“That wasn’t even the worst of it,” he continued. “When Cam jumped out of bed and ran downstairs, I thought it was gunfire. I went into total combat mode and tossed my dad across the kitchen right as my mom and brother hurried in. I’ll never forget the look on her face. It was like she’d seen a monster. That’s when I realized what the hell I’d done.” Tears blurred his vision, and he forced them back. “That’s when I left. I knew if I didn’t, I’d end up hurting someone at some point, so I bailed.”
“Was that when you went to the homeless shelter?”
He nodded. “Yeah, but that didn’t work out any better than being at home. Too many people and too much noise. That’s actually where I met Spencer. He’s the one who suggested coming out here, that the solitude of the forest might help. I didn’t realize he’d taken his own advice until Stutmeir captured me and I saw Spencer in the cell next to mine.”
Zarina’s lips curved into a small smile. “You must have been thrilled when you came back out here and discovered he was okay.”
“Yeah, it was good seeing him,” Tanner agreed. He’d been freaked out when he’d first caught the hybrid scent on the breeze and followed it all the way to the prepper camp. He’d been sure he was losing his marbles. “But if we’re being honest, there was some baggage that came along with finding them, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“I expected that seeing Spencer and the others would bring back some bad memories from my time in the lodge, and they did. But after I’d found them, I started having flashbacks about the battle in Kunduz again.”
“That’s not surprising.” Zarina rubbed her right thumb back and forth over his hand. “I’m not an expert in psychology, but I’ve read enough to know that when it comes to PTSD, flashbacks can be triggered by anything that pulls you back into those horrible moments when the trauma first happened. Hearing Spencer and the other guys talk about crawling out of the same kind of shallow grave you were in put you right back in that crater in Afghanistan. All these horrible events are interconnected in your mind, and they’re not going away until you find a way to deal with them.”
“That’s easy to say but hard to do.” He knew Zarina was right, but he wasn’t sure how to deal with them. “At some level, I blame myself for the death of the guys on my team as well as the Afghanis working with us. In my gut, I know that’s crazy. There was nothing I could have done differently that would have prevented their deaths. Every one of us was living on borrowed time the moment we went on that mission. That doesn’t do anything to change the feelings of guilt I have, though.”
“Guilt.” Understanding slowly dawned on her face. “Is that why you don’t want to take the antiserum? Because you’re beating yourself up about being alive when everyone else on your team in Afghanistan died?”
He dropped his gaze to their intertwined hands. “I suppose that’s part of it. Part of me keeps thinking I have no right to be alive when men who depended on me to bring them home didn’t make it. But it’s more than that.”
She frowned. “I don’t understand.”
He was so screwed up, he barely understood himself most of the time.
Tanner didn’t say anything for a moment, using the time to figure out how to put into words what he’d kept hidden in the darkest, most private corner of his mind for a very long time.
“I’ve lied to myself from the day those doctors turned me into a hybrid,” he finally admitted. “I allowed myself to believe the beast inside me was entirely to blame for me being an out-of-control monster. That it wasn’t me doing all those things but the animal inside me.”
She sagged a little, her body relaxing as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. “You’re scared to take the antiserum because if it works and you’re still out of control, you’ll have to face the fact that it was never the beast inside you. You’ll have to accept that it’s your PTSD and a past you’ve never wanted to deal with.”
There it was. Out there for the world to see. Or Zarina at least. As far as he was concerned, she was the whole world.
“Stupid, huh? Especially since I had violent episodes way before I ever became a hybrid.” He snorted. “I guess I’d rather hide away and lie to myself by blaming the corrupt part of my DNA than face the fact that I’m broken.”
Zarina’s eyes flashed. Tightening her grip on his hands, she stood and tugged him to his feet. “You are not broken! You’re a man who went through one horrible event after another. But you’ve kept going, fighting against your inner demons as hard as you fight to protect the people you care about. Instead, all you see are those moments when you’ve lost control. You forget that every time you lost control, you regained it before you hurt anyone important to you. If you choose not to take the antiserum, that’s your decision, and I’ll support it. I won’t push you to take a drug you don’t want to take. But I refuse to stand around for one more second and watch the man I care about wallow in this pain by himself.”
Tanner opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off.
“I won’t let you push me away, and I won’t let you deal with those issues alone anymore. If you don’t want to talk about your PTSD with anyone else, then you’ll have to talk about it with me. If you want to isolate yourself from the rest of
