The shouting drops.
The monitor’s rhythm steadies, thin but sure.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Her lips are right at my ear when she says it—so soft I don’t know if anyone else hears.
“You’re still mine, Dax. And I’ll fight every fucking ghost in this desert if that’s what it takes to keep you breathing.”
I want to answer.
Want to tell her she already owns me, has from the start but the dark wins this round.
It swallows me again—only this time, I feel her voice tethered to my chest and I know when I claw my way back, she’ll still be there.
Chapter Twenty Seven
Cassandra
The monitors are quieter now. Not silent—never silent—but steady enough that the panic in my chest has dulled to a sharp, throbbing ache instead of a knife.
Dax is still here.
Still breathing.
Still tethered to this world by machines, wires, bruises, and me.
I haven’t moved from his side. My legs ache from standing too long, my eyes burn from refusing to close, but I won’t sit, I won’t rest, I won’t fucking blink longer than a second in case when I open them—he’s gone.
Outside, the base doesn’t sleep. Boots pound across gravel. Shouts tear through the canvas. Choppers thrum overhead, blades chopping the air to pieces. Somewhere out there, another convoy limps back in, another stretcher carries a body that didn’t make it. The war doesn’t pause just because my heart is on this cot.
The war doesn’t care about him.
About me.
About us.
My hand shakes when I brush the sweat-damp hair off his forehead. He looks nothing like the man who kissed me in that ruined chapel, nothing like the bastard who burned me alive with his touch. He looks younger. Hollowed out. Fragile. His lips are cracked, his lashes dusted with grit and fever.
And I hate it.
I hate how fragile he looks when the only way I’ve ever known him is unbreakable.
“You don’t get to leave me,” I whisper, my throat raw. “Not like this.”
The nurse on shift gave me a stack of letters earlier—ones that came in on the last supply run. She said reading helps, that familiar voices sometimes drag them back.
I wasn’t going to. It felt like betrayal, opening what wasn’t mine but then I saw the handwriting.
Lola.
Her letters always start with a mess of doodles in the corners—flowers, suns, little spirals that look like she’s scribbling out the silence. This one’s no different. My chest cracks open just looking at it.
I sit beside him, my chair scraping the floor, and unfold the paper slow, like it might fall apart in my hands. His hand is still under mine. Still warm. Still alive.
