Yeah.
“We were briefed on this going in, but we were also told that it had been all but eradicated. Yeah, right. Fuckhead warlord didn’t get the memo.”
“What did you do?” Her voice was laced with sorrow.
It took him a second to answer. “I broke his jaw. First thing. I wanted to kill him and I would have, without a second thought, but one of my men caught me. Stopped me. He didn’t pull his weapon but he said afterward he was thinking of it.”
She laid a hand on his forearm and could probably feel his tension under her fingers. “I’m surprised they stopped you. But I understand why they did. I nearly attacked a 300-lb 6’4” man who came in with a little girl who was cradling a broken arm in complete silence because she was terrified of him. She froze every time he looked at her, tried to make herself as small as possible. And her stepfather would stand over her, watching every word she said. I wanted to knock him out cold. But I took an oath to heal.”
“Yeah.” Matt nodded. She understood. She understood completely. “I wanted to waste the fucker, but I couldn’t. Had to be content with breaking his jaw. And besides that, there was a wounded little boy to look after. He was bleeding. And he was shackled to the table.”
Her eyes widened.
“Yeah. Just like you. It had been badly forged and had sharp edges. The kid had nearly cut his own hand off trying to get away. Luckily, I had our corpsman with us and he was able to stop the bleeding, stitch him up.” While he’d been stitching the kid up, the fuckhead on the floor had started groaning. Matt had kicked him in the head and he went back out like a light. No one said anything, anything at all. “The kid started babbling. I know Pashto. But the kid spoke some kind of dialect. I did recognize one word though. Others. He kept repeating it and he pointed to a back room.”
She was watching him so intently, silvery eyes sad. She gave a little sigh, knowing what was coming. She squeezed his hand.
“Yeah. So I followed this kid down a dusty filthy corridor, down a rickety wooden staircase to a room underground. Just following that kid was the saddest thing I’d ever done. He was emaciated, in rags, bleeding from the wrists, so stressed he’d lost his hair. When he turned to point down the stairs, he was actually crying blood. I’ve seen a lot of shit in the military but I’d never seen that before. It took me a minute to look at what he was pointing to.”
Matt stopped, jaws working.
“Bad?” she said softly.
His head hung heavy between his shoulders. “Bad.”
He’d seen bad shit but never like this.
The memory was with him constantly. Often all he had to do was close his eyes and he could see those little boys in hi-def, 8K. Eleven of them, shackled to the wall like miniature Counts of Montecristo. Only they weren’t men, they were boys. Tiny, emaciated, dressed in rags that stuck to filthy skin where they’d bled. Cheekbones stark in furrowed faces that somehow looked old, though they were just kids. Eight, nine maybe ten years old.
But also a thousand years old.
Matt had grown up in a stable and loving family in Santa Cruz. When he was ten, the biggest thing in his life had been baseball, Little League. He slept with his brand new catcher’s mitt and neglected his homework. His world was made up of loving parents and two sets of grandparents nearby, friendly neighbors, a crowd of baseball-crazy boys to run with. His world had been stable and safe. A million miles away from what those boys had gone through.
“There was a key hanging from a ring on the wall. I took the key and unlocked all the shackles. My men watched me without saying a word. I told the boys that it was going to be okay, though it was never going to be okay for them, ever again. But I told them I was going to take them somewhere safe. I don’t think they understood me but they understood the tone. They believed I was there to help, though they had no reason to. I think it was because anywhere else would be safer than there. We had to walk out through the warlord’s council room. His jaw was mangled and he couldn’t talk, but he had four of his fighters behind him and they were holding AK-74s, aimed right at my chest.”
For the rest of his life, Matt would remember the metallic sound of his men bringing up their weapons in perfect unison, all the muzzles pointed at the warlord’s chest.
Stalemate.
Matt was not going to back down and he knew the warlord knew it. Bullies know. Matt was not going to put those boys back into that man’s hands. He’d rather die.
He knew he’d reached a turning point. A line in the sand had been drawn in his head. He was not walking away from this. All the shit he’d seen and done in Iraq and Afghanistan … it stopped here.
His jaws clenched and his breathing sped up, remembering.
“Matt?” Honor laid a hand on his forearm, grounding him, bringing him back. “What happened?”
“The warlord finally broke the stalemate. He made his men lower their weapons.”
“You’d have shot him.” She said it as a statement, not a question.
“Damn right. It was point-blank range but we had body armor and they didn’t. And I was not going back down that hillside without those boys. I was not going to leave them to that monster. So I walked out, herding those boys in front of me. I didn’t dare look behind me, but I knew my men were with me, watching my six.”
“He was too scared to attack you. Bullies are like that.”
Matt nodded. “Once inside the troop carrier, we saw that the kids were still terrified. Not much we could do about that, but we gave them bottles of water and MREs and they relaxed a little after that. I just wanted to get them down off that damn mountain and to a UN medical station about 40 clicks from our FOB. Our Forward Operating Base.”
He hesitated, memories crowding in. The heat, the dust. The terrible smell of the kids, their open pus-filled wounds. The way they attacked the water and food. They’d been so starved their systems couldn’t take it and several vomited the food and water right back up. It had been an endless ride down to the base.
Honor looked down at his suddenly clenched hand. He had to focus to relax it. She traced the lines of his palm then looked up. “Please tell me this story has a happy ending.”
“No, ma’am, it doesn’t.”
She didn’t wince, her face just became sadder. As an ER physician, he imagined she was used to unhappy endings. You can’t save everyone. “What happened?”
“Well, fuckhead must have radioed down because we had our CIA liaison waiting for us, fuming, when we got back from the UN camp where we left the kids. He was nearly frothing at the mouth. Got right up in my face, screaming threats.”
“What kind of threats?”
“That I’d be court-martialed for stealing the property of a CIA asset, for one.”
She shot up straight at that. “Stealing the property of that vile man? He called those kids property?”
Matt had gotten used to the story but he could see that it hit her just as hard as it had hit him. Color was in her face and her gray eyes flashed with rage.
“Yeah. He said we had to respect local customs and bacha bazi, using small boys as sex toys, was a long-standing custom.”
Honor’s eyes narrowed. “We fought a bloody civil war so that no human being would ever be considered anyone’s property, ever again. We can’t condone slavery overseas either. I don’t care what local customs are. That’s precisely why we fight.”
“That’s what I said, only I used more colorful language.”
“Well, could you report him to — to the authorities?”
Matt felt the weight of it all over again. “No, but he reported me.”
Her eyes widened. “He what?”
“He reported me for insubordination, dereliction of duty, violence toward an American military ally and theft. And though my commanding officer vouched for me, Lee Chamness had a lot of power. It — what?” Her hand had jerked inside his. “What is it?”
“That name.” her voice dropped to a whisper. She stared at him, eyes wide. “Cha
mness —”
“Lee Chamness. Yeah.” He wasn’t ever likely to forget that name. Just hearing it, even when he himself said it, made his heart race with rage. “Corrupt piece of shit.” The color had drained from her face. “Hey. Do you know him?”
She looked poleaxed, but was shaking her head. “No. N-no. I’ve never heard that name before, yet when you said it, my heart jumped.”
Matt frowned. “Do you know another Lee Chamness? I mean it’s not a common name but it’s not an unusual one, either.”
She sat transfixed, unmoving, barely breathing. Her gaze had turned inward as if consulting herself. She gave a little shake. “No. No, it means nothing to me and yet — it does.” Her face was troubled. Her hand shook in his. “How can that be?”
“I don’t know.” Matt ran a gentle thumb across the deep frown lines between her brows, trying to ease her anxiety. Man, he was asking so much of her and she was still recovering. “You know, it’s probably nothing. Maybe the name is similar to a name you know. Maybe some former patient.”
“Maybe.” She looked troubled. Shook herself as if shaking off a bad dream. “So what happened? What did he do?”
“Chewed me out in front of my commanding officer, who had no choice but to take it. Said I’d destroyed a long game. He took it all the way up the line. I was spared a court-martial only because half the Navy stepped in. But the CIA has real clout and I was kicked out. Given an Other Than Honorable Discharge. It’s what they give to drug addicts or alcoholics. Or soldiers with dementia.”
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “That’s awful!”
Matt nodded. “The brass was only able to save my ass because I had a chestful of medals and a couple of big ones in a shadowbox that civilians couldn’t know about but that the DOD did. Guaranteed.” He blew out a slow stress-relieving breath. “The fucker tried to wreck my life. An Other Than Honorable Discharge stops you from ever working for the government. I lost my pension. Luckily, ASI knew the whole story and they couldn’t care less about the OTH. So, in the end, it’s okay. I heard Chamness left the CIA.”
“And the kids?”
He sighed. “The kids.” He picked up her hand, played with the fingers. No rings. Thank God. “The kids didn’t make it.”
“Not one of them?”
“Not a one. The UN camp was running low on supplies and they didn’t have much beyond antibiotics and some other meds. They did what they could but the kids were weak, malnourished. Stressed beyond imagining. There was no saving them. And that’s why I am sulking on the mountain.”
She laid her hand over his. “I’m so sorry. You trashed your career to save them.”
He lifted a shoulder. “Well, I tried. It’s all anyone can do.”
“Don’t I know it. We’ve had kids come in after getting drunk and crashing the car, we prep them for surgery, then a team of surgeons and surgical nurses will work ten hours to save them and then they just slip away. It’s heartbreaking.”
He watched her face as she spoke. Watched the passion and the sadness and the regret and knew that she understood, as few ever could.
The next morning, Honor woke up again, refreshed. Each time she slept she woke up feeling stronger, more like herself.
The clouds in her head wouldn’t lift completely, though. Retrograde amnesia was a bitch.
Ribot’s Law, governing the interaction between the medial temporal hippocampus and multiple areas in the neocortex. The stronger the trauma, the further away the lost memories could be. She’d studied it, she’d dealt with it in the ER, but she’d never experienced it. It was frightening beyond measure to lose memories of your life, of yourself. To have a black void where you should be.
She still had no real memories of anything after the eruption of the volcano. She had a few images, like photographs briefly flashing across her field of vision, some snatches of conversation though she couldn’t identify the voices. No clue as to what was being said. Every time she thought things were coming into focus and concentrated, an almost crippling flash of pain shot through her brain, so intense tears would spring in her eyes.
She learned the hard way not to push it. The pain was so intense she thought she’d pass out.
It was horrifying to think that she might have lost those days forever.
Could Matt and maybe some of his people help her find out?
But if people started enquiring after her, would word get back to the nameless shadowy people who’d kidnapped her? Would they realize she wasn’t dead after all, and come after her again?
So many questions, so few answers. Still, she was getting physically stronger. Maybe her memory would come back, too. Not ever coming back — no, that was too awful to contemplate.
There was a dent in the pillow next to her head and the blankets on Matt’s side of the bed were thrown back. No sounds from the bathroom. He’d let her sleep.
She showered and changed into a pale gray sweater and soft black yoga pants, again blessing the women who’d left clothes here.
Oh man, she’d give anything to go back home. To her quiet, restful apartment. To have her things around her. This place was super luxurious and there was everything she needed, but it felt as blank as her mind. Nothing here was hers, nothing here touched her in any way.
Except, well, for Matt Walker. He touched her, big time. The sex they’d had filled her with joy and heat and life. Just his presence made her feel better. Talking to him was reassuring, made her feel a little less lost.
Honor had never needed a man to make her complete. This was entirely new. The thing was, it didn’t feel backward and needy. It felt … right.
It felt right to talk to Matt holding his hand. Him heating Isabel’s excellent food for her felt right, too. Walking around the Grange, hand in hand, made the place less foreign to her, more welcoming.
Truth be told, she missed him. She never missed anyone, but she missed him right now. Was that dependency?
Well, no point feeling bad about that, not when she had so much to feel bad about. His presence was one of the good things about her situation. His presence and that of his friends. They all had her back.
Imagine if she’d survived the rapids of the river, found herself beached on the river bank, in the cold, wet late afternoon. Battered and bruised, danger screeching in her mind but not knowing where the danger was.
She was strong, but she wouldn’t have survived that. Where would she have gone? They were out in backcountry here. She’d have frozen to death that night, or if she’d somehow survived the night, she’d have starved to death because she had no way to get into town, back to civilization. She still didn’t know exactly where they were.
The door of the room closed behind her and she walked slowly toward the Great Hall. Though there didn’t seem to be any windows the area was filled with light. What time was it, anyway? The light was artificial but the air smelled fresh, maybe because of the huge plants in big enamel vases. She skirted an enormous lemon tree, taking in the slight citrusy scent with pleasure.
What would have happened without Matt? Someone would have found her bones, maybe months from now. He’d saved her.
And there he was, walking toward her. His head cocked as he studied her. It was the assessment of someone who cared. The second assessment was pure male, his gaze like hands reaching out and touching her. Heat filled her, down to her fingertips.
“Hey,” he said softly. “You look —” he paused. She expected him to say she was looking good, looking rested. Instead what he said was, “You look beautiful.”
The way he was looking at her, she felt beautiful.
He held his arm out at a weird angle. “Ma’am? May I escort you to your breakfast?”
It was role play but it felt … good. The men in Honor’s life had never been particularly chivalrous. She’d dated mostly med students and fellow doctors and they were not romantically inclined. Presumably soldiers, too, were not romantically inclined, but though Matt was play-acting, there was something g
enuinely chivalrous about him. He was a protector, an old-fashioned kind of guy.
And it just so happened she needed protecting.
She fluttered her lashes, appalled to find she did it completely naturally. Without a hint of irony. Putting her hand in the crook of his elbow she smiled up at him. “Lead the way.”
They set off very slowly and Honor frowned. Then realized Matt was setting his pace to slow. The kind of slow nurses were familiar with as they escorted patients down the hallway of the hospital. But Honor didn’t feel slow. She felt … strong. Well, if not strong, then stronger.
She tugged at his arm. “Hurry up, slow poke. I’m hungry!”
“Yes, ma’am.” And his stride lengthened.
He led them across the Great hall to the small kitchen and table. The table was already set. He seemed to always be cooking for her. Or at least nuking for her, he’d said his cooking skills were nonexistent. Still, it was the thought that counted.
“Ma’am.” He pulled out a chair and seated her in it as if she were the Queen of the Grange, then rounded a counter to the kitchen area.
He frowned with concentration as he transferred something from a plastic bin to a plate for microwaving, like some five-star chef checking the arugula leaves were placed just so. He looked up suddenly, met her eyes. That dark intense gaze, it just took her breath away.
Heat flashed through her again, life-restoring, glorious sexual heat. For the first time she understood the phrase she’d heard hundreds of young girls use — I have the hots for him.
The hots. Yeah.
What she felt flashing through her was hot and elemental and … healing. For the first time since he’d fished her out of the river, Honor felt like she was going to be okay. Maybe. At least her body. Maybe her mind would continue to be like Swiss cheese but she could feel strength flowing back into her, like a beloved long-lost friend.
Matt came around the kitchen island, a slight smile on his face. “Well, look at you. You’re looking real good.” He walked up to her, so close she had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes.
“Thanks.” She tilted her head to one side. There was something about his face …
Midnight Renegade (Men of Midnight Book 7) Page 13