Chapter 13 Mine
Mine
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president…
— THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Yanking up Lucas’s sleeve the next week, a smile tugged at my mouth. The burn was healing well. “You did as I said!”
“Yes, as I continue to not be an idiot, I did tend to my injury.”
The sarcasm was easy to ignore while I shed the infuriatingly warm clothes he made me wear. Taking off my outer layers no longer intimidated me. Perhaps I was stupid to trust him, but if he ever attacked, I’d lose anyway. Might as well be comfortable in the meantime.
I faced him that night with the same vigor as usual.
As time passed, my discomfort with him faded.
I grew familiar with his body in a way I had with no other man, not even Jayden.
Not intimate per se, but I learned the shape of him.
I memorized how he moved. I’d begun to decode the mysterious colors in his eyes.
Not only that, but I luxuriated in the protection my name provided me.
His sister was Sophia, and she had died. I was Sophia, and I was still alive.
I wasn’t afraid to exploit that psychological advantage to the edge of his sanity. He wanted me alive. The power dynamic had shifted just slightly in my favor, and we both knew it.
But still…
Why had he willingly handed over such a telling truth?
That question festered, and I knew I’d never get the answer.
Around the summer solstice, I finally convinced him to play me the piano.
He avoided and diverted me every other week, but I was tenacious.
I needed to see his hands do something other than hurt or kill things.
He sat at the piano only because I dragged him into the room and forced him onto the bench. Back straight, he stared daggers at me.
I leaned my elbows on the piano’s lid. “You can either play for me now, or listen to me complain every week until you do.”
“Your stubbornness is going to get you killed someday,” he said with the barest shred of humor.
I pointed at the keys. “I wrestle with you for you. You will play for me.”
He glanced at the ceiling. Taking a deep breath and donning a victimized expression, he set his hands to the keys, and played—
Chopsticks.
“Do it right!” I flicked his ear. He glared at my hand, and it occurred to me that he had killed people for lesser slights. “Please?” I added in a small voice.
After a moment, he replaced his hands on the keys, and out poured the most melodic, haunting song I’d ever heard, one that pulled his fingers up and down the keyboard like a wave.
Fascinated, I followed his hands.
Practiced. Scarred. Talented.
And it occurred to me… This music was beautiful.
These hands were capable of great things.
If he wanted, he could probably paint masterpieces or skillfully operate on the most delicate structures in the human body.
Sadness crept over my skin with prickles and goosebumps as I ruminated over the horrors he’d chosen to create with them instead.
The song curled about me, stirring something deep inside.
Something evocative—almost graphic—in its hopelessness.
It crooned my ruin until tears pricked my eyes.
When he finished, he peered at me with nothing other than a raised eyebrow. I cleared my throat and wiped away the rebellious tear, hoping he’d mistaken it for something else.
“I wrote that for Sophie,” he murmured into the silence.
My mind conjured an image of a younger Lucas playing songs for the enjoyment of his little sister, and a spark of heat erupted in my chest, reminding me of the warmth he’d buried in my cheek.
“You…wrote that?” What emotions did Lucas keep hidden behind his tiny smirks and aquamarine eyes? Powerful ones, if that song was any indication.
His hands spread over the keys, but he didn’t play any of them. “Before she died, obviously. She—” He cleared his throat. “She called it her sad girl song.”
I fought the urge to reach for him. His grief gleamed in the barely visible cracks and crevices he couldn’t hide. It united us, that sadness. Grief was something I could relate to. It was universal. This war had taken from all of us. I’d lost everything.
But losing everything meant I had nothing left to fight for. He was still fighting, which meant that, deep down, Lucas Scott still had a shred of optimism.
I wondered where he’d gotten it.
I wondered if he’d share.
In the following weeks, I distracted myself in the hospital wing or the quarantine house—busy, bloody hands tending wounds on autopilot. As one of the quickest, I treated a lot of the serious injuries.
Lieutenant Isaac Johnson—Devon’s boyfriend—was brought in one afternoon with a gunshot wound near his collarbone. I was the first to assess him, shushing Devon’s panicked pleas so I could concentrate.
“You are a lucky son of a bitch,” I said, smiling at the location. “It missed your chest cavity, and there’s an exit wound.”
He groaned out a laugh. “Doesn’t feel lucky.”
Dr. Grayson stopped by, listened to my assessment, then let me treat him. After I’d cleaned the wound and dosed him with pain meds, the tension in his body eased.
“Damn, girl,” he said after I finished tying his sutures. “I barely felt that.”
Clipping the remaining thread, I smiled. “Fast hands.”
At first, I’d been a hesitant medic, but after mere weeks in the hospital wing I’d realized that no amount of attention I gave a wound could make it worse. Now, I sped through it all just like Dr. Grayson and his years of experience as an army physician taught me.
Isaac gripped my hand. “Thank you.”
Dev hugged me, and they left after a few hours, Isaac’s arm around Dev’s shoulders. Pride welled in me as I turned to the next patient.
A while later, a woman was escorted into the hospital wing, shaking and half-dressed. Zara and I exchanged knowing glances. With a creased brow, she took a paper bag from our supply closet before leading the woman to a private exam area.
“What’s that?” I ask Dr. Grayson on my first day as a medic, pointing to a stock of paper bags in the top corner.
His gaze clouds over. “Ah, yes.” He takes one from the shelf and hands it to me. Inside are a few pills, two vials, and a single foil packet that stares up at me with the words hCG Rapid Test Device (urine).
I swallow.
“It’s a rape kit,” he says unnecessarily.
“How often are you handing these out?” I whisper.
“More often than I like to talk about. If you need to distribute one, ask if they want an exam. Sometimes there’s tearing.”
Swallowing, I shoved that memory away to focus on my task—the next injury to patch up.
As days passed, the stories from the injured soldiers painted a darker picture of the outside world than even I experienced in my time as a soldier. Yes, Hunters were cruel and awful, but the Defiance response bordered on merciless.
In early July, I treated an acid burn on a soldier whose hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
He said his unit had come across a group of children near a combat area and tried to move them away from danger.
A throng of Hunter women attacked with squirt guns full of some caustic substance, and the soldiers had been forced to retaliate.
He covered his eyes with one trembling hand. “I killed two of them. Someone else got the others. In front of the children.”
A smattering of memories from my days as a foot soldier crossed my mind, and I shied away from the fear and hopelessness in them. I touched his hand. “They hurt you. What else were you supposed to do?”
“I could have—I don’t know—I could have knocked them out. They kept spraying. Got Phelim in the face. He might be blind now. But they didn’t want us touching the kids, even though we were trying to help. Didn’t want us near them. Like we were dirty.”
After thorough irrigation, I dressed his acid burns with ointment and gauze, ignoring the two silent tears that crawled down his cheek.
“The world’s gone mad around us,” I whispered, “but we’re going to win this.” Unsure whether I believed my own words, I couldn’t look him in the eye.
A bitter scoff answered me. “And then what? The country’s decimated. Nothing will ever be the same.”
“We’ll—we’ll rebuild it. Better than it was.”
He rolled his eyes.
I found his body among the dead brought back from a mission two weeks later. I lifted his dog tag.
MORIN
CARTER P.
739 80 2831
B NEG
PROTESTANT
Hands shaking, I dropped it back onto his chest. The sight of him motionless sent me into a tailspin. The panic attack slammed into me like a sheet of glass, shattering everywhere as I fell through it. I collapsed in my bedroom, praying for air.
Tall trees.
Warm rain.
Scent of cypress.
It didn’t help.
I curled in on myself on the floor and bawled.
That place inside my heart where sadness resided had expanded to touch every nerve, every cell, squeezing the life out of me. The pain of being the one left behind ached like a deep bruise. Why was I special? Why hadn’t I been the one to die? When would it be my turn?
Lucas went easy on me that night, but distracted and upset, I still lost. Afterward, as I reached for the door to leave, he grabbed my wrist. “You okay, Sophia?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. But are you okay to ride home?”
“It’s only a five-minute ride.”
His voice grew terse. “A lot can happen in five minutes.”
I stared at his throat, afraid I’d cry again if I said anything.
He didn’t let me go. His focus drilled into my face for a long, silent moment. “I need you alive.”
I couldn’t help my gaze as it strayed to his eyes.
Heat from the long fingers around my wrist spread up my arm.
He didn’t care about anyone else’s life, not even his own, but he cared about mine.
I opened my mouth, but words stuck in my aching throat.
When it finally escaped, it was barely more than a whisper, a hope that he would give me the truth. “Why?”