to see him leaning in the kitchen doorway now, arms crossed.
“Fer-de-lances,” says Jake with a shudder. “Whisper-fangs. Venomous little bastards. They like debris piles and we landed right in one.”
“I get bit,” Damian says, “because I kicked what I thought was a vine.”
“And thenIget bit,” Ryder adds, “pulling him out of the pile.”
Wyatt rolls his eyes, smiling ruefully. “Comms were fried in the storm and we had no backup and no med kit. First mission as a unit and we’re going down before we even hit the target.”
“But we didn’t,” says Ryder.
“Only because things got intimate real fast,” says Damian with a grin.
The men laugh.
“We literally didn’t have any antivenom, nothing,” says Wyatt. “So Jake and I grabbed them, dragged them under a tarp, and did the only thing we could do. We sucked the venom out.”
My face twists in distaste and he laughs.
“Yup. We each took one man. I took Damian and Jake took Ryder. We cut the punctures open with my field blade, and then drew venom until our mouths went numb, and then we spit and repeat.”
Damian huffs a laugh. “Romantic, really.”
Ryder smiles. “Saved our lives. Slowed the spread, bought us time.”
“But then we had to keep them awake,” says Wyatt. “Because if they’d slipped under, their breathing could’ve tanked. We had to keep them warm too, and keep ourselves from going hypothermic. We took turns talking. Singing. Swearing. We were under that tarp for the better part of twenty-four hours waiting for these two to pull through.”
“Aw,” says Damian, looking at the others proudly. “We weren’t a team before that night.”
“But by dawn we were Hellbent,” says Ryder, reflecting back his proud smile.
“Wow,” I breathe. “That’s bonding.”
“Yeah,” says Wyatt. “We were brothers after that.”
“And wait,” I clarify. “This is all because of the Dead Man’s Hand? Am I going to get bitten by a snake?”
