American Prince

Just three hours ago, the rest of Ash’s company and I had rolled into the abandoned town of Caledonia to set up an outpost. It was supposed to be easy—or whatever passed as easy these days—no guns needed, just some HESCO walls and a few generators, enough to select one of the evacuated buildings and fortify it. The sweeps of the other buildings in town were supposed to be perfunctory, unnecessary.

It had been a trap. A fucking trap. The whole fucking time.

Ash had thought of the elevator shafts as a way to get out, and almost all of the company who’d been caught in this rat-trap had made it down to the basement, but there were at least three unaccounted for. Three that were all my men. Ash had insisted that he’d be the last man down, and initially I was going to wait with him because I couldn’t stomach the thought of him waiting alone, but now that three of my men were stranded in this no man’s land between the lower floors and the enemy-occupied upper floors, there was no way in hell I could leave.

“Check in, or I’m fucking coming down there,” I yelled into the radio. I tried to peer down the hallway, but there was only smoke.

Christ. I’d been deployed for two weeks and I was about to die. In an ancient apartment building, halfway across the world from my family, yards away from the man I loved. On fucking linoleum. Who wants to breathe their last on fucking yellowed linoleum?

Whatever Ash had shouted at Dag, it had worked. Dag crawled backward through the open elevator doors and into the shaft, using the small ladder inset into the wall to work his way down. Ash turned to me.

“Ready?”

I shook my head, pointing down the hall. “We got three still out there, sir.”

His pupils widened ever so slightly when I said sir, just as they had the whole week since that strange moment with the pushups in his office. We hadn’t talked since then, or at least, hadn’t talked about anything that wasn’t duty and war, but the moment lingered between us, and I couldn’t look at his face without remembering what his boot leather felt like against my lips. I felt like he could see it in me, like he could smell the desperate confusion burning in my blood, but he didn’t push, he didn’t chase. If anything, I got the feeling he was a little hurt that I kept my distance, which made it twice now that I’d hurt him because I was too fucked up to get my shit together and admit what I wanted.

It was agonizing. Every minute of it.

But right now, all of that faded behind us. There was too much to do to survive in the here and now.

“I’m going down there,” I added, unshouldering my M4.

“It’s not safe—”

I was already down the hall. I’d claim I didn’t hear him if he tried to give me shit for it later, but there was no way I wasn’t going after the stranded soldiers. I heard him swear behind me, heard a shout from somewhere down the hall, followed by three telltale cracks.

My radio crackled to panicked life—it was the men trapped down the hall. “They’re up here! They’re in the south stairwell—” The radio crackled some more, punctuated by loud pops I heard both through the radio and outside of it. The explosive had left the floor and most of the walls intact, but it had lit odd portions of the walls on fire—it took me a moment to realize it was the wooden doors to the apartments. The acrid smell of burning paint stung my nose.

“Fuck,” I muttered, creeping through the smoke. My finger weighed heavy on the trigger. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Crack. There was a scream, and I stepped through the smoke to find my guys sheltering in a doorway, one of them now clutching a bleeding arm.

“I’ll cover you,” I said, trying to keep my voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry. “Get to the elevator.”

Suddenly Ash was there—he’d followed me into the smoke-shrouded firefight. There was a shout in Ukrainian, and Ash pushed me into a doorway with him, the recess just barely deep enough to shield us. Reflected flames danced along the edges of his ballistic glasses, a trickle of sweat ran down from under his helmet and slid down the strong, graceful lines of his neck. He was tense, alert, but also completely in control, his tension contained by an immense sense of calm. Being near to him in this linoleum hell was like pressing your palm to a sun-warmed boulder or digging your fingers into the sand: inherently soothing, grounding, a reminder of what real power feels like.

That was Ash in battle. The inevitability of stone, the strength of storms and waves.

He glanced at me and bumped my shoulder with his. “We’re getting out of here, Embry.”

I scowled at the end of the hallway through the smoke. “Those Carpathian fuckers won’t.”

I didn’t give a shit why the separatists wanted their own country right now; I didn’t give a shit about anything except that they’d tried to kill men I cared about, they tried to kill me, and fuck them. Fuck them for picking this jagged, piney piece of crap country to live in, for choosing this ugly-ass Soviet-era bullshit for me to die in, fuck them all.

“Hey,” Ash said, and I realized I was still scowling. “Getting out of here is the first priority, okay? Living is more important than killing.”

On cue came a crack crack crack crack from through the smoke.

I dropped to a knee as Ash stayed standing, both of us squeezing our triggers to fire bursts of bullets at the enemy. My three guys across the hall took the chance to run back, and then Ash yanked at my shoulder as he started walking backwards. “Come on, Lieutenant.”