Great Spirit and the beyond, she knew all about shame and how debilitating it was.
She felt it then, not just the aftermath of their bodies, still joined, still trembling, but the echo beneath it. The wound he never let anyone see.
She eased her hand up, cupping the back of his head, her palm cradling the weight of him like she could hold every broken thing he hadn’t said. Her voice barely rose above a breath.
“You just showed me some powerful truth, now speak it, Dakota. Give it to me so that I can take it into my body just as you’re seated in me now.”
He lifted his head, waves of pain and starvation broke behind his eyes, they filled, a tear sliding down his cheek.
“My dad used to drink. Said I would never amount to anything, just like everyone who lived in this cage.” He pulled in a breath that shook as it left him. “If I cried, he hit harder. If I stayed silent, he told me I was weak for not standing up for myself. I couldn’t win. So I got quiet. I got small. Then I got gone.”
Bailee’s heart cracked, not in pity, but in recognition.
“For the better part of my life, he was either belittling me or absent. I got to love the absent parts, but it took a toll on my mother. For her sake, I didn’t ask for a damn thing, and she was so tired, she just didn’t notice. I measured my worth by not speaking what I needed, stifled my voice, and hid my truth behind a calm, silent wall.”
She had her own versions of those silences. Those no-win rooms. That sense that love was conditional, respect was earned only through obedience or invisibility.
He shifted slightly, still inside her, as if the connection between them was the only thing keeping him grounded to the moment.
“I never told anyone that,” he said, voice rough. “Not the team. Not Flint. Not even Ayla before she disappeared.” A long pause. “But you needed to know why I don’t touch whiskey. Why I don’t raise my voice. Why I never say I want unless I already know I can’t have it.”
She couldn’t speak for a long moment. Her throat burned. Her eyes stung with fury, with grief.
With that impossible ache that came from realizing the boy she’d fallen for had learned to survive by vanishing himself.
She pressed her lips to his temple. Not as comfort. As promise.
“I see you now, Dakota,” she whispered. “All the way through. Your truth lives in me, and I’ll never look away from it. I’ll hold it until my eyes dim and I breathe no more.”
With a choked sound, he buried his face in her throat, tethered to her by both body and soul, and his quiet release heaved in his chest and sent slow, aching, salty trails down her skin.
They stayed that way for long moments. Shaking. Clinging. Breathless.
In the hush, her head pressed to his chest, his heart thundering against her cheek, one truth rose in her like a vow.
She wasn’t lost.
Not if he was her way home.
17
The drums began before the light. Slow, hollow, steady as a heartbeat, they rolled through the dark and pulled her up from the depths.
At first she thought it was the sound of surf against the hulls of the Navy boats, that measured percussion of oars on water. Then she saw them. Men in dress blues, lined in silence, their faces shadowed beneath the visors of their caps. The sky above them was a bruised gray, trembling at the edge of dawn.
The casket stood in the sand, flag folded crisp and perfect. The sea was too calm for what it held.
Bear’s Trident gleamed gold on the lid. The first one. Then another. The strikes came one by one, metal into wood, the dull, final sound of brothers marking a grave.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Each impact shuddered through her bones.
She tried to move toward them, to tell them they were wrong, that he wasn’t dead, that he couldn’t be. Her mouth opened but no sound came. Her throat was full of saltwater and prayer.
Wind lifted the flag’s corner, and she saw the body beneath, broad shoulders, dark hair falling loose over his brow. His face was peaceful, the way she had seen it only in sleep. The calm after everything he’d carried.
“No,” she whispered. The word went nowhere. The sound died against the drumbeat.
