He felt a shift in the night air, knew the second before the bomb exploded.
BOOM!
Merc was thrown forward, tossed through the air, holding on to Caroline with all his strength. He hit the ground with enough force to knock the oxygen from his body. The violent explosion threw shrapnel and debris everywhere. Merc wrapped his big body around Caroline’s tiny one, trying to shield her from the fallout.
Ears roaring and ringing, he lay there trying to get his scattered wits.Got to move.
Merc climbed to his knees in a daze. The flames leapt to the sky in bright dancing orange streams as huge plumes of smoke blacked out the stars. Where the palace once stood, a large crater now filled its place. As if in slow motion his gaze drifted down, taking in multiple dark scars in the sand.
Bodies.
Lots of bodies.
Chest tight, Merc stumbled to his feet, keeping his stance wide so he wouldn't fall flat on his face as he swam through waves and waves of dizziness. His back burned hot and blood trickled down his leg, but the loud buzzing in his head dominated the rest of his body.
Caroline lay on her stomach, unmoving. Her once clean tunic was now burnt and torn to reveal a bloody back and legs. Her soft, damaged skin glowing in the firelight had probably never had anything harsher on it than the loofah she used in the shower.
Merc shouldn't care, he’d never cared before, but a strange sort of apprehension constricted around his chest seeing her so broken.
“Caroline?”
She didn't move. Dammit, he should've listened to her. She’d been so frantic, so desperate to leave the palace immediately, but his thirst for revenge and his need for answers had overrode common sense.
No, not common sense. Common sense would have been waiting for backup and performing a precision extraction as a unit. But he’d known that if he’d waited on his team, Mr. J would have beat Caroline to death and escaped. His chance of getting his hands on J would’ve slipped through his fingers like the sand beneath his feet.
“Caroline, can you hear me?”
A secondary explosion detonated, and even though they were far enough away from the palace, the blast threw him backwards. He lay there, stunned for a moment, and then he staggered up to his knees like a man on a two-day drinking binge, the roaring in his ears reaching a crescendo so loud it blocked out all other sound. The sand tilted and weaved precariously about to drop out from underneath him.
Bodies everywhere. The fire.
Merc’s vision hazed and he blinked rapidly, trying to get it back into focus. But what he saw before him wasn't the burning palace; it was a bright, sunny day in downtown Afghanistan. He was in a line of men he didn't recognize but he knew. They were all dressed like him, head to toe black with rifles in their hands as they crept down a street littered with trash. Merc was at the end of the line. He ducked behind a car and signaled to another teammate to move forward. And then a blast hit and he was down. He couldn't breathe, like a load of bricks had landed on his chest. Not bricks. A body.
His teammate.
Merc used all his strength to lift the body off him, his movements stiff with white-hot fear. The rest of his team lay in the streets. Dead.
They were all dead.
“Merc.”
He was in some sort of strange fog like he was floating in the air.
“Merc.”
The dead man at his feet called out his name, reaching a bloody hand up. How could he speak when half of his face had been blown off?
“Merc.”
And just like that, the memory snapped back into the deep, dark hole it had crawled out of and Merc was staring down at Caroline Cotter, her trembling hand reaching up for him.
Glancing around wildly, he realized he must have crawled over to her, shaking all over like a damn baby, his skin clammy and drenched in a cold sweat.
What the fuck had that been?
Black dots teased his periphery and Caroline seemed to shift beneath him. Merc went to his elbows and then his stomach in the sand. He used the last bit of his strength to turn his head to the side and watch Caroline lose consciousness. Beyond her, far on the horizon, he swore he saw a group of men on horses galloping toward them.His team.
He felt the vibrations in the ground even as his own eyes slid shut. And then, nothing.
