Page 25 of Dark Soul

“Is there a question there, Dark?”

“Tell me what happened. Help me understand. Hell, maybe you’ll feel better if you talk about it,” Dark said gently.

“Confession is good for the soul, right?” Griffin said, his green eyes mocking. “I’ll place my bets that you were a boy scout. Yet you look like you’ve also seen the inside of a prison. What did you do? You didn’t sell enough chocolate bars?”

Dark took a deep breath. He knew Griffin was looking to rile him up.

Not going to work.

“Yeah, that’s why I ended up in Fort Leavenworth for twenty years,” Dark said calmly. “We all have our darkness, Griffin. But I can’t let yours affect the team. You understand that, right?”

A look of intense shame crossed Griffin’s expression.

“Come on. Help me understand.”

“When Slate was captured, I… everything I thought I knew about myself changed from one day to the next. I’d always put my country first. Always. And so had he. We didn’t know that much about each other’s roles, but hell, we were brothers. And when I saw his name on that list… and then realized we were going to leave them to rot in that hell-hole… something just snapped inside of me.”

“So you took it upon yourself to rescue him.”

Griffin looked straight into his eyes.

“You might as well know.” He took a deep, shaky breath. “I won’t excuse my actions. There was a particular insurgent everybody was looking for at the time. I purposefully made up intel placing him in that prison, then made it seem like there was additional intel that I could only confirm on the ground. So when a SEAL team was sent in to capture the insurgent, I was there as well.”

“And your brother was rescued.”

“What was left of him, yes. Him and two other men. The only ones left alive. They’d been tortured to within an inch of their lives.” He ran his hand through his short hair. “Fuck. It was a miracle nobody died during the extraction. I could have ended up killing all those men.”

“And then they discovered what you’d done?”

Griffin shrugged. “I hadn’t covered my tracks particularly well. I just wanted to get my brother out.”

“So you went to prison.”

Griffin nodded, his green eyes harsh. “I’d been in prison for a few years, minding my own business, when Thorne came. He offered me my freedom. I thought it was my deal to make. But it wasn’t. Slate also had to give up his life, join the team, for me to get mine back.”

“And that’s why you’re angry with him." The pieces of the puzzle finally clicked into place. “You think he should have left you in prison.”

“Yes. Because that’s where I deserved to be.”

“But you didn’t leave him in prison.”

Griffin waved Dark’s comment away. “It’s not comparable. I was in the United States, in prison for a crime I committed. My brother was being tortured in an Afghan prison. So I’m sorry if you feel you can’t trust me, Dark. I deserve to be in prison.”

Dark couldn’t completely stifle a shaky laugh.

“So do the rest of us, Griffin, so do the rest of us. I can’t give you the absolution you’re looking for. But I can tell you, this hatred you’re holding on to, won’t help you or your brother. Right or wrong, you’ve been given a new chance to reconnect, and you’re squandering it by holding on to this anger.”

Griffin stared at him, but the stare was slightly less hostile than it’d been earlier.

“Yeah. We’ll see. Maybe next time you can tell me what you did, Dark.”

Dark swallowed, hard.

“Maybe,” he said noncommittally. But he already knew he didn’t want these men to see him for what he really was.

A killer.

“In the meantime, you should let my brother take a look at that shoulder. You look like shit.”