The announcement had Ren's eyebrows hitting his hairline.
“What happened?” There was concern in the question, but Tox didn’t even try to hide his happiness at the announcement. Even Chat, who in the most stressful situations was inscrutable, looked pleased.
“I accidentally killed a trafficker they were trying to turn.” Finn flipped his palms up in a what was I supposed to do? Gesture.
“How’d you accidentally kill him?” Herc asked, grabbing a fresh beer from the cooler.
Finn gave an evil grin. “Shot him in the face.”
“Well, that would certainly do it.” Steady crossed the room to hug his friend.
“And I may or may not have punched the Assistant Deputy Director of Operations. Also in the face.”
“Whoa.” Tox ran a hand across his five o’clock shadow. “That's a lot of fucking up faces.” He instantly regretted the comment seeing Finn's own scarred profile, but it was Finn's reply that silenced the room.
“Yeah, well, when Gabriel Lorca, the most vicious cartel leader in Eastern Europe is patting you on the back for killing an informant—a guy who makes a living selling children—and the CIA is hauling you in for disciplinary measures, it kind of skews your reality.” He poured straight bourbon into a red cup and took an unhealthy swig.
“You were embedded with Gabriel Lorca?” Ren asked.
“Classified.” Finn finished his drink and poured another.
“The CIA put Lorca in power fifteen years ago. He kills his rivals and blows up their operations with enough C4 to put a crater in the ground. Then he went rogue. Now he's their biggest problem,” Ren said.
Finn clapped both hands together. “So, what's on the agenda tonight, boys. I need to get laid.”
Five dumbfounded faces stared back at him.
Chat stood. “We find our brother. We don’t rest until we do.”
Finn laughed awkwardly. “Oh, come on. There's nothing to do. Nothing in those files will shed any light.”
Chat stepped away from the table and stood toe-to-toe with his friend. “It doesn’t matter. We work with what we have. We dig. Cam isn’t resting, so we don’t rest. That's how this works.” He grabbed Finn's forearm. “Every time.”
Finn closed his eyes against the memory. Chat continued, undeterred, “We didn’t sleep for three days straight looking for you. Ren made the connection between the insurgents and a local man. Tox held a knife to his wife's throat until he gave up the location of the cave.”
Tox's face was expressionless, but his gaze was unashamed. Steady, nicknamed for his composure, released a rare burst of temper. “What did you think, Finn? That we hit the town and waited for Nathan and OpNav to get us intel? It was combat naps and MREs until we found you.”
Finn set the bottle of booze on the kitchen counter. Shame, rage, sadness simmered beneath his skin. With an anguished cry, he grabbed the bottle and threw it against the far wall, whiskey and glass bleeding down the wallpaper. Grabbing his hair in both fists, he stormed past the men out onto the deck, where he stomped onto the decayed boards…
And promptly fell through the wood onto the sand ten feet below.
A tormented “Fuuuuuck!” rose up.
Tox lifted both hands to stop his brothers and turned to the deck. He gingerly worked his way around the rotted boards and fresh hole to the stairs and descended. He found Finn sitting under the deck, head in his hands, weeping.
Tox took a seat beside him and waited. A minute passed, then another. Finally, Finn looked up, making no effort to hide the tear tracks that ran through the sand on his face.
“Something's got to change, Miller.” The fact that Finn had called him by his name spoke volumes.
“Yes,” Tox agreed, “it does.”
“What the fuck do I do? You think I want to be this way? Last month I put a guy in the hospital because he called me Two-Face. Before that, I smacked a woman. I was in the middle of fucking her. I don’t even remember what she said.” He rested his forehead on the heels of his palms. “I used to be a good guy.”
Tox rested a hand on his back. “You still are a good guy, Finn, but you’re not invincible. There's no shame in asking for help. Shit, I get therapy to work through what happened to you.”
That had Finn looking up. “Get? Still?”
“Yeah, still. Look around you, brother. Look at the Spec Ops guys who struggle. You faked your way through mandatory psych evals, and those demons don’t just die,” Tox said.