His first year in Vietnam had been raw combat from day one: deep-cover recon, search and destroy, cross-border infiltration. In that first year, Jason won a field promotion, two Purple Hearts, and a Silver Star. Darzell’s feelings about it had been pretty plain.

People talked about him even then …

We never heard a thing about it.

Jason must have impressed some important people, though, because when he re-upped for another tour, he was seconded to a Navy SEAL master chief and an ARVN colonel in command of three South Vietnamese rangers, the six of them tasked to run disguised gunboats into the DMZ to rescue downed aviators. In the first six months, they saved eleven Americans, including a marine lieutenant with a bullet in his lung, and two shattered legs. Under heavy fire, Jason dragged him from a crumpled jet, and carried him four miles through dense jungle, getting shot twice for the trouble. That earned him another Purple Heart and, this time, the Navy Cross. None of us knew about that, either, but Darzell had nursed the bitterness for a while.

Should have been the Medal of Honor.

Ask any marine.

No one could doubt my brother’s willingness or courage. He’d won other commendations. Darzell had other stories.

But the rest of it …

What came last …

I rose from the bed, too keyed up to have my head on a pillow. The room was still a box, but I paced it, anyway.

What else could I do?

Seriously.

31

X had Jason brought to the subbasement, and his eyes were keen as the young man entered the cell. It was the last cell in the row, and the one he used to store his completed paintings. Dozens hung at eye level; hundreds more leaned in stacks against the walls.

“Ah, Jason. Good. I want to show you something.” He took a canvas from a stack of others. It was a portrait of Jason, his eyes intent behind strands of dark hair, his face battered and bruised, but set in determined lines. “I call it The Unconquerable Soul. It’s what I see in you when we fight.”

Jason struggled with a sudden surge of unexpected emotion. The painting was … intimate.

“It’s in the eyes,” X said.

For Jason, looking into those painted eyes was like staring into something at once familiar, terrible, and strange, a part of himself he preferred to keep hidden and dark. That a man like X could capture it so perfectly …

“Put it away, please.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Please. If you would.” X seemed surprised and hurt, but Jason didn’t care about that. “When I finished my sentence, you said I was free, that you would stay out of my life.”

“I did say that, yes.” X propped the painting against the wall. “But I have so little time in the world.”

“I don’t understand what that has to do with me.”