“I won’t! Now shut up!” Vince said, ducking his head down, covering his and Will’s heads with his hands as another bomb landed nearby.

Will squeezed his hand again and grunted, “On lu…love…on…Rose.”

Vince stared at him, feeling even more choked up, as he watched a single tear roll down the side of Will’s face, but Will was still breathing.

His team leader was still yelling for everyone to move out of the area. Deliberately disobeying his team leader’s direct orders was something Vince stopped doing back in boot camp. But now he had no choice. He lay there next to Will, still holding onto his hand. With the gunfire getting even closer and growing more deafening by the second, the team leader didn’t wait. Instead, he ran for cover leaving Vince there alone with Will until Vince heard and watched his good friend take his last breath.

What happened next brought his father’s words spiraling at him. Everyone’s fate is predestined. The decisions one made, in Vince’s case usually in haste, had something, but not everything, to do with the consequences brought about because of them.

A bomb went off just as Vince had pulled Will’s tags from his lifeless body and had begun to move away from him. Vince hit the floor again, assessing for a moment where the bomb had gone off. Looking up, he saw that the explosion had come from the direction where his squad had headed. The whole area was on fire now. He knew they couldn’t have gone far. He had to get to them now. There had to be casualties from that massive bomb. Just as he got up, two more bombs went off in that same vicinity, and Vince dove behind a pile of rubble for cover.

Feeling the warmth of blood streak down the side of his face, he knew he’d been hit by some kind of debris from the explosion. He wiped it away, wincing at the pain of what felt like a small gash along his temple. At that moment he knew—there was no way his squad had survived all three of those bombs. The whole area had been obliterated by it. Yet here he was still alive—saved twice from sure death by his friend Will.

As the gunfire died down, an eerie fog of smoke and silence settled into what had been chaos just moments ago. Vince crouched there, numb and lost in thought. He should’ve been thinking of what his next move would be. How the hell was he going to get out there alive? Instead, all he could think of were Will’s final words, and had it really been his fate to die today?

If Vince could go back to that day—the day he let his parents down, again—the day he broke Rose’s heart, ultimately landing his ass in Army boot camp and had now brought him here, would he do things differently? Would his decision be different now that he knew the outcome?

Taking a deep breath, he realized this really had been predestined. Looking back now, even after all the heartache he knew he’d caused his parents and the love of his life, he hadn’t had a choice. Given the circumstances his decision would’ve been the same. Therefore, this had been Will’s fate.

Rose had moved on already and never once bothered to respond to any of his letters: not even the one he thought for sure would make her understand. Maybe his dad was also right: that some things weren’t meant to be. Deep inside he’d always known he wasn’t the kind of guy a girl like Rose should be with. She deserved better.

His heart ached knowing that even Will and Missy Anne were not meant to be. Life was cruel. But at least Will died knowing his girl loved him unconditionally—faults and all. Things had been different for him and Rose. Maybe he was never meant to have someone like her in his life.

So why the hell couldn’t he get the nagging feeling out of his gut? It insisted that even back then his choices, including the bad ones, had ultimately led him to her. But then later, decisions he’d made because of her, for her, had made him a better person—one that made him worthy of a girl like Rose—until that day when it all went to hell. But before that, things had been nearly perfect.

Vince lay there; his warm tears now mixed with the blood that still ran down the side of his face. He cried silently for the friend he’d just lost and finally allowed himself to cry for Rose. Life had been beautiful with her, and he’d been happier than he’d ever imagined he could be. She’d given him so much hope for a perfect future together. But that was then. Everything was different now…

Part I

CHAPTER ONE

Vince

Then…

“Spread your feet, boy.” The cop kicked Vince’s legs open before he even had a chance to spread them.

Another cop car pulled up, joining the other three that were already there. Vince was not even supposed to be here tonight. He knew when the guys showed up riled up about what had happened at school earlier that day it was a bad idea to buy booze and hang out. He’d already said he was out but at the last minute decided to join them.

Sure enough, as soon as a few of them got buzzed, they started talking about walking the two blocks from the abandoned car lot where they’d been hanging out to their high school and crossing out the offending tags they were so pissed about.

Now here he was face down on the hood of a cop car as a cop frisked him roughly. Most likely, he would be thrown in jail for vandalism. He hadn’t even been one of the ones doing the tagging. In fact, he’d been the one telling them they were stupid for doing it.

They didn’t call themselves a gang, but they may as well have because they sure as f**k acted like stupid thugs sometimes—like tonight, for example. The guys were all pissed because someone had tagged several of the more noticeable walls at school with the word Basset: the city just over on the other side of their high school.