“Please,” I choke, breath splintering. “Please don’t make me bury you. I’ve lost too much already. I can’t lose you too.”
My body trembles harder. Too many hours awake. Too many nights split between machines and ghosts. Too many words that never should’ve been left unsaid.
And then it happens.
The fight goes out of me.
My body folds, heavy and spent, until I’m slumped across him—my arm hooked over his chest, my head tucked into the curve of his shoulder like I belong there. My breath staggers once, twice, and then the exhaustion takes me whole.
I don’t even feel the tears when they finally stop.
All I know is his heartbeat, faint but steady, under my ear.
All I know is the whisper that slips from my lips as the dark drags me under—“Butterfly…”
It doesn’t matter if it’s his voice or mine anymore.
I let it carry me down and for the first time in days, I sleep but I don’t let go of him. Not even in dreams.
Chapter Twenty Eight
Dax
The first thing I feel is weight.
Not the weight of sandbags or body armour or the desert pressing down on my lungs. This is softer. Warmer. Human.
Her.
Cassandra.
She’s draped across me like she couldn’t hold herself up any longer, her arm hooked over my chest, her head pressed into the hollow of my shoulder. Her breath flutters against my skin—uneven, exhausted, but real.
For a second, I think I’m dreaming again. Another hallucination built out of fever and morphine, another cruel trick my brain plays when it wants to keep me chained to her even while I’m dying.
But then I hear it.
The machines.
Beep.
Hiss.
Beep.
And the pain—fuck, the pain. It’s not sharp anymore. It’s not fire tearing me open. It’s a dull, dragging weight in my ribs, a constant reminder that something tried to kill me and didn’t quite finish the job.
I blink. The ceiling swims into view—canvas, dim light, shadows moving slow outside the flap. The smell of antiseptic still clogs my throat, but underneath it, faint and fragile, is her. Soap. Sweat. The salt of tears she didn’t want me to see.
My lips part, dry and cracked. My throat is sandpaper. The words scrape out anyway.
“Butterfly.”
Her body jerks against me. She stirs, a soft sound slipping from her throat, and when her head lifts—when her face tilts up to mine—those eyes cut straight through the haze.
Red-rimmed. Wet. Alive.
She looks at me like I’m something she’s been holding together with her bare hands. Like she’s been keeping me alive through sheer fucking will.
