little as I wanted to see her.
“Clue.”
I frowned. “What is that?”
“You’ve never played?” Kati squealed, but finally stopped bouncing long enough to clap her hands, and then she did the damnedest thing… she somersaulted, in midair, off the bed.
“Whoa!” Lily burst out, her eyes wide at the display.
Mouth gaping, I managed to ask, “Kati, since when did you do gymnastics?”
Her eyes twinkled. “It was just something Cyan was showing me. Neat, huh?”
Neat?
That about summed it up.
Four
Maverick
“He isn’t dead.”
I glowered at Link who was sprawled beside me in one of the uncomfortable hospital armchairs, trying to register that he was old now.
I mean, not decrepit. When I looked in the mirror, I was the same. Just as old as him. Scarred too.
What the fuck was wrong with me?
I felt like I was twenty-seven. In my head, I was back in Afghanistan at Nic’s side as our A-team leaped from post to post, putting out fires before they had the chance to turn into infernos.
Instead, I was somehow approaching forty, had spent the past four years in a wheelchair when I was capable of walking, had married someone called Ghost—what kind of name was that anyway?—and the man I’d loved with all my fucking being was dead.
It wasn’t possible.
It. Just. Wasn’t. Possible.
“You know we wouldn’t lie to you,” Link grumbled, folding his arms across his chest, a peevish glower crossing his features as he huffed at my refusal to accept the truth.
“You would. You’re pulling some kind of joke on me—”
He shook his head. “You know that isn’t true. We wouldn’t joke about shit like that.”
That was the kicker.
I knew they wouldn’t.
But I wanted to think they would.
Link, alongside Rex, Nyx, Storm, and Steel, were like family to me. They weren’t blood, but they might as well have been. We pulled shit on each other all the time, but nothing like this.
Nothing about someone being dead when they were really alive.
“I can’t handle him being dead,” I said rawly, staring at my feet that were bare, exposed to the air because I refused to lie in this bed like I was sick.
The doctors weren’t letting me out of here until they finished running their tests. I had a feeling, from that gleam in Dr. Beau’s eye, that they were going to try to use me as a human fucking guinea pig, but they could back the fuck off.
“You have to handle it, Mav,” Link murmured softly. “I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you otherwise, that he was happily married with two point four kids in Wyoming, but he ain’t, brother. He passed a long time ago.”
Steel, standing in the other corner of the room, grumbled, “There’s a lot that makes no sense right now, Mav.”
“Where’s Rex?” I demanded, knowing he wouldn’t lie to me.
“He’s with Bear. He won’t leave his side, and if you saw the state of him,” Nyx replied grimly, “you’d get it.”
Flinching, because if Nyx said it was bad, then it was fucking bad, I stared at my feet some more before I wiggled my toes.
Toes that, according to these guys, I’d claimed were paralyzed.
“Was I ever really paralyzed?”
Steel blinked. “Yeah. You were. For a while. You stopped doing rehab or things like that. Wouldn’t come here, refused to do anything that would get you back on track. You’ve always been a stubborn fuck. Not surprised your brain shut down and restarted messed up to get some things out in the open.”
The rancor in his voice had me shooting him a glare. “You obviously know nothing about computers if you think that analogy works.”
He rolled his eyes, but Link was the one who said, “I can’t believe you don’t remember Ghost. Do you think if I hit you on the head again, you’ll wake up and remember her? Damn, it killed me to see her the other day, Mav. You fucking annihilated her.”
“Link,” Nyx grumbled. “The idea isn’t to make him feel like an even bigger pile of shit.”
The gloomy shadow standing by the window was some men’s idea of a walking, living nightmare. He brought death, and it wasn’t the government sanctioned variety either. Not like with me.
I’d say the years hadn’t been kind to him, because there was hell in his eyes, but the prick was as handsome as ever. The craziest shit of all was that, today, I’d learned he had a firecracker for an Old Lady.
A pregnant one.
Somehow, and I had no fucking clue how it was possible, Nyx was going to be a