Cutting Edge by CD Reiss

Author:CD Reiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942833550
Publisher: Flip City Books

* * *

Jenn was safely in bed. I’d check on her in the morning. I should have gone to bed too. The mortar area was taped off. The casualties had been treated and assessed. There was nothing left for me to do. But I was energized. Hyper. Activated.

I wanted to see Caden. I told myself I wanted to make sure he was okay, but the fact was I wanted him to tell me I was okay.

His trailer was dark, and he didn’t come to the door when I knocked. He wasn’t in the chow hall. Or the hospital.

“Hey,” I said to a doctor in recovery.

She leaned over a patient who had gauze over his eyes. With her blond hair tied into a neat ponytail, I didn’t recognize her.

“Hi.” She smiled.

I held out my hand. “I’m Major Greyson.”

She shook it. “Ferguson. I’m stationed at the airfield.”

“Oh, nice to meet you.”

Airfield surgeons went into combat with the medevac teams. Dr. Ferguson had vibrant skin and clear eyes. She didn’t look like a woman who went to the front lines in a Blackhawk, but that assumption said more about me than her.

“I have an eye specialty, and they traded me,” she said.

“Traded?”

“For a general surgeon, oddly, not a field doc. I was going to rush back, but they’d already left on a nine-line with him. That won’t go over well.”

General surgeons were too valuable to go past the wire.

“Did his name happen to be Captain St. John?”

“Yeah. Hard name to forget. He jumped right in. Volunteered like that.” She snapped her fingers.

The medevacs did not fuck around with time. Caden must have jumped on the truck to the airfield, told them he was a doctor, and taken off.

Caden outside the wire. Everything could go wrong. What was he thinking?

He wanted to own me, but he didn’t even know me. He didn’t know I had brother in Afghanistan or that my father had been eaten alive every day by regret and guilt even as he gave more and more years in service. He hadn’t grown up with stories of blood and gore, rage and impotence. I had. The fact that I’d chosen to serve in a war zone didn’t mean I fetishized battle. It meant I went in with my eyes open.

I wished I’d had time to open his eyes, and when he got back, I was making it my job to put away all our power games and make sure he didn’t deploy again. He was going to hear about my father’s night terrors, my brother’s suicide attempt, my grandfather’s guilt. Eight days of treating soldiers who had been blown to bits was going to seem like a cakewalk.

Caden was going home after this deployment if I had to scare the shit out of him.

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