Chapter 2 The Fracture #2
Cursed with watching everyone I loved die, I’d pushed these friends so far I couldn’t truly call them friends anymore, but both of them were good men. Great men. Men worth dying for, surely.
Maybe what I’d just agreed to with the Blood Colonel would save their lives.
I seized a faded magazine from the coffee table to avoid Adam’s stare. “I can’t believe they used to care about this bullshit.” I glared at a comparison of two women wearing the same dress—an entire page dedicated to who looked better.
What a fucking joke.
“These are the things you worry about when you have nothing to worry about,” Devon said.
“Well.” I threw the magazine back onto the table. “Both of those women are probably dead now. Wonder who wears that better.”
Adam snorted and returned to his guitar. “I found some chocolate on a raid the other day, Soph. You take my KP duty and I’ll give it to you.”
“No deal,” I said. “Last time you stole me chocolate, it was chalky and terrible.”
He faux-gasped. “The things I had to do to get that chocolate!”
I forced a laugh. We’d all done terrible things for scraps of information or supplies. Our resistance was built on theft. Even our soldiers were stolen from the NAO—Americans who refused to bow.
In the early days of the war, the NAO’s military was focused on the Security Restoration Campaign in Canada.
During that time, renegade bands of the US forces turned against the new government and joined the rebellion, forcing the Commander to divide his military.
He called troops inland to fight the rebels, strengthening the NSF into a true hunting force.
In a speech made over our only remaining television network, Commander Haynes called the rebel forces weaponized defiance, and the phrase took fire.
Defiance.
Soldiers like Adam flocked to us to fight. To defy.
After the attacks on our peaceful neighbor, worldwide panic set in. Within days, Europe sent troops to bolster Canada’s tiny military and neutralized our overseas bases. In a week, cyber-attacks and EMPs took down our internet and power.
World war erupted, everything destabilized, and for a scary few weeks, I was certain it would all end in a nuclear holocaust.
But that never happened.
Instead, information disappeared, trade was disrupted, and the civil war became our entire lives. We lost access to medicines. To gas. To food.
Including chocolate—my favorite.
I’d done many things for chocolate, but never anything like what I suspected Lucas Scott would want from me. At once, I succumbed to thoughts of those things—being choked, bent over in humiliation, forced to beg for it until he gave me the information I needed.
It’s your turn to suffer, I thought. You deserve this.
I had three days to prepare and no idea how to do it. Maybe I should try to make myself as ugly as possible. Would it anger him to receive an unattractive, unkempt woman? Would he punish me for it?
Probably, since he was a Hunter specifically requesting a woman.
Maybe he’d expect me to be flirty and accommodating, like an escort. Did I know how to do that? I’d been sleeping with only one person for the last year, and Jayden was only a fuck buddy, someone to relieve the stress. I didn’t flirt with him.
Well, if Lucas Scott was expecting skill, then fuck him. He’d be disappointed and could request someone else.
Still, cold shivers of dread chased themselves down my spine and goosebumps rose across my body. I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t ready.
I couldn’t do it, could I?
I waffled back and forth between duty and desire, pitting selfishness against self-sacrifice.
An off-key twang of Adam’s guitar jolted me from my thoughts when the front door of headquarters banged open, spilling chaos into the house. I locked eyes with him before we both raced downstairs at the noise, shouts preceding carnage as bleeding bodies were dragged inside.
Adam and Devon scurried to help while the rest of the medic team flooded in.
Springing into action, I helped transport the injured soldiers to the hospital wing.
It filled quickly. Too quickly. So many bodies and too few ways to help.
I pressed both hands against the blood spurting from a crossbow injury to a man’s chest, trying to stop the bleeding with pressure and prayer.
He gasped for oxygen. The bolt rose and fell with each breath.
“Look at me,” I said.
His chest heaved.
I glanced at his dog tags. “Aiden, look at me!”
His brown eyes met mine.
“You’re going to be okay. Alright?”
We both knew he wouldn’t.
“Just do it!” he hissed between breaths.
No.
I didn’t want to.
If I ripped the bolt from his chest, his time spent in agony would shorten with his life. We had no resources to save him from an injury like this. No surgeries. No blood. Nothing. This was the way of things.
But choosing to take his life instead of letting it end naturally…
“Do it!” he demanded.
Obeying his wishes, my shaking hands closed around the shaft, and I yanked it from his chest. Two more gasps, and his muscles relaxed as he bled out into his chest cavity. His eyes went glassy, and he was gone.
I sat back, staring at his slack face. Handsome. Young.
What did it say about me as a human that it had grown easier to watch them die?
A hand squeezed my shoulder in passing. I didn’t bother to check who it belonged to.
The compassionate touch was familiar. Dr. Grayson had been our lead physician since the beginning.
He always offered comfort when one of us lost a patient, even when he was rushing to save one himself.
His partner—and my friend—Zara Akbari did the same.
Hours flew by in minutes, and when I finally looked up from my last patient, now stabilized, Dr. Grayson and Dr. Akbari sat beside each other, heads in their hands.
A pang pierced my chest as I made my way to them.
It had become a common sight, the two of them mourning those we couldn’t save. My mentors, losing hope.
“What’s the final count?” I asked Zara.
“Twenty-seven soldiers,” she whispered, exhaustion and grief spilling from her hunched posture. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, but the sorrow had broken her face into fragments—splotched cheeks, creased brow, sad little diamonds that dripped from her eyes and sparkled in the light.
“What happened?” I asked her.
Before she could answer, a survivor with burns across her face and arms spoke up from her bed. “We were sent to attack what we thought was a Hunter center of operations, but it was a decoy. We were the only ones who escaped. Left fifty behind.”
Zara and I exchanged pained glances.
“This world is like the devil’s playground,” she whispered. “Death lives in every shadow.”
I’d joined the war effort with the belief that I was doing the right thing, that good would always triumph.
But that was sheer naivety. Good and evil didn’t exist. There was only strength and weakness, and the NAO retained the might of what used to be the United States.
We were just a rebel band of do-gooders fighting the most powerful empire of all time.
We needed intel. Good intel. Not the stuff that would send soldiers uselessly into the line of fire, but information that would save thousands.
A small sacrifice on my part could turn the tides of this war. People died today to fight the NAO. To consider backing out of my deal with the Blood Colonel was unforgivably selfish.
So I wouldn’t.