Shattered (The Protectors 11)

Tantalizingly close to…

I stumbled to my feet. Jace grabbed my elbow to steady me, but I quickly pulled free of him. My body felt like it was on fire. “I’ll… I’ll re-bait your hook,” I stuttered. I avoided Jace’s gaze as I worked. “Do you want to try casting again?” I asked when I was finished. Jace’s eyes were still on me, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“No, not sure my ass can take a second hit.”

His attempt to lighten the tension worked and I found myself smiling. I took the rod from him, avoiding touching him as I did so, then quickly re-baited the hook and cast the line into the water. I returned to my seat and Jace did the same. The silence between us grew, causing my anxiety to build.

“So, um, you can’t ski, cook, or fish,” I blurted. “What can you do? Besides save my life and stuff,” I added, flashing him a slight smile.

“I can juggle,” he said with a grin.

I chuckled at that.

Jace sobered and said, “There was never one thing I was particularly good at when I was a kid. I got mediocre grades, I wasn’t popular or good-looking, I did okay in sports but I wasn’t any kind of standout. I eventually just accepted I was average.”

“I find that hard to believe,” I admitted.

“It’s true,” he said. “At first it was hard for me to be okay with it. My parents, they were amazing – they always encouraged me to try things, but never pressured me to succeed – it was always more about me doing things that I enjoyed. The skiing was my idea because I just wanted to find that one thing I was really good at – that thing that would make me me.”

“And did you?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s just not something I can say I’m particularly proud of. I mean, I was at the time, because I thought it was really cool that I could do what only a handful of people could. I mean, suddenly I was being noticed for something.”

“You were good with a gun,” I said softly, as it dawned on me what he was referring to. The tone in his voice suggested it wasn’t a topic he enjoyed talking about.

“No, lots of guys in the military can shoot. But they can’t take out a moving target from a mile and a half away.” Jace took a sip from his bottle of water.

“You hated it,” I murmured. On the one hand, I hated having brought him down with the unpleasant conversation, but on the other, I wanted to understand what made him tick.

“Sometimes,” he said. “I didn’t know shit about the men and women I saw through my scope. I was told who to take out and that was it. I didn’t ask if the person on the other end deserved it. I was a good little soldier and followed orders.”

When he fell silent, I instinctively knew there was more. “What happened?” I asked quietly.

“Over two hundred kills in ten years. Didn’t hesitate even once. Final mission, final deployment. Order comes in, I find my target… it’s a woman and a kid approaching a checkpoint. She ignores orders to stay back. Soldiers on the ground can’t get a good shot – too many civilians around. She was acting suspicious enough that they were worried she had an IED and was using the kid to blend in. I knew something was wrong because she was drawing too much attention to herself,” Jace said with a shake of his head.

“Did you take the shot?” I asked. My heart was in my throat because I already knew the answer.

“Had to follow orders,” Jace said quietly. “I didn’t have a clean shot, not with the way she was holding her kid. Baby couldn’t have been more than a year old. But I did what I was told.”

“I’m sorry, Jace,” I offered.

He shook his head. “Turned out she was just trying to get some help for her kid, but she was deaf. Couldn’t understand the orders the soldiers were calling out to her. The baby had been sick for a few days, but she’d been afraid to take him to the hospital because the city had been overrun by insurgents. When we showed up, she thought we were her kid’s salvation.”

“You couldn’t have known,” I said.

“But I did. In my gut, I knew. But all that discipline that had been drilled into me when I enlisted, that I’d needed, had me pulling that trigger anyway. There’s a husband out there who no longer has his wife or youngest son. There are four other kids who don’t have a mother anymore. And what did I get out of the whole thing? A medal. An actual fucking medal.”

Jace took another sip of his water, then motioned to the bay. “That fucker’s out here. Hopefully buried under twenty feet of fish shit where it belongs.”