MILITARY ROMANCE: The War Within Himself (Alpha Bad Boy Marine Army Seal) (Contemporary Military Suspense & Thriller Romance)

by Claire Branson

  Chapter One

  Garthen smirked at the guard standing just on the other side of the bars. His lips folded into a sneer as he slammed his baton against the concrete walls.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Garthen knew what they expected of him. Stand up. Acknowledge.

  The guard let out a huff of breath, his jaw set as he yelled, “Get up!”

  Garthen couldn’t help the way his smirk widened at this. Sure he was the one in the cell, but the guard had just lost the face-off. He swung his legs over the side of his cot and stood up, shuddering at the way his muscles stretched. “Am I being punished for breathing again?” He wrapped his hands around the bars, an action that brought himself less than a foot away from the guard.

  He flinched, but otherwise kept an even expression. “You know well enough that it was more than that.”

  Garthen rolled his eyes. “Please. He’ll heal in days. Don’t be dramatic.”

  The guard flexed his jaw, whipping his key out of his back pocket and unlocking the cell. “I don’t have time to discuss this with you. The lottery is in minutes.”

  The lottery.

  Garthen tried to ignore the way his heart skipped a beat at the mere sound of that word. His dissidence had passed. He stepped out of the cell and joined the other soldiers in the hall, marching to the cafeteria.

  Garthen listened to the names, jumping when a sound even remotely similar to his filled the air. His heart pounded so loudly in his ears that he barely heard the words, “Garthen Vell.”

  “Fuck,” he whispered.

  A thin tear streamed down his face.

  Garthen took his time stalking through the crowd to the front of the room. The men who had not been chosen stood with their hands folded behind their backs and their eyes drooping with relief.

  They were the cowards, the ones who would rather waste the rest of their lives stuck in a brig in the center of an ocean on a nearly desolate planet than go somewhere new and inhabitable and filled with inferior creatures just waiting to be colonized.

  His assent from prisoner to pioneer only made him think of his charmed past. Visions of sterile conference rooms, the modern derivative of the thrones that had been burned in revolutions past filled his head. He could just see it, the matching stern faces of his mother and father buried in stacks of paperwork from the council.

  The memory had been blurred by trauma and willful forgetting, but the words could never fade.

  “Where is my brother?” His voice had echoed.

  Their mumbling ceased.

  “What do you mean?” His mother’s words meshed together.

  “Honey, the calculations.” His father barely looked at him.

  “My brother. Aleksey. Your oldest son. Where did you put him?”

  His mother’s chest rose and fell with a sharp breath. “Really, Garthen? A comet is going to hit our planet in 32 moons and you’re worried about where your brother ran off to?”

  “He didn’t run off. He was put somewhere.”

  “Just because Aleksey is pathologically dumb doesn’t mean he can’t do things of his own accord,” his father said. His brows furrowed as he eyed a piece of paper.

  “Besides, we need to focus on your engagement.”

  But Garthen knew his parents. The engagement was only a distraction and a halfhearted attempt to hide whatever they had done to Aleksey. He let out a slow sigh. Suddenly a thick wave of fatigue had washed over him, and the thought of arguing his point any further made him want to vomit. “What engagement? The world is ending in 32 moons, remember?”

  But there Garthen was, four months after impact, in a world still very much in existence.

  “Everyone looks so goddamn desolate.”

  Garthen glanced over at the Kaharan assigned to copilot his journey to Earth. In the short three hours since they had been plucked, they had been suited and assigned spaceships. The crafts seemed a bit overstated, considering the fact that they were only made for two people and meant to only last the one-way journey to Earth. “So, you’re excited or something?”

  He shrugged, fingering the helmet in his lap. “We are the apex. I can’t wait to collect our own.”

  Garthen glowered. “What’s your name again?”

  There was static in the craft, followed by, “Vell and Dredson. Prepare for takeoff.”

  Garthen nodded. “Dredson.”

  Dredson placed his helmet in the small hatch next to the seat. “Just twenty seconds. I can’t wait to feel a true star shining on my skin again.”

  “What are you? A poet?”

  Dredson lifted a brow in confusion. “Are you excited about anything?”

  It sounded like an accusation. “I’m not gonna be doing anything when I get to that sickening place.”

  “Take off in twenty, nineteen, eighteen…”

  “But you’ll at least find a demi? An Old Kaharan?”

  A dry laugh slipped out of Garthen’s lips. “Oh yes, of course. I’ll find a female, but I’m not interested in her bloodline.”

  “Ten, nine...”

  Garthen checked all the readings on the monitor. He was no scientist, but he learned quickly and was confident that manning a spacecraft couldn’t have been that much of a challenge, especially for Garthen.

  “So what are you interested in?”

  “One last moment of true freedom. Mind and Body. Before I end it.”

  Dredson let out a humorless laugh. “What, like your life?”

  “There’s nothing funny about it.”

  “Three, Two...”

  Dredson turned away. “And I thought I was the poet.”

  It only took Garthen five minutes of staring at the controls and listening to Dredson’s nervous muttering before he dozed off. He had a fitful sleep, twitching this way and that, his breath shallow and irregular. Something kept tapping him on the shoulder, then the chest, then the face.

  “Garthen!”

  His eyes flashed open just in time for a slap in the face. The sting wrenched him into awareness.

  A piercing screech cut through the craft.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “We’re in the atmosphere.” Dresden punched a red button in the center of the control panel.

  Garthen let out a grunt as it shifted into a nosedive. His chest pressed against the front panel. “Why the hell did you do that?” he yelled over the screech of the warning sirens and the lurch of the spacecraft.

  “There’s too much resistance!” Dresden wrapped his hand around his joystick and heaved, struggling to drive the spacecraft back upright.

  Garthen ripped his hands away. “No! Not yet!” He buckled himself in and grabbed the control. “We have to wait this one out.” He kept his stare even and his jaw set even though his heart pounded in his chest and his stomach rolled like the waves of an unsettled sea.

  Garthen could feel the exact moment when the resistance fell away and they had finally entered Earth’s atmosphere. He couldn’t deny the mild excitement he felt about being in a new place, but he had to put that on a back burner.

  There they were, in complete hold of gravity, propelling themselves toward hard rock faster than a freefall.

  “Now!”

  They both pulled. Garthen regretted falling asleep with each new second of being faced with a death he didn’t plan. Their spaceship fought against them, its dense body barely yielding to their attempts to steer it upright. They had waited far too long to do anything.

  Garthen had made the wrong call.

  As soon as the engine failed, the spacecraft suspended itself in the air. Dresden jabbed his finger on a button, opening all of the windows.

  Garthen glanced out, holding his breath at the first sight of open water since before the impact. It glistened in the moonlight, the silvery streams of water intertwining with dark slosh. Garthen didn’t want to admit to himself that he thought it was beautiful.

  His insides curdled as the spaceship t
ipped forward and eased into a plummet. After steering had failed, he clutched the seat with his hands and tried his best to stomach every flip and roll of the craft. Dresden screamed throughout the whole thing, his words, Kaharan chants, bouncing off the walls.

  Garthen knew the end was coming when, out of the windows, he started to gain vision of the sky and its stars…its moon. He let out a solitary “humph” right before the craft slammed into the ground. One boom after another.

  An airbag erupted from the control panel, whacking Garthen in the face. He winced at the crack in his neck, taking in shallow breaths just as he noted the fact that Dresden had finally stopped screaming.

  The tumbling seemed to last for days. The craft juddered, Garthen’s brain jumbling around inside of his head until finally the craft slammed into something, throwing Garthen back into the airbag.

  Silence cut through the craft as Garthen looked over at Dresden, who sat staring at the controls, his face wet with tears and his chest rising and falling with his rapid breaths.

  Garthen opened his mouth to say something, but a crack sounded, so loud he could hear it through the craft. “Oh—”

  But that’s all he got out before something slammed into the craft. It hit the space directly on top of Dresden’s head. A small dent fell out of the ceiling, punching Dresden in his skull.

  Garthen winced as he watched him melt, lifelessly, back into his chair.

  Chapter Two

  Keira stomped across the sand, her feet sinking into the damp ground as she pressed her fingers into either side of her temples. “I made the right decision,” she said.

  I made the right decision.

  I made the right decision.

  I made the right decision.

  She stopped, turning her face up to the sky. The sunrise hadn’t quite reached her yet, and she had nothing to look at but a depressing combination of grays and blues. “So why do I feel like shit?” she yelled.

  Her voice diffused out all around her, but she never worried that anyone could hear her. She loved that about the quiet beaches. When no one was on them, no one was listening. Her only answer was the sound of water rushing over itself and waves dying at the shore.

  “He was a brute who didn’t understand me and didn’t even try to understand me. He didn’t care what was in my head. Listening to himself speak was his favorite thing to do. He was awful at sex…”

  But she stopped, lifting her left hand up to face the rising, crimson sun. It looked naked without the ring. “But he was going to marry me.”

  She huffed out a breath. All of her attempts not to think about the way his eyes had turned red with the news, the way his lips quivered as he tried to argue his points, went to shit. All she could think about was the grief she had felt when she let him kiss her one last time.

  Greif that wasn’t hers.

  She knew they weren’t meant to be, but why did she feel so goddamn guilty about it? She huffed out a breath, turning her head up to the sky again and hating everything about the human condition.

  A scream shot out of her mouth.

  ***

  Garthen had never been to a Kaharan funeral. In fact, the first time anyone he knew died was only after impact, and no funerals were held, just a mass memorial service conducted by the men who survived. So, when he had finally erected the observation station they had come to Earth equipped with, he looked to Dredson’s lifeless body.

  After only twelve hours of being dead, the green pigment had begun to take over his skin, and anything remotely human about his appearance had drifted away. Garthen figured he should bury him. It seemed a little unfair to the both of them that Garthen could want so badly for his existence to end but Dredson was the one to die, almost as if his wishing it had killed him.

  Garthen tried to ignore the guilt by diverting his attention to the physically taxing task of digging him a grave. He sprayed the Kaharan with a substance meant to chemically burn Kaharan flesh. This was the council’s way of making sure no unwanted physical evidence was left behind…if they could help it.

  With every new heave of his shovel, he couldn’t help but hate Earth more and more. The sun had begun to rise, setting the sky on fire with its light, and all he could think about was Aleksey.

  Aleksey would have found that beautiful.

  Aleksey would have smiled, or even laughed at the warmth and the water.

  But Aleksey was dead, so Garthen stopped trying to predict what it would be like. He continued to dig, doing a good job of keeping his mind off his past. He listened to the sound of the trees rustling in the wind as he worked. Seagulls zoomed across the shore; their cry echoing in the wind caught his attention.

  He threw the wrapped, decaying Kaharan into the pit he had dug for him and returned the dirt. Just as he had made his final shovelful, he heard a scream pierce the morning quiet. He stopped.

  The frequency told him it was a woman.

  He dropped his shovel and made his way through the wooded area, following the sound of the voice until the trees began to thin and he caught his first glimpse of the beach. Indeed, there was a figure just three hundred meters out, kneeling in the sand just beyond the place where the water met the land.

  Garthen narrowed his eyes as he watched her stand up and pace back and forth. Her streamlined body moved with grace and speed. Her long, brunette hair, which looked it had been dipped in some kind of golden dye, glistened in the light and her olive skin shined effortlessly.

  His skin tingled as he realized he had to have her.

  Within the next ten minutes, he had made his way back to his post. He barged through the doors, thoughts of Dredson forgotten as he changed out of his preservation suit and into regular layman’s clothes. The pack of supplies that had been granted to him contained an ample supply of medications he could use to his advantage. Although his stint with the navy had been short and uneventful, he knew enough to self-medicate and, thus, more than enough to put a human female down.

  Thirty minutes later, he jogged back to the spot where he had seen her, hoping to himself that she had not gotten away. The sight of her lying on her back, letting the waves wash over her, filled him with excitement.

  He pushed the brush aside and stepped onto the sand, an annoyed wince crossing his face at the sensation of the fine dirt pulling him down. It was no matter, because after the third step, he had grown accustomed.

  She had senses like a wolf.

  One hundred meters still separated them when she stood and turned, her thick eyebrow raised in confusion. The sound of his approach had been covered by the crash of the waves, thus only Kaharan ears could have picked them out.

  “What are you—?”

  Her voice pierced him, but he decided to ignore it.

  He launched into a sprint, wrapping his arms around her thin torso within the next second.

  “Stop!” she yelled, stomping on his foot.

  The resulting pain merely annoyed him.

  “Shut up!”

  The struggling excited him.

  She elbowed him in the gut with such force that he doubled over in pain. His eyes flashed wide in surprise. How could a human woman deliver that much pain? The apparent contradiction kept him interested.

  But as soon as he was upright again, a backhanded slap met his face.

  He realized far too late that he had underestimated her. He didn’t want to hurt her at all. This whole thing was just supposed to be nothing more than a final experiment, a last entertainment before he offed himself, but she was making it exceedingly difficult for the both of them.

  As she spread her legs in the universal stance for fighting and put her fists up in front of her face, he realized he was going to have to hurt her if he wanted to leave with her at all. And what kind of man attempted a kidnap and then gave up because the woman put up a fight?

  No kind of man.

  That was the answer.

  So, he avoided a punch to her face and instead landed one in her gut. He went easy on her,
slowing the impact at the last second.

  She doubled over in pain anyway, and he used that hesitation to whip out his syringe, filled with a sedative cocktail, and drive it into her neck. She melted into his arms. He held her in his arms as opposed to heaving her over his shoulders just in case anyone happened to see him transporting her off the beach.

  The spaceship had been totaled, but the adjoining aircraft, something the council had equipped him with for Earth travel, managed to survive. He gave it a quick once-over before throwing her in the passenger area and climbing into the cockpit. With one button, he had freed it from the rest of the ship.

  As he fired up the craft, listening to the whip of the blades, spinning faster and faster with every revolution, he couldn’t help but to worry a little about his quick assessment of the craft he was flying in and, furthermore, the fact that he had just left a crashed spaceship in the middle of a forest clearly proximal to human inhabitation. But as the trees grew smaller and smaller, he reminded himself that soon he would be dead and none of it would matter, at least to him.

  After a lifetime of worrying, all he wanted to think about was the nice, solitary island where he would complete his short bucket list.

  Chapter Three

  Keira’s eyes flipped open.

  The ground was swaying.

  Ouch.

  She winced at the sharp pain in her torso. She didn’t want to move, felt like she couldn’t move, but she knew she had to. She sat up.

  Slow and steady.

  The sun beat down on her, its backdrop nothing but the blue sky. She was in a helicopter. But as she swept her surroundings with her gaze, taking in the curved surfaces, the stainless steel and the streamlined design, confusion washed over her.

  Muttering drifted toward her. She used the support of the lone backseat to steady herself as she stood up and peered down the short corridor. A male body occupied the pilot seat. His gaze pointed down as his hand flitted across the controls.

  Then she remembered. Her blood boiled with anger as she stomped right up to him. As if of its own accord, her hand slapped him in the back of his head.

  His shoulders jolted at this before he turned.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” She slammed herself into the copilot seat, her arms crossed.