On His Six
A Summit Seduction SEAL Novel
Rachel Robinson
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
Other Titles by Rachel Robinson
Copyright © 2021 Rachel Robinson
All rights reserved.
Cover by Melissa Gill Designs
Cover photo by Lindee Robinson Photography
Editing by My Brother’s Editor
Editing by J. Wells
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the above author of this book. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.
For anyone who has had to pick up the pieces. You’re stronger than the greatest superhero.
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Chapter 1
Maeve
Not again. Not again. Not again. They are the only two words running through my mind as I hold my hand against the bullet wound on Lincoln’s shoulder. I’m fumbling with his shirt and his massive weight to see if there’s an exit wound on the other side of his body, but it’s near impossible with how violently my body is shaking. The shock hit me the second the bullet hit him, and I’m barely functioning. I didn’t think Rena would. How could she? I didn’t see it coming. She was supposed to be mad at me—take her crazy out on me.
Don’t take him, too. Please God, don’t take him, too. Sirens cut my train of thought. No exit wound, I realize. I’m wearing a flannel shirt that I shrug out of and tie above the wound currently pulsating blood. I have to straddle his body to pull the sleeves tight enough. More pressure, I think. For tourniquets to be helpful, they have to cut off the circulation. A strangled war cry echoes the room, and it’s not until after I realize it’s my own. Medics, firefighters, and police officers run up the stairs. A medic kneels on the other side of Lincoln and says something, but I can’t understand. He has his fingers against his neck as another medic brings a stretcher to transfer him onto.
Standing, I let my gaze flit around the room. They’re taking Stavros down the stairs—a sheet draped over his body. Ramona, I think. Her face is red and blotchy as she cries on the sofa, her gaze so far away, she doesn’t even look human right now. I can’t keep my focus away from Lincoln for more than a few seconds. I turn back and see them loading him onto the board. “Is he going to be okay?” it’s my voice, but I don’t recognize it.
“Ma’am. Please have a seat,” an officer says, leading me to a chair by the fireplace.
I shake my head and suck in a breath. I can’t sit. My body won’t let me. “Not until I know he’s going to be okay. He has a pulse!” They’re descending the stairs, carrying Lincoln, and it looks unstable, his body shifting unnaturally. “He has a pulse,” I say again, this time for my own benefit.
“Ma’am. We need your help. We’ve arrested one man, but we know he wasn’t here alone. Where is the person who fired the gun? Is anyone else here?”
My hands balled in fists by my side shake even harder. “I-I… don’t know. She ran. Rena. That’s her name.” I say. “Black SUV.” Terror spikes as I think about his last question. “Turner!” I call out, a strangled, harrowing plea. That’s the last word I get out before the adrenaline spikes and fully takes me out of commission. My vision blurs as my body sways, and I pass out.
“No one ever comes for her,” the girl, Jessica, hisses. “We only took her in because she had nowhere else to go. My mom doesn’t even want her.” She pauses, coughing on an inhale of her stolen cigarette. “We can’t wait to send her away. Mom felt bad when the social worker called, so she said yes.” Jessica is speaking loudly—she wants me to hear.
I’m huddled in a ball on their deck. I have a tattered copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales pressed between my knees, trying to see how hard I have to squeeze it to keep it from tumbling to the deck. She’s not telling her friends that she’s lying. She doesn’t admit that since I’ve been in the house, her stepdad leaves her alone. It’s not like I have some hero complex or anything, but I’m smart enough to rationalize what he does to me is done to her when I’m not here. What he does is bad. I tried to be her friend for the first few days, thinking if we could band together, at least we’d have each other. Jessica doesn’t want allies. Jessica wants to surround herself with people who think she is perfect. Because I know her dirty, marring secret, I didn’t make the cut. In fact, she treats me like less than the dirt on the bottom of her shoe.
“But like, why hasn’t she been adopted? She’s so old,” Jessica’s friend hisses in between drags of the cigarette.
“She’s just too… broken,” Jessica replies.
My head swims for a second or two as I digest her words. It’s not like I haven’t been called worse, no, it’s because she speaks the truth. This girl is just as broken as I am, recognizes we’re similar, but chooses to focus on how we’re different. I’m the homeless girl without anyone who cares. Jessica has a mom that cares, but she refuses to tell her what Bob does to her in the middle of the night. He threatens her. Makes her feel worthless.
The girls stomp up the deck stairs, Jessica last. “Oh, there she is,” she hisses when she spots me balled up in the corner. “Don’t talk to her,” Jessica orders her friends, pressing the cigarette out in Bob’s ashtray he keeps on the railing. Her friends, for all of their effort, still manage to wince. They feel sorry for me. God forbid if that pity was turned on their glorious leader.
I stay silent, mulling over my assessment. “Well, aren’t you gonna get out of our way, dummy?”
I’m blocking the sliding glass door. Standing quickly, I sway. The heavy book falls to the wooden planks below me and I lean from the sudden movement and pass out. It was the first time I’ve ever fainted. They had to take me to the hospital because I hit my head hard. Jessica blamed herself, but I couldn’t pinpoint why I passed out. In the end, I think I just stood up too fast. It wasn’t that Jessica was calling me out and embarrassing me, though that’s what I assumed as a kid. At the hospital, a kind nurse who was trying to hide a shiner with too much makeup, took pity on me when I told her I didn’t want to go back.
That RN never made me tell her why I didn’t want to return—she called CPS without asking questions, and I went back into the home for girls instead of the bedroom next to Bob’s. The girls there are fantastically mean, but not in the same way Jessica was. I have friends there. Ones that I can talk to without fear. Most importantly, there aren’t any Bobs at the home for girls. Just rats, cheats, and thieves. Enemies I know and can defend myself against.
When I come to, I’m in the back of an ambulance, a medic leaning over me. “Ma’am, you’re on the way to the hospital now.” Glass bottles are rattling somewhere in here and it distracts me as I come to, brain hazy, stuck in the past—the last t
ime I fainted.
“Lincoln. Where is Lincoln? Is he okay?”
The medic pulls a face. So much for bedside manner. “I’m sorry. He didn’t make it,” he says, voice low enough to be sympathetic but loud enough that I can hear him over the accelerating engine.
A swift punch to the gut couldn’t have taken my breath away quicker. “What?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am.” He pauses, not meeting my eyes. “They do have one man in custody and they were tracking down the other person when we left. How are you feeling?”
How am I feeling? How am I feeling? I don’t know. It’s an out-of-body experience, like I’m floating above myself watching my world shatter once again. I slam my eyes shut so tightly I see bursts of colors and lights. Fireworks for those too fearful to enjoy actual fireworks, for the damaged and broken.
I focus on my heart. It’s beating. It’s jagged and hollow, because I’m not sure how to quantify this loss… again, but it’s beating. You can do this, Maeve. You are enough. I replay Rexy’s words from his last email. I want to ask him, what happens when I get caught in the backblast because I didn’t know surrounding myself with Lincoln also meant surrounding myself with Rena? I’m trying to shake back, Rexy. How do I shake back harder than this?
I try to sit up, but can’t. “Stay back. You hit your head. We’re almost there and we’ll get you up and going. Just a few more seconds.”
“I need to see Lincoln. Where is he?” Something I never got a chance to do with Rexy. When you don’t see a lifeless body, it’s difficult to rationalize the permanence of the absence. For me, especially.
The medic tells me he’s probably on his way to the morgue as he lifts the bed I’m on out of the ambulance and onto the pavement where there is a team waiting for me. Me. These people think I need help when Lincoln is gone. There has to be a better use of their time.
“I need to sit up.” They give me reassurance that I’m going to be fine instead. “Where the fuck is Lincoln Wilds? Sit. Me. Up.” My tone leaves little to the imagination.
A man who looks to be the youngest obliges, lifting the head of the bed up so I feel at least a little more in control.
“Where is the morgue?”
“What do you mean, ma’am? We’re going to get you into a room and do a few tests, but I’m sure you’ll be on your way in no time. No need to ask about the morgue.”
“I don’t care about me. Like I said before, I need to see Lincoln Wilds.” For Turner, at the very least. My stomach flips when I think about the boy. How his life is going to be altered from here on out. I’ll make sure to give him all of the love I can. It’s what Lincoln would want, but I know it won’t be enough. They wheel me through double doors and directly into a pocket where they shut the curtain, concealing what’s on either side and in front of me.
The medic says something to the RN, leaning in so I can’t hear, and then vanishes.
“How are you feeling? Do you have any family you can call or we can call for you? So you’re not alone right now?”
Ramona. Oh, my God. She has to be in unbearable, immeasurable pain. I lost Lincoln, but I’ve lost to a great degree before, Ramona doesn’t remember when she lost her parents as a child. This is going to be the greatest loss of her life.
“Ramona,” I say in a rush, palming my jeans to see if my burner phone made it. Of course not. “Ramona. She might be here already. She lost her… friend. Boyfriend. Stavros. Tall guy, bullet hole to the chest,” I explain hotly. I’m motioning to my body as I talk. “He died. He died, too. The other man injured on the scene. She’s here. Please find her. I need her.” She needs me.
The nurse nods, a confused look on her face as she connects a drip bag to the IV I didn’t know I had. They must have inserted it while I was out. “Please stay down. Relax. You don’t have any signs of a concussion, but we’re going to hydrate you to help combat the… shock. I will find Ramona if she is here. I promise.” She touches my shoulder. I believe her.
“Thank you. Thank you.”
I’m momentarily distracted from my quest to see Lincoln’s body by the realization that my best friend is in agony. It’s not the type of pain that you can numb with alcohol or pills. You can’t massage it away or block it from your mind. It lives in every breath you take. In every step you take. In every word you speak. You can’t hide from it, bury it, or run from it. I’ve tried, and I’m weary from the burden and effort. A burden I’ll now carry two-fold. Oh, my sweet, beautiful man. My breathing ragged, the knot in my stomach gnaws at me. Who will tell his parents? Isaac. I call it the loss tsunami. After a loved one passes, it is only then that you realize how many lives they touched, and not a moment sooner. The news spreads like a communicable disease, causing grief that spans far and wide. It takes all of us under, leaving nothing but carnage and desolation in its wake.
Ramona will feel this, know this, be forced to embrace it. Will she overcome it, or will she be swallowed alive by it? My job will be to keep us both afloat. I’ve been alone with my thoughts for longer than I realized because the machine controlling the saline bag is beeping out a ballad of discontent. The nurse returns and unhooks the empty bag.
“We’re not supposed to let anyone in these rooms, but your friend Ramona is on her way.”
I meet her eyes for the first time and see the sympathy, and I’m transported back to my childhood and recall the nurse that saved me that time. Like a cat, orphans seem to have many lives.
“Thank you so much.” I will her to feel the emotion behind it.
She nods, then looks away. She slides the curtain halfway open and leaves it that way before leaving. It takes three deep breaths before Ramona appears wearily, peeking in. She closes the curtain behind her and crawls onto the slim bed and cuddles in next to me.
I jolt from the contact, but let her warmness envelop me. “I’m so sorry, Ramona. I’m so sorry. This has to be unbearable.”
“You’ve been through this, so I need to know if this pain goes away. How long exactly it takes to go away, and if I’ll ever be normal inside again.”
I find it odd she says nothing about Lincoln, but decide against bringing it up. As expected, she’s lost in her own tsunami. “I could lie and tell you that it goes away, but it doesn’t. Not really. It changes over time until the grief resembles something tactile. Something you can apply to your life.” I choke up, thinking how I’m going to have to take my own advice. “Then when you have something worth holding on to again, you love a little harder.” I sniffle. “Because you now understand that time is the one thing you have no control over, and it dictates everything. Everything.” I whisper the last word and hug her close. “I’m not going to tell you that it’s going to be okay or apologize for your loss. That’s never helpful. It’s just polite.”
Ramona is sobbing quietly into my hair. “I can’t stop thinking about one thing.” She pops her head up to meet my eyes. “That bastard died for love. Out of all the messed-up things he did to me over the years, I knew I was the one for him. I knew, Maeve. You don’t understand why I kept going back to him, but this is why.” She drags her arm across her face to wipe snot on her sweatshirt sleeve. “The ultimate apology. The one thing he could do to prove to me how much I meant to him. He put himself in between me and the gun. I meant… everything to him, Maeve.”
I get it now. She told me it was different with him and I didn’t understand how a man so unfaithful could keep such a hold on her. He died for love, and he did it without question.
I swallow down the lump in my throat. “Listen, they were both good men.”
Ramona looks at me, quizzically. “You mean Stavros and Rexy?”
Furrowing my brow, I hesitate, blinking. “Lincoln died, Maeve. Didn’t they tell you?”
She looks baffled, face twisted in confusion. “What, like since I’ve been in here with you? He wasn’t dead when I saw him on my way to see you here.”
I feel screams of relief at the back of my throat. “They told me he died. That h
e didn’t make it. The medic in the ambulance. No one told me differently since I’ve been here.”
Ramona listens in bewilderment. “Wait, you thought Lincoln died, and you didn’t say anything until right now? You don’t think I would have brought that up first? Maeve.” It’s a sweet, low tone. “Lincoln was heading into surgery, but the doctors said he’s going to be okay. He was even awake squawking for you. The medic must have confused Stavros and Lincoln.”
It’s an odd feeling to feel such joy when my friend is at her lowest low, but I can’t help but smile as ugly tears rear their head. “Oh, my God. I can’t believe this. I thought it happened again.”
“What did I say?” Ramona says, running her hand through my hair. “You deserve only happiness and light. The universe won’t do that to you, again.”
I sit up straight.
“I need to see him.” It’s whiplash. From drowning in despair to near bursting with relief and bliss. “Will they let me see him?” Carefully, I move from the bed onto the cold floor. I’m barefoot. I hadn’t even put on shoes before Rena and Rufio blew through the open door and changed our worlds forever. “Turner. Where is Turner?” I hold on to the bed railing for a few seconds to gain balance.
“Isaac has him in the lobby. He dropped Chonk off at the vet on his way here.”
My voice breaks. “Chonk.”
Ramona clears her throat. “Isaac said his ear was, well… preserved because it was in snow. There’s a chance they’ll be able to reattach it.”
I cringe. “My poor dog.” Then I realize I’m worrying over an animal when there are far more important things to dwell on. “I’m so sorry, Ramona. Stavros was an asshole, but he loved you. He only loved you.”
On His Six : A Summit Seduction SEAL Novel (The Summit Seduction SEAL Duet Book 2) Page 1