Semper Mine (Sons of War #1)(3)

Mr. Khavalov accepts it, his features warm. “You are always welcome in my family, Captain Mathis.” He pats me on the arm. “Petr told me you have none of your own. You brought him home. You can consider this your home, too.” He waves towards the mansion.

I nod briskly, not certain what to say. I brought one son home in a box and the other in a coma. How that earns me any sort of consideration from a man like this, I don’t know.

But his words touch me. He’s right. A ward of the state from the age of two until I was eighteen, my family is the Marine Corps and the elite, multi-forces group I command. They are the only family I need, and yet, I appreciate how generous he is being, given the circumstances.

I can’t respond, so I bow my head, turn crisply and walk away. I find myself reaching for my good luck charm and stop, knowing it’s lost somewhere in the deserts of Iraq after the gunfight a week ago.

It is not those who were lost but those who were saved that should be counted.

As much as I like the sentiment, I don’t think this, either, will help me sleep at night. With a glance at my watch, I realize I’ve got about six hours to grab my gear and be back on base, before I’m headed back to Iraq.

This has been the most draining week I’ve ever been through. It’s not in my nature to second-guess myself, but recalling the amount of pain in Katya’s eyes …

Save Petr.

I need one of the Khav twins to pull through, for my own sake. A family can’t lose two sons at once. It’s just not right.

I can’t wait to get back. War I understand. There are no down moments for me to think about the suffering of men like the twin’s father and women like their sister, whose lives are forever destroyed by one decision I made.

That’s all it takes to change someone’s forever. One choice.

I’ve never been this f*cking tired.





Chapter Two: Katya


JULY



Everyone dies around my birthday. I lost my mother a week before I turned nine and one of my brothers three days after my twenty-fifth birthday this year. I don’t think I’ll ever get over either of the two times in my life where I’ve seen my strong father cry.

I get lost in my head a lot, unable to close the door on these memories the way I ache to. I’ve been tempted to take down the pictures in my bedroom with my two brothers, hoping that helps me move on, but can’t bring myself to do it. If I take down Mikael’s picture, I’m afraid he’ll disappear forever. It’s silly, the same thought I experienced after my mother’s death, because I know they’re already gone.

But if I keep the pictures up, it’s like they’re still around somewhere, maybe just outside my room, and I can pretend all I have to do is open the door and they’ll be there waiting.

A hard smack of flesh on metal snaps me out of the melancholy thinking.

My surviving brother, Petr, is playing with his prosthetic leg like he’s a five-year-old who got the best birthday present of his life. It doesn’t look like a real limb and kind of weirds me out, which is why I’m grateful he’s in jeans this time and not boxers. It’s made of some sort of resilient, lightweight metal and reminds me of the robot troopers in the latest round of Star Wars movies. The design is purely out of some science fiction magazine or comic book. If I hadn’t seen him run on it, I never would’ve believed it’d hold his body weight.

“You’re going to knock your leg off,” I snap at him. “The doctor said not to mess with it!”

Petr rolls his eyes. “This thing is cemented to my bone. It’s not coming off.” He slaps his new leg harder, and I flinch.

It just doesn’t look sturdy.

“Your meds,” I say and hold them out. He’s been avoiding them, I think because they make him a little less … hyper. He’s been insisting for days he’s ready to return to duty, while the medical staff wants him to wait another month before letting the military decide what he can and cannot do, if they let him back in at all.

At a little over six feet tall, he’s got my father’s heavy features, a nose that’s been broken more than once, and a lopsided grin that makes him charmingly roguish in appearance. His hair has grown out some since he came home four months ago, but there’s no way he resembles anything other than the soldier he is.

He’s regained the muscle mass he lost while in the coma for three weeks and managed to put on more weight. He works out every day like he’s going to return to the war that killed our brother and nearly cost Petr his life, too.

Over my dead body. I’m the youngest in the family, but you’d think I was the mother. Probably because I took over the role of taking care of my thickheaded, stupid older brothers after our mother died. I was nine, and they were fourteen, old enough to be in trouble every weekend.

“Kitty-Khav, I’m a trained killer. I can take care of myself,” he reminds me and takes the meds, only to put them back on the tray. His blue eyes sparkle with mischief, the way they always have, though there’s a shadow in them that wasn’t there before Mikael’s death.

The death of our brother haunts us both.

He stands, moving away from the hospital bed as if he’s not wearing a fake leg that looks like it could collapse at any minute.

“You shouldn’t be going to the retreat at all, Petr,” I tell him, not for the first time. “What if you trip in the forest or something?”