[MF] Love and War and Love (Ch. 3)

[Chapter 1](https://www.reddit.com/r/Erotica/comments/11bv8bx/mf_love_and_war_and_love_ch_1/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) | [Chapter 2](https://www.reddit.com/r/Erotica/comments/11glxz3/mf_love_and_war_and_love_ch_2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)

Amara’s scream had turned into a whimper as I crashed through the door of her bedroom. I saw her sit bolt upright and nearly jump out of her skin as I spun from corner to corner. There was nobody else in here – and judging by her reaction, it had been a nightmare.

“I’m sorry!” she wailed, confusion in her voice. She was covering her face from the glaring light off the bottom rail of my pistol. I slapped the light switch on the wall, then clicked off the weaponlight and lowered my sidearm. She lowered her hands slowly and blinked a few times – only for her hands to shoot back up and clap over her mouth. Her eyes were as big as saucers. After a beat I realized that I was nearly naked – I slept in a pair of tiny workout shorts, and hadn’t wasted time putting on anything else.

Her hands remained over her mouth as I saw her eyes sweep up and down my body. She was rapidly turning beet red. I felt a flush creep over me, though I had no idea why – I was certainly no stranger to women seeing me in my underwear, and I knew how good my body looked. So what was different now?

I heard Taz call “bro, you in there?” from the hallway. I called back “yeah, one coming out,” then poked my head out of the doorway. All of my teammates were outside, in varying states of undress, holding weapons.

I said “We’re good, guys. Sorry.”

Taz grinned at me. Hooch grunted unhappily and began to stalk away – for all his qualities, he’s an absolute dick when he first wakes up – but Boz just nodded knowingly as they all retreated back to their rooms. Our safehouse was big enough (I spent a week trying to make the term “safe-palace” happen) that our rooms were all separated by a pretty significant distance. So even as good as I knew my teammates were, I was surprised how fast they had arrived. Like me, they had clearly been sleeping with weapons close at hand. A sign, perhaps, that we were all a little more worried about the ambush tonight than any of us wanted to let on.

I ran a hand through my hair, trying to decide what to do. I was sympathetic to her nightmares, but I didn’t know how much I wanted to intrude on this girl’s life – or get involved in it. Bad enough that we had gotten her uncle killed. I’d been the one to make the call on bringing her out here, but that was more to buy enough time to figure out something else to do with her.

No, I resolved, I’d made sure she was safe, and now it was best to go back to my room.

I stood there for a second, then ducked back through the doorway into Amara’s room. She was curled up, hugging her knees to her chest. She had been sleeping in something like leggings and a short-sleeved shirt, and I could see she was covered in a light sheen of sweat. The sheets were an absolute rat’s nest – it was clear she had been thrashing around until I burst in.

“You, uh… need anything?” I asked.

Her forehead was resting on her knees. She didn’t give me any sign of acknowledgement, so I turned to leave once more.

“John,” she said hesitantly. I stopped.

“Will you stay with me?”

“…sure, alright,” I said. “Thinking about your uncle?”

She shook her head a fraction. “No. Yes. And other things.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. Given the screaming, I’d been certain that her nightmare had been about the death of her uncle, just a few hours before. God knows that the first time I saw a teammate get shot in front of me, it woke me up for the next few nights.

Which is why I was surprised to hear that apparently seeing a relative get shot in front of her barely even rated.

“One sec,” I said. I went back to my room and squatted down in front of my favorite chair, a ridiculous overstuffed loveseat that I’d found at a local furniture market on one of our first days in-country, when we were doing area familiarization. Boz had made fun of me the whole drive back to the safehouse, but joke’s on him – this chair was awesome. I wrapped my arms around it and hoisted it up with a grunt, maneuvering it out of my room and the few steps down the hallway to where Amara was sleeping.

I set the chair down with a thump and positioned it so that my back was to the wall, where I could see both Amara and the doorway. I saw that while I was gone she had untangled the sheets and crawled back underneath them, pulling the blanket up to the bottom of her nose.

I leaned back in my chair, putting my feet up on the coffee table and tugging a blanket over myself. I heard Amara’s muffled voice say “thank you, John.” More quickly than I’d expected, her breathing slowed and became regular. I gave it a few minutes to see if she was going to have a nightmare again, but she seemed to be sleeping peacefully. Not long after, I drifted off too.

A cramp woke me. I unfolded myself from the chair and checked my watch – noon. A little earlier than I usually got up, but not by much. I looked over at Amara – she was still sleeping peacefully. I got up and padded out of the room. Only once I had closed the door behind me did I stretch and flex, turning my spine – I sounded like bubble wrap these days, and I didn’t want to wake her.

I grabbed some fruit from the kitchen that our housekeeper washed and bleached for us and ate it on the way to our gym. We had a ragtag collection of workout equipment here, in the safehouse – some of which we’d bought, most of which we’d made. I started with bodyweight mobility exercises, and by the time I had moved to the weights, Boz, Taz, and Hooch had all joined me in the gym and were working through their prescribed routines. Counterintuitively, it was more important to keep a regular workout schedule while deployed than when back at home. With everything else we had to do, it was very easy for an operator to want to put off the gym time, but regular exercise kept both body and mind healthy. As I worked through my kettlebell circuit, I let my brain wander, turning last night’s mission over and over in my mind.

As with so many of these missions, we’d received the tip on the house from the local self-defense forces. That would’ve been easy enough for our mystery adversary to plant, of course, but what was puzzling me was that the squints back home had validated the lead through… whatever it was they did back there. I certainly didn’t claim to be an expert on that kind of thing, but I had to believe it would be much harder to gin up a trap that would fool those guys. So where did that leave us?

The house had been a trap. That much was clear – even without the presence of the spy cameras, the whole interior had looked staged, or sterile. But… the trap had been executed poorly. Assuming they had wanted to kill us, the house should have been rigged with explosives. Or, at the very least, the attacking force should have been much larger and arrived much faster. And command-and-control had been shoddy, too – when we blew the back wall and escaped instead of coming out the main gate, it had caught the attacking force off guard and they hadn’t recovered.

The only thing that made sense was if the trap had been planned by one guy (or group) and then executed by another. The finesse of the way we had been drawn in suggested to me that whoever had planned the trap was a pro. I didn’t know if that meant the bad guys had a hotshot new recruit or – more worrisome – if they were getting support from a hostile nation-state. Lord knows there were a few options there. With that pleasant notion occupying my thoughts, I left the gym to shower off and grab some breakfast. Hooch had set the next sync time at 1500, so I had a bit of time to check on Amara.

I stopped by my room to grab an armload of books written in the local language, and I balanced the bowl of oatmeal and fruit I’d brought for her on top of the stack as I knocked on her door before unlocking it and entering.

She was sitting comfortably upright in bed, her eyes closed meditatively. At the sound of my entrance, she opened her eyes and treated me to a small, hopeful smile.

My heart almost stopped. This was the first time I’d seen happiness on her expression, and it transformed her. She was always beautiful, but before it had been the kind of beauty you see in sculptures at museums – backed by a sort of cold, marble, hardness. The smile softened her, wiped away her worries. It was like a sunrise.

I knew instantly that I’d do almost anything to see another smile like that.

I saw that she’d showered – her sable hair looked damp, and she’d rewound it into a looser braid. Interestingly, instead of wearing her hijab, she’d folded it neatly and placed it on the bedside table. I wanted to ask about that later, but for now I settled on saying “are you hungry?”

“Yes, please,” she said.

“I also brought you some books,” I said, setting the stack on the bedside table. I held my breath – her intelligence was obvious, but I wasn’t sure how well she could read. I didn’t want to embarrass her.

She picked up the first one. “The *Muqaddimah*!”

My eyebrows shot up. “You know it?”

“Yes,” she said. She had already opened the book and was flipping through the pages. “My father always said that I deserved an education no less simply because I am a woman. He paid for private tutors for me. When I was a little girl, this was not unusual, but as I grew older the country grew more conservative. By the time I was a teenager, my father could not pay a tutor enough to run the risk of teaching me. Instead, he spent his money buying me as many books as he could. He claimed they were his, but he was never a reader. The *Muqaddimah* was my favorite.”

“Where are your parents now?” I asked.

She paused, still looking down at the book but no longer rifling through the pages. Her eyes were hard, but her voice was level. “I am now alone.”

I winced. “I’m sorry, Amara.”

She looked at me and her expression softened. “It is alright, John.”

I waited for a moment, and just when I was sure that she wasn’t going to say anything else, she continued.

“My father was the elder in our village. When the extremists came, they demanded tribute and shelter. In order to keep the peace, he agreed. Then they insisted on recruiting from among the young men in our village. Again, my father felt he had no choice but to agree. But then they demanded what he was unwilling to give.”

I closed my eyes. All over the world, the bad guys had used marriage as a weapon. They rolled into villages and married the local girls – sometimes voluntarily, sometimes by force. And then, because they were part of the family, the locals were obligated to help them, provide them food and shelter.

Amara was continuing in the same level tone of voice. “The commander of the extremists demanded a wife. He wanted to marry… one of the local girls.”

She hesitated. “My father, he… refused. The commander was offended. He killed my father and my mother.”

I blew out a breath. *Fuck*. No matter how many times I heard this type of story – or saw the aftermath – it never got easier. There were obviously things she wasn’t telling me, but I couldn’t blame her. Nobody liked to relive this kind of trauma.

“I- I was gone,” Amara said softly. “I came to the city with my father’s brother. I convinced him to let me join the police force. I knew that it was a small start, but I could think of no other way to start trying to find the men who destroyed my family.”

I nodded. “And your uncle joined to protect you. And because you had a chaperone, you could move around. Do your work.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “And I was so happy when I was selected to work as the liaison to your team. I knew that I was getting much closer. But my uncle said it was too dangerous to be near the foreigners – that we would be targets.” She sighed. “And he was right.”

“I’m sorry, Amara,” I said again.

She shook her head, then looked up at me. There was a strange emotion in her eyes. “It is not your fault. The extremists killed my uncle. You saved my life when anyone else would have left me to die.”

I shook my head. “You saved yourself. If you hadn’t made it to our position….”

In response – neither agreeing nor disagreeing, simply acknowledging what I had said – Amara inclined her head. Damn, she had poise.

After a comfortable silence, she asked “do you know who it was that attacked us?”

“No,” I said. “But we’re gonna find out. And we’re gonna kill them.”

Source: reddit.com/r/Erotica/comments/11lgo8b/mf_love_and_war_and_love_ch_3