In the Shadows (The Club)

The tension in his shoulders almost vanished from that simple statement. She wasn’t pushing him to spill his guts like all those reporters had years ago. Her straightened spine told him she was more interested in hearing this than she was willing to let on. Still, her readiness to let him take the reins burned away a little of the cold that always rose when he thought of his past.

“I don’t know where to start,” he admitted, tightening his grip on his coffee mug.

“Your parents?” she suggested. “After all, they made you, so it seems as good a place as any.”

His parents, huh? Okay, fine, he could do that. “They met in Dublin. My father was there on business and my mother was working at the pub he visited. One thing led to another and she got pregnant. So he married her and brought her back to the States.”

“Then they had you?”

He took a quick swig of coffee. “No. She had a miscarriage. So they tried again.”

“It couldn’t have been easy for her,” Vivian said.

“It wasn’t. I was lucky number four,” he said. “By that point, things between them were...strained, at best. My father’s work kept him away from home and my mother didn’t have anyone but me.”

“They wouldn’t divorce?”

“She was a staunch Catholic and, even if he was crappy at showing it, my father did love her. He was always faithful to her, despite everything, and I’m finally old enough to know that a marriage goes both ways.”

He couldn’t go deeper than that. He only knew that he would never settle for the same nightmare his parents had allowed themselves to be trapped in. The endless fights, two lives spent in complete separation despite being under the same roof, the desperate search both his parents made to find anything that would give their lives meaning again.

“It must have been hard on you. Is that why you joined the military?” Vivian’s soft voice pulled him from that dark place, but the compassion in her eyes is what gave him the strength to continue.

He tried to take another sip of coffee, but only a trickle remained. Stymied, he set down the mug and noticed his hands were starting to shake. Dammit.

“I got into a fight in high school and got suspended. The other kid deserved it. He’d been running his mouth off about an exchange student from Lebanon. He was just another racist dickhead who never had anyone stand up to him before. So I reminded him to be polite.” Zeke grinned. “I’d been boxing for a while. Guess my uncle back in Ireland was pretty good and my mother thought I might be good too. So it wasn’t much of a fight. There was a recruiter on campus that day. He saw the whole thing happen and spoke up for me to the principal. Kept me from getting expelled.”

“That was good of him,” Vivian agreed with a hint of a smile on her lips.

“I enlisted right after graduation. The only thing both my parents ever agreed on was that I’d made a horrible mistake.” He took a breath and leaned down to rest his arms on the counter. As he continued, he centered his weight on them, trying to get himself to relax. “Did well in training. Did well in Afghanistan. Got recruited to a commando unit. Did well there. When the international team was started, I was recruited for that too.”

“The men in the photo?”

“Yeah. America, England,

Ireland, Spain, Australia, and even Turkey. We were effective together.”

“So what happened?”

The shaking in his hands intensified, so he clasped them together. “We were sent into Syria. We were sold out by an informant and ambushed. Part of the team escaped. Five of us were captured and taken to the cell’s safe house. Two died there from their injuries.”

“What about you and the other two?”

“Tortured.”

Her face blanched. “For how long?”

“Seventy-two days.”

“Seventy-two days. Who let it go on that long?” He loved the way her horror gave way to fury and he wished someone like her could have fought to find him. Any man going toe to toe with her like that—eyes flashing, body taut with rage—would have thought twice about calling bureaucratic bullshit like they had.

“Our team made things complicated. We weren’t exactly what the paperwork said we were. So it took longer.”

“Clearly you escaped,” she said. She was also shaking now, but with a different emotion. “So why did you say they were filming an execution?”

“Because they were. They’d tortured us and still hadn’t gotten anything.”

She made a noise in the back of her throat. “John’s hands–?”