“A series of bad choices apparently.”
She scowled at him, clearly wanting more than flippancy. He read the pinch of fear that haunted her eyes, along with the thin cast to her lips. She recognized the danger, the likelihood of a fatal outcome, yet she held herself together, maybe from an ingrained Russian stoicism, an acceptance of life’s injustices. But he suspected it was just this woman, one who had twice stepped between a rifle and his dog.
Tucker sighed, knowing he owed her an honest response. “I grew up in a country not much warmer than Siberia. Rolla, North Dakota. Near the Canadian border.”
“What was it like? Growing up there?”
“Pretty nice. Spent summers at Willow Lake, hiking the North Woods. In winter, it was snowshoeing and ice fishing. But it wasn’t as idyllic as that postcard sounds.”
“Why’s that?”
“My mom and dad died when I was three.” He shrugged. “Don’t really remember them. They’re just pictures in a photo album. It was my grandfather who raised me. Then, when I was thirteen, he had a heart attack from shoveling snow one hard winter. I found his body after coming home from school.”
She winced. “How horrible.”
He continued, not entirely sure why he was being so forthright. “From there, with no other relatives, I ended up in the foster care system. I petitioned for early emancipation and joined the military at seventeen.”
He skipped over the dark years between those two tentpoles of his life.
It’s no wonder I like dogs better than people.
“That’s how you ended up with Marco and Kane?” she asked, rubbing fingers through Marco’s ruff. “Military working dogs.”
“Actually, it was Kane andAbelfirst—Kane’s littermate brother.”
She must have read something in his voice or attitude. She winced again, as if sensing this was a well of pain.
“I lost him during a firefight in Takur Ghar. We were assisting soldiers from the Tenth Mountain Division, securing bunkers in a place called Hell’s Halfpipe, when a pair of IEDs exploded. Taliban fighters swarmed from concealed positions.”
He shook his head, trying to clear the memory, but it was branded there.
He fell back to that mountaintop.
He and a handful of survivors had been able to reach a defensible position, to hold out long enough for an evac helicopter to land. Once Kane and his teammates were loaded, he had been about to jump off and go for Abel, who was injured, but before he could, a crewman dragged him back aboard and held him down—where he could only watch.
A pair of Taliban fighters chased down Abel, who was limping toward the rising helo, his pained eyes fixed on Tucker, his leg trailing blood. Tucker scrambled for the door, only to be pulled back yet again.
Then the Taliban fighters had reached Abel.
He squeezed those last memories away, but not the haunting voice forever in the back of his mind:You could’ve tried harder; you could have reached him.
If he had, he knew he would have been killed, too, but at least Abel wouldn’t have died alone. Alone and wondering why Tucker had abandoned him...
“I’m sorry,” Elle whispered.
“I’ve come to peace with it.”
Barely...
He pictured the arid Arizona desert, and a glimpse of sun dogs chasing across the sky, where he had been able to let go of some of his grief.
But he would never be entirely over that loss.
And he knew why.
I don’t want to be.
Abel had earned that pain.
