Dead Man’s Hand (Snakes & Daggers #3)

Chapter One

RYDER

I’m staring at the blood soaking through the bandage on my hand.

It’s seeped along the fold of my palm, tracing the lifeline beneath the wrap, black in the desert light that strips everything of its color.

It’s from a deep slice where the blade slipped while cutting paracord an hour ago.

It should throb, but I feel nothing except this tremendous, terrifying calm.

“She’s dead,” my uncle is saying, his voice cutting in and out on the sat phone, stuttering with delays. Across the room, my platoon sergeant watches me, shoulders square but eyes soft with a pity that tells me he already knows what this call is about.

“You need to come home, son. For the funeral.”

My mother is resting, my uncle Rob tells me. It’s been a shock for her.

I stare at my hand, noticing the fine shimmer of sand sticking to the edges of the dried blood.

“Home?” I repeat. The platoon’s running lean. Half our guys are sick, two are on rotation out at the wire, and the idea of getting on a plane while they stay here feels backward and obscene. People die here.

I look up at the platoon sergeant, and he nods.

“The funeral is on Sunday,” Rob says, ignoring my question.

The funeral. But she’s just a kid.

“She was fine,” I hear myself say, although she wasn’t, really. I just don’t know how to come to terms with this. Mom had been telling me that she was worried. Late nights, the boyfriend with the bike, dropping out of school. I said I’d talk to her, but Samantha was never home when I called.

Rob clears his throat and keeps talking, but I can barely hear him over the pressure building behind my eyes, the wordless scream that’s whistling between my ears. “The Sunset Motel…overdose…”

What would a kid be doing at a motel?

Pictures of Samantha run through my head like a carousel, spinning faster and faster: riding her pink Huffy with the streamers, knees scabbed from crawling on the grass; stormy nights when she crawled into my bed because Mom was working late; the county-fair goldfish she made me eulogize when it died.

The last image is of a scrawny teenager in a hoodie waving at the bus, pretending she wasn’t crying.

The pictures keep looping, the colors bleaching out until there’s nothing left but white. Sunlight so bright it hurts.

No—moonlight.

I blink, recentering myself, and the memory recedes.

The desert’s gone. The air is different. Damp instead of dust.

The ringing in my ear fades, replaced by the slow slap of water against rock and the creak of the rocking chair beneath me. A breath, and I’m not nineteen anymore. I’m thirty-six, on a porch miles and years away from Kandahar.

My hand is in a fist, fingers moving over the thin ridge of a scar in my palm.

And Max is beside me.