“You’re already fucking gone for her, Kingston.”
And I was.
Still am.
So gone it hurts to breathe.
I lean back.
Pull the dog tags from my shirt.
His and mine, tangled together from the run.
“I’ll stay,” I mutter. “You’re not waking up without me here.”
I shift the chair closer. Pull off my gloves. Rest my hand on the edge of the bed and for the first time in weeks, I let the weight sit in my chest.
Let myself feel it.
The fear.
The guilt.
The ache of knowing the two people I care about most might bleed out before I can save either of them.
The last thing I say before the lights flicker again?
“Don’t make me lose both of you.”
I don’t move for hours because if he dies…and if she walks away again…
I don’t think I’ll come back either.
Chapter
Seventeen
Dax
The base is louder tonight. Generators rumble like dying metal beasts. Distant artillery thuds against the horizon like a heartbeat trying to restart itself.
The air smells like dust, disinfectant, diesel, and the kind of heat that never really cools after sundown — the kind that carries sweat and smoke and the metallic breath of fear.
Canvas walls flap. Boots stomp. Somebody argues with a corpsman outside about painkillers. Someone else sobs softly behind the comms room, muffled like it’s supposed to stay private.
This place eats people alive and somehow I’m still breathing.
I’m not even supposed to be here. One week embedded to ‘observe’ intel patterns, and now I’m knee-deep in blood, hauling kids I didn’t train with out of ambush zones.
The words echo off the metal bed frame as I drop into the chair beside Mason’s cot. The tent feels too small for what’s happened today — too narrow, too stifling, too full of the ghost of the explosion still ringing in my ears.
Mason is still lying there hooked to machines. Not moving. Not speaking but still breathing.
That’s more than most men get out here.
She’s there.
Pretending she’s busy. Like folding gauze or checking monitors is enough to ignore the fucking gravity between us but I can feel her watching me.
