Broken Honor (19 page)

Tears burned on her cold cheeks. She stared at the pack he’d left on the floor.

Yes, he had to come back. He wasn’t wearing his boots.

Chapter Twenty-Three

He had to go back.

Quinn blinked and looked around, his heart stuttering at his unfamiliar surroundings. A house. He sat at a kitchen table, a spoon poised midway to his mouth. He stared at the plate in front of him. Some kind of meat stew and a corn porridge. He’d eaten half of it and could still taste the spices and onion on his tongue. How did he not remember eating that? Or even sitting down at a table to eat?

Had to go back.

He dropped the spoon and shoved away from the table so hard his chair banged on the floor. The constant hum he’d heard since coming around stopped, and only then did he realize it was not a hum. It was conversation. Three people he didn’t recognize sat around the table, staring at him in open-mouthed surprise: an older woman with a round, pleasant face and white hair tucked underneath a bright red-and-green head scarf; a man who looked close to the same age as the woman and had a wide nose and skin hardened to leather by too much time in unforgiving environments; and an androgynous child of about five with a fringe of blond hair held out of pale blue eyes by a red headband. The small room consisted of the creaky four-person dining table and nausea-inducing candy-striped wallpaper.

“Where am I?” The question came out as little more than a croak. “Where’s Mara?”

The man and woman shared a glance, then the man stood up. He motioned to himself and spoke in broken, heavily accented English. “I am Rustam Belyakov.” He indicated the woman. “My wife, Valentina.” And the child. “My granddaughter. Nadejda.” Then he said something long and complicated in Russian.

Quinn shook his head. “I don’t speak—”

Nadejda said something to Rustam and received a nod of approval. She jumped up from her chair and took hold of Quinn’s hand, tugging him toward a splintered wood door as she chattered happily in Russian. He glanced back at the older couple, who both watched him go with frowns of concern.

Obviously, these people meant him no harm.

The next room wasn’t so much a room but an open alcove that contained a rusted sink and a hand-crank well. It let out onto a courtyard where several small, bright blue buildings squatted around a wide patio. Nadejda pulled him across the concrete and through a narrow alleyway created by two of the buildings. Up ahead, a fence held back a flock of chickens and geese and one gigantic turkey that cocked its wrinkled head and peered at them with large black eyes. A dog chained to a coop whimpered and pawed at the fence as they passed.

“Where are we going?”

The girl tugged on his hand and continued to talk enthusiastically, pausing for a moment to point through the fence at a goat, then at a small pig, then at the rabbit coops lining the shed that made the goat’s home.

Finally they came to another small building painted the same turquoise blue as the others. Nadejda marched up the steps and peeked through the door, then turned to smile at him. She didn’t seem inclined to go any farther, so he ducked inside and found a large room set up to look like a living room with two wood chairs, a futon-like couch, and a TV older than he was. Burnished gold-and-brown tapestries decorated each white-painted wall and clashed with the bright teal-and-pink-flowered rug covering the floor, and yet the place felt homey, lived-in, and well loved. His pack leaned against one of the chair legs.

He glanced back to ask Nadejda what he was supposed to do in here, but she was gone.

“Okay,” he muttered and scratched at the stubble coming in on his jaw. So he’d just have to determine what happened himself and find a way to get back to Mara.

Christ. He’d left Mara out there somewhere. Alone.

If he had to take a wild guess, he figured another lights-on-nobody-home episode had landed him here with the Belyakov family. Sometimes when he woke up, he was in the exact spot he’d been in when he blacked out. Other times, he found himself on a bus or in a mall or on a street halfway across the city. Rustam and his family must have found him wandering and brought him home with them.

He didn’t know how he’d ever thank them for their kindness, but right now, his number-one objective was Mara. He strode forward and reached for his pack, but a whisper of sound from the other side of the room caught his attention. In truth, it was barely a sound, more like the shift of air with the softest rustle of fabric, but he sensed he was no longer alone and glanced up.

The moment his eyes met Mara’s, his emotions ran the gamut from a brilliant joy to fear that he was dreaming to an extreme need to take her into his arms and never let her go. The only thing that stopped him from running forward and scooping her up was the fear that his knees would give out from the intense relief that she was safe and he’d land on his face like an idiot. She stood in another curtained doorway, her hair hanging loose and damp around her shoulders, and looked so very tired, her complexion shades paler than it had been, the tender flesh around her eyes bruised.

She yawned but covered it with the back of her hand. “Paulie, you need to go eat. I told you I’d be there in a minute.”

Quinn’s heart stuttered to a halt, and every drop of saliva in his mouth evaporated. “What—” The word came out high-pitched and strangled, and he had to clear his throat twice before he found a semblance of his real voice. “What did you just call me?”

“Pau—” She stopped short, and her eyes narrowed a fraction as she studied his face like she was seeing him for the very first time. “Travis?” She launched across the five feet separating them and hugged him so tight he felt his vertebrae shift. “Oh, God. You’re back? Please tell me you’re back. Are you back?”

He awkwardly patted her back, his mind still reeling from the name she had…

No, but she couldn’t have. Nobody had called him that in over twenty years. He hadn’t even thought of himself by that name since he was eleven.

He grasped Mara’s shoulders and set her away from him.

“You’re pushing me away?” She gave a short, sniffling laugh and wiped at her eyes. “You are back!”

“Where did I go?”

“Physically, nowhere. Well, you ran off into the snow, but Rustam was out fixing a broken fence and found you right away. You led him to the van. We were on his property, and so here we are. Rustam and Valentina have been wonderful.”

Quinn shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’m not following. Did you call me…Paulie?”

Mara bit down on her lower lip, then entwined her fingers around his and urged him over to the couch. When he refused to move, she dropped his hand and sat herself, clasping her hands together in her lap.

“What happened?” he asked again.

“You went into a fugue state and I think…I think you regressed back to your childhood. You called yourself Paulie and kept telling me you had to go home or Big Ben would be angry with you.”

Quinn shut his eyes against the words that registered like a blow. He sank to the couch beside her. “Paulie died a long time ago.”

“I don’t think so, Travis. He was here not even fifteen minutes ago. He’s been here for the last twelve hours.”

“Twelve—?” Groaning, Quinn leaned against the couch cushions. “That’s a new record.”

“How long has this been happening to you?”

He lifted his head and looked at her. Surprise rippled through him. He actually wanted to answer her question, and honestly at that. He glanced away again. “It started after the car accident that ended my SEAL career. I suffered a traumatic brain injury and…I started losing time. A few minute here, a few there, but it’s been getting worse. I knew I was functional during the blackouts because I’ve interacted with people and then didn’t remember it later.” And ever since one such encounter during the team’s last mission in Afghanistan, he’d had an uneasy suspicion he was reverting back to the worst years of his life during the blackouts. Now he had confirmation.

Mara touched his arm, drawing his attention. “Have you told your doctor about it?”

He opened his mouth to give his usual line—yes, he’d already been checked out by doctors and they didn’t know what was causing it—but stopped short without uttering a sound. He drew a breath, exhaled softly. “I stopped going several months ago.”

There was no condemnation in her eyes, no pity. She didn’t lecture him about the importance of seeing his doctor, and that was a relief. Of course he knew he had to see his doctor, but honestly, he dreaded what he’d find out when he went. Healthy, normal people didn’t black out or regress to being a kid. He was obviously not healthy…but what if he was sicker than even he thought?

Mara remained silent for several seconds, then curled one leg up underneath her, settling in for a long story, and he knew she wasn’t going to leave until he spilled everything.

“Okay,” she said, “who is Benjamin Paul Jewett Jr.?”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Quinn glanced away from her. Up at the paint-chipped ceiling. Across at the faded tapestry on the wall. Down at the frayed rug covering the floor. Searched for anything to look at but her.

“So?” she prompted after a moment.

“He’s nobody important.”

“You’re lying.”

Annoyance spiked through him. Annoyance and something else that had the acrid, hated metallic taste of fear. “He’s dead.”

“No,” Mara said without a shred of doubt. “I have a feeling I’m looking at him right now, or at least part of him. Why won’t you tell me?”

“What, you think you can heal poor Paulie like one of your blind, three-legged pets?” He clenched his jaw against a swell of bitterness that he couldn’t quite rein in. “You can’t.”

Her chin lifted to a stubborn angle, and the fires of determination sparked in her eyes. “Maybe not. But we won’t know that for sure if you don’t tell me, now will we?”

“You really want the whole ugly story?”

She nodded, and something twisted inside him. He didn’t want to go back. Christ, he really didn’t want to go back there, and the telling of it would suck him right down into the black abyss. Was he capable of clawing out a second time? He didn’t know, but the concern and understanding in her expression worked as a fortifier. She was carrying a child that contained his DNA. At very least, she deserved to know the kind of people that child had come from.

He sucked in a sharp breath through his nose, readying for the cold plunge into the dark. Then he jumped. “Benjamin Paul Jewett Jr. is the name I was born with. It was a miserable childhood, full of drugs and alcohol and violence. My first clear memory is of my father punching a hole in the kitchen wall after kicking the shit out of my mother in an alcohol-fueled rage. I went hungry more often than not. Half the time we had no running water, and I went weeks without a bath.”

“And nobody helped?”

“Child services came in at my elementary school’s request one time. They removed me and put me in foster care, which wasn’t so bad, but it didn’t last long. You have to understand, I was all but feral. I’d never lived with rules, and suddenly I had a bedtime and homework, family dinnertime and baths. Within three months, I drove my foster family away. But by then, Big Ben had landed himself a couple years in jail for dealing, and my mother went to rehab, so I was returned to her when she completed the program. She didn’t stay clean long. The very night I came home, I found her passed out on the couch with a needle still in her arm. I realized I hated Cherice then for what she did to herself, to us. I don’t think I’ve ever really stopped hating her. I don’t think I can.”

“Tell me what happened to Paulie.” Mara reached out and laced her fingers through his as if she realized he felt like he was drowning and needed the contact of another human being. “When did he become Travis Quinn?”

The contrast of her dainty hand next to his big one settled him a little, and he focused all of his attention on their joined fingers. “When I was ten, Big Ben came home drunk and murdered Cherice, then walked into my room and shot me.” He lifted their joined hands to show her the scar on his pointer finger.

Mara traced the ridge that extended from his knuckle to the web of his thumb, and even that light contact from her stirred his body. Christ, he was in so much trouble with this woman. Then again, he’d known that from day one, hadn’t he?

“That’s where you got the scar,” she whispered. “A bullet?”

“I was playing with a Game Boy I’d stolen out of a classmate’s backpack. We didn’t have money for shit like that. I was jealous of the kid and his picture-perfect family, so I took it and one of his games.
The Amazing Spider-Man.
It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Then Big Ben got home, and I thought he was going to slap me around for taking it. I was trying to hide it when he came in with the gun. The bullet went through the game, sliced open my hand, and hit me in the chest. I stayed in ICU for two weeks and in the hospital for another eight because I was malnourished, my immune system was shit, and I kept getting infections. Sam Quinn was my doctor and his wife, Bianca, my nurse. They saved me. In more ways than one.”

“Sam and Bianca Quinn,” Mara said, realization in her voice. “They adopted you.”

He nodded. “I wanted nothing to do with Big Ben, so I legally took the Quinns’ last name and my maternal grandfather’s first name, because he was the closest thing I’d had to a father before Sam.”

“Were they good to you, Sam and Bianca?”

“The best. They were my parents in every sense of the word except biology. I wasn’t a somewhat inconvenient visitor in their home like I’d been in my first foster family’s. I was their son, and for once, I had a real family. That’s all I ever wanted. A family.” His gaze dropped to her belly, but he couldn’t bear the sight of it and shut his eyes. “At the time.”

She stayed silent for another moment that felt like ages. “So what happened to them? Where are they now?”

“Dead.” Like so many others, and a chunk of his heart had died with each and every one of them. Including Gabe, but he wasn’t about to tell her all that. Couldn’t quite face it yet himself, because when he did, when he finally let himself grieve for his best friend, he was going to lose himself. Maybe forever. Just like Sam had. “Let’s leave it at that.”

“No,” Mara said and squeezed his hand reassuringly, even though her tone allowed no room for argument. “You need to talk about it. How did they die?”

Christ, her and her questions. He wanted to say it was none of her business. Wanted to lash out so that she’d drop the subject. But he didn’t.

“Mom got cancer.” He had to force each word out of his constricted throat. Why did it still hurt so much? After all these years, the wound was as fresh as ever and, if possible, even more jagged around the edges. “We watched her waste away for eight long months. When it was over, Dad couldn’t stand the grief of losing her and I—I wasn’t enough to keep him alive. He killed himself.”

“Oh, no,” she breathed. “Oh, Travis. You’re not responsible for any of that. You know that, don’t you?”

He couldn’t look at her, couldn’t bear to see the pity he knew must be in her eyes. “Yeah, of course. I didn’t put the gun in Big Ben’s hand. I didn’t give Sam the rope for the noose.”

Mara touched his cheek, drawing his gaze to hers. No pity. He searched her face. No, she didn’t pity him. She understood. How could that be when nobody else ever had?

“How old were you?” she asked.

“Sixteen. I’d just passed my driver’s test. I was saving up to buy this old Impala that sat in my neighbor’s yard. With some work, it would have been a beautiful car. I was going to buy it and fix it up before prom so I could ask this girl I wanted to…” A whisper of laughter escaped him at the memory. “Well, I was a teenage boy. You can guess what I wanted to do. I was just a normal kid with a norm
al life, normal teenage concerns…and then one day, there was nothing left of that life. Mom died, and Dad shriveled up until he couldn’t take living without her any longer. I was all alone again, and I didn’t know how to cope.”

Mara scowled. “I’m sorry, but Sam should have protected you.”

Everything in him revolted at the suggestion. “He didn’t owe me anything.”

“You’re so wrong. He owed you everything. He took on the responsibility of caring for you when he adopted you. He should’ve been stronger for you, should’ve realized you were hurting just as much as he was.”

What could he say to that? If he was honest with himself—and he didn’t want to be—her words were the same thoughts that had tortured him for years. Why hadn’t he been enough for Sam?

“What happened after they were gone?” Mara asked after his silence stretched a moment too long. “Were there no relatives?”

“No. Neither had siblings, and their parents were all long dead. I ended up in foster care again, ran away, got into as much trouble as I could find, and generally had a ‘fuck you, world’ attitude for the remainder of my teenage years.”

“But you straightened up.”

“I wouldn’t have. I was so angry at everyone, but then…” He trailed off as memories he hadn’t thought of in years emerged from the chaos that was his fucked-up head. The things he’d seen and done…to survive. He hadn’t stooped as low as he could have, and he had only one person to thank for that. “It was the winter of ’98. I stayed in this slum boarding house in East Baltimore. Horrible place. Rats in the walls, and half the time the furnace didn’t work. My neighbors were all heroin addicts, and there was always blood in the kitchen sink, needles scattered across the bathroom. But one of my neighbors was a drunk, homeless World War II vet everyone called Froggy, short for Frogman.”

“Frogman?” Mara smiled. “He was a SEAL.”

“Close. He was in the Underwater Demolition Teams, the predecessor of the SEALs. He always told stories and nobody ever listened, but for some reason, that morning I sat down and talked to him over a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He was amazing. The stuff he’d done… He was a hero. It wasn’t right that he was wasting away on booze and PTSD in a slum house.” He lifted a shoulder. “Seth, our sniper, has PTSD. Nobody wanted him on the team, but I fought so hard to keep him because I saw Froggy every time I looked at him. Saw that future for him if someone didn’t step in and help. I didn’t want that for him.”

Mara smiled. “Seth’s lucky to have such a good friend.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing. But he didn’t see anything good when he looked in the mirror, that was for fucking sure.

After several minutes, Mara softly said his name and he cleared his throat. “Yeah, so that day, I listened to Froggy’s stories and the world seemed to click into place. I realized I was heading down the exact same road I’d been on before the Quinns took me in, and I wasn’t going to sully their memories by destroying myself. I left everything I owned except a photo album at that boarding house, found the nearest navy recruiter, and signed up.”

“And you never looked back.”

“And I never—” He stopped short. Shook his head. “No, that’s not true. I did once. When I graduated BUD/S, I went back to show Froggy my trident, but he’d died the winter before of pneumonia. I still visit his grave occasionally.” He lifted his sleeve and showed her his one and only tattoo on his left bicep, a cartoon frog with a stick of dynamite in its hand. “That was for him.”

Mara ran her fingers over the design, a reminiscent quirk to her lips, and he remembered her doing the same all those months ago while they lay tangled together in her bed. She’d traced the tattoo over and over again, as if fascinated by it.

“I’ve wondered about that frog for months,” she said now. “It seemed so…unlike you. But I was wrong. I didn’t know you well enough then. It suits you perfectly.” She smiled up at him. “Can I visit Froggy’s grave with you sometime?”

He sucked in a breath and told himself to say no, because they had no future together. Instead, when he opened his mouth, “I’d like that,” came out instead. “My place back in Baltimore was ransacked, all my pictures of the Quinns gone. Froggy’s all I have left—”

Mara jumped up, smacking him in the chin with the top of her head. His teeth cracked together, and his head spun for a second.

“Oh. Oh, God. Sorry.” She bent over and kissed his forehead. “Just…hang on to that thought for a second.” She disappeared through a curtain into the other room.

“I don’t have any thoughts left in my head after that blow,” he muttered, rubbing his chin. He heard her talking to herself as things rustled around.

Curious, Quinn stood and followed her. The room on the other side of the curtain was a tiny bedroom with barely enough space for a guy his size to hold out his arms. A narrow bed sat on a platform that jutted from a wide concrete column built into the center of the wall. Fire crackled behind an iron grate at the base of the column.

He walked over and placed his hand on the concrete. Warm. Huh. He looked at the bed and tried not to think of how easy it would be to share that warm, narrow space with Mara. “Interesting way to keep a bed warm.”

“Valentina said it’s called a
soba
,” Mara said as she continued searching for something in another one of the packs she must have brought from the van. “It’s their version of a furnace. There’s one in each section of the house.”

He lifted a brow. “You speak Russian?”

“I was an exchange student in Russia during high school. Spent a summer in St. Petersburg, studying history.” A shadow crossed her features. “I used to love history until Ramon told me it wasn’t a practical field of study. Oh, here it is.” She pulled something out of the pack but wouldn’t let him see it and held it behind her back. She nodded toward the bed. “Sit down.”

He did as she asked. “Now what?”

“Now…” With a flourish, she produced a photo. And not just any old photo, but the one he’d dropped at Olesea’s house. He slowly took it from her with hands that trembled. She had taped the two ragged halves together, and Sam and Bianca once again smiled up at him over their anniversary cake.

“I knew it was important to you,” she said, “so I picked it up before we left Olesea’s. I tried to tape it back together.”

“Mara.” His voice came out raw. “This is…” Nobody had ever done something so thoughtful for him, and he couldn’t find the words to express the emotions warring inside his chest. But he’d never been very good at saying the right thing anyway, so he set the photo aside and stood, wrapping her up in his arms. He poured everything he felt into the hug and hoped it was enough.

“You’re welcome, Travis.” The warmth in her brown eyes as she smiled undid him. Everything that had gone wrong and soured between them suddenly didn’t matter. It was all drama and senseless baggage that needed unpacking, but for now…