“Maybe, but I’d rather have you there while I hunt this ¡capullo!9 down.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” her brother told her.
“Just call me after you get there,” Rox replied. “If Sam’s up for it, I need to talk to her—bring her up to speed with what’s going on.”
“You got it.”
She hung up, looking around the darkened terminal again. She’d have to get ahold of all the manifests for the ships scheduled to leave the port tonight and early tomorrow morning. Not easy, but not impossible either, especially now that she had a duffle full of money to grease palms with. Rox may have lost him for now, but she was going to use all of Lightner’s guap to find him again, and that was fucking money well spent.
*
December—Early Morning
Asklepios Klinik Barmbek, Hamburg, Germany
S A M A N T H A
She was dreaming. A feverish, hazy, morphine, and trauma-induced slide show flickered behind closed eyes. Samantha saw her little brother, laughing, running through the fields at the ranch. Then that image dissipated, transforming into Ibrahim Nazar’s leer as he drove the knife deeper into her back. She tried to scream, but couldn’t.
Trapped.
Darkness.
She was lying underneath the paper cranes dangling from her penthouse ceiling.
Suffering—guilt, shame, loss—
In her mind’s eye, she saw her father drunk at his desk, a picture of her dead mother in his hand.
Your mother’s dead, Sammy. She ain’t coming back—
More darkness.
She recalled the warmth of Aunt Hannah’s embrace on the porch, smelled the soft rose scent of the talcum powder she used. Such comfort. Such love. But it didn’t last—nothing lasted.
She was standing on the tarmac in Rio, watching Carey take two slugs to the chest from one of Lightner’s men. She was screaming, screaming…
No.
Samantha struggled, trying to wake.
She dreamed of Jack, the way he looked at her the first time he told her he loved her, his silver eyes clear and incandescent. But his smile morphed into Wes’s grin, bright as the sun. He slid his hands around her waist, picking her up and swinging her around.
Wake up.
She was somewhere dark and heavy, her mind a prison. She tried to open her eyes, tried to wake up, but now she was staring into the empty, black eyes of the first insurgent she ever killed, mouth filled with blood, body riddled with bullets. Her bullets.
A sob caught in her throat.
No.
She had to wake up—she wanted to wake up—
“Sammy girl—I’m here—you’re going to be okay—I’m here—”
She groaned a low feeble sound, forcing herself up through layer after layer of consciousness, like rising up through murky water until she was just at the surface, her breathing thick and labored, her eyes so heavy that she wasn’t sure she could open them.
She felt someone squeeze her hand, and she tried to squeeze back, but the pain was too much, gathering, circling and tightening as it became more concentrated and powerful. As she came to—that pain refracted into a brilliant spectrum of white-hot agony, vivid and breathtaking.
“Ms. Wyatt is responding positively to all the stimulus tests,” she heard someone say in a brisk German accent, the silence punctuated by beeps and the whooshing sound of machines. “She will need intensive physiotherapy to repair the damage to her spine, but she’s responding to the stimulus tests.”
“Will she be able to walk again?” she heard Carey ask, his voice low and anxious.
“I believe so, yes; but she’ll need time. We’ll continue to keep her here in critical care, but if she continues to demonstrate consistent improvement, she should be ready to be transferred to private inpatient care within twenty-four hours.”
“Oh, thank Christ,” Carey responded with a relieved sigh. “Is she—” he took a pause. “Is she in a great deal of pain?”
“She’ll be in some pain, yes,” the doctor confirmed. “But we’ll manage that as she wakes up. We’ve reduced the amount of opiates to her system, because we wanted to measure her responses.”
“I don’t want her hurting, Doc.”
“I understand. I’ll make sure the nurse administers more morphine. She’ll hook Ms. Wyatt to a pain management IV, so that she can control the dosage as she needs it.”
“Thanks, Doc.”
Overwhelmed by her hurt and exhaustion, Sam drifted again, dozing off until she felt a gentle movement at her side. A nurse stood over her, adjusting an IV bag. She felt the bend of the mattress as a strong, sturdy arm slipping under her shoulders to lift her up gently. Sam opened her eyes slowly, registering Carey’s exhausted, worried expression as he cradled her, holding a plastic hospital cup to her mouth, nudging her lips with the straw.
“Drink, Sammy. You’ll feel better.”
Unlikely, she wanted to say, but she didn’t or couldn’t.
The water tasted crisp, cool and delicious in the cottony desiccation of her mouth, and she gulped down fast, taking her fill as if she’d been dying of thirst in the Mojave Desert.
“Whoa, there, nelly—don’t choke on it, honey. It ain’t beer,” Carey teased, pulling the straw away before dabbing at the water trickling down her chin as she gazed up at him.
Over the two tours of duty she’d served, Sam had woken up from being shot, stabbed, strangled, and bombed. But the rippling, all-consuming pain she felt now had to be the very worst of it. Each hard-fought breath, each punishing wave of agony, brought her closer to comprehension, the memory of what she’d survived returning to her in splintered fragments, like the detritus from a shipwreck.
Sam blinked against the diffused light filtering into the room, her gritty eyes slowly adjusting to the luminescence. Carey as he hovered over her, his face haggard with worry, a couple days’ worth of bristle on his strong jaw. He lifted her hand, squeezing it in his warm clasp as he brushed her hair back.
“Wh—” her throat worked. “What happened?” she rasped.
He rubbed her cheek with the rough pad of his thumb. “You kicked the bucket a couple times, baby girl. Scared the absolute shit out of me and the boys,” he murmured. “Nearly lost you there, Sammy.”
“Where—” she swallowed again. “Where am I?”
“Hamburg,” he murmured, watching her closely, blue eyes lit with worry. “How do you feel?”
She tried to give him a reassuring smile, but the result was more a glancing wince. “Like a bug pinned to your 6th-grade science project,” she croaked.
Carey chuckled softly, reaching over and pressing the button the nurse had put in her hand. An immediate languid haze doused the pain from a painful throb to a low hum. Better. So much better. Sam relaxed against the pillows, enjoying the hypnagogic effects of whatever was coursing through her system, like floating on a smooth and easy river.
“You remember anything?” Carey asked her after a moment.
“Afghanistan,” she answered drowsily.
“Yeah.” Carey sat back, pushing a hand through his blonde hair as he expelled a breath. “You killed Ibrahim Nazar, Sammy. Took out his team and that heroin-processing facility he had going. But not before he sawed his knife through your back,” he told her. “Rush carried you out of the compound before the SEALs blew Nazar’s compound all to hell. They took you out in a Dustoff chopper, but you almost didn’t make it—” His voice broke, belying his worry as he stroked her cheek.
“How did I end up here?” she asked, fighting drowsiness.
“The medics at Shindand did what they could, but the damage—it was too much, Sammy.” Carey’s eyes blazed with pent up emotion, his concern for her plain as day as he held her hand. “The guys flew you to Germany to have the surgery.” He kissed her hand. “Swear to God, during the entire flight here from Texas, all I could think of was how I’d tell my mama you weren’t ever coming home—”
“It’s alright
, Bear.” Samantha squeezed his hand feebly, watching him work through the worst of his fears as he gripped her hand. She must have been at death’s door for him to look like that, her sweet and stalwart Bear. Always faithful. Completely loyal. “I’m here, Carey. I’m okay—”
He nodded, lifting her hand to his mouth. He pressed a kiss to the back of her hand, his eyes closing. “If I lost you…”
“Not going anywhere,” she mumbled, closing her eyes. “Who’d boss you around if I kicked the bucket?”
“You’re too damn mean to die. You remember that,” he told her, his smile endearing.
The pain continued to diminish, and with it, her ability to stay sentient. Sam felt the suck and ebb of the sedative, like being drawn out with the tide. She didn’t think she’d be able to stay awake much longer.
“Where are the guys—are they okay?” she asked sleepily, her eyelids falling.
“Rush and Talon are here. They wouldn’t leave your side, even if I ordered them to,” Carey told her with the ghost of a smile. “The rest of the team are back in London and Chicago.”
“Did anyone else get hurt?”
“No,” he shook his head. “The boys did good, Sammy.”
Drowsy. She could feel herself slipping back into the deep shroud of sleep.
“Love you, Sammy.”
She smiled softly. “Love you too, Bear,” she whispered, falling asleep.
*
December—Mid-Morning
Asklepios Klinik Barmbek, Hamburg, Germany
W E S L E Y
“You alright?” Evan Rush asked him as Wes paced the hospital waiting room like a caged animal.
“No, I’m not fucking alright,” Wes answered, pushing his hands through his hair before lacing his fingers behind his neck as he shot Evan an aggrieved look. “I haven’t seen Sammy in over a dozen years and the first time is in a hospital in Rio. She’s been shot, stabbed, and fucking resuscitated more times than the goddamn Bride of Frankenstein. Are you kidding me—am I alright?”
Evan nodded, looking away.
In all of Wes’s years of accumulated experiences across ravaged war zones, witnessing genocides, and an array of horrifying human travesties in conflict-ridden countries, watching the love of his life struggling to survive on the flight from Afghanistan was the very worst of it. Because in his foolish optimism, he assumed he’d always have a chance to make things right with her. He’d always banked on seeing Sammy again, when the time was right for both of them, because he’d never doubted they’d end up together, regardless of the passing time and the distance between them. Wes had always known he’d find his way back to her, as certain now as he was then that she would be the only woman he’d ever love.
Wes realized now how tenuous that thread of hope really was when the medical team on the jet had to punch hundreds of joules through Sammy’s heart with defibrillator pads, to get her heart to start beating again. All his dreams, all his plans, hung in the balance in those horrible, breathless seconds until her heart started beating on its own again. The faith he’d always had in their interwoven destinies nearly slipped from his grasp, again and again in a handful of hours.
When Wes arrived at the hospital, he could tell immediately it’d been a rough night. He could see it all over Carey’s, Rush’s, and Talon’s faces.
“I shouldn’t have left,” he muttered moodily as he paced the waiting room floor like a caged animal.
“What would you have done, Wes?” Evan challenged as Talon sat down next to him, handing him a fresh cup of coffee.
“You’d just have driven yourself nuts and us in the process,” Talon added. “It’s better you weren’t here.”
Wes pushed his hands through his hair. “So what’s her status now?”
Evan glanced at Talon briefly as some unspoken communication passed between them like a current. “She was touch-and-go,” he admitted. “But the doctors don’t think she’ll need another surgery.”
Wes squeezed his eyes shut. “Shit.”
“Carey’s in there with her now while the doctors check her out,” Evan went on, sipping his coffee.
“Can I see her?”
Evan was just about to answer when the sliding glass doors to the waiting room came open. All three of them looked up at the tall, black-haired man who stopped at the threshold, eyes scanning the waiting room.
Wes stiffened in shock as their eyes clashed.
“I don’t believe it.” The guy he was staring at was fifteen years older than the man he remembered and had the layers-deep tan and squint lines of a man who’d spent years in the desert, but Wes recognized him immediately.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Texas A&M’s worst bartender,” Alejandro de Soto drawled as he strode forward and came to a stop just a few feet away from Wes and the guys. He lazily brushed the snow off the sleeves of his old leather jacket as he considered Wes with the same smirk he’d had way back when they’d been in college together.
Talon and Evan exchanged glances in askance, clearly confused.
“Better than being A&M’s biggest asshole,” Wes replied, bemused.
“Can’t argue that.” Alejandro shrugged before extending his hand. “So you and Wyatt are still together after all this time?” he asked as they shook hands. “Got to admit, I’m surprised. I never thought you’d stick around, Elliott.”
The casual jab sliced a lot deeper than it should have. “And I never thought I’d see you again after you graduated, ranking No. 2 behind her,” Wes answered smoothly, careful not to keep the sting out of his voice. A guy like de Soto lived for the upper hand. No way would Wes give him the satisfaction. Not after all this time.
But what the hell was he doing here?
In all his years, Wes’d never expected to see de Soto again. The guy had been Sam’s nemesis through most of undergrad, the two of them at each other’s throats as they vied for the top spot in A&M’s notoriously difficult ROTC program. They’d thrown down more than once from what Wes recollected. At one point, he’d been certain they would literally kill each other.
Alejandro surprised him by smirking, humor in his pitch-black eyes as he turned his attention to Evan Rush and Lee Talon. “You two must be her guard dogs.”
Evan, so typically easygoing and laid-back, had been simmering for days over a low flame. The mission to kill Ibrahim Nazar, Sam’s ensuing injuries, and his unwillingness to leave her side had culminated into a crucible of angry stress that was just begging for release. And to say that de Soto had a gift for rubbing people the wrong way was putting it lightly. Evan rose to the bait, immediately stepping forward, antagonism coming off of him waves.
“Who’s asking?”
De Soto cocked a brow. “The guy who’s here to do what you two couldn’t.”
Talon made a sound, moving close enough to bump chests with de Soto. “The fuck does that mean?”
“Just what I said,” de Soto replied as they stared each other down. “I’m here to do what you Navy squid punk asses couldn’t. I’m here to protect Sam.”
Chapter 3
December—Mid-Morning
Asklepios Klinik Barmbek, Hamburg, Germany
S A M A N T H A
“I went into shock?” Sam asked after the surgeon left. They were running some additional tests and wanted to keep her in ICU for another day, but things were looking marginally better.
Carey nodded grimly, his lips compressed into a frown bracketed by stress lines. “That’s three times you’ve had to be de-fibbed in two days, Sammy. I swear to God, it’s like you’re trying to give me a heart attack too.”
She gripped his hand tightly. “I’m sorry I scared you, Bear.”
He closed his red-rimmed eyes. “You scared the shit outta Jack.”
“He was here?” she asked, confused. She was pretty groggy from the pain meds, but she had no recollection of Jack being there.
Carey nodded, a flash of something crossing his face. Guilt? Remorse?
Sam squeezed
his hand. “What is it?”
“Nothing that can’t wait. Jack isn’t here anymore, but he left something for you. And Wes is outside.”
She blinked. “Seriously?”
Carey just chuckled tiredly, scrubbing a hand down his face. “Other than Jack and Wes, you got any other crazy ex-boyfriends who won’t take no for an answer?”
“You know what’s so ironic?” Sam mumbled. “Time was when I was young, I would have done nearly anything for the love of a good man.”
“Guess you’re extra-lucky then ’cause you’ve got the love of several good men, and they’re all standing outside waiting to see you,” he responded with a smile.
A knock sounded, and Carey glanced up at the doorway, his mouth turning down as he stood, his stance protective.
“I tried to stop him, but he says he knows Sam—” she heard Rush say, his voice unusually strident and accusatory as a tall guy stopped by her bedside, peering down at her with eyes of jet black.
Samantha blinked as her pupils dilated and focused. She could have sworn he looked just like Alejandro de Soto… no, couldn’t be.
“I’m on some good shit,” she slurred, certain she was hallucinating. “You look just like an asshole I was in the Corp with.” And once-enemy from her days as a cadet. He was older now and more chiseled, his handsome face lined with character. He could sand the paint off a barn with his five o’clock shadow, and he had the kind of deep tan that looked like he’d been steeped in the sun.
“You look like shit, Wyatt,” Alejandro’s apparition told her as he leaned against the railing. “Must be slacking off if you let an old bastard like Nazar get the jump on you.”
“Don’t talk to Sam like that,” Carey snapped, protective. “Who the hell are you?”
“Friend of hers from way back,” Alejo replied, not bothering to look at him.
Carey cocked his head. “She called you an asshole.”
“That’s because he is an asshole,” Wes interrupted, moving closer to the bed. He edged Alejo out of the way, taking his place as he leaned in to press a kiss to her forehead. “Welcome back, darlin’,” he murmured, his voice tender. “You sure know how to scare the hell out of a guy.”
Fearless: Complicated Creatures Part Three Page 4