Hot Summer Night

7 - Declan

"Declan?" the woman breathed my name questionably. Even I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me.

What the ever living fuck?

This can't be... this can't be my girl. Can it?

The longer I stood frozen, studying the woman standing mere inches from me, the more my head shook in disbelief at what my eyes believed they were seeing.

Assuming I was hallucinating, I repeatedly blinked, trying to get my eyes to focus correctly, expecting the face I thought I was seeing to disappear when they closed and have my eyes see who the real woman was when they opened. But the same woman kept reappearing.

I looked past the swollen black, blue, and yellow eyes and her swollen, broken, split lips. I thought back to her voice and accent when she awoke on the drive here and was talking with Marla. Also, when she spoke to me. And now, when I look at the familiar baby blue eyes staring back at me like she's looking at a ghost, with them also brightening from the tears welling in her eyes, told me everything I thought I was seeing was accurate. My eyes were telling my mind and heart that I knew her and that I knew her very well.

The blonde wig threw me off, but after taking another hard look at the crying, bruised woman and hearing the familiar pronunciation of her words when she spoke—an accent that always made my heart flutter whenever she said something, my heart pounded so hard it felt like it was seconds away from hammering its way through my chest.

This woman isn't just anyone. And her name isn't Sara. This is the girl who's had my heart since meeting her all those years ago and then lost after having to abruptly leave to do a classified operation that kept me away longer than I was told it would. My ex-fiancée, "Seraphine?" I finally spit out.

Marla, bringing Seraphine back to my life unexpectedly and like this instantly makes me feel like I finally found the buried treasure I'd been searching for for years. I also feel various emotions, and I'm unsure which emotion affects me most.

A week ago, after Marla explained what "her friend" had been going through, I felt terrible for her. Now that I see who her friend is, battered, bruised, and broken, the thumping muscle behind my chest ached like a motherfucker, like I'd been stabbed there. The pulse point in my neck also felt like it was pumping a million times a minute.

Instead of reaching and pulling Seraphine to me to comfort her and tell her everything would be okay, and because it felt like I couldn't breathe, my hand flew to my neck, and my eyes closed.

"Well. Well. Well. What do you know? You two know each other," Marla quipped a hint of humor in her voice. That's how it sounded to me, anyway. And that has me thinking even more. What the fuck?

Marla and I met when Seraphine and I were together. We were in the same Marine unit and deployed together. She worked in the Marine Counter Intelligence/Human Intelligence department. And she was very smart—so bright that she was always a step ahead of foreign adversaries.

Marla's also the one who planned and coordinated the classified operation that cost me Seraphine.

She didn't purposely do it, and she didn't intend for me to lose my fiancée. The job needed to be done. And I was the chosen man to get that job done.

I'm at a loss for words because I often talked to Marla about Seraphine when we were deployed. She knew how in love I was with her. She also knew how much it destroyed me when I returned home and saw Seraphine in the arms of another man.

She knew...

Now that Marla opened up to me last Friday night, telling me everything about "her friend" and what her husband had been doing to her for the past six years, I now realize it was Marla's way of telling me I'm bringing your girl back to you, but she has a story, and it's one you're not going to like—she's badly broken.