It was the sound of pain escaping before pride could stop it.
Something inside Connor moved before his mind could stop it.
Service only looks clean to people standing outside the blast radius. Once you have been broken by it, you start recognizing the others who were broken too.
“One hundred,” Nathan said.
No one moved.
Connor looked at Odin.
Odin looked back.
Not calmly.
Not hopefully.
But directly.
For a second, the warehouse seemed to shrink to the space between a wounded man and a wounded dog.
Connor’s scars pulled tight beneath his shirt.
His right leg burned under him.
His discharge papers were folded in the glove box of his old Ford Bronco outside, as if a stack of official pages could explain what it meant to lose the only version of yourself you knew how to be.
Nathan lowered the microphone slightly.
“Fifty dollars.”
The man two rows below Connor snorted.
