Page 34 of The Prices We Pay (Vittori Enterprises #1)

Dante

W orry instantly flashes across Joe’s face. “What do you mean?”

“I’m originally from a small town in Upstate New York, right on the Canadian border.

It wasn’t anything like Billings, though.

It is one of those tiny rural towns where nobody ever leaves.

There was no opportunity. No room for growth.

It was a nowhere town; I knew it from the moment I was old enough to understand the concept.

What there was, though, was a rampant drug problem.

You wouldn’t think it would be the case in such a tight-knit community, but I think that was part of the problem.

Because there was quite literally nothing better to fucking do, everyone turned to drugs and alcohol.

You would have been hard-pressed to find someone who didn’t have at least one vice—my parents included.

Even though I had two parents, I was all on my own.

Both of them were too high to remember that I even existed half the time.

I constantly went hungry. I was dirty because they never paid the water or electric bills.

And I remember—even at an early age—wondering if it’d be better if I just didn’t wake up the next morning.

If it would have all been… easier. But I always knew that I didn’t want to end up like them.

I didn’t want to give up. I wanted to have a purpose in this world.

To mean something. To make everything that was happening to me worth it. ”

Mirroring me, she sets her bowl of ramen on the desk and turns the chair to face me head-on. She doesn’t waste a second as she reaches out and wraps her soft hands around mine. She doesn’t say anything, though, as she waits for me to finish my story .

“School felt like it was my only safe haven. It was the only place that kept me warm. The only place I didn’t have to worry about where I was going to find food.

The one place I could forget about my shitty life, if only for a few hours.

The summer between my junior and senior years, I was working at a local mechanic shop, and I remember this guy bringing in his car that broke down during a road trip.

He wound up just sitting around the shop all day, waiting for the repair to be finished.

But the entire time he was there, I felt his eyes on me.

Not in a creepy way either, but like he was studying me.

Till this day, I don’t know why he did it; maybe he saw something in me—the desire to want more than what that shit town had to offer.

But during my lunch break, he saw me sitting outside, eating a shitty excuse for a sandwich, and came to talk to me.

He told me that he was in the Navy. He told me a couple of amazing stories about his career and some of the things he got to experience.

He told me about the men and women he has met since he joined who have become his family.

But the thing I remember most vividly is the expression on his face when he told me the Navy changed his life.

I could tell he meant it with every fiber of his being.

“And when my lunch break was over, he clapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘If you want more out of this life, all you have to do is reach out and take it.’”

Joe’s thumb strokes the back of my palm, and I sink into the feeling.

“I spent my final year of high school getting into peak physical condition. I worked hard in school. I picked up as many hours at the shop as I could to save as much money as I could. And I spent as much time away from my parents as possible. Despite my shitty life, and by some miracle, I graduated high school that year with honors. I had never been so proud of myself. Until the very next morning, when I drove two hours to the nearest recruiting station and enlisted in the United States Navy.”

She hits me with a mega-watt smile, equally as proud of me as I was of myself that day.

“A month later, I was walking out the front door of the hell hole I grew up in to head to boot in Chicago. They couldn’t even be bothered to say goodbye to me.

Hell, they probably didn’t even know I was leaving for good.

That was the last time I saw either of them, and they were passed out in our living room with a coffee table of drugs in front of them. ”

A small sniffle fills the room before a lone tear falls from Joe’s eyes, landing on our interconnected hands. Yet… neither of us move.

"I graduated at the top of my class in boot camp and became a Navy SEAL recruit.

After 62 of the most excruciating, exhausting, and rewarding weeks of my life, I was officially a SEAL.

As hard as it all was… I had never felt like a more authentic version of myself.

I knew I was doing what I was meant to do all along.

Years went by, and I went on countless missions.

Some are widely known, and some are still a secret to this day.

I traveled the world more times than I can count and saw things I never could have imagined.

Both beautiful and horrifying. I was making a life for myself—a career—and my brothers had become my family. Being a SEAL was wh o I was.

Until being a SEAL on a night raid in Aleppo five years ago changed the very fabric of my being for the second time.”

“We had intel that an abandoned building was where some locals were keeping children hostage. There was one night that we knew all of the rebels were supposed to be gone on a mission of their own. Knowing that was as good of an opportunity as we were going to get to save those kids, we moved in. What should have been a simple extraction turned into an absolute bloodbath. The entire thing was a trap. The kids were gone, and the building was full of rebel soldiers. We didn’t make it twenty feet inside before an ordinance exploded.

It killed half of our men and wounded the other half, including our troop chief and my best friend, Charlie.

By the time I came to, I was the only one standing, but I had so much shrapnel in my back that I could hardly move.

Just taking a step had me screaming in pain.

But that wasn’t even the worst part. No.

The worst part was standing in the middle of that room—in that fucking building—knowing that the only reason we even went in there was so that we could help save children’s lives and listening as my brothers screamed out in agony around me.

Watching as the ones that were dead continued to bleed out onto the floor.

Begging my body to cooperate so I could save Charlie.

So I could get to him, and he could go home to his wife and kids.

But no matter how much I wanted too—” My voice cracks as my own tear streams down my cheek.

“No matter how much I wanted to move to get to him, I couldn’t.

I couldn’t make sure he was okay. My body was in shock from my own pain, and I couldn’t move. ”

I choke out a sob as I vividly recall the most horrible day of my life. Letting go of my hands, Joe stands from her chair and climbs onto my lap. Straddling me, she buries my face into her chest as I cry.

A few minutes go by before I’m able to get myself together enough to tell the rest of the story. But I leave my head where it is. The feel of her hand rubbing the back of my head and the sound of her heart beating against my ear provide me with the comfort I need .

“Charlie was lying there, screaming my name. Over and over again, all he did was scream for me to help him. I hear the noise in my nightmares.” I take another deep breath.

“I may not have been able to move most of my body, but one thing I was able to do was shoot my gun. So, once the rebel team came in, the two other guys who could still shoot their weapons were able to hold them off long enough for our rescue team to arrive. After they cleared them out, they were able to get to us. I’m not sure how long we were trapped in that room.

It felt like days, but in reality, I’m sure it wasn’t more than thirty minutes.

The wounded, including me and Charlie, were medevacked to the nearest military hospital.

Sixteen of us went in that day, and only seven of us came out.

Charlie ended up getting an infection in his leg that the doctors couldn’t get under control.

It spread to his internal organs before they could stop it. He died in the hospital a week later.

“My back eventually healed, but my mind didn’t.

The Navy wouldn’t clear me to return to the line of duty without a clear mental health assessment, so I was eventually medically discharged.

Eventually, I got hired by a private security firm here in the city.

It paid like shit, but I was at least still helping people the best way I knew how.

Vittori Enterprises threw a huge party to launch a new rebrand of a company they had just bought.

There were so many guests that the company had to hire the security firm I was working at to keep an eye on the crowd.

Long story short, there was a small incident with a man and a gun, which I was able to spot in time.

Luca was so impressed that he offered me a job for the company’s security on the spot.

One afternoon, Luca saw the shithole apartment I was living in and basically forced me to come to live with him, Enzo, and Sebastian.

A few months later, when Luca took over as CEO and named Enzo COO, one of the first things they did was make me head of security.

I had more than proven myself, and they knew I could do the job.

I’ll be forever grateful for it. Because they’re my family now.

And I’d do anything for them. My life now has a purpose again.

What I do as a Horseman is enough to make what happened to me in Aleppo feel like a path I was supposed to take in life rather than just some fucked-up thing that happened to me. It led me here. To them.”

I lift my head from her chest and look her dead in the eye. “To you.”