He needed it so much that he didn’t trust the feeling completely. Maybe there were ulterior motives. Did she and her father plan to ransom him? If so, to whom? The U.S. government? Hell, if someone from the military knew he was alive, they would have already moved heaven and earth to find him. No man left behind. It was the Special Forces credo.

The thought hit him like a tank.

Was he Special Forces? If not, why would that particular spec-ops credo step front and center? Why not Navy SEAL or Marine Force Recon or Army Ranger or Delta?

Special Forces. Army. It felt right that he’d worn a green beret.

Or maybe it was wishful thinking because he’d like to believe he’d been so much more than the weak, useless excuse for a man that he’d become.

A familiar pain knifed through his head, reminding him that isolation was not a small house made of mud bricks and straw plaster in the middle of a war-torn country. Isolation was crippling vertigo, fading eyesight, and not knowing your own damn name. Not knowing if you had a family, if you had a life worth going back to, or if you even had a dog.

He forced a deep breath. Then another. He couldn’t go there. He had to deal with now. Only now was as unknown as his past.

“I must go,” she whispered again, and this time, he stopped her with a request.

“Tea. Please?”

While they never spoken of it, he knew she mixed opiates in a concoction of tea and honey that did little to disguise the bitter taste of the poppy.

She glanced toward the cooking room, then back to him. “Do you need it?”

Yeah. He needed it. He needed the haze of nothingness the drug spread through his mind and body. The need made him a weak man. He knew that. He knew he needed to resist.

Would tonight finally be the night? Could he do it?

With remnants of the nightmare hovering just out of his grasp, he knew he should at least try. If his head cleared, maybe he would remember something. Maybe tonight he didn’t want to.

“Yes, please,” he said, ashamed to be so deep into the drug that he craved it more than his strength or the life he’d lost.

Tomorrow, he resolved, as she rose on quiet feet and walked out of the room to make his tea. Tomorrow he would try. Tonight he wanted only relief.

FOUR MORE TOMORROWS passed before he finally found the courage to let go of the opium.

“You are sure, askar?” Rabia asked with concern in her eyes.

“I’m sure.”

She didn’t ask again. She understood. She knew he had to do this.

Once he’d said no more, the tea had become sweeter.

Life had not.

He’d thought he’d known pain. But the withdrawal was beyond anything he could have imagined. Cold sweats, tremors, vomiting, anxiety, and his old friend insomnia. And then there was the pain—muscle, bone, hair, teeth, everything hurt with unconditional torture.

All in a day’s work, if you were a junkie kicking the habit.

Through it all, Rabia stayed by his side.

She bathed him.

She cleaned up after him.

She held him while he shook until his bones ached.

She soothed his brow through the night terrors.

And when he finally slept, the nightmares shot at him like bullets. Fragmented images cut into his mind like daggers, waking him to his own screams as he faced fire and smoke and IED blasts until exhaustion sucked him under again.

“HOW ARE YOU this morning, askar?”

He opened his eyes slowly. Sunlight slanted in beneath the meager drape of fabric covering the small window. “I don’t know. How long has it been?”

“Since the tea became sweet?”

He tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. Immediately, she knelt beside him and tipped a cup of water to his lips.

“Yes,” he croaked after taking a small sip. “Since the tea became sweet.”

“Seven days.”

Seven days of hell. But he was alive. "Let's not do that again real soon.”

“Oh that, we agree.”

Because he heard a soft smile in her voice, he smiled, too, something that he realized he hadn’t done since he’d come to, chained by his ankle in that cave.

Suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude for all she had done for him, for all she had been to him, he reached for her hand. “Thank you.”

She wove her fingers through his, squeezed, and inexplicably, the darkness in his heart lifted. He didn’t think about it. He brought their linked hands to his mouth and kissed the back of her knuckles.

The action was spontaneous and achingly intimate.

Just as suddenly, it was over.

She tugged her hand out of his. “I must prepare the morning meal.”

Then she was gone, leaving him wondering what the hell he’d been thinking. Well, that was pretty damn clear. He hadn’t. He hadn’t thought at all. For an instant, neither had she. For once, she’d responded in a way that wasn’t an offer of comfort or aid. She’d touched him out of affection. He’d reacted in kind.

And it had scared the hell out of her.

Hell, it scared him, too. And, unexpectedly, aroused him.

He stared at the ceiling, experiencing what it felt like to be a man responding physically to a woman and instinctively knowing he had not lived his life in a sexual vacuum. There had been women. Possibly one special woman. Was one waiting for him even now? Would he ever remember her if there was? And what would it matter if he never got out of this damn country and reclaimed his life?

Frustrated, fighting defeat, he willed his thoughts away from the softness of Rabia’s body and the fullness of her lips. Thinking of her that way was one-hundred-percent out of line. Thinking of her that way would not happen again.

But the house was small, the walls thin. There was no way to distance himself physically or mentally. For long moments, he listened to her speak softly to her father in the cooking room. For the first time in seven days, the smells coming from her kitchen didn’t nauseate him.

And for the first time since he’d come to in that cave, he decided that it was time to see his own face.

He stared at the wall beside his pallet and the small mirror that hung above the wooden table. Flat-out, unadulterated fear accelerated his heart rate. What if he didn’t recognize his own face?

What if he did?

What if seeing his image triggered his memory and he didn’t like the man he’d been? What if who he’d been was so horrible that his mind had been protecting him with the amnesia?

There was only one way to find out.

He lay there a little longer, gathering his courage, then, moving slowly and carefully, struggled to sit up. Winded and weak, he gripped the table for support and eventually made it to his knees. Several steadying breaths later, when the vertigo hadn’t reared its ugly head, he managed to get one foot under his weight, then the other, while constantly repeating his mantra.

No sudden movements.

Do not dip your head.

Do not turn your head.

Do not look down.

Still, the room started spinning wildly. He gripped the table for several seconds before the world righted itself again.

Heart slamming, knees threatening to buckle, he drew several bracing breaths, then faced his nemesis in the wavy, mottled mirror—and experienced another loss so acute that it trumped all others.

The eyes of a stranger stared back at him from a face half covered by beard and skin stained dark by the henna dye Rabia had applied to help disguise him in the event that he was spotted through a window.

He’d been certain he’d at least recognize his own face, and in truth, he had put off looking for fear that he wouldn’t… and still he wasn’t prepared for the tears that suddenly clouded his vision at yet one more blow fate had seen fit to deal him.

Shock and curiosity finally beat out despair, and he studied this man who was him and whom he didn’t know. The eyes looking back at him were brown, the skin drawn, the cheeks sunken; streaks of gray were threaded through the tangle of dark hair and beard.

Despite the weakness, he had, for some reason, decided he was not an old man. He’d been certain he was in his thirties. Now he wasn’t so sure. The emaciated man staring back looked much older. Maybe it was his eyes. The eyes looked a hundred years old. Eerily empty. Because of his injuries? The opium? The absence of self? Had he lost his soul when he’d lost his memories and been sent into a time continuum where he’d aged by decades? Or was his soul merely as damaged as his body?