Radios hiss like angry insects.
I lean against the edge of the medical tent, scrape a hand down my face, and breathe through clenched teeth.
Fuck.
Why did she have to be here.
Why did I have to still feel.
I press my thumb into the inside of my wrist, hard. It grounds me. Barely.
That girl. That fucking girl.
She doesn’t know what she walked into. Doesn’t know what I’ve done. What I was before they dropped me here like a broken cog because I’m not even supposed to be on the front lines.
I’m supposed to be the ghost. The mind-breaker. The invisible threat with a calm voice and a clipboard full of secrets. Psychological Special Operations. That was the title. The cover. But the truth? I got too good. Too invested. Too close to the subjects I was meant to manipulate.
They sent me to unravel threats with words instead of bullets—get into their heads, pull them apart from the inside. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes… I didn’t care if it did because something cracked.
Maybe it was after that op in Kyiv. Maybe it was the face of a boy who wouldn’t speak, even when I told him he could live. Maybe it was the fact that I started seeing myself in them — the men I was meant to undo.
Whatever it was, command saw it.
Pulled me.
Reassigned me.
Said it was “temporary.”
Said they needed eyes embedded with field units, someone who could “observe.” I know what this is. This is punishment in camouflage. This is exile by another name and I deserve it.
I deserve the blood on my boots. The weight in my chest. The silence that follows me like a second shadow because I stopped following protocol the second I let her in and now she’s here.
Here, in the same hell I’ve been trying to outrun. She thinks I’m a soldier now. Just another body with a gun but I was never trained for this.
Not the brotherhood.
Not the mess.
Not the blood spraying in your face when your teammate gets hit.
Not the fucking hope that maybe you’ll make it home.
No—my job was always to destroy from the inside.
Not to care.
Not to feel.
And now?
Now I’m standing outside this tent, covered in Mason’s blood, with the echo of her voice in my head—and I swear to God, I want to rip my own heart out for ever letting her matter.
Chapter
Eighteen
Cassandra
