Bound to Break: Men of Honor, Book 6 (13 page)

“Yes.”

“Over what?”

“Control.”

“Obviously not in the bedroom.”

Rex snorted. “We didn’t have issues there.”

“And you’re with someone else now.”

“Yeah. His name’s Sawyer. He’s a SEAL.”

“Guess you have a type,” Lucky said before he could stop himself and heard Cooper choke on his coffee. Rex was at least smiling. “So things are good?”

“I think so. It’s still all new. Took a long time for him to admit his feelings for me.”

“Scared because you’re his CO?”

“Scared because he didn’t think he was gay.” Lucky raised a brow. “He’s bi.”

“Can’t help who you fall in love with,” Lucky said quietly.

“Who did you fall for?” Rex asked now but Lucky shook his head. Still, he had a feeling Rex knew. The way he’d watched Dash walk away at the airport in South Africa, he figured it was obvious to a blind man.

“I guess it’s enough to know I haven’t forgotten how, right?” He leaned back against the couch. He’d been so tense, like he’d been bracing for a flood of memories. Now that nothing was happening, he realized how much he needed to know about his life. “How old am I?”

“Thirty-six,” Rex told him. “A year older than me. Your birthday’s November sixth.”

“I told her my birthday was in April, but Emme always insisted I was a Scorpio.”

Rex smiled, like maybe they’d had this conversation before about astrological signs.

Lucky glanced toward Cooper. The shrink had said he’d rather Lucky find out about his capture here, in the hospital, in case he had a bad reaction. “Why’s the CIA involved?”

“You might not remember being a SEAL, but you definitely have an operator’s instincts,” Rex told him. “For the mission we were captured on, the CIA sanctioned us to retire a terrorist who kidnapped two CIA agents and beheaded one of them on national TV.”

“And the other agent?”

Rex shifted. Glanced at Cooper then back at Lucky.

“Rex, they’re acting like I can take down the free world.”

“Because they’re worried you were turned. That this is all an act.”

“Turned?”

“By the terrorists who captured us.”

A chill went through Lucky, and as he went still, so did Rex and Cooper. “I…I didn’t see that coming. Jesus, they think I’m a terrorist? That I’ve been hiding for four years. Working as a bartender?”

“South African shoreline…a good spot to sneak terrorists into Africa without notice. You could be a conduit. Or you could have other plans. Terrorists are a notoriously patient bunch.”

“I didn’t even remember 9/11. Emme was watching a special on it. I recognized it from some of Dash’s pictures. I pretended but I stayed up all night researching it. I was already in the Navy when it happened, according to Cooper.”

Rex nodded. “Our team went right into action after that. Hunted down a lot of them, took them out. You helped a lot.”

“And now they think I’ve defected.” He paused. “They’re never going to be satisfied. They’ll haunt me forever, just in case something pops up.”

“They won’t let you leave the country. Maybe not the state without an escort until they’re satisfied you’re not working with the terrorists.”

Which was never going to happen unless he could prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that his memories would never return, or that he’d never been in collusion with the enemy.

He rubbed his forehead like he could bring the memories out, but they weren’t even skirting his consciousness.

“Our team went in to save the CIA agents and we were captured.” He didn’t want to go further into the actual methods of capture and torture, not then. Maybe it was more because he didn’t want Rex to have to relive it. But they were coming perilously close to having no choice but to deal with it.

“Right.”

“What did you think happened to me?”

Rex’s face clouded. Lucky didn’t want to go there any more than Rex did. But if they wanted memories from him, he’d have to try to trigger them any way he could.

Cooper said Lucky would probably need something harsh to break the amnesia. That it might happen now or ten years from now.

Or never.

“We were put into separate cells. Beaten on a rotating basis. Given a day to heal, listen to the rest of us getting hit. We were each told we could make it stop. Standard shit.”

“But they did let you go, right?”

Rex blinked. Stared. “We were let go about two days after they told us you died.”

A chill went through Lucky as Rex talked about his death. He didn’t remember any of this—it was like being told the plot to a movie. And Lucky wanted all the spoilers, but it was strange being so detached and so invested in the outcome all at the same time. “Did you think the terrorists killed me?”

“No. It was an infection in your leg. They wouldn’t give you medical treatment, no matter how hard we begged. They’d only do it if we did what they wanted us to. And we couldn’t. You have to understand that we couldn’t.”

“I do, Rex. You couldn’t give in.”

“Fuck.” Rex rubbed his head and the pain in his eyes was unmistakable. “If they’d wanted something else, I would’ve given it to them. If they’d said to me, ‘Your life for his’, I would’ve let them kill me.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s the truth, Lucky. It’s what you need to hear. I would’ve saved your life if that was all it would’ve taken.”

That weighed heavily on Lucky, and he wondered how much someone could take on before he broke.

Rex continued, “They showed us your body. They threw you into a fire, said they didn’t want infection to spread, which was bullshit. I figured they just didn’t want us to be able to bring your body home.”

Lucky nodded. Everything was bits and pieces of a puzzle that wasn’t fitting together quite right for him.

“So why wouldn’t they have done the same thing with me that they did with that agent? Why not show my body to the world on videotape?”

Lucky didn’t realize he was indicting Rex with that statement, realized it only after the anger in Rex’s voice came out. “At the time, we didn’t know what they’d done to that agent. We were being held, remember.”

“I didn’t mean it like that, Rex. I have twenty-twenty hindsight,” he started, but Rex cut him off.

“Let me see your leg. Your calf.” Rex’s voice sounded hoarse and then he was kneeling at Lucky’s feet.

Lucky felt like he should pull away, that Rex wasn’t going to like what he found. But he didn’t, let Rex pull up the scrub pants, which were all Lucky was allowed to wear in here.

And then Rex held his bared calf in both hands and stared at it like something was really wrong. Ran his hands around the back, lifted it like it wasn’t attached to Lucky.

“I don’t understand this,” he muttered. He went for the other calf, did the same thing. “Nothing. Not fucking possible.”

“Want to tell me what you’re looking for?” Lucky asked.

Rex sat back on his heels, his eyes dark, an obvious temper rising. He looked angry and confused, and Lucky steeled himself. Fought for a scrap of memory and found none. He stared down at his calves, wondering what Rex had expected to find. “Do your scars go all the way down to your calves?”

The question seemed to wake Rex up. “No.”

“Mine stop at the back of my knees.”

“Mine too,” Rex said.

“Then what are you looking for?”

“Nothing. Guess I got confused.”

“And now you’re lying.”

Rex glanced up at him, seemed to remember he was on the floor and pushed himself to his feet. Lucky fixed his pants, trying not to let the panic rise.

Rex started slowly. “They told us that you had an infection in your leg. That you had a fever. They said it was killing you and under those conditions…”

Rex had already told him this, so Lucky was even more confused. “Did you see the infection?”

“No. There was a bandage on your leg. And you were so out of it. Glassy eyes. Lethargic. None of us were in great condition but you looked like…” He paused before he uttered the word
death
.

Lucky stared. “Guess it wasn’t me.”

“The men who held us, they showed us a picture of your leg infection. It was down to the bone in your leg—and then they told us that they’d get you medical attention if we turned. When we didn’t…fuck, that’s when they burned a body that was supposedly yours. Christ, we were all so out of it, drugged and beaten, and you’d been so out of it the last time they dragged you past the room I was being tortured in. But now, this doesn’t make sense. There should be a goddamned scar. Maybe I got the leg wrong, but there should be a scar.”

“But there’s not. So what does that mean?”

Cooper had intervened not long after Rex went looking for the scar on Lucky’s legs and found none. Rex had looked angry and apologetic when he left, escorted out by Cooper.

Lucky could just imagine the conversation the two of them were having.

In the meantime, he pulled up his own pants to stare down at his calves. Other than some small scars here and there, there was zero indication that he’d had a severe, life-threatening infection.

Cooper came back into the room then, shut the door behind him, and Lucky was so drained. He hoped that Cooper wasn’t going to keep him here for much longer. His head spun, his fucking heart hurt.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Cooper said quietly, although it was more of a demand than Lucky had ever heard from the man.

“I don’t have the scars on my leg.”

“So? Rex himself said he was being beaten daily. Starved. Maybe drugged.”

Lucky nodded. It would be so easy to believe what Cooper was telling him, what Rex told him earlier. God, he wanted to, so damned badly. But… “What if…what if I did agree to help them in exchange for my team’s life and then…” He shook his head. “Why go to all that trouble and then beat the shit out of me and dump me in the ocean? That doesn’t make sense.”

“What does makes sense to you about it?”

He glanced at Cooper. “I’m not playing the speculation game with you.”

“Why not? Afraid of what you might find?”

“Look, I don’t remember shit. And now, a member of my team is actually starting to doubt my story. So fuck this.”

He stood, stormed out of the office, not turning back when Cooper called his name.

At this point, he was still a prisoner. And he wasn’t going back to therapy unless they locked him in and forced him. Which they probably would, come morning.

He circled back to his room, going through the locked ward doors with the soldier-slash-guard silently following him. The guy must have orders to not talk to him ever, so it was like having a ghost trailing him. He wondered when—if—the guy ever slept. Or if he was a twin. Or if everyone and everything was starting to look alike to him, because maybe if you spent enough time in a mental ward, you became mental.

He wondered if Dash would come in for a session. That would be worth going back to Cooper and asking. And then he could finally process the truth behind the fact that Dash had used him to get intel. That he was a job to Dash.

No matter how much he told himself it hadn’t felt like that, even when Dash handed him over to his old SEAL team, Lucky knew he had to come to terms with the truth.

No one’s ever going to fully trust you.
And how the hell was he supposed to live with that?

Chapter Fourteen

Sawyer hadn’t seen Rex for six weeks, since the night he’d come home for the party. After that, Sawyer and the team, with their XO stepping in for Rex, had gone on a month-long mission. When they’d returned home, Sawyer slept on base to finish his SITREP.

He knew Rex was still going through hell, being called in for debriefings about the capture. He wondered if Rex’s career was in jeopardy, but more than that, he was worried about Rex.

At first, Rex checked in by text. Sawyer wanted to hear his voice but knew that would upset both of them further. Although he wasn’t really sure Rex was upset at all, at least not about the fact that he wasn’t spending time with Sawyer.

“I know he’s being watched, but I also know he’s totally fucking avoiding me,” he told Jace now as he finished lunch at Jace’s house.

“Didn’t sound like he avoided you the night of the party.”

“That was sex.”

Jace nodded. “Sex is always easier than anything else. But you would’ve been more worried if he didn’t fuck you, am I right?”

“You just like hearing you’re right,” Sawyer mumbled, hating to admit that Jace had a point. “He wouldn’t talk much about it. Said he couldn’t.”

“Well, that’s partially true. But I’m guessing he figures it’s weird for you.”

Sawyer shrugged. “Weirder pretending it’s not happening.”

“Did you tell him that, or are you going to share shit he can’t possibly know now with me only?” Jace asked.

Sawyer threw a fork at him, and Jace ducked. The fork rattled in the wall, tongs embedded.