1. CJ
CJ
Jesus.
The sun has no business being this bright.
It doesn’t just shine; it cuts, slicing through the gap in the curtains like a blade and driving straight into the softest part of my skull. The hangover already pounding behind my eyes surges, vicious and unforgiving.
I roll away from the window, dragging a jagged groan out of my chest. Nausea hits first. Acidic and hot.
Then comes the smell. Stale whiskey and regret.
I hit the whiskey hard last night, harder than I should’ve, trying to outrun the memories, drown them, silence them. It didn’t work. It never does.
The bottle lay empty on the floor beside my bed, as a silent witness. It’s a monument to my failure.
It didn’t work. It never fucking works.
Not when it came to him.
It was Charlie’s anniversary, and I needed to forget. Or maybe I needed to hurt. I’m not sure anymore. The line between the pain and the relief has blurred so much it’s become the same thing.
I stare at the ceiling. My chest heaves. The familiar ache settles deep into my bones.
The memories don’t wait for permission. They never do. They rise. Sharp. Merciless. A choke hold dragging me back to the day everything went wrong.
* * *
I feel the heat first. Not the warmth, but punishment.
A suffocating, relentless force pressing down on us until every breath feels like a negotiation. Even the trees looked defeated, their dead branches reaching toward the sky as if they’d finally surrendered, as if they said: “Fuck it.”
Every inhale. Work.
Every exhale. Stolen.
The exhaustion was bone-deep. Dehydration causing my tongue to stick to the roof of my mouth like sandpaper. Every step felt heavier than the last, the earth pulling at my boots, as if it was trying to bury us ahead of schedule.
Deck bitched the entire way. It’s the only thing keeping the madness at bay.
“We’re pushing shit uphill,” he’d muttered. “This is bullshit. Our superiors can go fuck themselves. When I get back…” It went on and on.
He wasn’t wrong. Not then. Not now.
My head was constantly on a pivot. Left. Right. Scan. Listen. Move.
The silence in the valley was deafening, a heavy pressure against my eardrums, yet every single crunch of our boots sounded like a gunshot. A beacon, announcing our exact position to the shadows.
I felt them before I saw them, that shift in the air, that vibration I get under the skin. It’s something deep, a primal shift that vibrates inside my bones, whispering that we’re no longer alone. I tried to explain that exact vibration to Deck once.
Now, the smart-ass calls me Yoda, always telling me to use the Force.
I tell him to get fucked, but the truth is… I don’t think he’s entirely wrong.
Every muscle in my body locked tight. An icy wave rolled over me, my stomach twisting violently as adrenaline slammed through my system like a freight train. We weren’t alone. Someone was watching us.
“Move!” I barked, the urgency ripping from my throat.
Deck glanced over at Charlie, a grim smirk touching his lips. “Yoda’s on the ball today.” They followed my lead instantly, never doubting my call.
Five steps later, the first shot cracked through the heavy silence. Rocks exploded beside us. More shots. More dust. More fear.
I didn’t see the shooter, but the deafening sound ricocheted through the jagged mountains as another rock exploded right beside Deck. Another burst next to Charlie.
Then another.
And another.
We sprinted hard for higher ground as lethal rounds tore through the surrounding air. With every stride, I expected the sharp agony of a bullet burying itself in my back.
I risked a glance over my shoulder and spotted them. They’re hunting us. We had taken something from them. Now, they wanted our blood to pay for it.
When we finally reached the extraction zone, we threw our bodies behind a cluster of massive boulders. The heavy impact rattled my teeth.
Charlie’s knuckles were stark white as he keyed the radio, his raw voice barking over the static, giving our coordinates and marking the hostile area. The reply came back almost instantly:
“Five minutes. Hawks inbound. FRIES collection.”
We were going out by ropes under heavy fire in five long, fucking minutes. Enough time to make it home. Or just long enough to die trying.
The enemy spread out behind some rocks, fanning into a choking semi-circle that slowly tightened around us. We had only one job left: keep them pinned down until the Hawks arrived. We traded rounds in desperate bursts, each exchange buying us another precious second, another single heartbeat.
And then I heard it.
The distant, beautiful thump… thump… thump of rotor blades echoed through the mountains.
The dominant beat grew louder, vibrating straight through my ribs until a surge of fierce hope finally replaced the clawing fear in my chest. I looked across at Charlie, and he was already smiling.
“Let’s go home, Baby!” I shouted over the din.
He grinned back at me. We were going home.
The Hawks laid down a wall of suppressive fire as the ropes dropped from the sky like lifelines.
We hooked in quickly, and we lifted clear of the ground, three lines cutting up through the thick smoke and rushing mountain air with Deck right beside me.
As we were being winched up, I looked over toward Charlie’s rope.
He watched me with a sad, steady smile. His lips moved through the haze, forming three silent words.
“I love you.”
Then his head dropped to his chest, and his body went limp.
My world narrowed to the sound of rotor blades and the sight of his blood pooling on his vest.
The moment we cleared the cabin of the Hawk, the medic was already throwing himself onto Charlie.
Hands moving in a desperate blur, cutting away his tactical gear.
Charlie’s blood soaked through his clothes, bright and completely wrong against the floor as I watched in horror as it spread out beneath him.
I couldn’t speak. The air violently punched out of my lungs. Deck pulled me down beside him, anchoring me, but there was absolutely nothing I could do.
Oxygen masks. Trauma kits. Panicked commands were yelled over the roar of the rotors. They fought for him all the way back to base, but his chest never rose. I looked at Deck, the crushing truth already radiating from his pale, hollow face.
* * *
Back at the base, I followed the gurney in a daze until I was told to wait outside the medical center, time completely disappearing into nothingness.
Eventually, a nurse came out for me, her eyes full of pity as she led me down a sterile corridor and into a quiet room.
Charlie was there, lying under a white sheet.
Still. Quiet. His face was bare, completely calm, looking as though he were merely sleeping.
My angel.
I walked up to him with trembling hands and placed my palm flat against his chest, desperately waiting for it to move. Waiting for him to wake up. For his eyes to snap open. For him to laugh and tell me this was all some sick, fucked-up joke.
Nothing happened.
Footsteps sounded behind me as Deck walked into the room and stood beside me, his hand coming down heavy and grounding on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, brother,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, ragged whisper, as though he was terrified of waking Charlie up.
I would have given anything for a scream, for a violent fracture of the silence, if it meant Charlie would open his eyes.
I shook my head, refusing the reality. No, this wasn’t right. Charlie was just messing with me, playing a game. That’s all this was.
Right?
“He’s going to wake up, Deck. You’ll see.”
Deck’s voice was even quieter this time, laced with a heavy, unyielding grief. “No, brother. He’s gone. He saved us.”
Something snapped.
I pulled Charlie into my arms and sank to the floor, holding him like I could force him back into the world. Tight. Desperate. Begging whatever god existed to give him back.
Then I broke.
A sound tore out of my throat that didn’t even feel human, a raw, agonized scream that emptied my lungs until there was absolutely nothing left inside my body but hollow emptiness. When the sound finally died away, there was only a suffocating silence.
And then I was entirely alone.
The formal military inquiry later confirmed what my soul already knew.
Charlie had been shot shortly after his last transmission to headquarters, his body cam catching the exact, brutal moment the round hit.
I can still hear the sharp grunt he made when the bullet tore into him; that single, quiet sound was the exact moment he was taken from me.
He never told me or Deck that he had been hit.
Typical Charlie. He just held on anyway, enduring the agony long enough to ensure we got out alive.
We received commendations for the mission, while he got a hero’s funeral, a three-gun salute, and all the rigid ceremony they used to dress grief up in a uniform.
I stood there shoulder to shoulder with Deck, my muscles locked tight, watching his mother clutch the folded flag to her chest as they lowered him into the cold ground.
Me.
While standing there at full attention forcing, my body not to move, I fell apart completely on the inside.
The funeral ended. The world kept moving. I didn’t. I went home to a bed that never felt warm again.
* * *
And this morning, I forced myself out of it, my head spinning in a violent, dizzying circle.
Nausea hit again instantly, my stomach rolling with the stubborn hangover that refused to leave me alone. A toxic, pulsing ache. I didn’t know why the fuck I did this to myself.
Stumbling into the bathroom, I gripped the edge of the sink until my knuckles turned white, staring at my reflection.
The jagged scar running down my cheek glared back at me, a permanent reminder of a past that wouldn’t stay buried.
I washed my hands, scrubbed my teeth until the mint burned my raw throat, and headed to the kitchen.
I made a coffee so strong that the spoon almost stood upright in the mug. Thick. Black. Lethal. The absolute nectar of the gods. I took a mouthful, and with the heat scorching my tongue, I walked out to the glass doors overlooking the bay.
Campbell River is quiet. Soft. The kind of place where the world stops shouting long enough for a man to breathe. It’s the perfect place to disappear, and some days, that’s all I want.
Deck and I became inseparable after Charlie died. Neither of us wanted to keep going the way we were, our souls entirely hollowed out by the service to our country, so we took voluntary release. I just couldn’t do it anymore. The ghosts followed me everywhere.
We had stumbled across Campbell River on one of our Harley trips back in the day, riding our Fat Boys until our muscles ached. A week away from the madness. Delicious salmon. Quaint streets. An illusion of peace.
What I didn’t expect was how brutal civilian life would be. We both struggled. We both came back fractured, bleeding from scars you can see and the dark ones you can’t.
So, we built something else out of the wreckage.
PalMerc Security.
Campbell River became its foundation, its base.
It started as two broken veterans trying to find a single shred of direction, and it mutated into an empire with eight offices around the world, staffed entirely with former special forces, intelligence officers, and lethal government operatives.
Men and women who knew how to survive in the pitch-black corners of the earth where most couldn’t.
It gave us a purpose. A reason to draw breath.
I finished my coffee, the bitter taste lingering on my tongue as I rinsed the cup and set it on the counter with a soft click. Nothing at work needed my immediate attention yet, so that meant I had a choice. Go in and deal with the looming headache of Finn and Deck, or avoid the office altogether.
Finn was… well, Finn. A chaotic hurricane.
He and Deck were… Hell, I couldn’t tell you what they were.
A dangerous, unspoken tension simmered between them, something heavy and electric that neither of them wanted to acknowledge out loud.
Finn called Deck his Lumberjack, constantly claiming he wanted to climb him like a tree.
A vivid, graphic image none of us needed to hear more than once.
Deck just needed to take the goddamn plunge.
Finn already had; he was completely gone for Deck the second their eyes met.
I just wanted Deck to be happy. And Finn, in all his unhinged chaos, might be the only one capable of breaking through Deck’s walls.
I shook my head, a sharp wince shooting through my temples. Too early for thoughts about Finn. I love him like a brother, but my hangover didn’t possess the patience for his brand of madness today.
My body wasn’t up for negotiation, so the gym it is.
Silence.
Sweat.
Maybe if I bleed the whiskey out of my system, I’ll be able to face the day, or at least survive it.
Maybe, just maybe, I’d be ready to face the world.