Rome (Marked Men, #3)(52)

They had been trying to reach me out in the field for three days before they managed to find someone that could relay a critical message from home.

Remy was dead.

There was an accident. He crashed his car on the interstate and hadn’t made it. I was being granted only a few days’ leave to get home for the funeral and then was expected back in proper fighting condition.

I felt like someone had stuck a serrated knife right through the center of my chest.

Remy was the good one, the best of the three of us. He was kind, he was loving, he was careful, and there was no way he was the one of us that was going to die before his time. Rule was going to get shot by an angry boyfriend or piss off the wrong meat head at a bar. I was going to step on a land mine or get taken out by enemy fire. There was no way it was Remy’s time.

I flew back in a daze. I couldn’t think, couldn’t feel. I was numb. I think that was how I missed my mom going from being just distant and snappy to Rule into totally arctic freeze-out mode. We were all sinking into a well of grief and despair for our own reasons and there was no way any of us could offer the others a hand out.

All I could think was that I hadn’t even told him how much I loved him before I left. I had ordered him to take care of Rule, always told him to watch out for his more difficult brother, but never said anything about how amazing and impressed I was with the man he had become. I never let him know I might have been his hero, but he was mine. The regret that I squandered the last minutes I had with him was a bitter pill that I never managed to swallow. Add in the fact that I knew something was going on with him, something I needed to make him talk to me about, and a chunk of my heart, a part of my soul, went into the ground with him.

I went back to the desert without talking to my parents, without being able to look Rule in the eye because it hurt too bad to see Remy’s eyes looking back at me. Every night for the next year, no matter what mission I was on, no matter what barracks I was in, no matter what part of the sandbox they sent me to, I went to bed at night thinking about everything I would do over again if I could. I had seen a lot of death in my line of work; it always sucked and it was always hard to forget, but nothing woke me up in the middle of the night with tears running down my face like the memory of those last wasted seconds with my brother.

There was a weight on me. Not the typical heavy, sucking weight of sorrow that I woke up with when that particular memory blindsided me, but a soft, warm weight that was whispering my name over and over again. I struggled up from the blackness and found Cora in my lap. She was literally straddling me, her hands on either side of my face. She was saying my name over and over again, whispering it against the scar on my forehead and against the twin tracks of moisture I could feel leaking out of each eye.

My baser instinct was to shove her off of me and get out of there. It was to bury the shame and sadness deep down inside and cover it with a layer of vodka so thick I couldn’t ever feel it again, but I knew if I did that she wouldn’t give me another shot, so I just stared at her and let her brush kisses all over my face until my heart rate slowed back down and I could breathe normally again. I put my hands on her waist and counted backward from twenty until I was absolutely sure I wasn’t going to bolt on her again.

“Want to talk about it?”

No, I sure as hell did not, but I had promised to let her in, so I would make an effort, and if it meant keeping her on top of me, stroking her fingers along my scalp, I would struggle through it even if it felt like it was killing me.

“Remy. I was thinking, maybe sort of dreaming, about Remy.”

If the thought of a man’s dead younger brother wasn’t allowed to move him to burning-hot, sorrowful tears in his sleep, then nothing was. I wanted to be embarrassed, didn’t want Cora to see how fractured and torn on the inside I really was, but she just watched me and didn’t say a word. The bluish green of her turquoise-colored eye was full of compassion and kindness; the melty chocolate of the brown one was much sharper, waiting to see what I was going to do now that I was naked and raw in front of her.

“The last time I saw him I was annoyed. My folks were on my nerves, Rule was acting obnoxious, Shaw was being weird, and something was going on with Remy that he wouldn’t talk about. Now I know it was his secret and Shaw was all bent out of shape over Rule, but at the time all I wanted was to get back to work. I told him to take care of Rule, not that I loved him, or that I missed him, or that I was so proud to be his brother. I just told him to keep Rule out of trouble.”

I had to swallow back the flood of memory in order to keep talking to her. She just kept her eyes steady on mine. She didn’t interject, didn’t tell me it would all be fine, she just watched me and let her fingertips run along my shorn hair.

“When I came back for the funeral everything had turned to shit. Rule decided that the best way to deal with the loss was to be even more of an * than he was already. Shaw turned into this conciliatory, peacemaking machine, and my parents immediately went into blame mode. It was Rule’s fault for calling for a ride, it was my fault for not being home to keep an eye on him, and it was Shaw’s fault for letting him go. They put him in the ground and every single one of us went with him.”

I had to blink and strain to keep my eyes on her. My fingers flexed involuntarily as I tried to decide if I wanted to pull her closer or push her away.

“I went back to the desert and watched more kids die, gave more of myself to the sand and the enemy, and then when I came home last time, things went from bad to worse. Mom had turned into this grief-filled monster who wanted to eat Rule alive. Shaw was head over heels in love with him and he was oblivious and it was killing her. And then there was Remy. Gone but always there between all of us and his goddamn secret that everyone seemed to know but me and Rule. I was so mad at him. Mad at him for lying, mad at him for using Shaw, mad at him for being gone, but mostly I was so furious with myself for letting him go that last time without saying something that mattered. Maybe if I had been different, acted differently, he would have been comfortable enough to tell me about his life. It’s all I can think about.”