Page 34 of Mariposa (Queens Command #1)

KADE

Hurt by Johnny Cash

V iolet leaves when we hear Castle’s distant shouting from outside the clinic’s door. I stay in the closet and wait a few minutes, so it doesn’t give off any red flags.

She gets under my skin. I’m convinced she’s doing it on purpose at this point. I wish I were strong enough to tell her I don’t want her, but it would be a damn lie. I like her stubbornness. A stubborn little butterfly—but she’s my stubborn little mariposa .

I will find out who that man is and ensure she avoids a mistake like marriage.

If I have to keep fucking that ring off her finger, then that’s what I’ll do.

She’s not going to make the same mistake I did, which is to believe that marriages last, especially when you have a job in special operations.

I don’t want her to settle down just yet.

I exit the building where I made Violet choke on my dick. I take one step before being met with a smirking, satisfied Booker. I deadpan as best as possible, grab my set of Aviators, and slide them on.

“Truck all fueled up?” he asks, chewing his gum harder. His mustache lurches upward as he chews through a cheeky grin.

“Yup.”

Reaching into my pants for a cigarette, Booker catches up to my side as the sun sets. We walk toward our housing area while a cool, dry breeze blows through us, and I gaze at the mountains with a pink and purple sky above them.

“And I’m guessing your balls are empty?”

I stop in my tracks, giving him a death glare. I don’t need to pull off my sunglasses for him to know he’s pushing it. Clenching my jaw, I continue to narrow my eyes at him while he raises his hands, surrendering the topic while chuckling. My silence is his warning.

“I’m going to fucking kill you if you don’t shut the fuck up,” I snarl.

Bringing the cigarette between my teeth, I light it.

He shrugs.

“Anyways, I came to find you because Delta wants to pull a few off the team for a humanitarian mission tomorrow. It should only be a couple of hours.”

Blowing out the smoke, I shake my head.

“I don’t like it.”

I have a bad feeling .

“I don’t, either,” he shrugs, grabbing a cigarette from my pack.

Twisting my neck side to side, my bones pop as that familiar stress of war creeps into my veins.

“Violet isn’t going,” I say, taking another hit. Booker quirks a brow at me. “If she volunteers to go when you announce it tomorrow to the team, you make sure she’s not on that list.”

I don’t want her to go anywhere if I’m not there.

“Roger that, Master Sergeant.”

Everyone is at the pit tonight. Drinking, watching movies, shooting the shit, and I’m in my office alone, going crazy.

I enjoy being alone, and I’ve gotten used to it since my divorce.

Being in the military for so long, I’ve adapted to a quiet, alienating lifestyle.

My mother and siblings live in Colorado, and I’ve been stationed on the East Coast for as long as I’ve been enlisted.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen them, but they send a care package my way for each deployment.

I’ve never cared about any of the women in the past I’ve fucked from time to time. I didn’t care to know their names or if they were messing around behind someone’s back. It’s quite frankly none of my business, and I’ve never developed feelings for another person since my ex-wife.

But Violet Isla has ruined me by giving me a taste.

Who the fuck is she engaged to?

Flipping my next wooden project over, I concentrate harder as I use a small blade to get the details just right.

Carving wood always relaxes me, but it’s not easing the need to know what’s going on in her pretty little head.

Marriage is an eight-letter word of straight bullshit.

It’s an eight-letter word of false hope because promising yourself to another person is as utterly depressing as it sounds.

If I can stop another person, namely Violet, from staying clear of that false commitment, I’ll do it.

With each passing second, I grow more stressed. I keep carving hard, deep, concentrating, and lost in thought as Johnny Cash’s rendition of “Hurt” continues to play. My knee bounces up and down fast, anxiously.

Fuck, I need another drink.

Grabbing my full glass of whiskey, I down it in one go. The liquid burns down my throat fast, and I place the glass back down harder than I should on my desk.

There isn’t a high divorce rate in special operations for no reason. Who wants to wait months to a year for their partner to come back home? Who wants to put themselves through lonely nights and days in a duty station far from home, worrying if they’re dead or alive?

As I cut deeper and faster, the song slowly feels as though the volume is being lowered, and I’m back in North Carolina as a twenty-four-year-old again, remembering the day I lost my reason why.

“Please...don’t do this.” I breathe out as my throat threatens to close on me. The look in Penny’s eyes tells me that she’s checked out a long time ago, and this is what I’ve come back home to.

An empty house. An empty wife.

"I'm sorry, Kade. I'm done waiting around. I'm done crying myself to sleep.” She looks around the empty house before she pins her eyes back to mine like she’s ready to leave. “I resent…” she pauses with a deadpan expression. There’s a crisp, cold cut to her words, leaving me in a state of desperation. I don’t recognize her or this new tone of voice she’s using when she looks at me.

This is not my high school sweetheart. This is a stranger who can’t stand being a Special Forces wife for another second.

“You resent what?” I grit out through clenched teeth.

My eyes water as I stare at the beer bottle.

She hates it when I drink, but I think after fighting for my life and seeing the horrors of war less than forty-eight hours ago and then returning to find my son and wife's things gone from our home, I needed one.

I grab it while I feel her eyes burn through me. She needs to finish her sentence. Even if the truth hurts, I need to know.

“I think you already know,” she tells me as she clutches her car keys.

I swallow, my tight throat over the hard rock that settles into my flesh without my permission.

“Say it, Penny.” I quirk a brow and lock my lips. I open my legs wider, planting my boots onto the floor like I’m about to stand.

I force a dead smile, and she frowns harder. I place my elbows on my dining table, wave my hand in front of me, and the beer bottle sways.

“What do you resent, my love?” I clear my throat before I crumble. Men don’t cry. Man the fuck up. We don’t cry. I can hear my father’s words in the back of my head. The same ones he would tell me before he’d beat the shit out of me.

Penny watches me with an intense gaze. I know her too well at this point, and my now ex-wife has never bitten her tongue, and I know this is going to hurt more than I’ll ever let her know.

"I resent you, Kade. I never want to wait for a man to come back home again. My son deserves a father who’s present.

You are always gone! During your absence, I've fallen out of love with you! I couldn’t take it anymore.

I only stayed with you because I had nowhere else to go.

Not because I loved you.” She pauses again as she brushes her knuckles across her tear-streaked face.

“And for what? For you to miss five out of his seven birthdays? For me to spend almost every Christmas and anniversary alone because you keep deploying?”

“This is my ? —”

“For me to spend nights thinking about what my life could have been if I had chosen to leave you after high school instead of marrying you?”

“This is my job! I’m a special operator—a soldier who would give up my life for my family. I’ve almost lost it far too many times for me to count already, and you’re throwing it in my face?”

Penny’s entire body trembles, and her hands are inside her hair like she wants to tear her ears off.

“I don’t like your job! I don’t love you. Don’t you fucking get it? I hate that I wasted the past seven years with you. You are a shitty father!”

“Don’t you dare say that to me? I love my son, and I love you!

Whenever I’m home, I spend every second I can with you and him.

I’m away because this is my way to provide for you and our boy.

I’ve been caring for you and him…so that you guys have everything you need.

Don’t you think it kills me not to be home with you and him?

Every night, you are the ones I think about right before I fall asleep.

You guys are my reason to fight like hell to come back home. I-I…”

“I fucked him.” Penny paces around in a circle like she’s ashamed of herself…or tired of holding her secret.

My heart shatters.

"What? Who?”

"I think you heard me."

“Dammit, Penny! Who?” I bang my fist on the table as I shout. My emotions are getting the better of me. I suck in a breath and clench my jaw.

An eerie pause hangs between us as I recollect myself. Her brown eyes never leave my body, but I can tell she’s satisfied with herself.

“It doesn’t matter,” she scoffs. I meet her gaze, and she smiles. She’s smiling, and I’m fucking broken.

Of course, she won’t tell me.

“You’re right. I guess you don’t owe the man you promised to love until death do us part, an explanation, right?”

Every time I’ve come back home recently, she’s been distant.

"I don't love you anymore, Kade. Honestly, I don’t think I ever have. Thank you for giving me my son. But I regret wasting these years waiting on you to return home, and now?" She walks to the front door, drags her purse over her shoulder, and shakes her head before stepping out.

“I don't have to anymore. Take care of yourself. But I will not let you see Adam anytime soon.”

“Penny. He’s my son! You can’t do that to me! To him, most importantly. I’m his father. He’s my boy.” I stand with a strangled growl.

“I can do what's best for him, and I think keeping you away from him will bring more stability to his life.”

“Don't take him away from me,” I beg, searching for mercy. I know she doesn’t want to grant me anything. She keeps walking away. She takes slow steps to the door while I stay put—the sun through the shades of my front window glints against my wedding band.

This. Fucking. Hurts.

“Tell me something, darling. Were you wearing the wedding ring I got you while you fucked him?” I slant my lips, take another massive swig of my beer, and narrow my eyes at her hand.

Did she fuck him while I was getting shot at? Or did she fuck him while I was carrying out a dead child from a bombing attack?

“Did you fuck him while my face got slashed in half?” I lift the bandage off the side of my face and launch it to the ground. My newest injury makes her grimace, as if I’m a monster. She stands her ground and looks away with no remorse.

“I come back home, bandaged and bleeding, and you don’t want to know if I’m okay or how this happened?”

Silence.

She rolls her eyes.

She’s heartless.

“Where’d you do it, huh?”

She contorts her face.

“Our bed?” A tear rolls down my face.

“Our couch?”

She shakes her head like she wants me to stop talking. She opens the door and takes one step out. I grab my beer and down the rest until it’s empty.

“You were my world, and my son still is. When did I stop being yours?”

She gives me one last glance with no emotion filtered through her brown eyes. She brushes her brown hair back over her shoulder and sighs like she doesn’t care that she’s made me feel undeserving of a home…of a family.

“You never were,” she shrugs. “You aren’t husband or father material. You were never married to me. You’ve always been married to your job.”

My heart sinks even further. I furrow my brows and look at the wedding picture of two eighteen-year-olds on the coffee table, Adam in my arms. We got married right after he was born.

Right after I joined the Army, we got married. I stare at the moment captured right after graduation and smile at the memory. A part of me always felt like something was missing between us. Like I knew she wasn’t my soulmate, but I overlooked everything to give her and my son the world.

“I’ve always been good to you...” I look at the wedding band still on my finger, twisting it around…and it hits me. I won’t be able to give my son a complete family.

I’m never going to wear this again after today, and I vow never to let myself be a husband again.

“Goodbye, Kade.”

Pain strikes when I accidentally stab my finger deeply, snapping me out of the memory that made me the man I am today. Red immediately pours out, staining the wood with bloody fingerprints. With blinding rage, I chuck the wood into the trash can across the room, and it lands with a loud thud.

Dammit !

It needs to be perfect, but she’s in my head, tormenting me. Standing up, I grab the bottle of whiskey and drink it from the top. I pace the room, getting ready to pick out a different piece of wood to continue.

It needs to be perfect .

Blood continues to drip down my arm from where I stabbed myself. I can’t feel pain; I’ve trained myself not to feel anything. I’m almost twenty years in and can do what needs to be done and not break.

I rip one of the hand towels off the bar and use it as gauze until I can address this correctly, because all my medical supplies are in my room.

Wrapping it around until it’s tight, I cut the rest of the fabric off.

After a few seconds, the pressure stops the bleeding, and I’m ready to carve again.

As I grab my knife, the handle accidentally knocks over a stack of papers.

“Shit,” I mutter, dropping my blade to the ground and kneeling to pick it up.

As I assemble them back in order, it’s the faces of soldiers and victims of people killed by The Surgeon.

This evil monster is responsible for a lot of death and misery.

There was only one person to escape him, and he was a Navy SEAL, call sign: Creature.

Everyone else was tortured until he killed them brutally. Anyone would be better off dead than to be captured by him. We’re closer to finding him. We’re just waiting for Intel to give us his coordinates, and we’ll execute a plan to bring him alive.

After working on my secret project for thirty minutes without another self-inflicted injury, I’m heading to a different building from mine tonight.

I need to finish what I started earlier.

Every step I take is with harsh purpose, going in the direction that will have me damned to hell, but the magnetic pull she has on me is impossible to fight.

The next thing I know, I’m doing something I’ve never done for a woman.