Zane shrugged that imagery off. He’d have to deal with it soon, but he wanted to see what he could get out of Nick first.
“I guess none of us sleep much. Ty’s down there muttering in Farsi,” he said as a way to break the ice.
“He does that still?” Nick asked in amusement.
“Only when he’s asleep or really, really pissed off,” Zane admitted, sliding the glass back and forth on the table near his gun. He kind of enjoyed the dig, letting Nick know that Zane was the one who held Ty at night. It might have been beneath him, but he didn’t care. “When he sleeps, he doesn’t sleep quietly.”
Nick gave that a melancholy smile. “We were all like that, to a degree. You can be disqualified from making Recon if you snore, but what they don’t realize is that after half a year, every one of us talked in our sleep. Or screamed.”
Zane emptied his glass and reached for the bottle to refill it. “I don’t think that’s something I’ve ever done. Talk in my sleep, I mean. Keep it bottled up, I guess.” Not to mention that a large part of the time he’d been undercover, he was sleeping with someone—or someones—he didn’t want knowing who he really was.
“Not healthy,” Nick chastised, smiling and lifting his own glass to his lips.
“Are you a friend of Deuce’s too?” Zane asked wryly.
“Ty’s brother? I’ve met him a few times. I don’t know, something about combining the Grady traits with psychological training didn’t sit right with me. Made me nervous.”
Zane laughed. “Grady traits? Like blustering out of tight spots and courage under fire?”
“And being crazy enough to pull off the impossible.”
“Gummi bears.”
“Cheetos. And that look, like he knows exactly what you’re thinking and he finds it funny.”
“I hate that,” Zane muttered, setting down his half-full glass.
“Me too,” Nick said, laughing and looking down at the ice in his glass again. “God, I miss him sometimes.”
Zane looked up at him, an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t want to imagine what it was like to miss Ty.
Nick was silent too, watching Zane in the dim light again and drinking his water without further comment. Finally, Nick smiled and looked away with a shake of his head. “Ty told you, didn’t he?”
It threw Zane for a moment, and he stared at Nick, wondering if he was headed for a showdown of some sort. “Yes.”
Nick nodded, still looking down at the glass he’d set on the counter. “I was hoping he’d forget.”
“He told me that night. As soon as he got home.”
Nick nodded. “His brand of morality is pretty unique,” he said as he looked up to meet Zane’s eyes. He straightened and put both hands on the counter. “I owe you an apology.”
Zane frowned, not sure how to handle the straightforward approach. “Am I actually going to hear it?”
“Depends,” Nick answered with an easy shrug. “Do you deserve it?”
“Yes,” Zane said, meeting Nick’s eyes.
Nick raised one eyebrow and cocked his head to the side. “Ty told me he was involved with you, that he loved you, and I should have respected that. I didn’t, and for that I’m sorry,” he offered, sounding sincere.
Zane nodded, noting how precisely Nick worded that apology. “Now tell me how you really feel,” he said, keeping his tone dry. He didn’t want to start an argument, but he did want to know where Nick stood. And he did still want to slug him.
Nick snorted and gave him a grim smile. “I think you’re one lucky son of a bitch, and I kind of want to hate you. The hell of it is, I know Ty. He won’t come looking for me unless you give him a good goddamn reason to.”
“I know I’m lucky,” Zane said as he realized that the little bundle of nerves he’d always had to deal with when he thought about love and Ty just wasn’t there. Was that confidence? Trust in his lover? Zane wasn’t sure, but he liked it.
Nick lowered his head, shaking it minutely. “In that case, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry for making a move on your boyfriend.”
It sounded so absurd that Zane huffed a laugh. “Thanks.”
“Yeah.” Nick stood for an awkward moment, obviously not sure what to say or do.
“If you weren’t so damn much like him, I’d probably have been able to hit you,” Zane told him, wondering where the urge to share was coming from and kind of wishing it would stop.
Nick looked up at him, expression guarded. “If we can be friends, it’d make our lives easier. And Ty’s.”
Zane nodded.
“You can tell he’s tense. I’ve been wondering if that’s because of me, or just life. But then, he never did like it when people tried to kill him.”
“No one likes it when people try to kill them.”
Nick smirked at that. He picked up his glass and turned to get more ice from the freezer. He moved deliberately, trying not to make any noise. He glanced toward the stairs again. When he turned back to the counter, he reached for his own bottle of water to refill his glass.
“He said you’ve been on the run pretty much nonstop,” he said to Zane. “You’ve got to be as exhausted as he is, why are you really up?”
“Honestly? You.”
“Ah.”
Zane glanced toward the stairwell, then back to Nick. “How close are you?” he finally blurted out. “I have no frame of reference, other than the oorah and your tongue down his throat.”
“Whoa, okay.”
“Well?”
“Right. Uh… we met on the bus ride to Parris Island. Stuck together for the next… ten years, I guess.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Then you’re going to have to be more specific.”
Zane shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been able to really talk to one of Ty’s friends before, besides his brother. I guess I figured you might have some insight.”
Nick was already shaking his head before Zane finished. “Just treat him like you would when you unravel a slinky. That’s the best I can give you.”
“That’s disturbingly apt,” Zane murmured.
Nick’s lips twitched as he looked down at the glass in his hand. Zane looked at him, truly studying him. He was beginning to understand why this man was Ty’s best friend, coming out and kissing him aside.
“Anything else?”
Nick’s smile fell, and he nodded. “I’ve lost count of how many times over I owe him my life.” He looked at Zane hard, narrowing his eyes in the darkness. “There’s something you’re dancing around,” he said, confident in his assertion.
Zane sighed. He figured he must be really worn out if he wasn’t hiding his emotions as well as usual. Nick was reading him, and Zane wasn’t sure he cared. “I’m worried. This mess could go so bad so quickly, and you know him. He’ll be right in the middle of it.”
“Ty was made for messes. He and the cockroaches will be the only things to survive the final meltdown.”
Zane looked down at the almost empty glass he held and then set it carefully on the counter. “I wouldn’t bet on the cockroaches.”
Nick was quiet, but Zane could feel his eyes on him.
“You and Ty… you were prisoners of war, weren’t you?” he said, looking up to meet Nick’s eyes carefully.
Nick inhaled sharply and rubbed his hand over his mouth as he looked away.
“I was wondering… I don’t want to ask him details. He doesn’t know I know.”
Nick looked down at the counter and shook his head, then pushed away from the counter and paced away, running his hand through his hair.
Zane winced. “I’m sorry, I….”
“I just, uh… it’s still classified. Not something I really like to chat about,” Nick stuttered. He was truly flustered, and Zane realized that it didn’t suit him.
“I thought maybe it would help me understand you two better. Understand him better. I’m sorry, I….” Zane shrugged. He had worried about asking Ty the details, but he hadn’t even considered the effect the mention of it would have on Nick. He realized that it had been cruel to bring it up. Despite wanting to hate this man, Zane found that he didn’t.
Zane’s words hung in the air between them. Zane wasn’t sure if Nick would give him details. Zane wasn’t sure that he wanted details, but he felt like it was something that had forged Ty into who he was now.
Nick returned to the counter, watching Zane, looking like a man with something heavy on his conscience. It was another look that didn’t suit him, and Zane frowned as a shadow crossed Nick’s face in the weak light.
“We were in captivity for over three weeks,” he told Zane without being prompted again. “Twenty-three days, nine hours, and fifty-one minutes.”
“Jesus,” Zane whispered.
“We were captured when our Chinook was taken down by an improvised rocket-assisted mortar. We’re not really sure how it happened; one minute we were in the transport, the next we were both waking up in a cell. The investigators said that the five us who were in the middle of the helo were thrown. He and I were the only two taken. They think it was because we were further from the wreckage. I don’t know. We were detained, questioned, and tortured for information.”
Zane shook his head. It was worse than he had imagined. He had guessed months ago that something had happened while Ty was in Afghanistan. Little clues had dropped over time, and Zane had collected them: Ty’s incessant nightmares and nocturnal muttering. Fear of small, dark, enclosed spaces. Hating being restrained or even forced to sit still for long. Recognition of interrogation tools and techniques. The POW sticker on the Bronco. The words Zane had overheard when Ty had spoken to Nick. And then Nick had confirmed it.
But when Nick laid out the details, it was so much worse than Zane had feared. Almost three weeks in captivity, being drilled for answers and tortured.
Nick gave him a moment to let the reality sink in and possibly to give him a chance to stop the narrative. Then he continued. “Ty kept pissing them off by speaking in different accents every time they questioned him.” He laughed. It was a bitter, thin sound. “He spent a whole day pretending he was Russian and telling them they were doing it wrong.”
Zane couldn’t help but smile. That sounded so much like the man Zane knew. Even in the midst of an ordeal like that, he was still Ty.
“They kept us together in a cell that wasn’t big enough for either of us to stretch out in. But we had each other, kept each other sane. When they’d come and drag Ty out, leave me there alone, that was the lowest I’d get. They could torture me all they wanted, do whatever they wanted to me. But sitting in that cell alone, wondering if he was coming back… those times are where my nightmares go.” Nick swallowed hard and looked away, his green eyes glistening as he tried to force the emotions back so he could continue. It affected Zane as well, and his chest already hurt in sympathy.
“Finally they started getting desperate. They realized that we were drawing strength from each other. Instead of separating us, though, they tried to drive a wedge between us. They’d take us out together, make us do the work. If we didn’t hit hard enough, we had to hit again. If we didn’t cut deep enough, we had to cut again. I don’t know how long it really was, but we estimated it was about a week that we spent torturing each other, beating the shit out of each other at gunpoint.”
Zane let his eyes fall closed. He had taken enough of Ty’s punches in the past to know how bad that must have gotten. He and Nick both must have been beaten to a pulp.
“But it didn’t work,” Nick murmured triumphantly. “They wanted us to resent each other, turn on each other. It just made us stronger, more determined to live through it together and escape. I don’t think they really knew what to do with us. We wouldn’t crack, we wouldn’t die, they weren’t willing to execute us. Ty wouldn’t shut up.”
His eyes began to peer off into a distance only he could see. Zane watched him, apprehension and nerves swamping him. He could sense that Nick hadn’t reached the worst part yet.
“Then they came up with something that would work.” He looked up at Zane, his hard eyes coming back into focus, bright with anger and memory. “One day they strapped Ty down to this table. I could hear the noise from my cell, and I knew from the way he was fighting, he thought he was going to die.”
The thought hit Zane hard, and he closed his eyes, wondering if he should ask Nick to stop. But morbid curiosity got the better of him, and he forced himself to open his eyes again.
“When they got him tied down, they brought me in there with him. They had him bent over the table, a rope over his back to hold him down. His hands were handcuffed behind him. They put cuffs on me, and I thought for sure they were going to make me cut him open.” Nick shook his head, raising his chin and glancing at the ceiling. “Then they told me I could either tell them what I knew or I could fuck him on that table with a gun to both our heads. And if I didn’t do it, they’d do it for me.”
Zane stopped breathing as he stared at Nick, suddenly frightened out of his mind. He’d expected to hear about torture, but not that. Was that what had happened to Ty to make him hate being held down?
Nick sat silent, eyes on the window, fingers trembling on his glass as he recounted what had to be one of the most terrifying, difficult experiences in his life. In anyone’s life. Zane dimly remembered that Ty told him once that they shouldn’t compare wounds. Now it made terrible, crystal clear sense. He felt sick.