More Than Life by Garrett Leigh Read Free Book Online Page A

wouldn’t come to Isa. Mik’s face was, all at once, that of a stranger and of everything he’d ever known.
    “You know, I heard the gunshots,” Mik said. His voice quiet, but Isa felt each word like an ax to his heart. “When I was running…I thought I heard you cry out. I thought you’d been hit.”
    “I took two bullets, not enough to kill me, apparently.”
    A tired smile briefly brightened Mik’s beautiful face. “I always knew you were a superhero. But what happened next, Isa? The Serbians killed all their prisoners in Pristina. They took them to the forest and executed them over mass graves.
    Isa shrugged. His sorry tale sometimes didn’t feel real, like it had happened to someone else, and despite it all, he knew he’d been lucky. “Once they realized I was American, they kept me alive for…well, they kept me alive. Let’s leave it at that.”
    Mik caught his slip. Of course he did. Years of war and persecution had taught him that his worst fears could become reality in an instant. “What did they do to you?”
    Isa shook his head. “Don’t make me tell you, Mik. I can’t…”
    Isa stopped and fought for the breath caught in his throat. It hadn’t taken his captors long to figure out he’d been so deeply entrenched in the Kosovan resistance, he’d been on the edge of betraying his own country. They’d known nothing of the boy who’d stolen his heart, who he’d laid down his life for, but they’d known he’d spent months working with the KLA, hindering the Serbian invasion and betraying their positions. They’d known he had knowledge of the underground smuggling routes.
    That alone made his captors determined to extract information from him by any means possible. Isa had seen torture before, but he’d never truly understood how low human nature could sink until he was strung up in a cell, battered and broken, pleading for mercy. He’d thought for sure he was going to break, but his saving grace had been Mik. To betray the Kosovan people would’ve have betrayed Mik too and Isa could never do that.
    And so he’d held out. For the first year, he’d been interrogated every day, his body and his mind beaten and abused until he lay bleeding on the cold stone floor, but he’d given them nothing and eventually, his captors had become bored with him, and left him alone in a cell to rot. He’d been half mad from his solitary confinement by the time US Army rangers broke into his cell. When they’d carried him onto a waiting chopper, it was the first daylight he’d seen in years.
    He had little memory of the long weeks he’d spent in an American military hospital—for the first few days he was barely alive—but his will to live had been strong and he’d discharged himself as soon as he could walk, and returned to Europe to search for Mik. His determination outweighed his pain. No matter how long it took, he would find the only man he’d ever loved.
     

Chapter Nine
     
     
    The American was thinner than Mik remembered, much thinner, but it was his face that frightened him most. His once dyed hair was now a natural golden blond, but the warmth in his complexion was dulled by too pale skin, and faded, sunken eyes. Isa was a broken shell of the man Mik remembered, and he was scared by the darkness that colored his features.
    Mik felt a shudder pass through him. It was almost easier to imagine Isa dead than to accept the living hell he must have endured, than to comprehend the nightmare the last four years of his life had surely become. Mik couldn’t bear to think of him broken by Serbian hands. Death would have brought him mercy…peace at last and an end to his suffering. “How did your people find you?”
    Isa sighed. “They believed I was dead for almost as long as you did. It was only a chance exchange of information with the Russians that led them to me. Rangers lifted me from the floor of a Belgrade prison and flew me first to Cyprus, and then to a hospital in Virginia. I