23 - Dog
The first thing that hit him wasn’t the pain; it was the smell. Antiseptic, floor wax, and the stale, recycled air of a high-tier surgical ward. It was a smell he knew intimately as a medic, but one he loathed as a patient.
Barkley “Dog” Berkshire the Fourth opened his eyes, and the world was a blur of fluorescent white. His head felt like it had been stuffed with wet wool: anesthesia, the heavy-duty kind. He tried to shift, to sit up, and that’s when the reality of the situation crashed into him like a physical blow.
He tried to flex his right foot to steady himself. The signal left his brain, sparking a phantom twitch in muscles he’d trained for decades. Yet there was no resistance, no pressure, only a sickening, hollow silence at the end of his leg.
Dog let out a low, guttural growl and threw the thin hospital sheet back with his good hand.
The sight was worse than the sensation. A heavy, white cocoon of bandages ended abruptly where his ankle should have been. The “quiet fixer” was broken. The medic who patched everyone else up had been dismantled by a piece of rusted iron in a Maine meadow.
Stupid. Reckless. Amateur.
The words looped in his brain, hissed in the voice of every instructor he’d ever had at BUD/S.
He was a SEAL. He was a combat medic with a PhD.
He had navigated minefields in the Syrian desert and dodged snipers in the dark of night.
And yet, he’d been taken down by a derelict bear trap because he’d been looking at the way the sunlight caught the copper in a woman’s hair.
He squeezed his eyes shut, his hands clenching into white-knuckled fists against the bedrails.
He hadn’t been a protector; he’d been a fool.
He had been so captivated by Margaret’s resilience, so distracted by the Emery she was unearthing beneath his calloused exterior, that he’d forgotten the first rule of the Brotherhood: Eyes on the X.
He had let his guard down for a picnic. He had traded his situational awareness for the sound of her voice.
Now, instead of being the shield she needed to hide behind while Charles Winslow’s world burned, he was a liability.
He was a one-legged man with a million-dollar bounty on his head, stuck in a bed while his team had to pull double shifts to keep them both alive.
The heavy door to the room creaked open.
“Emery?”
The voice was soft, hesitant, and filled with a tenderness that made his skin crawl with shame. He didn’t want tenderness. He wanted a court-martial.
He didn’t turn his head. He kept his gaze fixed on the blank wall. “What are you doing here, Margaret?”
His voice sounded foreign to his own ears: harsh, cold, and dripping with the clipped, aristocratic disdain he usually reserved for his brother’s business rivals.
He heard her footsteps, the light, rhythmic click of her shoes as she moved closer to the bed. “I’ve been waiting for you to wake up. The doctor said the surgery went as well as could be expected. Emery, I’m so?—”
“Don’t,” he snapped, finally turning his head. His eyes were dark, devoid of the warmth they had shared in the gazebo. “Don’t say you’re sorry. And don’t call me that.”
Margaret flinched as if he had slapped her. She was holding a small bouquet of wildflowers, wildflowers from where he didn’t know. Her face was pale with red-rimmed eyes from lack of sleep. “I don’t understand. I just wanted to be here when?—”
“You shouldn’t be here,” Dog cut her off, his words like jagged glass. “You should be at the Farm, behind three layers of steel and a dozen armed men. Your presence here is a tactical nightmare. Do you have any idea what it took to secure this floor? The resources I’m wasting just by lying here?”
“I know you’re in pain,” she said, her voice trembling but trying to remain steady. She reached out a hand toward his arm. “But we’re safe now. Charles is?—”
“Safe?” He let out a sharp, ugly laugh that held no mirth. He pulled his arm away before she could touch him. “Just look at me, Margaret!”
The rest of the words burned inside him, unspoken but no less real.
He was a medic who couldn’t stand. A protector who walked blindly into danger, too distracted by empty promises to see the trap.
He had failed the mission. The one thing he swore to do was keep her alive and the perimeter secure, and he had gotten soft.
He turned his gaze back to the bandaged stump, the sight of it fueling the fire of his self-loathing. “This is the price of getting distracted by you. It was a mistake. All of it.”
The silence that followed was heavy. He could hear her ragged breathing, the small catch in her throat as she struggled to maintain the composure she’d worked so hard to build.
“A mistake?” she whispered.
“A lapse in judgment,” he corrected coldly, refusing to look at her.
He needed her gone. He needed her to see him as the monster he felt like, not the hero she wanted him to be.
“I’m an operator, Margaret. I don’t do picnics.
I don’t do Emery. I patch people up and I stay alert.
I can’t do either of those things with you hovering over me like a reminder of how badly I screwed up. ”
He finally looked at her, his face a mask of iron. “Go away, Margaret. Go back to the Farm. Go find a real protector who isn’t half a man. I’m done.”
Margaret stood there for a long moment, the wildflowers trembling in her hand.
The hope that had been blossoming in her eyes for the last three days didn’t just fade: it shattered.
She didn’t argue. She didn’t cry. She simply straightened her spine, her “society armor” snapping back into place with a chilling efficiency.
“I see,” she said, her voice sounding as cold and distant as his. “I’ll tell Warden I’m ready to leave.”
She turned and walked out, the door clicking shut behind her with a finality that echoed in the sterile room.
Dog waited until the sound of her footsteps died away before he let out a jagged breath, his head falling back against the pillow.
His leg throbbed with a rhythmic, white-hot agony, but it was nothing compared to the hollow ache in his chest. He had done what he had to do.
He had pushed her away. He was a SEAL again. He was “Dog” again.
He was alone. And for the first time in his life, he was absolutely terrified.