American Prince

I flung a maniacally giggling Lyr onto the couch, tickling the sides of his still baby-chubby ribs, and reached for the remote.

“Do it again!” Lyr begged.

I rumpled his dark hair and flipped on the TV. “Cousin Morgan says we have to watch the news instead of play. Isn’t she awful?”

He nodded, but he didn’t fuss or complain. Instead, he burrowed into my side and stared up at the big flatscreen with me.

On the news, Krakow was on fire.

Carpathian separatists strike at the heart of opposition read the crawl at the bottom of the screen, and it was obvious right away that this time was different. This wasn’t the scattershot attacks on trains and villages that had come before. This was real terror, calculated and planned and flawlessly executed. Five buildings in the Main Square, in the heart of the city. A simultaneous bombing of St. Mary’s Basilica. Nine hundred dead.

And Melwas Kocur, the self-styled leader of the “Nation of Carpathia,” had already claimed responsibility.

There’s nothing new about atrocity. There hasn’t been anything new about it since humans dropped out of trees and started arguing about who got which swath of savanna. But perhaps the best testament to human nature is that each atrocity feels new, feels just as awful as if it were the first murder all over again. And this felt new. This felt different.

This felt like war now, even all the way from Seattle.

I got the call a few hours later that I was going back to Ukraine.

A week after that phone call, I kicked my duffel bag into my room in the barracks and walked back out to the yard. The base hummed with all the comings and goings—literally hummed. Choppers were lifting in and out, Humvees and Jeeps rolling through the gates, and soldiers swarmed everywhere, all busy, all shouting and energetic.

I looked at them, feeling a little bit like a senior on the first day of his last year of high school. All these boys seemed so…young. And eager. I wondered how many of them had truly fought before. How many had stood in a bombed village with sheep bleating madly as their pens burned? How many had carried screaming children away from the corpses of their parents, had heard those telltale snaps in the trees, the sounds of bullets whizzing by, and had to keep going, knowing they could be shot and killed at any moment? Colchester had been right to shake some sense into me all those years ago. I wanted to do the same to these boys now.

I went to the captain’s office to check in with my new supervisor, expecting some guy named Mark listed in my deployment orders. But surprise, surprise, the captain of my new company was not some guy named Mark.

It was Colchester.

I froze in the doorway, completely unprepared for this, my heart hammering against my ribs like it was trying to escape my body and go to him. He who’d lived in my thoughts and fantasies, and inside the ghosts of all my bad decisions.

He looked different. It wasn’t just the three years between our last meeting and now; he’d lost the boyish features all men carry into their early twenties and he’d grown into himself. Wider shoulders, stronger arms, the jaw slightly more squared, the cheekbones more sharply dramatic. His skin was still the warm, bronzed color I remembered, a little richer maybe with the summer sun, and his hair was still that dark, raven black, thick and a little longer on top than he used to wear it.

His expression though, as he peered down at the laptop on his desk, was the same serious expression from before, those lips turned down into what he probably thought was a frown, but with that full mouth, was almost a pout. He rubbed his thumb across his forehead as he read, and I couldn’t stop following the movement with my eyes, remembering what that thumb felt like against my windpipe, tracing the line of my jaw.

His face changed as he clicked and read something new. The barest tilt of a smile pulled at the corners of his mouth and eyes, and then the smile faded and he shook his head, as if irritated with himself. He closed the laptop with sudden vehemence and startled visibly when he looked up and saw me in the doorway.

“Embry?” he asked, as if he couldn’t believe it was really me.

And at that moment, I would have done anything he asked—anything he wanted—just to hear him say my name again.

He stood up and came around the desk, and for a moment I thought he might hug me, might press his body against mine like I’d imagined thousands of times alone in the shower, but he stopped just short of hugging distance, extending a hand for a handshake instead.

A fucking handshake.

“I thought my captain was someone else—”

“I was promoted just a few months ago, and they ended up placing me here because of my experience with the separatists,” Ash cut in.

“Oh,” was the only thing I could think of to say.

“Are you going to shake my hand, Embry?”

Some petulant part of me wanted to say no. Why, I had no idea, since arguably the reason we weren’t hugging right now was because of me. My choices. My cowardice.

He withdrew his hand, his dark gaze sweeping over me. “It’s rude not to shake someone’s hand,” Ash reproached.

“Then order me to shake it if you want to,” I said irritably. Irritable because of the way my cock stirred at his look. Irritable because all this awkward tension was my fault. Irritable because I could have been his, if only I would have answered that email three years ago.

“Shake my hand,” he ordered, calling my bluff.

“Fuck you,” I said in reply.

Ash’s eyes narrowed and iced over, a frozen green lake. “Twenty pushups, soldier.”