Berserk: The Team

By Romilly King

Come along with Berk and Snipe on a road trip to inner peace.

 

I'm a vegan rage machine who will try any alternative therapy to calm the beast inside me. He's a gun crazy sniper who until now looked at the whole world through his scope.

We aren't a match made in heaven. We argue constantly. We like to pretend we are barely friends but he's the only person I can tolerate when the anger gets out of control.

There is a resonance between me and Snipe and I'm going to help him get over the life changing injuries he got while on a mission with me.

I'm calling it duty.

He's calling it pointless.

I'm not stopping until we're both in a better place. Whatever it takes - sweat lodges, crystals, howling at the moon. We're going on a road trip together and we're gonna get healed.

 

Berserk is the fifth book in The Teams Series. It's a hurt comfort story of the complicated relationship between a man with anger management problems and an ice cold killer who needs to find a new way of being. Expect weird therapies, much banter, and a strangely sweet love story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balloon Ride Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215604618

Romilly King

Romilly write's character driven gay romances that focus on the dynamics of intense relationships.  Romilly's plots tend to dive deep into the more fascinating aspects of human behaviour - basically there will be a lot of kinky stuff!

Book preview

Prologue

Berk

Coming out of the red rage is always a disorientating experience. The images are fractured, the strain on my body leaves me dry mouthed and with my heart hammering, and always there is the horror of what I face. The aftermath. 

This time is no different.

It’s like so many other times.

Crashing fear and failure and blood.

Snipe is on his knees, his hands over his face, his dark hair escaping from the thong he has it pulled back with. His hands are covered in blood.  It pumps black and thick from his right hand, streaming down his wrist, staining the sleeve of the ridiculous jacket I made him wear.

My brain struggles to process the moment, wanting to retreat into the red mist, to go to the place where there is no thought, only action. Action is safe, thought is pain.

I fall to my knees in front of him, reaching for his wrists, trying to assess the damage.

There are cold wet leaves under my knees.  The air smells of that mix of ice and gunpowder. At least it's not dust and gunpowder.

Down, I am saying, over and over, Snipe’s down.

There is a rushing sound in my ears.  My vision, hyped up by the chemicals that send my brain and body into overdrive, sees the blood in every crease of skin on Snipe’s hands.  I can smell it now, metallic and horrible.

Rescue ‘copter incoming. Janus’s voice is as icy as the air. Head north, five clicks, status report.

Gunshot, hand, through and through. My voice sounds rough to me, my tongue thick in my voice. Eye injury, cannot be assessed. Fuck, I don’t know what to do!

Panic threatens to overwhelm me. Danger is all around.  There is a dead man behind me. Every tree could hold an enemy, every shadow an assailant.

My senses go into overdrive.  I can hear the snow melting, falling from the lower branches of the trees.  I can hear Snipe’s pained breaths, each one scratching at my fear.

I look around frantically, trying to work out which way is north.

Berk, straight in front of you. North, go north, we’re on our way. Stat’s voice is familiar and my brain latches onto it, homing in.  He’s given me enough information and I trust him.  I trust the team. More than I trust myself.

I lurch to my feet. In the leaf litter, mud and snow Snipe is curled in on himself. I reach for his jacket, taking two fistfulls of the fabric and yanking him to his feet.  He makes a muffled cry.  I fling him over my shoulder and the red mist descends.  I step into it gratefully.

Fueled by the rage, driven by the anger I pound north.  I can’t feel Snipe’s weight, he’s nothing when I am like this, more beast than man. All I am aware of is the direction I run in and the heavy footfalls of my boots.  Someone will tell me when to stop, someone who is better than me.

I’m a grunt.  I’m the muscle.  I do what they tell me until they tell me to stop. The red rage boils inside me, making me more than I am without it, like it always did.

Chapter One

Snipe

The pain is all sharp splinters, drilling through me to the beat of my heart. My hand throbs, my eye burns, the pain in my head is tight pressure that if I scream will cause my skull to explode. 

I am frozen in the midst of it.

There are medical smells, astringent and sharp, along with the heavy scent of blood, lots of blood.  A metallic taste in my mouth means they’ve given me something but it's not enough, clearly, because I can feel everything.

My fucking hand.  My eye.

Lights are exploding in my vision, the pressure in my eye increases and I squirm against whatever holds me.

Give him more, he can take more. That’s Blue’s voice, above the familiar frantic beat of helicopter blades, churning air.

Sir, we’ve given him a lot.

More, now. I feel a sting in my arm and I know Blue will have shown them his true nature, and they have obeyed automatically, because it is that or be thrown through the open door of the bird.  Blue doesn’t mess around and he knows what I can take.  This ain’t my first rodeo, but this is the first time the bull stomped on my favourite pieces of myself.

My hand! My eye!

The battering pain eases off, the beat of it slowing, and everything becomes distant and fuzzy.  The lights in my head become strange shapes and weird colours, bleeding together.

I draw in a shuddering breath. How bad? My words are slurred, my tongue feeling thick and heavy in my mouth.

Pretty bad, says Blue, who would never lie to a fellow psycho.

There is a strangled sob beside me.  That will be Berk, crying over spilt milk, like always.

Don’t be a pussy, Berk. I manage to get the words out. I’d still be there if you weren’t such a great big strong donkey.

I hear him snuffling a laugh through his anguish.  Stupid donkey.  Not his fault.

I sink into multi coloured dreams where kaleidoscope lights whirl through my head, pain and pressure ebbs and flows, and eventually everything goes dark and stays that way.

#

All I ever wanted to be was a gunman. The only way I wanted to look at the world was through a scope.

I’m the kid from the streets with an eagle eye and a rock steady hand. The one who made it out of the dirt by pointing a gun at anything they needed me to. Everything is clear and simple down the barrel of a gun.  Everything outside of that is hard to understand and regrettably murky.

I had experienced enough dirt and confusion by the time I was six years old. 

My mother died of a heroin overdose in a roach infested apartment and I hid from the authorities when they found her body and took it away. 

Even before that happened I had fallen through the cracks in society.  I don’t think my birth was ever even registered. I was small and sneaky and I crept through the walls of our shitty apartment building looking for food when my mother forgot to feed me.

That was handy really.  By the time she died I could survive.

I never went to school, I never had a family, I never missed either.

The street gangs raised me. They fed me and clothed me, smacked me around as necessary, and the best of them gave me a kind of code. They taught me what I needed to know, and I picked up the rest on my own. 

I prefer to work things out my own way.

I made myself useful to the gangs, first as a runner, then as an errand boy, and when I got my first gun then I really turned myself into an asset for them. 

When I was ten years old another street kid, trying to frighten me, told me about the Handlers.  What do you frighten the feral kids with? Something that takes out the career criminals without mercy - the Handlers.

People traffickers and drug lords, rapists and pedos, I’d seen them all by then, and the thought that there were special people out there who just killed them, that was awesome.  I wanted to be one. Some kind of superhero, but the bloody kind.

From that moment I had one goal in mind, become a Handler, get legally lethal, because somewhere along the way I had worked out that life would be much simpler if I switched to the side of the angels. I heard they had better guns too. Big plus point. Shiny new guns with all the bells and whistles.  Don’t get me wrong, I can kill someone with a BB gun, but I rapidly got sick of the rundown, badly maintained, and just as likely to jam as fire guns I used on the streets.

I taught myself to read from a Guns and Ammo magazine I found in the basement of a drug den I sometimes slept in.  When I discovered libraries I spent days there reading Janes, fascinated by the world of undercover intelligence and all the lovely shiny armaments.

I think I had one of my few wet dreams about firing a sidewinder missile! I told Berk