He’s always waiting.
I glance over. “Think they’ll hit us tonight?”
He doesn’t answer right away. His eyes stay fixed on the scrolling news feed.
“If I were them,” he finally says, “I’d come in right before dawn. Just enough time to catch us between sleep and instinct.”
My stomach tightens.
“So we don’t sleep,” I murmur.
Roja shakes his head, slow. “We’ll sleep. Just not deep.”
I nod, not because I agree, but because there’s nothing left to argue. My throat’s tight again. Too many words stuck in there, clogging up whatever I should be saying.
Instead, I reach forward, turn the screen down a few notches. The colors dim. The voices quiet. The light softens to something almost tolerable.
He looks at me. Finally. Long enough that I see the edges of tired pulling at the corners of his eyes.
“Don’t disappear on me,” I say.
His brow furrows. “I’m right here.”
“You know what I mean.”
Another silence. This one heavier.
He leans back against the wall, shoulders sagging just enough to show me the weight he’s carrying too.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says.
And then—just like that—the power cuts.
Not dramatic. No sparks. Just a soft flicker and then black.
The hum dies.
The screen fades.
The world goes still.
And in that stillness, with the dark closing in and his warmth next to mine, I finally breathe.
CHAPTER 23
ROJA
Iintercept the message by accident.
It’s barely a blip—just another encrypted packet in a sea of background noise. I’ve been combing the dead channels for over an hour, mostly static and system pings, and then this frequency pulses like a vein under pressure. Wrong modulation, wrong time. Coalition local but routed through private lines. It’s not patrol orders. It’s not logistics. It’s something they don’t want broadcast wide.
I don’t hesitate.
My fingers move fast, instincts kicking in like muscle memory. Reroute the signal, strip the shell, tease the key—until the firewall splits like wet bark under a blade. And then it’s there.
A name. My name. Then hers.
My blood goes cold.
