Page 55 of Knot All Is Ruined: Part 1

“Dani, you need to know the basic knowledge so I know you won’t hurt yourself in the midst of panic,” Petru informed me. “These things need to be second nature, and if we don’t start with a proper foundation, then everything we build off of it will crumble.”

“Who knew there could be so much to a simple weapon,” I grumbled.

Petru caught my chin, forcing me to meet his gaze. “No weapon is simple, not when it has the ability to take a life. Yes, we are at war; if we don’t kill them, we will end up dead ourselves. You must maintain a certain respect for the choice you make the second that gun is in your hands. With the ease of pulling one bit of metal, you can end the life of another. Self-defense or not, those deaths will be a weight on your shoulders. How much a person can handle varies, so not adding unnecessarily is always a wise choice.”

“How heavy is your burden?” I asked before realizing just how cruel that question was. “I’m sorry, that was thoughtless of me to ask,” I hurried, resting my hand on his wrist as he continued his hold on me.

Instead of irritation or anger at my words, his eyes grew soft, almost sad. “The weight I bear changes. Some days I feel like it’s crushing me, reminding me of all the lives I’ve taken. Then we have a mission where we get to save some lives or protect innocents who would have been crushed without thought. Those days it's like there’s no weight at all and I’m reminded why I chose to do this job. Each day I see you smile or hear you laugh, it keeps me from being overwhelmed. But if I’m to teach you the skills to kill, knowing the price you’ll pay with that knowledge, I’m not letting you do so blindly.”

Leaning forward, I pressed a quick kiss to his lips. “Thank you for teaching me how to protect myself from all forms of enemies.”

“It is my honor, Wildflower. Now let’s get back to the training,” Petru instructed.

When my time with Petru ended, it was time for lunch. Victor always had me sit and wait at the table as he got both our meals. He was forever filling my plate with everything available and telling me to eat what I wanted then he’d clean up. At first, I thought it was because he couldn’t go back for seconds and knew I’d only eat a quarter, maybe half, of the food. That reasoning fell through when I observed others going back for more.

“You know I can handle getting my own food. I know what most of it is now and how the whole routine works,” I argued one day.

Victor just glared at me. “No, you will wait here.”

“Vicky,” I snapped, shooting to my feet. “This is silly. There is no reason I can’t go with you and get my own meal for fucks sake.”

The hulking Alpha set both hands on the table and leaned down so our faces were mere inches apart. “I said no, Little Spark. Soldiers are assholes when it comes to chow time, and if one of them so much as bumps into you, I’m going to rip their arm off.”

That answer had me blinking at him in surprise. “Oh…”

“Yeah, oh, now sit the fuck down and be good so I don’t have to create more work for the janitors and get locked up in jail before we’ve had a chance to eat.” With that declaration, I sat and he marched off to get in line.

This time as I watched, no one dared to get near him. He had a good bubble of about two-feet at all times. It made me smile to think he did all that so no one would mess with me. It was adorable in a sick kind of way since I was not bothered by the fact that when he said he’d rip off a limb, I believed him.

Making it safely through lunch with no incidents, I left with Toma. He was teaching me about all the computer equipment they had. There were the standard radios for short-distance communications, but each team had a laptop connected to satellites, allowing us to use it anywhere we went. There were various programs to be used for contacting bases, towns, and even some of the generator plants they had scattered all over the South. We also worked on navigation with only a compass and the stars. Then we upgraded to using a map which sped things along since I knew how to read one.

As Toma and I worked together, he also had maps of the North, and I was marking down everything I knew or heard of. I amazed myself at what I picked up over the three years and with my information, Toma had even sent out drones to check out a few places. They had to be located near the border since communication with the drones could only go so far. There had been missions to set up more relay antennas at one point. However, the North caught on to what they were and destroyed them. This explained to me, at least, why they had such sparse knowledge of what life there was really like.

“Have you guys ever thought about sending someone undercover to find out stuff like this? Soldiers get transferred all over the place at random times for no reason. It seems like it would be easy for you to pull off,” I asked as I worked on translating our pretend location into the formula the computer system needed.

“I’m not sure,” Toma said, pausing whatever he was typing to give me his full attention.

That was something I noticed he did a lot when I initiated a conversation. It’s almost as if he never wanted me to think he didn’t have time for the multitude of questions I asked. As he taught me about the South and how they lived life, I couldn’t help but compare and contrast the two halves of the same whole. Thinking of this having been all one nation just seemed mind-blowing to me. Goes to show that leadership can make or break whatever they are put in charge of.

“While on the surface that sounds logical. Yet I'm sure you’ve noticed how Northern people blindly follow whatever they’re told. No one questions anything, ever, from what you tell me. Just picture a Southern person put in that equation. They’d blow it within the first day,” Toma reasoned. “I suppose if a person was rescued, flipped, and sent back to gather intel, that might work. Then again, if there’s no way for them to travel from place to place freely and get information back to us, is it any help? If we can’t count on getting what we need when we need it, the purpose of the whole plan gets called into question.”

The man had a point. It would be almost impossible to have an average soldier gathering intel. The only people who could come and go would be higher-ranking officers, and which of them would ever turn on their country? Falling back into a comfortable silence with only the sound of computer keys filling the air, I peeked over the screen to observe Toma. When he was here in the computer lab working on some project for the military, he changed. His passion for this was clear and showed in how people regarded his feedback. It was unusual for us to be alone here. Usually at least three or four others were working on various projects, but Toma mentioned they were testing something so they’d be gone for the day.

“Did you want to be in the military?” I blurted. “It’s just that you seem to love this part of what you do and I feel like that’s something they’d let you do outside the base. Like the person they brought in for this project that they’re testing. She isn’t part of the military.”

“That’s true, I could probably work anywhere I wanted to at this point with the skill level I have with computer coding. The thing with that is I wouldn’t be this good without the military. When I showed promise for it in training, they sent me to extra classes and built on that skill. If I had chosen to live a civilian life, I would have gotten my standard education until I was seventeen, then gone through the testing process. I might have shown the same skill but sucking me into loving this was the strategy behind it. Here they give you a problem and a limited amount of supplies, and you have to make do. It’s the pressure of knowing you could be the only thing that stands in the way of your team dying or getting your location to the support team who would then send for reinforcements. It’s hard to explain, but the rush that gives you is unlike anything you’d find in a civilian job,” Toma shared, then smiled and shook his head.

“That and Petru was enlisting. No way was he going to leave me behind, plus it was the only way he could support his family. When you enlist, they look after your family. So they found a place for his brother and cousins to live and be looked after while serving his country. Those kids wanted for nothing until they could support themselves, and I respect the hell out of that. It’s things like that which made it impossible for me not to fall in love with him. He is everything good and pure in the world. There was no way I wouldn’t be right by his side, watching his back and keeping him selfishly alive,” he admitted with a laugh. “God, I don’t think I’ve ever admitted that to anyone before. I joined the military because the man I love was putting himself in danger, and I wasn’t going to let him do that alone. Talk about a melodrama.”

Grinning, I laughed along with him because he was right, it sounded like something out of a book. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen three people love and care for each other the way you guys do. To be honest, I thought a love like that was lost to the world. So much of the time it’s about strategy, what you can get out of someone, rather than what you can create with them.”

“I doubted for a long time myself if we could make this happen with the world we live in, but the three of us decided that we would fight for our happiness. Once we made that choice, it gave us all the reassurance we needed to keep forging forward,” Toma said, a distant look on his face like he was remembering that moment.

The peace of our day was shattered when an alarm went off in the room and the warning lights flashed. Having no clue what was going on, I stayed where I was as Toma raced over to one of the computer terminals. He’d told me earlier that week that this room was used to monitor all the power stations so they could be alerted if there was any trouble after one got blown up. I did not share that I knew all about that situation since Lucian and his men were the ones who blew it up.

“Fuck,” Toma swore and grabbed a radio. “Base command, this is Staff Sergeant Dalca, I have an SOS coming from power plant number eight.”

“Understood. Head back to your barracks, we'll be rolling your unit out immediately,” the man on the other side of the radio ordered.