Chapter 1:
Words don't mean much when you're dead. They hold no comfort from the ripped pages of a letter you never got send for yourself. Dear Mom, I'm sorry I won't be coming home. This war was not mine, but I fought it anyway. No comfort offered by a uniform could heal the wounds that seared a heart after your fate is laid on the table with no visible proof of the believed truth. That letter, that you hoped would never find its way home, is no consolation to the loss of a child, sister, and friend. Dear Dad, I'll always be your little girl. My heart stays with you though my soul has left this world behind.
Gemma's fingers leafed around the frayed edges of the paper in her hands. Her heart had shattered far beyond belief when it was placed in her care exactly 3 years before. No mother should lose a child. Her boys had fought tooth and nail to live through the uncertainty of a genetic heart defect, but they were alive and well. Her daughter, her little baby girl had willingly stepped in front of the shrapnel and lead that took her life.
Gemma had down right begged Bryn to change her mind or even go AWOL to stay out of the military. But Bryn was Gemma in the sense that once she set her mind to something, it would be reality come hell or high water. Unfortunately, that reality had left her baby lying somewhere in the Middle East without even a body to bury. No evidence she survived the attack was what they had fed to Gemma, Clay, Thomas and Jax. The team she went in on the mission with—no one survived.
Bryn had broken down walls in the military—forced her way into a group of elite enforcers inside the U.S. Marine Corp. On paper, she was a sniper; in reality she was a covert operations officer that could handle hand-on-hand combat with the best of them. She was impressive, but she had also been taken out in her prime at 24 during a Black Ops mission overseas. The officers couldn't tell her family where she had died or how, just that she wasn't coming back and handed over the now-ragged Dear John letter that Gemma carried with her every day.
For the first year, Gemma didn't break down. She told people on a regular basis that Bryn was alive—she just knew it. She believed it wholeheartedly. Until someone left her body where she could identify her, Gemma Teller-Morrow was sullen to believe that Bryn was a live and captive somewhere in the far beyond.
The second year, Gemma broke down in hysterics at the headstone placed in the cemetery beside her first husband, Thomas and Jax's father, John Teller. She stayed on the grave in memory of her baby girl for 2 days in the rain and cold begging God to bring her back or to take her too. Neither had come to fruition and Clay, Jax and Thomas had carried her to the car sobbing and maniacal to get her ass back home. They had long since given in to the mourning of their loved one.
The third year, the present year, Gemma sat quietly praying for her daughter's soul. This was her day of grieving and she would sit in her room alone for the entirety of it to mourn her little girl. Grief was a silent pain that broke the soul a little at a time. Gemma, Clay, Thomas and Jax knew all too well just how cruel grief could be.