Chapter One
“Get down!” Xavier Michaels roared to the rest of his team, gesturing for them to get behind the bullet-riddled truck that served as their only cover. The sound of gunshots filled the air, and his team—what remained of them, anyway—dove behind the truck after Xavier.
Xavier pressed his back to the vehicle, breath tearing from his lungs, and glanced over to Max, his younger brother, hunkered down behind the blown-out front wheel of the truck. He had that look on his face, the look that Xavier knew meant bad news.
Max rolled out from behind the truck and fired off a few shots, until his gun clicked uselessly—empty. No more ammunition around them. A couple of the other members of the group were scrambling to try to find cover, to no avail. Most of them were hit, carrying injuries, their blood mingling with the dust on the ground.
“Max!” Xavier called to his brother, and Max flashed him a grin. Xavier could hear the steady pulse of automatic weapons beyond them, and his own blood rushing in his ears. He didn’t know what to do, but he had to keep his brother close.
Keeping his head down, Xavier crawled over to his brother, pulling him back behind the truck. He felt the tension in his brother’s body as he tried to keep him out of the line of fire, but Max was already squirming away from him, ready to get out of there.
“Listen to me,” Xavier ordered his brother, and Max finally turned to look at him, remembering that Xavier was technicallythe one in charge here. They both ducked as a bullet bounced with a metallic clang off the hood of the truck, sending shrapnel spraying into the ground around them.
“I have a few bullets left,” he explained urgently, his voice low. “And I’m going to use them to cover you. That building, right there? You make a run for it and take cover inside. I’ll be out to meet you in no time, okay?”
“And then what?” Max shot back. “We’re outnumbered. And you know backup isn’t going to make it in time.”
Xavier’s mind raced. He wanted to be able to argue with his brother, but he knew he was right.
He could feel the situation quickly spinning out of his control. He couldn’t put his baby brother in harm’s way. He had promised their mother when they had both left for the army that he would never do that. But the way Max was staring out across the dusty ground before them, spattered with bullets and blood, Xavier knew there wasn’t a chance he could stop his brother from what he was about to do.
Max flashed him another grin. That devil-may-care look that told Xavier he was ready to do whatever it took to make it out. He had survived so much, and it had made him cocky. There were only so many chances he had before his luck ran out.
“If this is how I have to go,” he remarked, tightening his grip on his vest, “so be it. I had a good run.”
“Max, you can’t—”
But before Xavier could finish what he had to say, another spray of bullets rattled the truck. Xavier ducked, turning his back, and they skipped past him onto the ground below.
But when he turned back to his brother, he saw that he hadn’t been so lucky.
A bloom of blood started to form around Max’s throat, a wet darkness spreading out across his camouflage uniform. Hiseyes were hazy and distant, and Xavier’s stomach dropped as he lurched toward him.
“Max!” he yelled. His hands reached out for his brother, but he couldn’t get hold of him. He watched as his brother slipped away right before him, and he tried to scream his name again, but it did no good…
“Max!”
XAVIER CAME TOwith a start, the sound of his own voice pulling him out of his nightmare. It took him a good thirty seconds to remind himself where he was. The memories were so vivid, the smell of blood and the sound of bullets so fresh in his mind, he couldn’t seem to shake them.
But after a minute or so, he sank back into the bed and closed his eyes once more. He was in his room in the lodge at the Warrior Peak Sanctuary. It was the middle of the night, and silence filled the air around him. He wasn’t at war; he wasn’t fighting anyone. He was safe.
And yet the memory of that dream pressed heavily on his mind as he tried to come back down to earth. His body was still racked with tension, and his insides felt as though they had been shredded as he was forced to relive the worst moment of his life for the hundredth time in the last few months.
When was it going to end? If it ever ended. Before the fire, the dreams had at least been a little more manageable, but since the fire on the property outside the main lodge nearly three months before, it felt as though he had been tortured nonstop by these memories.
If there was one thing that always served to bring him back to real life, it was a freezing-cold shower—a tip he learned in basic training as a way to wake himself up for any particularly early morning missions. He didn’t want to wake anyone up,wandering around the lodge at this hour, but he needed something to blast the memories of what had happened out of his mind, at least for a little longer.
Until he fell asleep again, of course.
He grabbed a change of clothes and made his way down to the showers. The whole place was quiet and peaceful. Normally, he would have enjoyed a little piece of silence, but right now, he could have used the company. Not that he would have made a point to talk about what was going on in his mind. No, running this place, people expected him to be strong.
People came here because they relied on him to handle himself and what he had been through. If they knew how tortured he really was, how much the guilt played on his mind and how much he had let his own brother down, they would never be able to trust him the same way.
He blasted the water on as cold as he could take it and stuck his hand beneath the shower head to try to ground himself. After stripping off his clothes, he stepped into the shower. His teeth started to chatter immediately as the cold seeped into his system.
He closed his eyes, but even with the cold water pounding on his back, he found his mind returning to the night of the fire. The way those flames had licked at the sky, the way it had felt like everything they had worked for was being ripped right out from underneath them. Sometimes, he wondered how they had made it through without any major injuries. Things had looked so bleak at the time; he had accepted in the back of his mind the possibility that the main lodge might go up in smoke with the paddock and surrounding grounds.
But Lawson would never have let that happen. They had both worked too hard to get to this point, to create a sanctuary for people like them who needed a chance to get their feet backunder them. They weren’t going to let something like a fire change that.
