He’d thought they’d shared something deep, something important. Obviously he’d been wrong, because if she felt even half of what he felt for her, then she wouldn’t have been standing here calmly telling him they couldn’t be together, because the idea would be tearing her apart.
Just like it was ripping through him, leaving a blackened trail of fury in its wake.
“It’s not like that.” She took half a step toward him. “Please believe that I am doing this for you, because you’re the most important thing to me—”
“Don’t try to tell me now how much you care!” The black rage within him turned white-hot. His fist closed around the bottle of wine, and with a single, sharp movement, he’d smashed the glass into a million shards. He stared at the neckpiece still clenched in his fist, as though his hand belonged to someone else. Part of him was on the outside watching his actions with a weird sense of detachment.
Sacha had flinched back, and the sight momentarily stunned him. Had he really just roared those words at her? Smashed her bottle of wine like some wife-beating bastard? But the ferocity within him blazed over to remind him that she was the one who’d brought them to this point.
“That uncontrollable rage you’re feeling, it’s only going to get worse.” Her quiet words grated against his simmering anger. “I can help you learn to control it, but that outburst just highlights why I’m doing this. You need stability and permanence. Volatile emotion is not your friend at the moment. Trying to make a relationship out of that will only end in disaster, and I care about you too much to let that happen.”
Through the haze of receding ire and rising emotional exhaustion, her words made sense, but that didn’t make them any easier to process. He looked at Sacha, but only saw pain. His body clenched, and the vague sense of nausea returned. He couldn’t do pain; he’d had enough of that this past year and a half.
“I can’t be here right now.” His words came out rough as he turned away from her, and he swallowed over his tight throat. “I’m sorry about the mess.”
“Kai—”
He skirted the kitchen bench, striding through the apartment as fast as he could without actually running. Running wouldn’t help, because all of the things he wanted to escape were stuck inside of him.
Chapter Thirteen
Kai lifted a heavy hand and used his forearm to wipe at the sweat dripping down his face. The silence pressed in on him, but he shut the thought down because it wasn’t really that quiet. If he listened hard enough, he could hear the slight vibrating hum of the ship’s various electronics, the slight whoosh of the air system, voices echoing from somewhere nearby, and a whole lot of other white noise he couldn’t identify.
Life was happening, the same as it did every day and night on board the Valiant Knox, and he was just sitting, feeling the burn in his muscles and cooling sweat over his skin.
A blissful numbness had set in a while ago, about the same time as he’d lost count on how many reps he’d done at the weight machine. Luckily, at this time of night, the officers’ gym was empty, so there hadn’t been anyone around to see him pumping weights heavier than he should be attempting less than a week out of prison camp, forcing himself through each blazing, aching repetition like a man possessed. No, not like a man possessed, he was a man possessed; demons of captivity riding his soul like a damned carnival sideshow.
At least the punishing weight set had resulted in exactly what he’d wanted—exhausting his body to the point his mind could no longer function, bringing with it that all-encompassing lack of sensation he had going on. It had worn away the last of his anger, stopped Sacha’s words from circling around and around in his mind, and then finally given him respite from the vague panicky feeling he’d been trying to ignore all day.
With slow, heavy movements, he dragged the towel from where he’d draped it across the padded bench seat earlier, and then swiped it over his face and neck. Maybe now he could face the fact that since he had nowhere else to stay, he had to take himself back to Sacha’s apartment, like a damn whipping boy who didn’t know any better. Though the bank had found his money, they hadn’t finished setting up his new account and returning the funds. Maybe he needed to follow up with them in the morning.
“Lifting without a spotter? You’re looking for trouble.”
Alpha had come into the gym and stopped in front of him. Kai had been so lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t even noticed. He mopped the towel over the back of his neck, and then left the cloth draped across his shoulders. “What are you doing here at this time of night?”
With a shrug, Alpha moved to sit on a nearby bench. “Sacha messaged me. She was worried about you, but she didn’t think you’d want to see her.”
Ah, hell. Guilt and shame spiraled through him in a stinging burn, blackening his insides. “What happened, it wasn’t—”
“She didn’t tell me anything.” Alpha held up his hands in a gesture to stop him. “And you certainly don’t need to tell me. She just wanted to know if I’d seen you. I didn’t tell her I was looking for you. And if you hadn’t been here, I probably would’ve given up pretty quickly.”
Kai breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing he wanted was to talk about what had happened in Sacha’s kitchen, not when he’d been doing his damnedest in the last few hours to forget.
“How’s your injured pilot. Orman, was it?”
Alpha’s expression sobered. “Alive. That’s about the best I can say. He suffered critical oxygen deprivation, along with some minor burns and contusions. They say if he wakes up, he’ll probably have some brain damage. He definitely won’t ever fly a V-29 again. Another good man lost.”
For a long moment they were both silent. He didn’t know about Alpha, but all the men under his command who’d been lost were crowding his head. This war had been too long and costly. Decades worth of fighting and death.
As the shadows of the dead faded, his thoughts rolled back around to that CS Soldier. Would Alpha believe him? Though he might be willing to risk the reputation of his sanity to do the right thing, he wanted to be in a position where people would be less likely to question his memory.
Proof. He just needed proof, and then they wouldn’t think twice about interrogating the man.
“Doesn’t it seem like we’re stuck in stasis?” Alpha muttered. “We’re not winning this goddamn war, though we’re certainly not losing it. All we’re doing is holding lines. And I can’t believe those bastards had you for over a year and never said a word about it.”
“Probably because they knew if news got out they were holding a commander, the entire UEF would ride on up to Ilari and blow them off the face of the planet. We might be at war, but there are rules about that sort of thing.” He massaged just above his bad knee, a small echo of pain throbbing through his bones. Those bastards had spent the first half of his confinement trying to get whatever information they could out of him and Amos. They’d been especially interested in the upper-workings of the UEF, questioning him about the people in charge and UEF protocol. He’d told them as little as possible. And when they’d gotten sick of that game, they’d spent the second half trying to convert him to their belief that technology was the basis of all modern sin and greed. “I’m sure the brass will want to hold that card close to their chest so they can bring it out at a time when it’ll cause the CSS maximum damage.”
“You know Cam has gone to Defcon One in the past few days? He’s been trying to convince Emmanuel that we need to call in extra forces and retaliate hard for what they did to you.”
“Is that why he came up here? I just assumed it was the usual briefing about current ground deployments.” He shook his head, clenching his fist around the damp towel.
The ones directly responsible for his imprisonment deserved whatever the UEF could bring down on them, but that left 90 percent of Ilari’s population who didn’t have anything to do with it. “It won’t change anything, and you know the ones who suffer most are the civilians.”
“Damn true.” Alph
a crossed his arms and shifted on the bench. “I’m not going to ask how you’ve been doing since you got back. You’re probably sick of people asking. But I assume you didn’t get the five-star accommodations at the CSS Enlightening Camp.”
Kai’s lips twisted into a grim smile, though even that expression felt false. “I sure as hell didn’t. I’m doing about as well as you’d think. The psyche would probably tell you I’m a textbook case for PTSD. Sacha seems to think so.”
“Uh-huh.” The non-verbal word sounded heavy with unspoken questions. “Well, I can tell you Sacha seems better since you got back. A bit brighter, more like her old self.”
A warm torrent of relief cut right through the middle of the cold, dark feelings he’d been fighting since leaving Sacha’s apartment. Selfishly, he hadn’t given much thought as to whether she was worse or better off for his return, but he was glad to hear she seemed to be doing better. His instincts had been right in sensing they needed each other to recover from their separate traumas.
“Sacha will always be Sacha; she’s too damn practical for her own good.” He dragged a hand across the lower half of his face.
“Yeah, I bet she’s giving you the doctor treatment twenty-four-seven.”
“You have no idea.” She’d let her doctor mask slip for a short time last night, and it had been everything he needed, everything they both needed. But since his meltdown she seemed to be hiding behind it more securely than ever. How was he supposed to get through to her as a friend, or something more?
“She probably wants you to talk it all out, but you know whenever you need to hang and not talk, I’m around. I can’t even begin to imagine where your head is at right now.”
“Believe me, you’re better off not knowing,” he muttered. “I don’t even want to face what this has done to me, so I don’t know how anyone else would. It’s ugly, Leigh. And everyone can sit here imagining what I went through, but it probably still wouldn’t be half as bad as the reality.”
Alpha leaned forward and gripped his shoulder. “PTSD is nothing to be ashamed of. We all know guys who’ve had it and come out fine on the other side. Frankly, if you weren’t showing signs of it, I’d be worried. I’ve seen some pretty horrible crap out there on the frontlines myself, and some nights it’s all I can do to sweat out the darkness and wait for morning.”
He stared at his friend, and caught the shadows in Alpha’s eyes, the same ones he saw in himself whenever he looked in the mirror.
“Thanks, brother.” Kai shifted closer to return his friend’s grip for a long moment. “I know I’m not the first soldier, or the only soldier, to go through this, but in that moment—”
“When there’s nothing but the panic, it’s hard to remember.” Alpha sent him a grim smile, before standing. “I’ve got to get up to squadron level, but we’ll catch up for a drink when I’m off-shift tomorrow.”
“Sure thing.” He waved as Alpha walked out of the gym again, leaving him in solitary contemplation.
Scenes from earlier in the night went on live-action-replay in his head. And with each moment, shame wormed through his guts, because he didn’t recognize the guy who’d all but fallen apart in Sacha’s kitchen. Was this his life now? A sense of jagged disconnection had struck deep in his soul and cemented into place, the old Kai unable to assimilate with the new Kai.
Maybe she had been right about them, but not for the reasons she’d given. Maybe she’d had second thoughts when she’d woken up in the morning and thought about Elliot. Maybe she felt like she’d betrayed his memory or something, and was using her role as his doctor as an excuse to distance herself.
He couldn’t really blame her. How could he ever be the man she needed him to be, when apparently he couldn’t even cook a meal without having a panic attack, or navigate a thorny conversation without blowing a gasket and smashing up her kitchen? He didn’t want to be that guy, and Sacha definitely didn’t deserve that kind of man in her life.
Yet a quiet sense of desperation for her had pierced his heart, and wouldn’t be dislodged. She might not need him, but he sure as hell needed her, even if she wasn’t willing to give all of what he wanted. The idea of going back to sleep at her apartment tonight soothed as much as pained him.
He rubbed the middle of his chest and stood with a long exhale. His life was a mess, like someone had set it on top of a landmine and stepped back to watch it splatter. He couldn’t ever put the pieces back to how they used to be, and maybe part of him had been trying to do that with her last night. All he could do was scrape up the usable bits he could find and work out a new way to mush it all together. As for how long that would take, well, trying to work that out would likely send him into another meltdown.
Instead, he concentrated on the now. Putting away the damp towel and taking himself back down to her apartment. And damned if he wasn’t a coward for hoping she’d be asleep.
Chapter Fourteen
Sacha checked the readout on the screen monitoring the fighter pilot’s brain activity. He was comatose, but the occasional heightened activity gave her hope he might wake up. However, the spikes were happening less and less often, which wasn’t a good sign. He seemed to be slipping away, and frustration swirled low through her, because there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.
She walked out of the room, releasing a low sigh. Her frustration wasn’t solely directed toward the unfortunate situation with the fighter pilot.
After the blowout in her kitchen last night, Kai hadn’t come home by the time she’d gone to bed. In all the years she’d known him, she’d never seen him display that kind of rage before. And while calm logic told her it all came back to the PTSD and his time as a POW, it didn’t help settle the roiling emotions within her. Didn’t help lessen the worry she’d stewed in while she’d waited for him to return and resisted the urge to go out searching the ship for him. At least he’d been there, asleep on the couch, when she’d left this morning. She didn’t know what she would have done if he’d failed to come home at all.
Worst of all, she couldn’t help blaming herself. Was it a coincidence that the first real cracks in his mental state had shown after they’d been together? Had the emotional intimacies between them deeply affected him in a negative way, just as she’d feared?
She couldn’t talk to anyone about this, because if they knew what had happened, not only would she be removed from his case, and possibly forbidden from seeing him, but she could face disciplinary charges for unprofessional conduct.
Yet selfishly, part of her didn’t regret what had happened between them. It had eased places inside her that had been hurting too long. If not for everything standing between them, she would have thrown herself into a relationship with Kai wholeheartedly. Instead, she had probably destroyed the potential of anything good ever being between them by giving in to her own self-centered desires and taking things to the one place she’d known they shouldn’t go.
Her med-comm vibrated, and she muttered a short thank god for the distraction. However, just as she wrapped her fingers around it, a siren started up, echoing throughout the ship. The sirens didn’t sound on the Knox very often; it had only happened one other time in all the years she’d been serving onboard the ship. Even as she snapped the comm off her belt, she could already guess what she’d see.
Code Alpha-One, Commerce Level. All available medico personnel to mobilize.
Adrenaline surging, she shoved the med-comm back onto her belt and ran for the nearest storeroom to grab an emergency pack. Other nurses and sub-doctors were already there, working in controlled chaos to prepare the med-level for mass casualties. Alpha-One was a critical code, meaning either the ship was under attack, or there’d been a major incident onboard with death confirmed. Considering the call was to commerce level, she doubted they were under attack, which meant something bad had happened in the trade sector of the ship.
They’d all practiced drills for this kind of thing, and each person knew their role, whether it was to stay on
med-level and take in the wounded, or be one of the first responders on scene of the incident. As she hurried through med-level to get up to commerce, it seemed like everyone was falling back on their training just as they should be, which made her job that much easier.
She joined the group of first responders and hurried into the levels above. As they stepped out of the transit-porter, the acidic taste of smoke hit the back of her throat, and she passed groups of people evacuating. There were a couple of military guards standing nearby, coordinating people getting on and off the transits. She snagged the attention of the nearest one.
“Hey! Where are we needed?”
“Port side, food sector, ma’am.”
She called a thanks over her shoulder as she led her group into the thickening smoke. She could hear the loud vroom of the environmentals above them, working to take the deadly fumes out of the air. She reached into the side of her pack and yanked out a small, light oxygen breather, snapping it over her face and then glancing back to make sure her people were doing the same.
As they reached the sector where most of the restaurants, cafés, and other eateries were, she could see flames burning out from beneath the awnings of a take-away. Military guys manned hoses, spraying a gray fire-dousing foam over the front of the shop. Bloodied and burned people lay and sat in the thoroughfare a little way down from the destroyed shop, but not far enough from possible danger.
“Let’s get a temporary triage set up near the transit-porters and start moving these people. Make sure everyone has a mask, especially those fighting the fire,” she said to the first responders. She took a quick moment to comm Macaulay and organized a second group of responders to help deal with this faster.
As she snapped on a pair of gloves, she caught sight of a too-familiar form in amongst the uniformed military people managing the hoses. She grabbed another mask from her pack and hurried forward, feeling the heat from the fire baking over her as she got closer.
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