“Are you okay?” Brand asks me, looking down at me. His face is confident, his voice calm. “You’re going to be all right.”

I nod because I believe him, because how could I not trust a voice that sure of itself?

But then it doesn’t matter.

Because out of nowhere, I hear a nauseatingly loud crack, and all of a sudden, the wall next to us comes down in a mass of metallic shrieks and groans and shards.

It shears my arm, and I can smell the blood.

I’m knocked free from Brand’s safe grasp, yanked from his arms, and I’m falling, falling, falling.

Then it all goes black and stays that way.

Brand

Fucking son-of-a-bitch.

White hot pain rips through me, from my hip to my ankle. I grimace, trying to pull myself out of the wreckage, to no avail. I’m the one who is stuck now, firmly and painfully in a mountain of broken wood and cinder.

The smoke surrounding me brings back instant memories of Afghanistan, of bombs and blood. But I shake those images away. I’m not there. I’m here. And I’ve got to keep my wits.

The girl.

The girl I was carrying, the girl with the dark red hair and big blue eyes. She trusted me. I saw it on her face.

I twist to find her, scanning everything around me. And then I see her thin arm, sticking out of a pile of rubble. I know it’s hers because of the turquoise bracelet on her small wrist.

“Help!” I call out to the EMTs who are now on the scene. One hears me, and rushes my way, but I wave him toward the girl.

“Get her first!” I tell him. “She’s under that shit. Get her first. It’s crushing her.”

He does as I ask, and it takes two of them to dig her out. I watch them carry her out, I watch how her eyes are still closed, I watch them stretch her limp body onto a waiting gurney before they come back for me.

Fuck.

“Thank you,” I tell them sincerely. They gingerly move the wood and the drywall and the twisted metal that is holding me down, before they roll me onto a stretcher.

“I’m fine,” I try and tell them, as I attempt to get up.

But I can’t get up. My left leg is twisted beneath me, my foot turned an unnatural way. I stare at it, aghast and astonished, noticing the way my knee is turned out, while my ankle is turned in.

Fuck.

I don’t feel the pain, so I know I’m in shock. I drop back against the stretcher, as they wheel me toward a waiting ambulance.

My leg was shattered in Afghanistan. I had multiple surgeries, months of physical therapy and I was only just starting to walk without a limp. And for what? To have it annihilated again? Here in fucking Angel Bay?

Fucking hell.

They load me up and close the door and I stare at the white metal for a second before I close my eyes. This can’t be happening. This isn’t real.

But it’s real.

The sirens, loud and wailing, tell me that.

Numbly, I wait. Then something occurs to me. Why are they using the siren for a broken leg?

I barely have the thought before my fingers grow cold, and my thoughts begin to get fuzzy, muddled.

What the hell?

But then it doesn’t matter, because I’m so fucking tired. Nothing matters, not the pain, or the lack of it, or even the girl.

My arms and legs grow heavy and I close my eyes, a sigh rattling my ribcage.

The girl. Her blue eyes are the last things I see before I close my eyes.

It seems like only minutes before the ambulance shrieks to a stop and I’m being bustled out.

I grab one of the EMTs arms as they race me into the hospital.

“What’s wrong?”

He stares down at me as he runs. “Don’t worry. They’ll fix you.”

I fall back onto the gurney and all I can do is watch everything happening. Waves of utter exhaustion and sleepiness pass through me and all I want to do is close my eyes.

So I do, but I can’t sleep because some damn faceless person keeps asking me questions, all the while other faceless people prod at my leg and cut off my pants.

What’s your name?

“Brand Killien,” I mutter.

How old are you?

“Twenty-seven.”

Are you allergic to anything?

No.

Can we call anyone for you?

“No.”

I open my eyes when they jam an IV into my arm, and the lights are bright, and the medicine feeding into me blurs it all together.

A nurse’s face blurs in front of me.

“You’re going in to surgery, sweetheart,” she tells me. I can’t see her face even though my eyes are wide open. “Your artery was nicked. They have to fix it.”

My fucking artery was nicked?

You’ve got to be kidding me. I survived the bloody hills of Afghanistan. I’m not going to bleed to death here. No fucking way. Holy shit. Why didn’t I have them call Gabe or Jacey… just in case?

I try to mutter that, to tell them to call Gabe, but they can’t understand me.

Another face blurs over me, someone with black hair. “Everything will be all right, sir. Just count backward from one hundred.”

The light swirls, the noise echoes.

Ninety-Nine.

Ninety-Eight.

Ninety-Seven.

Nothing.

Nothing.

I hear my father’s heavy footsteps stepping out of my little sister’s room, closing the door with a click, then leaning heavily on the bannister as he walks down the stairs.

Seventeen-Creak.

Sixteen-Creak.

Each of the seventeen steps groans, and then there is silence once again. Staring up at the ceiling, I wait until I hear the muffler of his old truck fire up before I breathe again.

He’s gone.

Relief rushes through me and I feel stupid. I’m six years old. I shouldn’t be so afraid.

But I am.

I get up to go to the bathroom, something I’d never do when he was still at home. I wouldn’t risk it. I tip-toe into the kitchen and grab a handful of cookies, being careful not to tip over the cookie jar onto the floor, before I make my way back to my room, running through the shadows, leaping into bed.

I turn onto my side and stare out my windows as I chew the chocolate chips. My mother had made them tonight, specially for dinner, only my father wouldn’t let me have one.

“Boys who don’t watch their little sisters don’t get cookies,” he’d told me sternly, eyeing me with his cold blue eyes.

I’d gulp and peered through my eyelashes at Alison. She was happily munching on a cookie, the crumbs gathering on the front of her shirt. Her grubby fingers grasped her sugary treasure and she was oblivious to the trouble I’m in because of her.

“But I was watching her,” I told my father. “I tried to make her come in and wash up for dinner, she just wouldn’t listen.”

My father was unsympathetic. “She’s only four. You have to look out for her. You’re bigger than she is. Are you telling me that you can’t take ahold of her arm and bring her in? Are you that weak, Branden?”

I gulped, shaking my head. “No.”

He shook his head, his steely eyes piercing me. “I’m not sure about that. If it happens again, I’ll have to teach you a lesson. I’ll show you exactly how you can make someone smaller and weaker do what you want.”

Panic welled up in me then, and it wells up in me now, at the mere memory.

I don’t want to get that lesson.

I stare out the window at the lake, watching the water roll gently into the beach. At night, the sand looks silver. The gulls are asleep, so everything is silent but for the rippling water.

A white ball appears, floating to and fro in the tide, and I watch it for a while, watching as it floats, then disappears.

I wish I could be that ball and float far from here.