Cut and Run 5 - Armed and Dangerous

what to do with us. We wouldn’t crack, we wouldn’t die, they weren’t willing to execute us. Ty wouldn’t shut up.”
    His eyes began to peer off into a distance only he could see. Zane watched him, apprehension and nerves swamping him. He could sense that Nick hadn’t reached the worst part yet.
    “Then they came up with something that would work.” He looked up at Zane, his hard eyes coming back into focus, bright with anger and memory. “One day they strapped Ty down to this table. I could hear the noise from my cell, and I knew from the way he was fighting, he thought he was going to die.”
    The thought hit Zane hard, and he closed his eyes, wondering if he should ask Nick to stop. But morbid curiosity got the better of him, and he forced himself to open his eyes again.
    “When they got him tied down, they brought me in there with him. They had him bent over the table, a rope over his back to hold him down. His hands were handcuffed behind him. They put cuffs on me, and I thought for sure they were going to make me cut him open.” Nick shook his head, raising his chin and glancing at the ceiling. “Then they told me I could either tell them what I knew or I could fuck him on that table with a gun to both our heads. And if I didn’t do it, they’d do it for me.”
    Zane stopped breathing as he stared at Nick, suddenly frightened out of his mind. He’d expected to hear about torture, but not that. Was that what had happened to Ty to make him hate being held down?
    Nick sat silent, eyes on the window, fingers trembling on his glass as he recounted what had to be one of the most terrifying, difficult experiences in his life. In anyone’s life. Zane dimly remembered that Ty told him once that they shouldn’t compare wounds. Now it made terrible, crystal clear sense. He felt sick.
    Nick’s voice wavered when he continued. “I was ready to tell them everything. I would have. Anything they asked, I would have given it to them. Everything Ty and I had stood for and fought for, I was ready to hand it over just like that.” His eyes welled and he closed them, possibly ashamed at the memory, but that just forced the tears out, and a pair tracked down his handsome face without him seeming to notice. “But Ty….”
    Zane knew without a doubt what Ty would have said, and he closed his eyes against the pain of it.
    “He told me to do it.” Nick nodded as he said it, as if affirming what Zane had already guessed. “He ordered me. Fucking pulled rank, like I cared at that point. He was still a Marine , and that’s all he cared about. I couldn’t process what they were going to make me do, what Ty was ordering me to do. I was standing next to this table, my best friend strapped down on it, a gun at my head, trying to decide whether I was a Marine with brass balls like Ty or a coward. And Ty told me to kiss him.” He laughed suddenly, the sound oddly incongruous with the story he told. “He had to tell me twice. And when I did he slipped a key into my mouth.”
    Zane’s heart seemed to lurch back into beating.
    Nick hummed deep in his throat, the sound both content and somehow ominous. “We didn’t leave anyone in our path alive.”
    Zane could barely get in a breath to speak. “So you didn’t have to—” His voice broke off, and he didn’t try to continue. He didn’t want to know, and yet he had to.
    Nick’s green eyes focused in on Zane again, as if he was just remembering that he’d been telling Zane the story instead of reliving it by himself. His eyes flickered away, and he shook his head. “No. I don’t think either of us would have come back from that.”
    The relief almost knocked Zane over. He gripped the edge of the table with one hand to stay balanced. After what seemed like a silent forever, he spoke in a hoarse voice. “That explains a lot about you two.”
    Nick nodded and swallowed hard. “I was in love with him. I’d already made up my mind to tell him after our tour was over. Consequences be damned, I just needed him to know. But after that….” He shook his head and cleared his throat. “There are some friends you don’t risk for your own peace of mind. Some things… at the time it wasn’t worth the risk of losing him.”
    “Last month when you….”
    “I knew I’d already lost him.”
    Zane nodded. “And now?”
    “Now what?” Nick asked. He leaned against the counter, body relaxed again as if he’d taken a weight off his shoulders and handed it to Zane