He offered the last with a wry grin, but dropped it the next second.
“I consider my debt repaid. I know I said I’d never be able to do that, but that was back when I couldn’t fathom you’d ever change. Now you both owe me. And what you will do to work that off is make sure that this mission is a fucking phenomenal success. I don’t give a shit if you’re moping all over Europe, but you’ll do it quietly and efficiently, do you understand? And once we get back to the States, you do what you should have done last year when you had the chance: you will disappear, and you’ll make damn sure that no one will ever find you again. I’ve worked my ass off to secure the position I hold, and I will not lose it to a damn people pleaser and his psychotic bitch. Do we understand each other?”
Nate didn’t object nor did he waste a second before he inclined his head. “We do.”
“Good,” Bucky surmised, looking my way as if he expected me to object. I didn’t. Once he made sure of that, he started forward, walking between us back toward the camp. His mostly silent entourage didn’t hang back, some of them looking bored, most a little distraught. I didn’t miss the fact that Red was foremost pensive.
I’d expected Burns to remain with us, but he mumbled something about filling Gita and Tanner in that nobody had lynched us yet. Well, not physically. One glance at Nate’s face, and I wasn’t so sure about his mental state—or my own.
“We should have gone to Alaska, huh?” I offered when nothing else came to mind.
“We should have gone to Alaska,” Nate agreed with me. It hadn’t exactly been a serious plan, but before we’d set out from the bunker, back in spring, I’d jokingly suggested it.
Exhaling slowly—and feeling like this was the first free breath I took in fucking forever—I tried to sort the thoughts racing through my head but it was impossible. So many questions, but none of them vital—except for one.
“What debt was he referring to?” I could tell that I didn’t need to explain.
Nate slowly turned to face me, still looking moderately shell-shocked, but didn’t hesitate. That didn’t bode well. “I lied. I know exactly what soured our friendship. What turned him into the man he is today.”
“And that is?” I knew I didn’t want to hear this, but that damn tenacious curiosity got the better of me again.
Nate grimaced but complied. “We didn’t get stone drunk the night before they shot us up with the serum. Not on our own, that is.” He paused, but I could tell it wasn’t out of avoidance but because he was trying to think of the best way to explain this to me. “He’s right. I had it easy. Easier than him, at least. Not because all doors opened magically for me or some shit. I earned every fucking bit of that, and paid a steeper price for it than he’ll ever know. It doesn’t matter. He’s right when he says I’m good at hiding my emotions. Part of that is due to the fact that I was blessed with a brother who was even better at that. They believed me when I said that I had no emotional ties to anyone whatsoever. My father was dead at the time, my mother had pretty much disowned me for daring to squander my intellectual potential and wanting to join the Army straight out of high school. My brother was wrapping up his studies at the other end of the country and he didn’t even call for my graduation. I was the perfect white canvas, and very eager to learn.”
“And Bucky?”
Nate sighed. “He pretended to be the same. On the outside, that worked well enough. He came from a family of flaming liberals, if you would believe it.” He barked a brief laugh. “Sam and you would have fit perfectly into one of their New York City dinner parties, back before I met you. He was the typical rebel middle child. Bright enough to make it into several Ivy League schools but that wasn’t the way he chose. And he did a good job leaving his former life behind—but he couldn’t leave behind his little sister, even though he tried.”
So many revelations, and none of them pleasant, I figured, considering Nate’s somber tone.
“What happened?”
Nate rubbed the back of his neck, a nervous tick if he had one. “For a long time, it wasn’t that hard for him to pretend like he didn’t care about her. And I guess, right when he signed up, he didn’t that much. She was several years younger. To a late teenage boy, that’s millennia.” He paused, catching my gaze once more. “Is. She’s still alive, spoiler alert. The rest of his family cut ties with him easily enough. He wanted to do everything they believed was the downfall of modern civilization, but to her he was her big brother who she adored. Idolized. She tried to write him several times but he managed to always undermine that somehow. I don’t even know how she found out about where we were stationed for the inoculation trials, as they called it. They had an official family meeting day before that started. We both knew, of course, that nobody would come to see us. We’d both, each in our own ways, made sure that nobody would come.”
I could tell where this was going. “But she showed up.”
He nodded, a slow, painful gesture. “That she did. Apparently she’d signed up for some extracurricular program her high school ran just to be in the same state that weekend. It was late evening when she showed up at the base. Why they even let her in, I have no fucking clue. My guess is that they were tracking her for a while already. Else I can’t explain how they could organize this on such short notice. We were in the mess hall.” He paused, snorting. “Dining facility, of course, at the time.”
“So you were getting drunk after all,” I intercepted. Damn that uncanny impulse of mine to cut the tension.
“On coffee,” he obliged my curiosity. “We both knew that we could die tomorrow. Didn’t want to miss a second of what could be our last night easily. Of course we knew we’d make it. You don’t live in that world expecting the worst to come true, not after the shit we’d already been through together. I think we both wanted to reminisce about our families but seeing as we didn’t dare, we were just shooting shit. Not sure what tipped us off. I think I saw the lights go on over in our barracks. We had our own comfy twenty-bunks building all to our lone selves, seeing as we were the only two officers of the bunch to get shot up the next day. The waiting time would have been so much easier if they’d just stuck us in with the rest.”
This time when he fell silent, I didn’t prompt him with inane tangents. Nate licked his lips before he resumed.
“They had her bound and gagged, naked on the floor. It didn’t take a genius to make the right connections. I’d never seen a picture of her before so at first glance I thought, shit. What are they going to make us do to that poor girl now? Hopefully she’s a stripper and they pay her well. But she had his eyes, and his hair. And there was no mistaking his reaction. It was the two of us against seven of the officers who’d gone through the program initiation the week before. We’d had dinner with them once before their great day, with us being envious and jumpy because we still had a week of tests ahead of us, any one of them could have disqualified us for the program. They hadn’t really had time yet to completely figure out their enhanced abilities, but it didn’t matter. Just meant that half the punches were twice as hard as intended. I managed to take one of them out, Bucky two more. That still left four of them to tie us up and force two bottles of hard liquor down each of our throats. They took turns, and they took their time. Maybe if we hadn’t fought so hard they wouldn’t have felt like they needed to let off steam on her. You know the irrational anger I warned you about? Two of them weren’t even trying to get a handle on themselves. The worst part? Except for the odd kick in the ribs to make sure neither of us managed to roll over and look away, they didn’t touch us again. I’m not saying I would have welcomed being sodomized but it would have given me something else to concentrate on. I think you learned that lesson in that white tiled cell.”
I nodded, incapable of saying anything else. Hell, not puking up dinner was hard enough.
“It was early morning when whoever was in charge of the program came to fetch us. They dragged us across the base, still trussed-up like Thanksgiving turke
ys, and only removed our gags long enough so we could give verbal consent to being admitted to the last stage of the serum program. I almost didn’t go through with it, but the general who was presiding over the legal matters was giving us enough warning looks to make it obvious that if either of us refused now, the girl wouldn’t make it out alive.” He rubbed his neck again. “If it had been my sister, I would have done exactly what Hamilton said I’d do if anything happened to you. I would have waited, and then waited some more, and then I would have killed everyone who was even passingly connected to this, right to the very top. Maybe easy for me to say as I never had a baby sister, and, damage done or not, she was still alive, so they still had leverage on him. I think he eventually accepted his fate. He’d paid the piper. Now all that was left to do was reap the benefits.” He gave me a considering look. “I know you don’t agree with his side of things. That’s one of the reasons why I married you. If you still consider that being a thing.”
I knew he was baiting me to tear me out of that nightmare scape of mental images, but that last sentence still perplexed me.
“Why, think that the fact that you had to watch your best friend’s sister get raped by the people you most admired would make me want to file for divorce? Try harder next time.”
“It’s not just that,” he hedged, the hint of a sheepish grin crossing his features.
I had to look away for a moment, warring with myself whether to give him a pass or not, but decided that, in the end, it didn’t matter.
“That you were, or are, PSYOPS? I’m sure your mother must have been proud.” That gave me a pause. “Did you ever tell her?”
He nodded. “After I dropped out. Five months into my freedom, after I’d made sure I was out for good, I tracked her down at a conference she was speaking at. You know, public space, giving her all the chance to just ignore me if she’d wanted. Turns out, she didn’t. She had a lot of blame to lay at my feet, some rightfully, some not. Didn’t matter. I told her everything. She listened. Then she started asking the questions that no mother should ask but every psychologist will.” He grimaced but it turned into a smile. “You know, most people assume that someone with questionable psychopathic tendencies gets that from their father. With my brother and me, it was our mother. And yes, she tested us both, and I hate to break it to you, I can do empathy with the best of them. I just sometimes choose not to. She never told me about herself, but I’m ninety percent sure that she was just acting all our lives, pretending to be the stern if loving parent. That talent I have from her as well. I couldn’t connect with her at the funeral. That would have been too dangerous.”
That reminded me of something else. “Didn’t you tell me that Hamilton had it out for you because you still had a brother and mother who cared for you? How did that work out, when you woke up in the hospital with Raleigh ranting his head off because he found out about the serum.”
Nate shrugged. “I woke up. He was there, immediately calling for our mother. Gave me the scare of my life. I needed all of sixty seconds to spill the beans and explain to him why it was impossible for them to be here. He caught on quickly and laid on the outrage very convincingly. I don’t think he was acting much, he really was personally offended someone would do something like that to anyone, friend or foe. I never found out how he learned about this to begin with. My guess is someone wanted to recruit him and he took the bait. They must have given him immunity because he joined the research program, and likely made sure to negotiate that our mother was untouchable. You know the rest.”
Which answered a question I hadn’t expected to ever get an answer to.
“You thought they’d gone back on that promise not to harm him. You thought it was that Decker guy who had simply bided his time to teach you a lesson and had him killed.” Nate slowly blinked but otherwise didn’t answer my question. Well, that wasn’t really needed anymore. “Does that mean that Bucky was right? The only reason we are both still alive is because he was kind of protecting us?”
“He was certainly protecting his own interests. And his own hide,” Nate growled. “Don’t think I would have passed him over on my way up the chain.”
“You really didn’t know?” That much was obvious but I still needed him to acknowledge it.
“I didn’t,” he confessed. “I didn’t, and I still can’t believe that the old bastard is still alive.”
“How can something like this be a thing?” I asked, feeling new anger well up inside of me. “You’re all part of the fucking Army! How can there be some systematic, planned, ongoing shit like that inside an organization that’s built on the very foundation of protecting the civilians?”
Nate gave another shrug. “It only takes one bad egg to spoil the cake. And that’s just it, a few people in the right places, living the power trips of their lives. Not everyone who was working with the program was bad. I’m convinced that the overwhelming majority—staff, soldiers, command, scientists—were decent people trying to do the right thing. That’s why I stayed. That’s why, once I dropped out, I didn’t go on a rampage and went for the soft, easy targets first. I only needed to know where exactly those rotten eggs were hiding.”
“Are you sure that it wasn’t Decker after all? He could have been pulling Alders’s strings for all we know.”
“And to what end?” I’d missed that chiding sarcasm from Nate, and almost welcomed it now. “Decker was never officially, directly involved with the program except for recruitment. We were his pride. And no, me disappointing him wasn’t enough to change his mind, I’m not delusional enough to even consider that. He’s responsible for a lot of shit that went down, but not dooming the world.”
“We’ll never find out who did that, huh?” I said, half joking—but then stopped. “You caught that part about Raynor trying to alert everyone two weeks in advance of the shit hitting the fan, right?” Nate nodded slowly, trying to guess what I was hinting at. “And now we’re here, in France, where she sent us, literally the day she got her hands on me, who she thought was valuable to her efforts.” Another nod. “I’m not being paranoid when I’m saying that that’s a glaringly obvious connection.”
Nate shook his head slowly. “No, you’re not.”
“So what am I supposed to do now?” I asked again. The first time we’d been at this point in our conversation felt like it had happened to two different people, a lifetime ago. Maybe that wasn’t as far off as I liked to think, judging from the latent fear still ghosting through Nate’s eyes.
“About your vitamins?” Of course he remembered. It was impossible to sidetrack him, now I knew that for sure. “Keep the pills but don’t take them. If in a day or two, you feel any adverse effects, you take them and check if that goes away. Easy as that.”
I really didn’t like Nate’s fatalistic tone. “Trial and error doesn’t sound so enticing considering I could have died last night.”
“But you didn’t,” Nate insisted, giving me a hint of a grin. “That was a minor setback. A hiccup, if you will. You’ve had those before. Your usual MO is to bounce right back from them. You don’t need me to tell you that.” No, he didn’t. I’d come to that very same conclusion. He paused, then shook his head as if coming to a negative conclusion about something he had been wondering about but didn’t feel like sharing with me. Ah, so we were back to that. Same business as usual. “Let’s get back to the others. If they’ve actually kept your metabolism firing on only half its cylinders, we need to get more food into you. We still have some extra left that we found at that village.”
I thought about holding him back but the moment had passed, and I wasn’t sure I wanted confirmation for my guesses. So like the good little soldier that I would never be, I followed him, pretending that I wasn’t deeply disturbed.
Chapter 19
Switching to a late watch shift wasn’t that bad, at least not tonight. I wasn’t sure that I would have been able to sleep after that talk even if I’d tried. Having to take care of food prep and weapon maintena
nce kept me physically busy and my mind from locking up in memory loops. I was still sore as hell, but as we returned to our packs, I checked on both the wound on my stomach and left hand, finding them healed shut, the scars still angry red and itching but without the threat of tearing the wounds open again. As much as that was a relief, the fact that Parker wasn’t a neat sewer didn’t exactly make me more fond of him. Well, so much for Bucky trying to shove a wedge between Nate and me by claiming that he’s indoctrinated me—which I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I could refute, or wanted to—at the very least, that confirmed that my dear husband saw more in me than a pretty face.
Burns had already filled Gita and Tanner in—as much as he’d thought they should know, which likely amounted to barely more than the heavily abbreviated version, so there was no need to rehash anything. I couldn’t help but shudder every time my gaze skipped over to where Bucky was sharing his dinner with Hill, Cole, and Russell. I absolutely refused to feel bad for him—nothing had changed about his actions—but he’d given me food for thought. Nate didn’t volunteer any further information and he remained quite somber throughout the evening, but I wondered if anyone but me really picked up on that.
We retired late, and I spent almost two hours tossing and turning before I had to get up for my watch shift. Crunching my way through frozen leaves and grass was easier than I remembered from the days before, but that could have been all in my mind. Yeah, right. I did my best not to overthink this shit. That was about as easy as ignoring Cole’s muttered taunt when I slipped when we crossed paths in the southern sector, but I forced myself not to give a shit. Nothing I could do about my situation in general, and bristling at every remark only cost me energy that was better spent elsewhere. Right now, someone making fun of the slight mishaps that still happened when I didn’t pay attention was really low on my list of priorities. And maybe Burns was right after all. They wouldn’t have taunted a nobody they thought far beneath them. I just couldn’t sort out my thoughts tonight to make peace with that.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 3 | Books 7-9 Page 67