It was a stupid mistake. He should have left the state, maybe the country, after revealing himself to the whole town, but instead, Tristan had found his way back to that same cave. The memories there lingered on his skin, he could smell Josh when he curled up and placed his nose to the ground, and sometimes if he shut his eyes and breathed very slowly, it felt like his omega wolf was curled up against him, keeping him warm.

He caught her scent on the air when she must have been no more than half a mile away. Eva, the Coyote who had helped him get back into the U.S. What was she doing here?

Curious, Tristan crawled slowly out of his hole, poking just enough of his nose out to sniff at the air. It was definitely her. He would recognize that scent, after being so close to it during his journey across the border.

Tristan couldn’t see her, so he crawled further out of the cave, staying low to the ground.

It was a nearly fatal mistake. Tristan felt something pierce his shoulder, and howled in pain as the most intense burning filled his body through every vein. He growled and whimpered, writhing on the ground in pain, and he looked up at Eva, dizzy, as she reached down to touch the wound lightly, and even that seemingly tender touch made him cry out in pain. The pain of it made him shift back into his human form, but he was still vulnerable, bleeding and poisoned, and it didn’t seem to get him any mercy.

“Silver,” she said. “You’d better let me get you to a hospital within the next two hours, or you won’t live long.”

Tristan would have loved to fight her, anyway, but he was too dizzy and sick, and as she bundled him up, locking silver cuffs into place around his wrists and ankles, he knew there was no point. He couldn’t break those, even at his best.

“I thought you were a world class soldier? You’re losing your touch,” she said, and Tristan growled.

“Go to hell, you backstabbing bitch,” he snarled.

“Backstabbing?” Eva shook his head. “I was never on your side. You were always my prey. It just took me a little time to figure out what you were running from. Or, who.”

That confused Tristan even more.

“Who?” he asked softly, stumbling as she dragged him down the hill, his bare feet scraping over the ground.

Eva laughed, and tossed him into her truck, while he got more and more faint, the silver burning through his blood stream.

“You don’t even know who they sent for you? Well, I guess you’ll find out.”

“I’m bleeding in your truck, bitch,” Tristan managed to get out, and then the world went dark.

When Tristan came too, he was being dragged out of the truck, and pushed to his knees on the hot, sandy desert ground. Where were they? He looked around, but couldn’t see anything but bush for miles.

“How much do you want for him?” he heard a familiar voice say behind him, but he couldn’t quite place whose voice it was at first.

Eva replied in Spanish, which Tristan didn’t understand, and that was when it hit him. Sanchez. What the hell was Sanchez doing in Texas?

“That’s ridiculous,” Sanchez answered, stepping back from Eva, which put his feet in Tristan’s view. He strained his neck up to try to see the man, to catch his eyes. Once, they had worked together as a team. Maybe the man could be an ally, more than Eva, anyway. He hated Sanchez, and for good reason, but so far, Sanchez hadn’t shot him with a silver bullet, and Eva had. “There’s no bounty out for him, that would come out of my pocket. You saved me some trouble, that’s all.”

“They sent you all this way to get him, and there’s no money involved?” Eva asked, clearly not believing it. “They gave you something for expenses. Otherwise, I’ll sell his organs on the black market and not look back.”

Sanchez shifted his feet in a way that made Tristan think the man actually cared if he died. That was sort of nice to know, in this situation.

“Sanchez,” Tristan groaned under his breath. “She’s poisoned me with silver, just give her whatever she wants.” If he didn’t make it to a hospital soon, he didn’t think it would matter who owned the rights to his ass.

Sanchez must not have liked hearing from him, because Tristan received the hard tip of his boot, shoved into his gut, and he groaned, curling around himself and spitting out sand.

“Jesus,” he panted.

“I don’t have to negotiate with you,” Sanchez said to Eva suddenly, and Tristan whimpered. He didn’t have time for Sanchez to be a stubborn ass and get into some sort of pissing contest. “With everything you’re involved in, I’ll just take you both in.”

Eva shrugged. “You’ll have a hard time getting us both,” she pointed out. “And your fellow soldier is being poisoned to death as we speak, not to mention bleeding all over the sand.”

“That!” Tristan said, lifting a finger. “I like that point. Listen, can we just get me to a hospital, and then decide who gets me afterward?”

“No,” Sanchez and Eva both said at the same time, and then turned to look as another vehicle pulled up.

“Shit,” Sanchez said. He grabbed Tristan by the silver cuffs around his wrists and hauled him closer to himself.

* * *

Garcia was new to the squad, but Tristan was glad to have her around. Often, he trusted female officers more. He found they made more rational decisions in the field, and were generally far more humble and friendly than his fellow male officers. The previous night, around the camp, they had all gotten to telling their most embarrassing stories. Tristan had went with crawling over to Josh’s house in little but his diaper in the middle of the night, and some of the boys had some embarrassing tales of drunken idiocy, but really it was a test for Garcia. She was new, and everyone wanted to see if she would put herself out there with the boys.

In the end, her story was the best of the night.

“Oh, I have a great one,” she said enthusiastically, her face lighting up into a wide, excited smile. “So my family is Columbian,” the word rolled off her tongue, and Tristan saw Sanchez, who was Latino himself, smile. He had no doubt it would be nice for him to have someone else that spoke Spanish around. “Very Catholic, all right? But you guys know how this works, and I’ve been single a lot, so I decided I was going to go out and buy myself a vibrator, all right? One of these pink, dick-shaped monstrosities…”

The whole squad was laughing, now, leaning in close to hear the story, and Tristan grabbed himself another beer, amused. He was pretty sure Garcia would fit right in. His mind was elsewhere, as it always seemed to be since he and Josh had broken up. He knew where he’d went wrong.. He would never settle down, not until he felt he had become the alpha Josh needed, but that fear of not being good enough had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I take it home, I turn it on once, but the way I was raised… I’ve never even seen something like this before. So I gave up. I just tossed in my drawer, you know? ‘I’ll get to it later’, I thought. And I forget about it. Entirely. Until about three months later, my grandma decides that she’s going to help me pack up to move.”

The camp began to roar with laughter then, as Garcia described her poor Catholic grandmother stumbling across the toy, yelling at her in Spanish while swinging around the floppy plastic pink dick as if it were a wooden spoon, chasing the young woman around her apartment.

“I was sure she would hit me with it!” Garcia cried, filled with laughter herself.

Tristan was drunk enough and sad enough that he left early. He had just started to doze off when he was woken by noises outside, Garcia screaming and several of his squad members talking.

He pulled on his clothes as he heard Sanchez say, “Hold her down, hold her down,” and followed by the man crying out in pain.

As he left the tent to investigate, he nearly bumped into Garcia, who had a split lip, and a devastated look in her eyes. He looked down at her in confusion.

“What happened to you?” he demanded.

She replied with just one word. “Sanchez.”

She pushed past him into the tent and began to pack her clothes. He stared at her, realizing that she was leaving.

Tristan was horrified. He knew they hadn’t had many women on their squad, but it had never occurred to him that it was because Sanchez and his friends were hostile to them. He remembered the last woman, Alicia, and how quick she had left, and a lump filled his throat. These men, he was supposed to trust them. Fight beside them. Save their life. But at that moment, he would have loved to see Sanchez take a bullet to the chest. Or the dick.

“You have to report him. I’ll come with you,” he offered, and she shook her head.

“No,” she said, and she gave him a look that he would never forget. Only hours before, she had been open with them, excited, ready to tell them her most embarrassing secrets. Now, her eyes were cold, her heart closed off. Her trust in her fellow soldiers had been betrayed, permanently. Tristan felt the same change happen in his own heart. “I’m going to apply for a transfer.”

Tristan shook his head. “That’s not fair, he should be punished, they all—”

“You really think that’s what would happen?” she asked him, and while he was still struck dumb by the question, she left. Tristan never saw her again, but looking back, it was the beginning of the end. Sanchez had been revealed for the monster he was, and Tristan’s willingness to follow his orders had been called into question like never before.

Was it really a military worth fighting for? And who was he, if he couldn’t protect those who needed it most?