Chapter 1
Gage
Isat straight up in bed, panting, my heart racing out of control.
The adrenaline wasn’t from fear but from the rage coursing through my veins.
My hands shook as I brought them up to run over my face.
I could feel the scrape of two-day-old stubble against my palms as I took in deep, ragged breaths in an attempt to calm my nerves and steady my heartbeat.
After a long moment, I swung my legs over the side of the bed, then glanced over my shoulder to see if I had disturbed Ry.
With a sigh, I noticed that he wasn’t even there.
All three of us had demons that came about from our time in the military.
Yeah, the things that we had seen and done were horrific and could cause nightmares in anybody, but it affected us a little harder than most.
Any soldier would be affected by their time at war in the military. I’d never downplay anybody’s PTSD. Every person’s experience was their own, and you couldn’t gauge pain and suffering—mental or physical—by one single guidebook.
Ry had different demons than I did. Ry’s pain stemmed from a bit of survivor’s guilt.
He and Dante were the only survivors of the roadside bomb that took out the rest of our team as I watched from a tower in the distance.
What made it doubly worse for him was that he walked away without a single scratch.
Dante lost a leg and ended up with horrific burns that marked a quarter of his body.
I knew his nightmares replayed for him that moment over and over.
The nightmares included the time he thought that he was going to lose Dante.
When you hold your best friend’s severed leg in your hand and your only goal is to stop the arterial bleeding, it’s something that replays in your mind over and over.
He’s never said it, but I know that he’s always wondered if there were any other of our teammates that he might’ve been able to save that day.
When he chose to save Dante over everyone else.
Dante’s demons were obvious. It didn’t take a psychologist to figure out why he had nightmares.
But what hurt the most when it came to my friend was the way he shut off from life as if he had actually died that day.
It wasn’t even the loss of his leg that had caused the shutdown of emotions.
He had scars that covered his left arm and face, and he had lost a limb.
But the way the woman that he loved, who he thought was waiting for him while he was deployed, fighting in a war that wasn’t ours, had walked into his hospital room.
Once we got stateside, his ex-fiancée looked at him, not even with disgust, which he probably could have easily hated her for.
It was that she looked at him with pity.
As she stood there next to his bed, her hand trembled as it covered a belly rounded with a baby that couldn’t possibly be his.
We’d been gone for ten months at the point of the roadside bomb attack.
He then spent another month recovering in a military hospital before she came to visit.
The hand resting over her large baby bump glittered with a diamond ring on her finger.
It hadn’t been the one Dante had placed there the night before we’d boarded the plane.
I knew it had broken something inside him.
There was a piece of his soul she stole that he would never get back.
I had a twisted mind, one I wouldn’t deny, but if that woman were to stand in front of me at this very moment, I didn’t think I’d be able to hold myself back from literally wringing the life out of her.
I’d never hurt or killed a woman before, but Dante’s ex was one I’d make an exception for.
I put my elbows on my knees and hunched over, continuing to take deep breaths, trying to banish my own demons from my memory.
I knew it was easier said than done. It had been three years since we walked away with mental and physical scars.
We left the military with honors. Dante with a purple heart, Ry and I with a bronze star.
In my dreams, I saw every victim that I couldn’t save and every monster that I couldn’t kill.
So many atrocities witnessed through the lens of a scope.
So many times I had radioed in to my superiors, asking, begging for permission to take out an inhuman monster, and every single time I was told no.
The soldier in me understood. By using a sniper rifle to end the life of one man, I could have put my entire team in danger as they did their mission.
But after witnessing so much filth through my rifle lens, the sorrow I felt began to be overshadowed by pure, unadulterated rage.
Those women and sometimes children were horrifically abused with no one to stand for them, no one to protect them. All I could do was bear witness.
After the roadside bomb, all three of us were discharged from the military.
I brought the two men I cared about in different ways home with me to Texas.
Ryu because I loved him, and Dante because he was my brother in spirit, even if it wasn’t in blood.
I knew that Dante needed a home and a family, people who would support him and care about him.
People who wouldn’t turn their backs on him.
Every single day, I searched for a spark of life to come back into him, back into his eyes.
Dante’s eyes that had gone dead the moment his ex-fiancée walked out of his hospital room, pregnant with another man’s baby, and another man’s ring on her finger.
From the moment I returned, I searched out my biological dad.
I drove straight to his construction company and dropped into the chair across from his desk.
He took one look at me, read the rage in my heart, and nodded in understanding.
I knew the one person in the world who would understand what I was going through, but also have the answers I needed.
My dad had witnessed too much when he was a kid to walk away without his own demons. The pain and the rage had become so fierce in him that he either became the monster he hated or learned how to become the monster who killed the other monsters. I needed that knowledge.
Right there in that chair, I broke down for the first and last time, telling him everything.
Everything I had seen and the way I felt.
From that moment on, once the tears dried, my dad guided me.
He taught me everything he knew, and I took his lessons to heart, knowing that, in his experience, he had become the monster other monsters feared.
In more than 30 years, he’d never come under suspicion.
But he also had help. Help from my other dad, who was a homicide detective.
Working at a police station, he had information about bad men, ones who hurt their wives and children.
It helped that our family ran a ranch, and were more than happy to provide a way to dispose of bodies.
After taking me under his wing and teaching me everything he knew, it provided an outlet to my rage until, instead of festering and boiling inside of me, it merely simmered under the surface. Deep underneath, where I was able to finally function as a normal human being again.
When my uncle passed away, my aunt gave me the ranch, which provided another purpose. My days were no longer listless, hoping for a new monster to kill; instead, I had land to tend and animals that relied on me.
I had never seen myself as a rancher growing up.
I had spent time with my aunt and uncle, and I’d ridden their horses.
My siblings and I played in their lake and fed their goats.
But I never imagined myself taking over one day.
I suppose I hadn’t thought further than the military.
The military had always been my goal. I wanted to have a purpose, to do good, and serve my country.
Instead, I left disillusioned and full of hate.
Looking at the clock, I saw that my alarm would be going off in about 30 minutes. There was no sense in attempting to go back to sleep. Instead, I stood up from the edge of the mattress and reached over for a pair of sweatpants. After sliding them on, I headed outside, knowing where I’d find Ry.
I slid open the glass door and stepped out onto the patio that overlooked the backyard.
There, surrounded by a tall metal gate and fence made of twisted black iron, was the swimming pool that my aunt had begged my uncle for about ten years ago to replace the above ground one that they’d had since I could remember.
My uncle had grumbled about the expense and the work it would take to build the giant pool my aunt dreamed of, but he never hesitated to give her what she wanted.
That woman had been his life. Whenever he heard about something she wanted that saw in town, he made sure to get it for her.
I watched the figure gliding through the pool, his strong arms slicing through the water, propelling himself forward. He’d likely already done at least twenty laps in an attempt to outrun the nightmares. Ry was a beautiful man. Tall, slender, muscular. Strength was hidden underneath his slim build.
I met Ryu Nakamura in basic training. At first, we had just been friends.
The more time we spent together, the more the feelings grew between us.
After we graduated, we moved on to AIT. To our surprise and delight, our advanced individual training led us both to the same place again.
At the time, I hadn’t been with anybody, male or female.
There hadn’t been anyone from my hometown whom I was attracted to or respected enough to want that type of relationship.
Ry had already had a couple of girlfriends and had even had a boyfriend once that he kept hidden from his family, knowing that they wouldn’t approve.