The Wounded Soldier Who Couldn't Walk Away

Chapter 1

Staff Sergeant Finch McAllister always rose early. Having joined the army at eighteen, his body was long accustomed to waking before his alarm each day.

The barracks were stirring with the sounds of soldiers waking, and shuddering of old pipes somewhere behind the walls.

He liked this slice of peace before the base came really alive and the day filled with orders, noise, and the press of bodies moving through the narrow hallways. This was his quiet time.

Finch rose, showered, and pulled on his army combat uniform. After lacing his feet into his boots, he tided his room.

His daily life had become predictable because the core habits he’d developed had remained consistent. He liked the familiarity of what came next, and the discipline of doing it well was something else that was now second nature to him.

Looking at his watch, he noted it was 5:00 a.m. His phone buzzed, signaling a call. Looking at his screen, he saw Blue Jay’s face. She was the oldest of his sisters.

“You know I work for a living, right? Unlike you,” he said by way of a greeting.

Looking at the latest framed picture on the small shelf opposite of everyone in his family but Finch and his younger brother Lynx, all of them smiling, he felt it again. A small tug of longing, but he wouldn’t give into that yet.

“Okay, so let me educate you,” his sister said. “I rise before the sun because your nephew is a vampire, clearly. Then there’s all the food I prepare for my children and that loser I’m married to—”

“I heard that,” Jay roared from somewhere in their house.

“Then I have to—”

“Got it, your job is way harder than mine,” Finch cut her off. “Was there a reason for this call, other than to insult me?”

“No, I just wanted to annoy you at five in the morning.”

“Job done, then. Now, if you’re finished annoying me, can I get ready to do some actual work?” Finch said.

“Because I don’t know what actual work is?” Blue’s tone was not happy.

“Go back to bed, and get out the right side, and tell your man I’m real sorry because clearly he married a crazy woman.”

“Love you, big brother,” she said.

“Love you, too, little sister. Now go nap.”

He cut the call, shaking his head. She’d always called him randomly—it was their thing—and usually just so they could throw insults at each other.

One day he’d have a family of his own with a woman he loved, and maybe they’d call Lyntacky home, but that was a few years away. Finch had things he wanted to achieve in the army first.

Looking at his phone as it signaled a message, he saw it was from Blue.

I managed to slip out to girls’ night, and Birdie may or may not have drunk too much and danced on the bar singing “It’s Raining Men.” But you didn’t hear any of this from me. Her backup singers were pretty good though.

The picture was of Birdie, his little sister, who had her head thrown back and was belting out a tune.

It was the woman next to her that caught and held his attention.

Nina Winters. Blond, lush, and distracting.

She wore a pair of shorts that showed off plenty of her lovely legs.

The T-shirt was tight and had him enlarging the picture.

Hot, sexy, and plenty of other words he wasn’t proud of thinking at 5:00 a.m.

She’d been throwing him looks that said she was interested the last few times he’d gone home. Maybe next time he’d let her know he returned that interest.

He turned off his phone, left it on his bed, and walked out, thinking about the woman in the picture and what he’d say to her when he got home.

How about dinner, Nina? It wasn’t original, but to the point.

The hallway outside his room was just beginning to stir with the thud of boots on linoleum and the smell of bad coffee brewing in the common room.

Corporal Diaz, already kitted for the same exercise, nodded at him as Finch approached. “Briefing’s pushed up twenty, Sarge. Command wants us out before the fog burns off.”

Finch checked his watch again and did the math.

Fog meant visibility was already going to be shit on the back roads, and pushing the timeline up twenty minutes meant less daylight margin if anything went sideways.

Not that anything ever did. He’d run that route more times than he could count, and he knew every rut and bend of it the way he knew the inside of his own boots.

“Copy that,” he said. “We’ll grab some food and head out.”

Stepping outside into the pre-dawn darkness thirty minutes later, now with a full stomach, both men headed for the Humvee parked a few feet away.

The air had a bite of cold to it, and a low fog still clung to the ground between the buildings.

He had tactical maneuvers this morning, so he made his way to the vehicle he was driving.

It sat low on its suspension, loaded down with heavy equipment.

Corporal Diaz climbed into the passenger’s side of the vehicle, while Finch did a slow circuit of it before climbing in, an old habit Drill Sergeant Okafor had beaten into him a lifetime ago and one he’d never managed to shake.

Tires. Undercarriage. The security of the load strapped down in the back.

Everything had to be squared away the way it should be.

Satisfied, Finch swung up into the driver’s seat.

He felt the simmer of excitement that never really faded, no matter how many mornings like this one he’d had. He fucking loved his job.

Corporal Diaz yawned loudly. Some soldiers never got a handle on the early mornings. Finch loved them.

His thoughts circled back to Nina Winters as he started the Humvee moving.

There had always been something about her that intrigued him.

She didn’t take any BS from anyone—not even Blue Jay, and his sister could be fierce.

He liked a woman who didn’t take anyone’s crap and knew her own mind.

There was no getting around the fact that she was definitely his type.

Pulling his mind back to the dark track ahead of him, Finch refocused.

Not the time, bud. He clearly hadn’t been with a woman in far too long if his brain was wandering like this on a training run.

Finch kept his speed steady, while beside him Corporal Diaz dozed, and pushed Nina and her body out of his head as he worked through the day’s itinerary.

The fog hadn’t burned off the way command had hoped.

If anything, it had thickened and was pooling low in the hollows where the track dipped between the tree lines.

It swallowed his headlights ten feet out and threw the light back at him in a flat gray wall.

Finch eased off the accelerator without really thinking about it, an automatic correction built from many drives down this exact stretch of dirt and gravel.

The radio in his ear stayed quiet, relaying only static and the occasional clipped check-in from the convoy somewhere ahead of him.

The deer came from nowhere, a pale shape exploding out of the fog and into the wash of his headlights, and it was directly in front of him before Finch had even finished processing what he was looking at.

“Fuck!” his passenger snapped.

Instinct took over, and his hands wrenched the wheel hard right, his foot already coming off the gas, his brain screaming at him not to hit it, to swerve. He felt the Humvee weight loaded on top shifting hard with the turn.

For one suspended second, nothing happened.

The vehicle stayed upright, and the tires dug into the gravel road.

Finch thought maybe everything was okay—and then the Humvee tipped.

Slowly at first, and then all at once everything sped up.

He heard the scrape of metal against rock, and the vehicle rolled once and then twice.

The gear broke loose from its ties. His head slammed into the side door.

“Sarge!”

He heard the panic in Corporal Diaz’s voice but didn’t seem able to focus on anything. His head felt odd.

“Hold on, I’ll get you out!”

Those were the last words he heard, and then there was only darkness.