Maybe I’m still hers.
Her breath hitches the second my fingers twitch again, the faintest scrape of movement against her chest where she’s holding me like I’m all that’s left in the world.
She’s still talking, still pouring everything she’s ever buried into me—anger, grief, love so raw it tastes like blood. Her voice breaks and builds, a tide that won’t stop rising.
“Don’t you leave me again, Dax,” she whispers, forehead pressed hard to mine. “Don’t you dare. You don’t get to tear me apart and walk away this time. You don’t get to die when I just found you again. You’re mine, do you hear me? Mine.”
My throat works. God, it’s a war just to drag air through the wreckage of my lungs. Every breath burns. Every sound scrapes but something inside me claws up anyway.
Through the haze. Through the pain. Through the ghosts.
My lips part.
Dry. Cracked. Barely moving.
And one word bleeds out.
“…Butterfly.”
Her whole body freezes.
Like time stopped with it.
Her hand clamps tighter around mine, her tears breaking open all over again, spilling hot against my face. A sound tears out of her chest—half sob, half laugh, so full of relief it guts me more than any shrapnel ever could.
Her fingers shake against my jaw, against the line of tubes and tape and bruises. “You—” she gasps, voice splitting in two. “Oh my God—you said?—”
I can’t say more. My body’s too wrecked, my strength too thin. But my eyes drag open, a slit, just enough to catch the blur of her face and fuck—she’s beautiful. Ruined, raw, crying—and the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Her lips press to my cheek, fierce, frantic, like she’s kissing me back to life. “Stay with me, soldier,” she whispers, her voice breaking as she throws my own word back at me. “Stay with me, please.”
The monitor beeps steady.
My chest lifts, shallow but stubborn and for the first time since the blast, I believe I might.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
Dax
The world feels stitched together wrong.
Every sound is muffled. Every shadow too sharp. Every breath burns like I’m inhaling glass.
I drift in and out.
White walls. Canvas shadows. The faint hum of machines that keep reminding me I’m not buried yet.
And her.
Always her.
Cassandra’s face swims in and out of focus like she’s caught between dream and reality. Sometimes she’s crying. Sometimes she’s yelling. Sometimes she’s just there, holding my hand like it’s the only thing anchoring me to the earth.
I don’t know what’s real.
The blast still echoes in my skull—sand in my teeth, blood in my mouth, Torres screaming at me to breathe but then I blink, and it’s just her voice.
Soft. Fierce. Breaking open.
