My team all went still. “What the fuck?”
“Kyle filled us in on Demingo,” Jagger said, trying to look relaxed but the strain in his voice couldn’t have been missed. “Fucker!”
Demingo had started off working for the government. He’d been a fucking awesome guy who had the record for cracking the most cases and intercepting a fuck ton of drugs, munitions and humans, when he’d been put on a case three years ago. What no one had known was that he was intercepting the shipments, and then selling it on under his own organization. There had been two massive interceptions that had then been hijacked as we brought them back onto US soil. Twenty-six young women and a grand total of three billion dollars’ worth of drugs and your worst fucking nightmares munition wise had all gone missing.
We’d been brought in and had worked hard with Demingo to try and track it all down. We’d recovered nine of the girls and some of the other shit, but then we must have gotten too close and three girls were found murdered with a note on them telling us to back down. What they’d been subjected to had haunted me and still did. The youngest had been six years old.
Over the course of five months, we’d worked our asses off and made small gains. It always felt like they were a hundred steps ahead of us though and they had knowledge that we just couldn’t figure out.
One night, before we were due to go to an intercept point, I’d been briefing the team when I’d looked up and caught site of a small smirk on Demingo’s face as he turned away from me shaking his head. It had all made sense. I’d taken it to my guys and to Kai and we’d come up with a plan to trap the bastard.
That night, we’d come under heavy fire and they’d used some of the most formidable weapons against us. We’d been prepared, but you can only prepare for so much. Sometimes technology just fucking wins. One second Demingo had been with us, the next there was a ball of fire where he’d been standing. We assumed that he’d been double-crossed, but that didn’t appear to be the case now.
“He’s mine,” I growled. I had a lot of payback for this son of a bitch. The image of those girls featured in some of my nightmares. Them begging me to help them and screaming at me for fucking up while they were held down…the bile rose again and I felt my breaths starting to get shorter and faster.
“He’s ours,” Noah said loudly. “We all get a fucking go at that motherfucker.”
“I’ve got a new scope,” Kyle grinned, tapping her short nails on the table. “Dibs I get a go at using it. I’ll make it a nice one too, one that means that y’all get your turn as well.”
The peace I’d felt earlier today was still there, but the burning anger that came from my training and experiences was beside it now.
I needed to speak to my men. We were survivors who had fought valiantly and still fought to get past war. I wanted it official, I wanted security for them and also for me, and I wanted us all to have a shot at life after the military. The security that held us in place with our experiences and nightmares was gone once we’d been discharged, we had to find a way to deal with it whilst feeling vulnerable at the same time. Some of us would get help and would go to therapy, others wanted to try and fight the battle alone.
Maybe this was what we all needed?
I knew what I had to do. As the one who had the most experience with engineering and mechanics, I walked over to the spare rims that I’d bought the other day when I noticed that Hunter’s needed replaced because they were rusting.
Taking them over to the space that had been created for us to work on our bikes in, I got the shit that I needed out and started working on it.
Four hours later, I sat back as I wiped my hands and looked at the new wheels on Hunters’ Indian motorcycle.
In the center of it, I’d put an old naval compass. A symbol of our unit and our military division. Also, a way of showing how we had and would be again scattered in different places, but we would all come back together as the unit we had always been.
I’d heard Hunter muttering about us being valiant survivors earlier, and had looked up a couple of Latin phrases.
Now, on the top of the rim the words fortissimus quisque semper were engraved. Always valiant, that was how we were.
Underneath it, I’d also etched semper timere meaning forever fearless.
It was official, we were now Valiant.
Something was up with Hunter. It wasn’t a bad thing that I was picking up on, but he was a bit different.
Sam, as always, was filling me in on how his day at my parents had been and then how his dad had picked him up and they’d ridden around the driveway at my parents on his bike. He’d even gotten to rev the engine from the sounds of it. The thought freaked me out, but I trusted Hunter with him so I knew that at no point would he have been hurt.
Hunter was very active in the conversation tonight. There was still a slight hesitation to him when things happened that were new, like Sam needing help cutting up his baked potato, or when he asked for a squishy which was Sam language for a juice box. He’d worked through them perfectly though and it gave me hope, but when he’d arrived, there had been a shadow hanging over him and I wanted to know what it was.
After I finished eating, I’d tried to clean up the kitchen, but Hunter had sat me down and told me to rest. It felt strange not doing anything, but I knew that I needed to rest my hand a little longer, so I did it, feeling like I was cheating and being lazy the whole time.
“Bath!” My boy was a water baby and looked forward to this every single night. This I could actually do though, so I went to get it all sorted out for him. Just as I dropped the plug into the drain, I let out a squeal as I was picked up and carried away from the bath.
“Stay,” Hunter said firmly, then turned back to the bath and started asking Sam what he was meant to be doing.
“Yeah, stay,” Sam copied his Dad to a t, and then turned around and started throwing every toy he could find in and trying to get Hunter to empty an entire bottle of bubbles into the water.
Watching them together the similarities really stood out. We’d always known that Sam was like Hunter, but in only a few days, Sam had picked up and taken on so many of his dad’s traits and characteristics.
When Hunter stood up to take his t-shirt off, Sam did the same, and copied the distracted toss Hunter had done, which led to his shirt landing right in front of me. Sam’s only reached half way across the room, but that was still pretty good.
Hunter was now standing with his hands on his hips watching the bubbles and discussing tactics with Sam who also had his hands identically on his hips with the same expression on his face.
At the same time, they turned to face each other and then looked over at the shower head. With a nod, Hunter reached for it and turned the water so that it came through the shower instead. Holding it close to the water, they both grinned triumphantly as more bubbles appeared until they were falling over the edge of the bath.
Shaking my head at the spooky image in front of me, I grinned as Sam got so excited that he forgot to take his jeans off and just got in the tub. A couple minutes of grunting, and a rude introduction to my son on how impossible it was to get wet jeans off, he was in and splashing away.
Looking back up at Hunter, I saw him covered in bubbles and grinning at me, the happiest that I had ever seen him. We had had so many good moments together, and the memories of his grin had gotten me through a lot of long nights, but none of it even came close to what was in front of me now.
I just prayed that when he was ready to tell me what was going on, that this memory would be enough to get me through it. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I was thinking? Maybe he’d had a bad day with the therapist or one of the guys was suffering? I’d had the chance to speak to them all and really liked them, but they were all broken in some way and I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t want to fix all of them.
I needed to speak to Hunter and figure out what the hell was going on. First things first, I needed to get some towels to dry off the floor bef
ore someone slipped and broke something, then I needed to find some painkillers because my hand felt like someone was stabbing it.
I had to tell her because no doubt we’d be leaving for a couple of nights soon, plus she was the other half of me. From now on there would be no secrets at all, but fuck me it was hard.
Tonight, we’d parented together, we’d worked as a unit; something that I thrived working in. It was something that I understood. Doing something as domestic as eating dinner with my son and woman, and then bathing him while she rested – it was bliss.
Now, I had to tell her that I’d be going away for a couple of days just when we were getting us back.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” Piper asked, as she started pulling off some pillows from the bed that had no use from what I could tell. She walked over to put them on top of a chest that rested against the wall.
Walking through to the bathroom to brush my teeth, I shouted a yes as I squeezed the toothpaste onto my toothbrush still thinking through everything that had happened tonight since I’d gotten back to Piper’s. Sam splashing me while he was in the bath and how he tried to copy everything that I did, had melted me completely. I remember when I was a kid, I wanted to be just like my grandad on Dad’s side. He was the shit. Funny, ex-army so he had a presence that you couldn’t ignore, he was also one of the most powerful yet amazing guys that I’d ever met in my life to date. Every time that I was around him, I’d copy everything that he did. To this day, there were still quite a few of my mannerisms that I’d gotten from copying him.
In 2014, we’d been hunkered down behind what remained of a house in the pits. We’d radioed in our location and were trying to find a safe spot for the helicopter to land. Two of us had small injuries, nothing life threatening, and I turned away from returning fire to change the magazine in my rifle, I gave my right ear a frantic itch. Within a second I’d figured out what I was doing and had started laughing. My grandad’s one tell had been itching his ear when he was nervous or frustrated.
I’d shared the story with the guys once we were on the helicopter and since that day, when I did it, there would be a cheer of “Oohrah Fallujah!” Which basically meant “Charge Fallujah!” like a battle cry and was where we’d been on the very outskirts of. After that ear itch, we’d turned and returned fire and had gained enough ground for the extraction to go ahead.
I’d love to see Sam doing that one movement. I saw a lot of my gramps in him as it was, so seeing that ear itch…
Tuning back into Piper, I heard her ask, “Are all of the guys PTSD or problems because of what you went through?” Shaking my head in response, she bit her lower lip before saying, “I want to help, Hunter. All of those guys are the reason that everyone I love sleeps safely at night and can enjoy their lives. My dad went through all of this too and I want to understand that a bit more. If I can help you guys, maybe the others will get to have what I have. What Sam has. What we’re building here.” She gestured between us with her index finger. I totally got what she meant and it meant more to me than I’d ever be able to put into words.
Holding a finger up, I finished brushing my teeth and washed my face trying to figure out how to tell her things without giving away other people’s secrets. I’d just told myself no secrets between us, but I couldn’t tell other people’s.
Turning to face her, I saw genuine curiosity and concern for my brother’s. We also had a couple female friends who had been active with us that I desperately wanted her to meet, but they hadn’t approached about assistance or anything. Maybe I should get Noah to check up on them tomorrow. Shit, Piper.
“A lot do, yes,” I hedged. “But some have them stemming from other issues. A mission, a situation, something they’ve seen, something that went wrong,” fuck this was hard because that was just so fucking vague. She wanted to understand and that meant everything to me. Sighing, I picked her up and carried her back through to the bed, laying us down facing each other. “It’s difficult to explain and it’s not my place to tell individual problems, but I’ll tell you what I can. My PTSD is based on death. It’s a specific PTSD not generalized like a lot are according to the shrink. I relive the narrow moment where there was an explosion, the tension of the situation. It’s like the world falls away and I feel the impending doom. At night, I have nightmares reliving it too; seeing bodies, dead eyes staring at me. My worst nightmare was not long ago and the man who died was replaced with Sam.” Tears were falling down Piper’s face and I hated putting these images into her head, but she wanted to understand the emotions associated with it. That meant something huge to me regardless of how much I wanted to protect her. “Others have a generalized fear. A noise creating a flash back, more than one person being around, nighttime, tall grass…there are so many triggers, but because they go hand in hand with other triggers, they’re considered more generalized. Others are just so conditioned to the stress and suffocation of the situation that they can’t get it to stop.”
“So, every last one of you have a form of this?” She asked, wiping away the tears on her face that were only replaced by even more seconds later.
“Yes,” I took a deep breath as I took a chance in revealing something so that she would understand a bit more. “Blake?” She nodded, remembering one of the most amazing guys I’d met in my life. “He developed PTSD from a non-war related situation.” I knew that Blake would actually tell her himself, he had developed a deep respect and like for all things Piper and Sam, so he wouldn’t mind. It still made my gut roll telling it, but she had a reason for asking and I wanted to help too. The thought of my guys having love, feeling that overwhelming love for someone and then again for someone that they helped create…I would literally give an arm for them to have that. I wasn’t saying that Piper had magical powers, but if she understood it, maybe she could help them in some way and they’d be a step closer to getting it all?
“What happened to him?” She cocked her head and stared intently at me.
“Blake grew up with his cousin. They were like brother and sister. Same age, very alike personality wise and just best fucking friends. Not long after we enlisted, his cousin was raped by three men behind a bar. She’d gone to get her phone out of her friend’s car and they’d pounced on her. There was a lot of physical damage obviously, but scars on the outside heal…” I gestured to my own scars with a dry smile. The look Piper gave me back cut me to the quick. “Blake got her in to see a therapist, apparently, she was meant to be a kick ass bitch. During the therapy, she told his cousin to think of someone that she could trust to be there for her, someone who would be there regardless when she needed her. His cousin couldn’t choose him because we had no choice in whether we accepted or rejected what we were told to do, so she chose another cousin of theirs.” Adjusting our positions so that she was more on top of me was a selfish move; it gave me more peace holding her this closely. “So, every time his cousin freaked out, felt down, had something not go her way, or as it ended - with just anything at all, she would call the cousin who would answer and either fix it or take on the negative feelings for her. The therapist had outsourced for help with his cousin, basically with the wording she used, in his cousin’s fragile psyche she basically implied that the other person was hers. To listen, to fix, to deal with and so on whenever the cousin needed it. It created an attachment and she became so territorial over her that Blake would dread going home to see her because she was so malicious and nasty.” I felt Piper rubbing my chest gently, giving me reassurance without realizing it. This had been a sad period for all of us as we were going through things as it was and then poor Blake was going through this on top of it. As a unit, we had each other’s backs regardless, and you did not ever fail a brother. “One day something happened, I forget what, and the cousin rang the other cousin as always. The poor woman was in hospital because she’d fallen and broken a wrist, so she said she’d call her back and couldn’t talk right now. The cousin took this as rejection from someone she’d created an unreal
dependency on, at the encouragement of the therapist. Anyway, she did the most malicious thing and committed suicide in a way that the people who found her would never forget. Because of this, Blake obviously has a lot of issues with trust, doesn’t trust therapists and feels like he failed his cousin. He has panic attacks, anger issues and sleep issues.”
Piper was quiet for a second before whispering, “Fuck me! He found her, didn’t he?”
Looking down at her, I nodded my head. That part was his part to tell for sure, but at least she understood him. He was the one that I felt was sinking the most, and although it might seem strange, I think having Piper and trusting her more than he already did, which had been a shock, might help him. My goal was to get him in to see my therapist, but it was baby steps I guess.
After Jagger, Preacher and Kyle had left today, he’d gone into such a rage at what we’d been told that he’d smashed up one of the rooms. I didn’t want Sam or Piper going near him until we could calm him down a bit. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him, I just didn’t know what to expect. I was irrationally protective over both of them, but I trusted Blake…fuck I didn’t know what to do.
Compass (Valiant MC Book 1) Page 9