He tips his head back and laughs.
“No one can touch me—haven’t you figured that out yet, Shelby? God, it was so pathetic watching you scramble around for all these years, doing whatever Mommy Dearest asked. I mean, obviously it benefited me since I finally got to fuck you after all those years I spent wanting you, but still. Pathetic.”
He laughs again when Shelby darts out from around me. The only thing stopping me from punching him in the face is wrapping my arms around Shelby and holding her back from doing the same.
“He’s not worth it, Shelby,” I say quietly in her ear as she squirms and tries to fight my hold on her.
“I have to give that woman credit, though,” Landry muses, shoving his hands in his front pockets. “As weak as she was, she sure turned into quite the firecracker. I wanted to kill you and get you out of the picture permanently, but she convinced me sending you on deployment was a better idea. And it worked, too, until your deployment was almost up and I knew you’d come running back home to her. A few phone calls to the right people and voilà! Your unit heads off into the most dangerous, IED-infested area there is. Boom. No more Eli. You couldn’t just stay dead, could you?”
It’s Shelby’s turn to clutch at my arms and try to hold me in place, but it’s no use. As soon as he says those words, as soon as he mentions the explosion that killed my brothers, I’m charging across the room.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I can hear Shelby shouting my name, but all I can hear are the sounds of explosions and screams, all I can see is red, and all I can feel is rage. My hand wraps around his neck and I slam him into the wall at his back, getting right in his face.
“You killed my men,” I growl. “Did you have me taken hostage, too? Was my five years in hell the result of another phone call to the right people, you sick son of a bitch?”
I tighten my fingers around his neck and he reaches up to claw at my hand, choking out his words with a cocky smile on his face.
“That was just luck. But I did make sure to send them a nice hefty bonus to finish the job I started.”
Yanking him toward me, I shove as hard as I can and slam his back into the wall once more. I feel Shelby’s hands clutching to the back of my shirt, trying to pull me away, but I ignore her as I squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. The memories slowly start to flash through my mind—the scorching heat from the blast, the shrapnel and pieces of my brothers raining down on me, the ringing in my ears, the punches to the face, being dragged across the sand, blindfolded, kicked…the sounds, the smells, the pain, it surrounds me until it’s all I can do not to kill this man for being the one responsible for everything.
“Eli! He’s not worth it, Eli. Please, he’s not worth it.”
Shelby’s voice finally penetrates, repeating the words I’d said to her just a few seconds ago, and I slowly start to loosen my hold around Landry’s neck, his red face and bulging eyes still holding an air of satisfaction and arrogance even as he coughs and sputters and tries to drag in breaths.
“I’m not worth it?” he croaks, his hands rubbing the skin of his throat when I finally let go. “What about him? You’re actually going to choose him over me? A man who couldn’t even keep his best friend alive?”
Blood rushes through my ears and pain explodes behind my eyes. Images try to push their way to the front of my mind but I won’t let them. Not here. Not now. I’m not ready for this.
“He couldn’t even save his brother and you think he’s going to save you?” Landry shouts at Shelby, his eyes narrowing as he leans toward me. “Tell me, did Sergeant Edwards beg for you to help him right before they put a bullet in his brain?”
I stumble backward, shaking my head frantically back and forth. It sounds like Shelby is screaming from somewhere down a tunnel. I want to go to her, I need her to make this all better, but I can’t get to her. I can’t move. I can’t stop his words from penetrating and I can’t stop everything from hitting me all at once.
Rylan joking with Kat, but her never acknowledging him.
Kat asking me if I’d taken my meds anytime I spoke to him.
Rylan asking Paul a question and Paul not even looking in his direction.
Kat looking like she wanted to cry when I told her Rylan was moving in with me.
Rylan aiming the remote at the TV but never getting it to turn on.
Rylan with the same shaggy hair and beard.
Rylan never changing, never finding anything to do, never moving on.
“You need to tell Shelby what happened over there and let go. Just…let go.”
“I’ll leave when you don’t need me anymore.”
I squeeze my head in my hands and close my eyes, trying to make it go away. Go away, go away, go away. I’m not ready.
Shouting, the pounding of footsteps and gunfire sound from outside the room and I wonder just how many people they need to bring in here to kill two weak men who can barely move.
My hands are quickly shackled to a wall above my head right next to Rylan, my broken body groaning in protest. No matter what happens next, I will not give in. I was born a Marine and I will die a Marine.
“Ooh Rah,” we both whisper to each other, not breaking eye contact as a loud explosion shakes the walls, rattles our chests, and rains dirt and rocks down on us from the ceiling.
How much can a man take before he breaks?
I see one of our captors rush over to stand in front of Rylan, lifting his arm and aiming the gun right at his head.
I hear myself screaming, screaming, screaming, tugging as hard as I can on the chains, kicking my legs, doing whatever I can to make this asshole point his gun at me instead.
Rylan’s eyes never leave mine. He tells me it’s okay. He makes a joke that we all have to die sometime. He tells me never to stop fighting. He tells me to get my girl back and live a good life for both of us.
He stops telling me anything else when the gun explodes.
I can’t breathe. I try to scream, I try to fight, I try to kick and claw away from the nightmare that I don’t want to believe is real. I drop to the floor and curl into a ball, trying to make it all go away. It’s not real, it can’t be real.
I didn’t save him.
I couldn’t save him.
I can’t do this. I can’t handle this. I just want it all to go away.
Closing my eyes even tighter, I do what I can to make it all go away, but it’s no use.
I finally know how much a man can take before he breaks.
Chapter 29
Shelby
It’s been a week since the day in the studio when everything came crashing down. Seven days of crying, of worrying, of pacing the halls of the hospital, sleeping in a chair next to Eli’s bed and begging him to come back to me.
The doctor’s called it PTSD with a side of a psychotic break. I call it misery and guilt and a pain so deep that I don’t know how to fix it. For Eli or for myself. I didn’t know what to do when Landry said those words to Eli. I couldn’t stop screaming when he dropped to the ground, holding his head in his hands, whispering and chanting to himself under his breath.
I didn’t pay attention when Paul came running into the room, with the police right on his heels. I know he told me he called them when he heard all of the commotion, but I didn’t care. I didn’t get any satisfaction out of watching Landry shout and curse and being led out of the room in handcuffs. I didn’t care about anything but the broken man I knelt down next to on the floor, held in my arms, and tried to soothe with soft words and apologies.
Nothing made sense when the ambulance got there and strapped him to a gurney. Nothing made sense when he wouldn’t open his eyes at all during the ride to the hospital and just kept muttering to himself, “It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real.” I didn’t understand. I thought he was just in shock, reliving his nightmare all over again, but that was far from the truth. So far from it that I hate myself and I blame myself for not realizing it sooner, for not pushing him to talk more, fo
r not wondering why we never talked about something so important.
Being distracted with each other always helped us…until it didn’t.
Nothing made sense, I didn’t understand, and there was nothing I could do but sit by his side and wait for him to wake up and finally talk to me about what we should have talked about weeks ago.
Kat was a little shocked to see me at the hospital when she arrived with her husband, but the shock quickly switched to worry for her brother when after a few days, he still hadn’t opened his eyes. The two of us kept a quiet vigil next to his beg, telling him we loved him, telling him we were sorry, and saying whatever we could to bring him back, but nothing worked. I blamed the doctors for doing nothing but pumping him full of drugs, but I had no idea what else they could do for him in a situation like this. They said we needed to give his mind time to rest and heal. I just wanted him to wake up and smile at me and tell me everything would be okay. That he would be okay. I couldn’t stand sitting by his bed day after day, seeing him so still and small when he’d always been larger than life to me. I wanted to curl up into a ball and cry for him, but I knew that wasn’t what he needed. He needed me to be strong and to fight for him when he couldn’t do it himself.
“Shelby, can I talk to you for a minute?” Kat asks softly, nodding her head in the direction of the door, indicating that she wants to leave the room.
I nod, standing up from my chair to lean over Eli and kiss his cheek.
“I love you. I’m not going anywhere,” I whisper into his ear, smoothing his hair off his forehead before I join Kat in the doorway.
We walk silently through the halls to the elevator and down to the first floor to the cafeteria. We both get coffee and she leads us to a table over by the window. Kat and I had just spent seven days and nights together, but we’d never said more than a few words to each other when one of us would leave to grab food, something to drink, or go to the bathroom. She’d sent her husband out to my place to grab extra clothes when I refused to leave Eli’s side. She introduced me to the doctors when they’d come in to talk to her, but we’d never discussed my reasons for being there. I fell in love with her immediately when she never questioned me or asked me to leave, quietly accepting that it would require a force of nature to take me away from Eli now.
“He never told me about the two of you,” she starts, wrapping her hands around the cardboard cup to warm them. “He never told me about a lot of things, I guess.”
She looks down at her coffee sadly and I reach across the table and grab one of her hands, giving it a soft squeeze.
“The two of us…it’s a long story. One that started six years ago. You were away at college then, and now…it just happened so fast.”
She nods her head in understanding, squeezing my hand right back.
“You love him.”
It’s a statement, not a question.
“Yes,” I whisper. “Always.”
She nods again and sighs.
“I should have pushed him more to talk to me. Every time I tried, he’d smile and tell me he was fine. I knew he wasn’t fine. I knew every time he talked to Rylan like he was sitting right next to him, or made plans to move him into his new place, that he wasn’t fine, but I thought he just needed time. I thought he would eventually realize what he was doing.”
She looks up at me when I say nothing and sees the confused, questioning look on my face.
“Did he ever mention Rylan when he was with you?”
I think about all the time we spent together, doing everything but talk about important things. He spoke to me about meeting with a therapist and he briefly discussed the five years he was held captive, but he never mentioned Rylan. Never once talked about the best friend he went to war with, that he watched die right in front of him.
“Never,” I tell her. “I knew he’d died when they were over there, it was all over the news when Eli was first rescued. I guess I just thought it was too painful for him to talk about, and like you, I thought he just needed time.”
I watch as Kat’s eyes fill with tears, and my own vision gets cloudy.
“The first day he was back in Charleston and we brought him home to live with us, I was making dinner and I heard him tell someone to get their feet off the coffee table and stop being such a slob,” Kat tells me. “Daniel had run out to the store and took our daughter with him, and when I asked Eli who he was talking to, he said it so quickly, so naturally, and so easily, “I’m talking to Rylan, obviously.”
Kat laughs sadly through her tears and shakes her head. “I thought he was kidding at first and it shocked me speechless. Until he did it again. And again, and again. Every day, he’d talk to Rylan or talk about him like he was standing right there next to him. Rylan was like a brother to me, too, and I missed him, but I didn’t go through the things with him that Eli did. I didn’t know what he needed to do to cope and grieve so I let it go. I shouldn’t have let it go.”
I move my hand from Kat’s to wipe away the tears that started to fall down my cheeks when she spoke. He was so broken, so hurting, and I had no idea. Why didn’t he ever do any of these things when he was with me? Was he so busy dealing with my drama and trying to put me back together that he didn’t have time to process anything, didn’t have time to heal or grieve or let go of the best friend he was forced to watch die right next to him?
How could I have been so selfish? When I looked at him, all I saw was strength and determination and I wanted that so much for myself that I let him give it to me. I let him build me up when, all along, he was crumbling inside. He gave me everything he had and left nothing for himself.
“Whenever he spoke to Rylan, I would quietly ask him if he’d taken his medication,” Kat continues. “The doctors had him on all kinds of things for depression and anxiety and I just thought maybe he wasn’t taking them or he’d skipped a dose. I was just so happy to have him back that I didn’t want to upset him. I didn’t want to hurt him.”
Her reasoning is the same one I gave myself. I didn’t want to force him to talk if he wasn’t ready. He’d been through so much and I just wanted him to be happy.
“I recognized you when I first got to the hospital,” she suddenly says, giving me a small smile. “From the night he was deployed. I was home on break and you stopped by the apartment, do you remember?”
I want to laugh and cry all at the same time. I’m strangely happy that she remembered me and it was probably the initial reason she didn’t immediately kick me out of Eli’s room, but I hate thinking about that night.
“Yes,” I reply softly. “You gave me a letter from him.”
She nods, her smile getting wider.
“I’m such an idiot. When you told me your last name, I knew it was from the stables he worked at and I thought it was a resignation letter or something,” she laughs. “It was a love letter, wasn’t it? I had a mushy love letter from my brother in my hand and I didn’t even read it.”
I can’t help but laugh right along with her even though the memories of that night, reading his words, losing control of the car, losing my dreams…it all tries to overwhelm me. There’s something about her laugh, though, so kind and genuine that I can do nothing but join in.
“Not exactly,” I admit. “He was kind of a jerk in that letter.”
She purses her lips and shakes her head.
“Yep, that sounds more like my brother.”
We laugh together again and I try not to feel guilty that I’m sitting here laughing and smiling when Eli is upstairs fighting with his grief and his fractured mind. Kat makes it easy to relax for a little while and let go of the worry.
“You’ll be happy to know that he more than made up for being a jerk. I have a whole shoe box filled with mushy love letters.”
She claps her hands together like a toddler and I laugh louder.
“Mushy love letters that you will absolutely let me read one of these days so I can tease him, right?” she asks.
“I don’t kno
w, how horrible was he to you when you were growing up?” I barter, taking a sip of my coffee.
“Are you kidding me? He was the worst. Anytime a guy came to pick me up for a date, Eli would sit right next to him on the couch, put his arm around the guy, and tell him he knew fifty different ways to kill a man and hide the dead body,” she tells me with a roll of her eyes. “And don’t even get me started on Rylan.”
Kat falters when she says his name, but I can tell it feels good for her to talk about him and remember him. She spent all this time worrying about Eli and not being able to grieve for Rylan on her own and I know she needs this.
“Did you know he lived with us?” she asks.
I nod my head, remembering when I came home from college and spent the first few days flirting with Rylan just to make Eli jealous. We only spoke a handful of times, but he was definitely a talker. I knew his entire life story five seconds after meeting him. After Eli and I got together that summer, he confirmed what Rylan had told me, and even though he was pissed about the whole flirting thing, I could see every time he talked about his friend how much he cared about him.
“So, imagine being a teenager and having not one, but two overprotective brothers trying to scare away your dates,” Kat says with a roll of her eyes. “It was like good-cop, bad-cop, but they forgot who should be which and they both decided to be the bad cop. My prom date senior year dropped me off five blocks from our apartment because he was sure Eli and Rylan were waiting up with shotguns in their hands.”
We share another laugh, both of us pausing to drink more of our coffee. I’m jealous of what she had growing up and I want to cry at the unfairness of it all. She had two men in her life, and they all cared so much about each other. I can’t imagine how much she must be hurting right now losing one of them, and not knowing if the other will ever be okay.
“I wish I’d had something like that.”
She cocks her head as she looks at me.