The taste of her skin is still on my lips when I manage the word, when I manage her—butterfly—and it tears my throat open like I’ve swallowed glass.
Her laugh cracks, jagged, wet, wild with relief. She presses my hand to her mouth like she’s afraid I’ll disappear if she lets go. Her tears drip hot against my skin, sinking into me, anchoring me.
And then she breaks.
“I love you.”
The words rip out of her like she’s been holding them in for years, like they’ve been clawing her lungs bloody to get free. She shakes her head, presses her forehead to mine, sobbing as if each syllable might undo her. “I love you, Dax. God, I love you so much it hurts.”
My chest heaves, jagged, uneven. The monitor ticks my shame out loud, every weak blip a reminder I can’t say it back without tearing myself to pieces. But she doesn’t stop. She doesn’t let me.
“You think you broke me,” she whispers, trembling against me, her words a confession and a wound. “But you didn’t. You are me. Every day without you has been a fucking war I couldn’t win. Every breath was glass. Every second you were gone—I hated you. I hated myself. But I never stopped. I never fucking stopped.”
Her voice cracks. She clutches my hand tighter, like the bones might snap. “So don’t you dare—don’t you dare think you can leave me again. I don’t care if you think you’re poison. I don’t care if you think you’ll ruin me. You already did. And I’m still here.”
The air scorches my throat. I want to tell her I don’t deserve it. I want to tell her she’s wrong. But the words won’t come.
All I can do is lie here, raw, ruined, her confession pouring into me like it’s the only thing keeping my heart moving.
Her lips brush mine, soft, trembling, not a kiss—just a vow. “You’re mine, Dax. Always. Even when you’re too fucking stubborn to say it back.”
My eyes sting. My chest jerks again, violent, breaking against the monitor’s steady hum and the only word I can manage, the only word my throat will bleed out for her, is the one that’s always been hers.
“Butterfly.”
She sobs again, louder this time, but she’s smiling through it. Smiling like she’s bleeding, smiling like she just won a war neither of us believed we could.
Chapter Twenty Nine
Cassandra
The quiet is the strangest part.
No hum of machines.
No shouting for morphine.
No sand grinding in my teeth.
Just the drip of the faucet in Dax’s kitchen and the low thud of his boots pacing across wood instead of dirt.
Two months. That’s all it’s been since the war spat us back out, but it feels like a lifetime ago and yesterday all at once. My volunteer stint ended, his discharge papers came through, and suddenly the desert let us go.
Only it didn’t. Not really.
He still wakes gasping, shirt soaked, eyes wild like he’s back under fire. I still hear the monitors in my head when the house gets too quiet. The war doesn’t stay overseas. It comes home with you. It crawls into your bed, into your lungs, into the spaces between your ribs where love is supposed to live.
I should feel safe but safety feels like a lie when every time I look at him, I see blood on his skin and my own hands shaking trying to keep it in.
The dress hangs crooked on the back of the door, a pale blue thing Lola swore would look “soft but not sad” when I stood beside her on the biggest day of her life.
I’ve tried it on twice. Both times I cried. Not because of the dress—because of what it means. Because my best friend is about to walk down an aisle and the man I love barely survived long enough to see it.
Dax sits at the table, lacing up black shoes like he’s prepping for inspection instead of a wedding. His shoulders are sharp lines under his shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, tattoos like shadows creeping down his forearms. He looks whole. He looks lethal. He looks like everything war turned him into, even if the uniform’s gone.
But I see the cracks.
I see the tremor in his left hand when he ties the laces.
