Otherwise Unharmed

  My head was empty.

  There were no memories, no thoughts of the next person I needed to stalk and kill, and no concerns about Moretti or Greco or jail—just the warmth of the body next to mine and the peace that came with it.

  It just felt…good.

  Maybe I didn’t deserve it. Hell, I most certainly didn’t, but I didn’t care. I wanted it. I wanted her next to me every time I woke up. I wanted to feel her warm breath on my skin and the scent of her hair in my nose. For the first time in my life, the idea of just settling down and being with someone else long-term seemed attractive.

  I didn’t just want it; I needed it.

  Moving slowly, I untangled myself from Lia, took a quick piss, and then went over to the window to peek out. There was a bright streetlamp just outside, which gave me a decent view of the area. Sentry duty suddenly seemed like a good plan, so I pulled my jeans on and let my Beretta sit across my lap as I watched outside and thought about the woman still sleeping in the bed.

  If I had been a completely stupid person, I would have let the desire to just run off with her overwhelm me and do precisely that. However, I knew exactly where that road would lead—a life on the run. I’d spend all my time watching over my shoulder and waiting for Trent to catch up with me and haul me to federal prison for the rest of my life or for Rinaldo to offer me a more permanent form of retirement.

  The strangest thing was, if I had been pressured by those two scenarios a month ago, I wouldn’t have given a shit what the consequences might have been. I would have just done whatever the fuck I wanted to do because I didn’t care what happened to me.

  Sometime over the last week, Lia changed all of that.

  Maybe I should have been pissed off at her for it. My simple, if dangerous, life had been turned upside down by her coming into it the way she did. No—that wasn’t fair; it wasn’t her, but how I felt about her. On the inside, she made me feel more powerful than I ever had in my life. On the outside, I knew she was a dangerous weakness.

  Others would know it, too.

  I couldn’t leave her alone. No matter what else happened, I had to keep her with me, both for her to be safe as well as for the more selfish reasons. As long as she was close by, I’d sleep well. If I was sleeping well, the chances of me keeping us both alive through all this were best.

  This was assuming she was going to have anything to do with me at all after breakfast.

  There was a very real chance she was going to take me up on my offer to get her to the airport and out of the city. It wouldn’t be the safest option for her, and I didn’t want it at all, but she might not leave me with a reasonable choice.

  A few unreasonable choices—including holding her prisoner in a basement for the rest of her life just so I could sleep and be near here—crossed my mind. None of them were realistic, and some of them weren’t even plausible, but that didn’t stop them from having a little picnic inside my head.

  I knew I had to come clean about all of it and just live with whatever she decided, but I didn’t like it. Keeping her in the dark and close to me sounded so much better. Maybe if I had found myself a dumb chick, it would have worked—but not with Lia. She was too smart.

  Lia stirred and eventually woke up. I let her take a shower while I ran out for coffee and breakfast sandwiches from a nearby fast-food place. By the time I returned, she was dressed and sitting on the bed, combing through her wet hair.

  “Fucking beautiful,” I murmured.

  Lia’s eyes met mine, and she smiled slightly. I could see the tension in her back and shoulders as she sat there and waited for me to spill the beans. I debated trying to talk her into another romp beforehand, but I knew it couldn’t be any better than last night had been. Instead, I handed her an egg-and-cheese bagel, and we ate in silence. As the last of the crumbs were dusted away, I knew I had run out of time.

  “What do you want to know first” I asked her, “what happened to me as a POW or what the fuck is going on now?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Does what happened to you over there lead into what’s happening now?”

  I shrugged.

  “Basically,” I said. “I mean, it’s what led to everything afterwards, so yeah, I guess so.”

  “Then I’ll take chronological order,” she told me.

  I realized that since I had left incarceration there had been only one thought that came into my head that mattered—Lia. It was also the one thought I continued to fight against. Deep inside, it was clear to me that nothing good was going to come of this. It was dangerous for her to even be seen with me, and giving her all the information I was about to give her was only going to make that worse. On top of it all, she had seen me at the lowest point in my life.

  She saw me—broken, destroyed, and being taken away in handcuffs so I couldn’t hurt myself or anyone else. I'd never be able to remove the memories from her head and make it right. She would always remember me in that state—a sociopath begging her to watch over my dog.

  What was she going to do when she knew the why of it all?

  Nothing in my life was going to be harder than this.

  Chapter 10—Blatant Truth

  “I joined the Marines when I was seventeen.”

  It seemed like as good a place as any to start.

  “Why seventeen? Did your parents want you to?”

  Or not.

  “No, I never met my parents.” I sighed and dropped onto the ledge by the window. I ran my hand over my head, somewhat disgusted by how long my hair had gotten, but also recalling how it felt when Lia had her fingers in it, so I couldn’t hate it too much. “I was an orphan. I grew up in a convent in southwestern Ohio.”

  “A convent? You mean, a place for nuns?”

  “Yeah, and also orphanages a lot of the time, usually for kids who are hard to place in foster care or whatever.”

  “Are you Catholic, then?”

  I snickered a bit.

  “Nah, not really. Not anymore.” My hand instinctively moved up to my chest, and I fingered the dog tags hanging there. I could feel the raised letters.

  “What happened to your parents? How old were you when you went there?”

  “I don’t really know,” I admitted. “I’ve never found out who they were, just that—for whatever reason—they either died or didn’t want me. I was there as long as I can remember, so I guess pretty much always. No one would ever tell me what happened, not even when I got older. I’ve always assumed it was because they didn’t want to deal with a kid at all because if they were dead, someone would just tell me, wouldn’t they?”

  “You would think so,” Lia agreed. She lay back on the bed and leaned her head against her hand. “So why seventeen?”

  “I was emancipated. I was done with high school, but I didn’t really have any money or anything. I wanted to go to college, so the military made sense.”

  “Are orphans usually emancipated?”

  “No, not usually.”

  “So why were you?”

  I hadn’t expected this portion of my past to really be a part of the conversation, and I wasn’t prepared to talk about it. Still, I had promised her I would tell her everything, so I did.

  “Because I asked for it,” I said, “and the Mother Superior wasn’t in a position to deny it.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Lia’s eyes darkened.

  She was way too perceptive.

  “Well…” I let my voice trail off a second while I thought about how to word it. There really wasn’t a clean way to do it, so I went with blunt. “I’d been fucking her, and I threatened to use it against her if she didn’t sign the papers.”

  “Holy shit!” Lia yelled out. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you were underage! How old was she?”

  “Fuck, I don’t know. Fifty-something, maybe?”

  “Jesus Christ, Evan!”

  “It had been going on for years,” I told her. “I think I was fourteen wh
en it started.”

  Lia contemplated a moment.

  “She molested you.”

  “Whatever you want to call it,” I said with a shrug. “I wasn’t complaining. Knowing all her dirty little secrets came in handy when I wanted something. If she was using me, I was using her just as much.”

  I watched Lia closely as she let my words sink in. She was staring down at the sheets, watching her fingers twist the fabric.

  “You still want me to go on?”

  “Of course,” she said quietly.

  “Your mom was right, you know.”

  “About what?”

  “You don’t know much about me. You might not want to know all this shit.”

  Lia thought for a moment and then looked back to me.

  “I want to know,” she stated.

  “It’s going to change everything.” My voice carried both warning and desperation. “I won’t be able to take it back. You won’t be able to just forget it.”

  “I know.”

  With a deep breath, I continued.

  “I went through basic training and figured out I was a damn good shot. I became an expert marksman very quickly, so I went for sniper school at the base in Quantico, Virginia, and finished out on top. I could take out targets over a mile away and hardly ever missed.”

  “Shit,” Lia said with a sharp outtake of breath.

  “I ended up deployed to the Middle East as part of a Scout Sniper platoon to do reconnaissance into Afghanistan for a while, did well, got promoted to staff sergeant, and led the other members of the platoon under the captain of the battalion. When he was killed in battle, I was promoted to lieutenant in the field and took over for the rest of the…well, up until the time I was captured.”

  My mind raced with memories, and I dropped my hand from my dog tags when I realized I was gripping them.

  “What happened?” she asked softly.

  “We were scouting out the area where one of the Al Qaida leaders was supposedly spotted. My team was the first one out, and we were the deepest into the area, but we hadn’t seen anything for days. There were four other groups behind us—spread out several miles to cover as much terrain as possible. We weren’t supposed to engage or anything yet—just watch and report back when the time was right for the rest of the SF infantry to join us.”

  “SF?”

  “Sorry. Special Forces.”

  “Got it.”

  “We had a small base set up in the rocks around the desert—tents, a couple Hummers, and a small outbuilding. I was back behind the outbuilding when they attacked.”

  I took a slow, steady breath. I was trying to keep my memories focused on the debriefing that took place after I returned to Virginia and not on the events themselves, but it wasn’t completely possible.

  “Like I said, it had been really quiet. I think we got a little complacent, which is how they managed to get the drop on us. I heard some noise, came back around, and everyone in my unit was dead.”

  “Oh my God.”

  I didn’t look at her as I went on.

  “I didn’t really have much time to react. I got hit over the head, came to for a few seconds in a truck, bumping down a road, but got hit again. The next thing I really remember, I was in one of their camps. They didn’t do much but smack me around for a while and ask me where the other units were located– they were waiting for their leader to show up.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Gave them my name, rank, and service number,” I said with a hollow laugh. “Just like the fucking movies. I couldn’t really do much of anything—they had me hogtied. They kept hitting me with a bag full of fucking potatoes or something—ached for days, even when they left me alone for a while.”

  When I glanced at her, I could see her looking at me closely, and I knew exactly what she was doing—checking for scars.

  I stood up, unbuckled my belt, and shoved my jeans down just a bit over my hip.

  “That’s the only one I have,” I told her as I showed her a two-inch long, faded scar on my left side. “The insurgents didn’t even give it to me. There was a bunch of shit lying around the motor pool when I got drunk and fell on a sharp piece of metal. I didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened, so I tried to take care of it myself. It got pretty infected, and I ended up in the infirmary anyway. It was the only official reprimand I ever received while I was serving. I think my captain called it ‘for being a dumbass.’”

  I laughed and shook my head.

  “The guys who captured me—they didn’t want to leave any permanent marks—hardly ever even hit me in the face.”

  “What happened when the leader arrived?”

  “Classic interrogation,” I replied. “He was a decent-sized guy with a shitload of facial hair and a nasty attitude. I never did hear his name, and he wasn’t someone well-known enough that I’d seen his picture before. He shoved my head in a bucket of water until I nearly drowned, then shoved my face into the sand. Then he had the rest of them beat on me for a while, claim they already knew the answers to the questions they were asking me, then start kicking me. He tore off my fingernails and seemed to have a pretty good time doing it.”

  Lia gasped, but I didn’t stop.

  “They’d ask questions; I wouldn’t give them anything, and then they’d start all over again. He yelled a lot, but he never could get anything out of me. After a few days, they tossed a burlap sack over my head and loaded me into a truck again. I tried to count so I could get an idea of how far we were going, but I didn’t really know where we started from, so it wasn’t very helpful. Still, I figure we drove about three hours. Once we stopped, I was pulled into a shed where they just made me kneel on concrete while they spoke in Arabic. I didn’t catch much of it—just got the idea they were setting something up. There were a lot of scraping sounds, like they were moving things around.”

  “When they took the bag off, I could see two other guys tied up like me. They had cameras and shit set up all around us, and there were Afghani soldiers standing all over the place with assault rifles pointed at us.”

  I turned my eyes to Lia to see how she was taking it all. She had moved to a sitting position on the bed and was watching me with her hands in her lap.

  “I figured that was it, you know?” I said as I looked at her. “I thought they were just going to execute us and be done with it.”

  “That’s where the video came from,” Lia said.

  “That’s the one,” I confirmed. “It got a lot of YouTube hits before it was taken down, I hear.”

  I collected my thoughts for a minute before going on.

  “You’ve watched it, so you know a lot of what happened next. They wanted us to say how well we were being treated, which made me laugh, and then they wanted us to say that the US president was wrong to have troops in the Middle East and that we agreed they should all be removed—the usual shit. The journalist guy—he just kept crying and screaming that he didn’t know anything. The other one, though—I knew him.”

  “Who was he?” Lia asked when I stopped talking for a minute.

  “He was another Marine—a private who had just been deployed a few months before. I’d seen him around a few times, but he wasn’t a sniper, so I didn’t know him too well. He was part of the infantry group who would have joined us if we had spotted the enemy first. He kept telling them to fuck off until they bashed his head with the butt of one of their rifles. He was unconscious during the filming.”

  “What was his name?” Lia asked.

  “Classified,” I responded automatically. The last thing I wanted to think about was the freckle-faced private who had ultimately been our demise. I still thought he went down way too easy when they hit him and wondered if he had been conscious though it all. Regardless, if he hadn’t cracked, my unit might have made it through. I might never have been captured.

  She blinked a couple of times but didn’t ask again.

  “When we wouldn’t cooperate, they went with Plan B. T
hey started rolling the cameras and told the world that we were invading their country unlawfully and all that bullshit. They said they were going to execute one of us as a spy, and I told them to kill me, but they didn’t. They took out the civilian dude just to make some fucking point. I was bagged and loaded back into the truck and taken somewhere else—I don’t know where. It took a lot longer than it had taken us to get to where they did the filming. I’d counted maybe four hours before I ended up falling asleep.”

  “Once we got there, it was pretty obvious the place was a fairly permanent site. There were decently constructed buildings hidden in the rocks and not just soldiers there, but women and children, too. I was dumped in a small room in the dark for a while, maybe just for the night—I’m not sure—and then they started all over again. Mostly they deprived me of any food and water, trying to break me down. I wasn’t too interested in dying of dehydration, but I figured at that point, I wasn’t going to make it anyway.”

  I looked over at the clock on the nightstand and realized I had been talking for more than an hour and a half already. I still hadn’t even gotten to the good shit—the shit that was likely going to make her turn and run.

  “Give me a minute,” I said. I stood up and walked out the door, not even bothering to put on a shirt or anything. Luckily, the dude at the front desk was willing to sell me a few of his cigarettes, so I didn’t have to go far.

  “Don’t smoke in the room,” he called out as I walked away.

  Whatever.

  I lit up with a pack of matches displaying the motel’s name on the front and walked into the room where Lia was still sitting on the bed.

  “You smoke?” She seemed taken aback.

  “Not usually,” I replied. I grabbed one of the plastic cups from the bathroom to use as an ashtray and put a little water in the bottom of it, then took my spot on the windowsill and went on.

  “Once they figured out all their abuse wasn’t going to work on me, they tried just letting me rot for days at a time in-”

  My throat tried to close up on me, like my body didn’t even want the words to come out of my mouth, but I swallowed hard and fought for a little control.