Book Five, Chapter 73: The Stacks
As I looked over the group of mercenaries, all eyes trained on me, I was hit with memories from my basketball days. That era was so long ago. Damn. I guess it really just hit me again—I was a retired basketball player. I’d been itching to quit for years, but when the time finally came, it wasn’t on my terms, and somehow, I hardly even noticed. Anyway, these mercenaries—they were like my old teammates back then.
There’s nothing like having a team, the common goal, the camaraderie, the clarity of purpose. That’s what sports had been for me. My teammates were a kind of family… back when my actual family was not.
And somehow, I’d found something close in this group of men, all of us in way over our heads. I could sense their camaraderie, feel their hands reaching out to me, inviting me into their strange, reckless chapter. They wanted me to be one of them, a fighter.
Hell, that’s what everyone seemed to want me to be.
“When are we gonna go out there and skin some pups?” one of the men called out, sparking a round of cheers from the others.
He had long blond hair tied up in a bun, deep blue eyes that almost pierced through you, and even a scar over his eyebrow. But I knew he wasn’t anyone important—he didn’t even have a name on the red wallpaper. He was a mercenary, and that was all there was to him—a mercenary who hoots and hollers and gets everyone riled up.
But wasn’t that what I was, too?
I surveyed the group. A lot of them were buzzing with rage, itching to kill something, but that didn’t sit right with me. Rage wasn’t what they needed; it didn’t make sense here. They didn’t have anything to be angry at. Maybe they just wanted blood, or, more likely, they were scared.
But why didn’t they run? They didn’t have to be here.