True Surrender: a Second Chance Military Romance

Aaron jerked awake, a gasp clawing up his throat before he forced it back down.

Pain. That’s what had woken him.

Or had it been a sound?

He lay motionless in the suffocating dark, heart hammering against bruised ribs, straining to separate memory from reality. The air in the cell hung damp and stale, thick with mildew and old earth. His own sour sweat clung to him, and the taste of blood lingered in the back of his throat.

Silence.

The usual sounds of his captors—boots overhead, low voices, the scrape of furniture—had stopped hours ago. The absence pressed in on him. Had they fled? Or were they out spilling blood somewhere else?

A soft scuttling sound skittered along the wall, and he flinched.

Rats.

He hadn’t actually seen them, but his mind supplied images anyway—their slick bodies and twitching whiskers crawling across his body once he stopped moving.

Move, Bricewick.

He shifted.

The chain attached to his right wrist scraped and clinked against the concrete, the sound shockingly loud in the stillness. He braced that hand against the cold floor and pushed himself upright. Fire streaked up his arm and into his shoulder, and he swallowed the groan that tried to escape.

He groped toward the plastic jug he knew sat near the door. His left hand—his ruined hand—barely obeyed him, the fingers swollen and stiff. When he closed them around the jug, agony shot through his palm.

“If you don’t give us what we want, we’ll take you apart piece by piece!”

The voice of the terrorist called Rashid—the only one who’d spoken English—slithered through his mind.

If he’d been able, would he have surrendered the intel to make this stop? He wasn’t a Navy SEAL or Army Ranger or Special Forces operative. He was a computer guy, for God’s sake.

But the choice had never been his. The network had sealed itself. He’d tried explaining that. Rashid had listened with eerie calm, nodding once—

Then picked up a club.

The memory slammed into him as vividly as the blow had. The crack of the bat against the laptop. The shattering of screen and circuitry.

Then bone.

His bone.