Summer was nervous. Luke had barely spoken on the ride to the hotel, and she imagined he had changed his mind or, worse yet, had not but was already regretting what they were about to do. As they walked down the hallway to their room, every step felt more wrong than the one before it.

They reached the door and he moved to open it, her hand on the back of his, stilling the movement. “Wait.”

What was happening here? And how had she gone from so certain she wanted — no, needed — to be with this man to so confused in such a short period of time? She cocked her head. “You have two room keys.”

“We need to talk.”

The distance she’d imagined was real. This wasn’t going to be the romantic night she’d been expecting, and her nerves turned to pure anxiety. He’d been struggling with telling her something she was certain she didn’t want to know. He opened the door, the sterile hallway stretching before her like an unpleasant choice.

“I thought you wanted to be with me,” she whispered, her embarrassment over being rejected again paling in comparison to whatever awaited her in that room. This was about Edward, she knew it was, and her heart still had a gaping wound where her brother was concerned.

“I do, but I can’t. Not until you know the truth.” He gestured for her to enter and her feet moved of their own accord. This room was too bright for sex, too white and smelling of new carpet. How could she have expected he would love her?

“I don’t think I want to hear it.”

“No. You probably don’t.”

She sat on the edge of the bed, her heart hammering. What could he possibly have to tell her?

“Edward’s death was an accident.” He perched a hip on the desk, unusually still.

She flashed back in time, her father breaking down as he told her the few details they knew about her brother’s death, and she realized Luke’s story would be different than that one. “Go on.”

“War is a numbers game. How many of you versus how many of them. How many weapons. How much ammo. Who has the most skill, the most powerful explosives. Add them all together and you come up with an answer, like an equation. This is what I think of when they say war is the great equalizer.”

He was staring straight ahead now, and she wondered if he even saw her, so engrossed was he in the past.

“People, troops, you know you’re just a number. One more guy on the side of right versus wrong. But there’s something they don’t teach you in SEAL training. Hell no. They don’t teach you about acceptable loss. That sometimes to get those numbers to come out as a win, you have to trade people for points like some twisted kind of algebra.”

This is what broke him.

Razorback wore his scars on the outside, but Luke held his inside. He was peeling back the layers and showing her what lay beneath, and it had something to do with her brother. Just hours earlier, she’d wanted to know what horrors weighed him down, but now she would do almost anything to stop it.

I don’t want to know.

The words rang through her mind like the tolling of a bell, but she didn’t speak them, torn between what she was able to digest and what Luke needed to say.

“A hundred of our men were in the valley, maybe more, and only fourteen of us at the outpost that led to it. That day was cool, and we were all grateful for the reprieve. But then they started coming over the mountain.” He shook his head. “Hundreds of them. Buckeye said they were like ants marching to a sugar bowl, and they just kept coming.”

He met her eyes. “I laid the charges in the building and the storage units. We knew we’d have to sacrifice the outpost to save the men in the valley. So we hid a couple of hundred feet away surrounded by sandbags and supplies and hoped to hell they’d take the outpost first, and they did.”

He dropped his head, letting it hang for a moment before inhaling sharply and raising it again. “We couldn’t find Zeke, not since the night before. But when the insurgents got there, we heard the barking.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Buckeye was so attached to him. He loved that damn dog.” This time when he opened them, she could see they were red and full of tears.

“He called out for us to hold our fire. Mac tried to stop him but he went anyway, running for the storage unit where Zeke was trapped. The dog must have gotten locked in there the night before, but he hadn’t barked until then. Maybe he ate something that made him sick, I don’t know. I was just huddling behind this stack of sandbags waiting for Buckeye to come back so I could detonate the charges.”

She closed her eyes. This was sacred territory, the place and time when her brother passed on, the retelling she’d so desperately wanted to hear since that day. She took Luke’s hand, but he pulled it away.

“That’s when everything changed in the blink of an eye. The insurgents had spotted us. We were taking heavy fire. The guy next to me went down. Mac was hit. We were all that was standing between a hundred troops and death, and through it all I’m watching for Edward just praying and screaming in my mind for him to hurry the fuck up, but he doesn’t. There’s no sign of him and a bullet grazed my head and I knew I only had a moment to decide or I’d be dead and gone, and the guys who were left would be fucked.”

Her mouth opened, her bottom lip trembling. “No.”

“There was a movement beside the shed and I thought he was coming out, but my eyes were playing tricks on me. It was just Zeke. And in that moment I was so confused and lost and torn between the hundred men in the valley and the one who hadn’t come out…”

She covered her mouth with her hand.

A tear raced down his cheek. “I detonated the bombs.”

She could feel it as if she’d been there, the blast wave going through her.

“The explosions expanded outward and I ran as fast as I could to where I’d seen him last, hoping he was on the ground and I could pull him to safety. But he wasn’t there. He was still in the building. I couldn’t save him, Summer.”

She closed her eyes, hot tears running down her face. She could see her brother standing there, the room exploding around him as he searched for his beloved dog, his teammate giving up on his life. “A few more seconds.”

“Yes.”

He killed my brother.

His still body and lifeless eyes infuriated her. She beat his chest. “A few more seconds! He was counting on you to be on his six. Isn’t that what you call it? Depending on you to save him.”

Luke didn’t fight back, his hands limp at his sides as she attacked.

“Never leave a man behind, but you let him die in there like he didn’t even matter. But he mattered to me.” Her voice cracked, great sobs of grief racking her body. “He must have been so scared and in so much pain. He didn’t deserve to die like that.”

“No. He did not.”

Her face crumpled up like a piece of discarded paper. “He loved you and you let him die.”

Luke’s voice was little more than a whisper. “Yes.”

“And you didn’t tell me. You let me believe it was an accident this whole time. I picked you out from the group and you just let me do it. You kissed me and you held me like you cared about me—”

“I do.”

“Fuck you.”

There was a knock at the door. Luke didn’t move, so she opened it to find Sloan standing on the other side. “I’m here to protect you tonight, Miss Daniels.”

She turned back to Luke. “You prepared your exit ahead of time.”

“I knew you wouldn’t want me here.”

“You’re right. Get out. Get the hell out.”

He walked to the door. When he was directly in front of her, she screamed in his ear. “Get the hell out!”