Every. Single. Time.

But it was only dusk then, and night hadn’t come yet and neither had the self-loathing. In that moment, I only felt relief and a vague kind of gratitude, and the desire to go find another cigarette.

“Show’s over, I guess,” I told Dag, as I turned away to go down to the village. And then I felt a presence behind me. A presence that wasn’t the slender form of Wu or the hulking stone-faced Dag, and I stopped walking. But I didn’t turn.

Not at first.

“You want to tell me why your cigarette was more important than your men, Lieutenant?”

The voice was the kind that made you pause. It was deep, yes, and held this interesting mix of husk and melody, like a song whose notes had been burned around the edges.

But it wasn’t the sound itself that stopped you…it was its purity. The strength of it. And not the kind of strength men my age pretended to have, all unearned swagger, but actual strength.

Calm, clear, honest.

Unequivocal.

It was the voice of someone who didn’t lie in bed at night and wish he’d never been born.

I turned to face him, already thrown by the sound of that voice, and then I felt completely knocked down by the sight of his face. Dark eyebrows above eyes such a complicated shade of green that I couldn’t decide if they were truly pale or truly dark. A serious mouth and high cheekbones, and a square jaw shadowed by stubble. Given his hyper-fucking-regulation haircut and gleaming boots, I guessed that Colchester was not the kind of man to miss his morning shave. Just the kind of man who couldn’t keep a smooth face for more than a few hours.

But it was more than his features that struck you. It was his expression, his gaze. He looked to be my age, and yet there was something in his face that seemed older than his years. It wasn’t even about age, now that I think about it. It was about time. He looked like a man from a different era, a man who should have been riding horses through thick forests, rescuing damsels and slaying dragons.

Noble.

Heroic.

Kingly.

All of this I thought in an instant. And in the next instant I had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling that he had just seen all he needed to know about me, that he’d seen my selfishness and my empty carnality and my dissolute laziness. That he’d seen every night I’d pressed a pillow over my face and wished I had the courage to snuff out my own worthless existence.

And I felt a sudden flush of shame. For being me. For being Embry Moore—Second Fucking Worthless Lieutenant Embry Moore—and that pissed me off. Who was this pretty asshole to make me feel ashamed of myself? Only I got to make myself feel that way.

I took a step closer to him, squaring off so that our chests were only a hand’s span apart. With some satisfaction, I realized I had an inch or so on him, although he probably had a good thirty pounds of pure muscle on me. And with even more satisfaction, I realized his uniform had a gold bar on it. A second lieutenant like me.

I found my voice. “They weren’t my men, Lieutenant.”

“So you were just going to let them beat the shit out of each other?”

I rolled my eyes. “They’re big boys. They can take care of themselves.”

Colchester’s face didn’t change. “It’s our job to look out for them.”

“I don’t even know who the fuck they are.”

“So when you’re out there, fighting the Carpathians, that’s how it’s going to be? You’re only going to look out for the men directly underneath you?”

“Oh, trust me, Lieutenant Colchester, I always keep both eyes on a man directly underneath me. Both hands too.”

Dag and Wu laughed, and I grinned, but in the blink of an eye I was backed against the metal wall of the barracks with Colchester’s warm forearm pressed against my throat.

“Is this all a joke to you?” he asked quietly, so quietly that the others couldn’t hear. “Are those fake mountains over there? Fake bullets in your gun? Because it’s not a joke to the Carpathians. They don’t have fake bullets, Lieutenant Moore, and it won’t be fake IEDs they plant in the roads either. You’re going to be asking these men to follow you, even when they doubt you, even when you doubt yourself, and so you better believe it matters that you take care of them. Here, there, every-fucking-where. And if you can’t accept that, I suggest you march over to the captain’s office and ask for a transfer back home.”

“Fuck you,” I growled.

He pressed his arm tighter against the side of my throat, cutting off most—but not all—of my blood flow, and his eyes swept across my face and then down my body, which he had caged against the wall with his own. His eyes looked darker in the shadow of the wall, like the cold depths of a lake, but there was nothing else cold about him right now. His body was warm against mine and I could see the pulse thrumming in his neck, and for the briefest second, his lips parted and those long eyelashes fluttered, like he meant to close his eyes but forgot how.

“Fuck you,” I repeated, but weakly this time, weak from his arm against my neck and something else I didn’t care to examine.

He leaned in close and whispered in my ear. “I’d rather it was the other way around.” And he stepped back, dropping his arm. I sucked in a ragged breath, the fresh oxygen cutting through my blood like ice.

By the time my vision cleared, Lieutenant Colchester was gone.

2

Embry

after

My life now has two parts.

Then and now.