But the Marines meant Afghanistan. I saw action. I killed for my country. Got my ass shot at for my country too, and when I caught some shrapnel in the arm, they gave me Oxy. And when the magic pain pills ran out way, way before they were supposed to because I was popping three times what I was prescribed? Well, Afghanistan is famous for one other thing besides radicalized terrorism: heroin.
Heroin was cheap. Heroin was quick, and forgiving. Heroin took the pain away and dulled out the shadows. Heroin became my fucking world, until suddenly, it all went bad.
I don’t really know what happened for a while after that. I know I was doing literally anything that you could smoke, snort, inject, or drink that I could get my hands on, until the world and the demons just sort of faded away.
That’s when I met Landon, and that’s when I clawed my way back from the edge of hell. How’s a strung-out junkie get to be friends with a bareknuckle boxer routinely getting his ass handed to him for a quick buck? Well, maybe we saw ourselves in each other. We saw our own reflection—the broken versions of what we should have been, clawing at the world trying to bury ourselves in hurt and harm.
Landon saved my life—holding me down and making me sweat and scream out my demons as addiction sickness tried to make me eat my own tongue. When the tremors and fevers had me screaming for the mercy of one little hit of smack, when my brain relived every single painful moment of life over and over again, and all I wanted to do was die, Landon stuck with me, until finally, I was clean.
And I saved him too. Landon wasn’t fighting for money or fame or even the sport of it. He was fighting because he wanted the pain. Heroin was my escape. Getting his face bashed in every night was his. And once I was clean of the smack, it was my turn to hold him down through the rage and the fear until he broke.
You go through shit like that with a guy, and you’re closer than brothers.
That was all ancient history now. But addiction never really goes away. The demons were locked up inside, but temptation of any kind had them banging on the bars, rattling to break free.
…Kennedy was that temptation. Bad.
Fuck, it was everything about her. The scent of her, the soft feel of her skin, the way those baby blue eyes blazed bluish purple fire when she got heated. The way her hips moved when she walked, the way her full, soft lips smiled or spoke. The freckles across her nose. Shit, all of it.
I’d known her, at least a little, for a year. And I’d stayed away. So had Landon, even though I knew damn well he felt the same way about her. But we both knew that a girl like Kennedy with the draw she had on us was dangerous. For her, and for us. Sobriety is a day to day thing. So is keeping your demons in check.
And everything about Kennedy made both of us want to go crazy. She made us want to break free of being in control. Fuck, she made me want to lose all fucking sense of self control and lose myself in her.
For a year, even with her working right up the street at her clinic and with her being friends with Addison and Larkin, Ryker and Axe’s wives, and of course with her sister being Stone’s girl—somehow, we’d still managed to keep our distance.
Because we had to.
But then, the other night had happened.
Both Landon and I had done a lot of things in life we weren’t proud of but working for Harry “Shotgun” Shaunessy was probably towards the top of the list. We’d both been around plenty of crooks, bad guys, mafia-types, and criminals our whole lives, but Harry was a demon—a true psychopath who took pleasure from causing people pain. We’d pulled a few jobs for him when we’d been down in Vegas—mostly some protection gigs and a few armed escorts.
But then he’d sent us on that last job, and everything changed. It was me, Landon, and this older guy Mario we’d known for a little while. Harry told us we were breaking into the office of a local union president to take something back that the guy had stolen from him. Turns out, we were just cannon fodder.
The office belonged to a mafia lieutenant, and the shit we were supposed to steal was just a bunch of cash. Who the fuck knows if it was the mobs or Harry’s, but the point was, we weren’t there for the money, we were there to start a war. Harry just wanted to provoke the local crime family so he could start a turf battle, and we walked right into starting it up for him.