Chapter Four #2
Marsh blinked. “What the hell was that?”
Eli smiled. “It’s nice to know you don’t know everything.”
Marsh leaned forward, grinning. “Challenge accepted. I’ll figure it out, program it in. You’ve clearly got a knack for it. Might as well make use of that mouth for something good.”
Eli raised an eyebrow. “That a tech joke or a flirt?”
Marsh grinned wider. “A little bit of both.”
They laughed, the room lighter now, and for the first time in a long while, Marsh felt a little less broken and a lot more alive.
Then Eli shifted gears. “What do you miss the most?”
Marsh blinked. “What?”
“From before. What do you miss?”
Marsh didn’t answer right away. His fingers fidgeted in his lap, twisting the hem of his sleeve.
“Running,” he said finally. “Fast. Full-out sprinting. Used to run five miles a day. Felt like flying.”
Eli nodded. “What do you feel now?”
Marsh’s jaw tensed. “Heavy.” He stared down at the floor, voice low. “Like I’m dragging my whole past behind me, and every step just makes it heavier.”
Eli let the silence stretch again, soft and open.
“I think you’ve been dragging more than your past,” he said gently.
Marsh looked up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I think you’re carrying everyone’s grief. Yours. The team’s. Like you think if you suffer enough, it’ll balance the scales. I think you feel like you’ve let the team down”
Marsh’s throat worked. “You don’t know me.”
“No,” Eli said. “But I see you.”
That cracked something. Marsh leaned forward, elbows on knees, head in his hands. “I don’t want to be broken.”
“You’re not,” Eli said almost harshly, clearly dismissing that opinion. “You’re hurt. That’s different.”
Another beat of silence. Then Marsh looked up. “You always talk like that to your clients?”
Eli smirked at him. “Only to the ones I really want to help—and kiss.”
There was a pause. A shift in the air.
Then Marsh reached forward, gripped Eli’s hands and pulled him forward. Eli came willingly, straddling Marsh’s lap like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Their mouths crashed together—hot, desperate, real.
Marsh’s hands found Eli’s nape, holding him still while he tilted his own head to find the perfect angle and devoured the man’s mouth.
Eli’s hands gripped Marsh’s shoulders, going pliant beneath Marsh’s hands, groaning the sexist sound Marsh had ever heard.
It wasn’t sweet.
It wasn’t careful.
It was need, raw and sudden, and when they finally broke apart, they were both breathing hard.
Eli grinned. “That was ... yeah.”
Marsh chuckled, dazed. “You’re dangerous.”
Eli kissed his cheek and stood, heading for the back of the room. “I’ll grab us some water. Stay put.”
Marsh watched him go. Watched the sway of his hips and the easy way he moved.
And then it hit him.
Eli had been in his lap. Straddling him. And not once—not once—had Marsh thought about his missing leg. About the weight. The balance. The loss.
It hadn’t mattered.
He’d felt whole.
Just a man, holding a man he wanted like nothing before, just wanting, and being wanted.
Marsh leaned back in the chair, heart pounding.
Maybe he could do this.
Maybe this was what healing looked like.
****
The Colonel leaned back in the leather seat of the private car, the hum of the engine barely audible beneath the insulated interior.
The driver said nothing—he’d been well paid for silence and discretion.
Outside, the trees of rural Wyoming sped past in a blur of green and gold.
A tablet rested on the Colonel’s knee, its screen glowing softly in the dim light.
The profile on display was sparse. Frustratingly so. Redacted documents. Missing medical reports. Interviews that had been sealed or scrubbed. But the name was there, clear and in bold at the top.
Elias Carmino.
Someone had run a search on his boy, and the Colonel, who had an entire tech team scouring all communication channels for anything related to him had picked it up.
And followed the thread. Sure, it had been frustratingly hard to follow, with some pretty impressive firewalls holding a few things back, but he got there in the end, and he would get his man in the end as well.
Then another chime as more information came in.
The Colonel’s lip curled. So that was where he’d run to.
Obsidian Ridge. That little fortress masquerading as a training and tech facility up in the mountains.
Clever. Very clever. Oh, he had heard about the facility and knew a lot about Lieutenant Anton Bateman, the head of the ill-fated misfits known as the Pathfinders.
That cocky little upstart had embarrassed him on more than one occasion in the past.
He swiped a thumb across the screen, flicking through images—passport photo, license scan, a grainy shot from a Cheyenne gas station two days ago. He paused on the last one. Eli, mid-step, coffee in one hand, head tilted like he’d heard something behind him.
Still looking over his shoulder. Good. He should be.
The Colonel tapped the side of the tablet. “Route recalculated?” he asked the driver.
The driver answered straight away. “Yes, sir. Pinedale. Located an hour’s drive northeast of Obsidian Ridge. Arrival in under four hours.”
He leaned back and closed his eyes, the tablet still resting in his hand.
A smile touched his lips, thin and humorless.
They would set themselves up in Pinedale and start to build the picture of a man with mental health issues, who needed help.
A man who couldn’t be trusted to make his own decisions, that perhaps, he had been coerced to come to Obsidian Ridge and that he was there against his will.
The colonel would set the scene properly.
“Time to bring my boy home.”