Caught in the Cogs Volume One by O. M. Grey Read Free Book Online

unable to resist when he had pushed toward seduction.
    Life had damaged him, but then it hadn’t left her unscathed either. The scars on her arms and legs, self-inflicted, spoke to that. But she nor anyone but another soldier could grasp the depth of his internal injuries. As former sniper who had served in Iraq, he struggled with normal life. She could see the pain behind his eyes because it mirrored her own. Although she hadn’t known him before, she sensed the war had changed him. Still, they understood each other’s insanities. Both broken. Both scrambling to survive in a world they didn’t understand, and more importantly, one that didn’t understand them.
    A buzzing pulled her out of her thoughts, and she looked over at her phone vibrating on the night stand, a reminder of an unread text from her best friend.
    He must have seen it.
    That’s how he knew she had told. She must have slept through the first alert, dreaming. Content in her satisfaction. His senses, honed from his experience overseas, enabled him to hear the quiet vibration in the night.
    Now he knew. Now it was over.
    She collapsed to the floor, holding herself in a fetal position. The fear that consumed her wouldn’t even allow tears to come. Gasping for breath, she tried to grasp this new reality.
    He was gone. It was over. Surely he couldn’t throw their love away so easily. But the fear of hurting his family mixed with the unstable nature of PTSD made him unpredictable. She had seen it, his personality change from charming and witty one moment to dark and brooding and harsh the next. She had often wondered if he was reliving something from the war, remembering things that he quickly pushed back down deep inside the darkness of his mind. Despite horrors of war, tragedy and loss and savagery beyond comprehension, his greatest fear now was losing his family. He would stop at nothing to protect his place with them. He would never talk of them. She had asked repeatedly to see a picture of his wife, hoping that seeing her as a person, instead of just a intangible concept, would help her resist him. She would not do anything to hurt him or his family, but he always made an excuse. Perhaps his fear of losing them, of being discovered, had turned dangerous and triggered something primal inside him.
    A new horror came to mind.
    What if he meant over over. Like, over for her. Completely, not just the relationship?
    “Get up,” her subconscious screamed at her.
    But she couldn’t move.
    “Get up! Get up!” The words burst from her mouth and echoed against the walls in the silent apartment.
    Forcing herself to her feet, her instinct took over. Naked and alone, she ran to the front door and turned the two deadbolts, locked the doorknob, and shoved a chair beneath the handle. She stepped back, pulling her hands to her mouth, and trembled. Listening. But the silence remained. The whole world quiet, save for the pounding of her heart and her ever-quickening breath.
    Her mind drifted back to a few weeks ago. She could still see him watching her with admiration. No, adoration. The heat in his eyes had startled her. No one had looked at her like that in quite some time, and she had thought she imagined it. An artist, like her, they had gone to an opening together. An excuse to see each other, of course, in a professional setting without suspicion, although there had been nothing to suspect at the time. They had just been colleagues, friends, supporting each other in a tough business. Keeping each other’s spirits up so that they could continue to create. But his wife was the jealous type. Older than he, on her third marriage, a scientist with little interest in the visual arts.
    That night everything had changed. She had felt him watching her, and she didn’t quite know what to think. They had embraced, as always, but this time he kissed her. Just on the cheek. Rather innocent, really; but she had felt something new in that moment. For her, anyway. The look on