“We won’t get moments like this there. No privacy. No letting our guard down.”
“How long will we be there?”
“I don’t know.” The admission burned. “Could be days. Could be longer. Depends on when Oliver’s ready for the weapons demonstration.”
“And after that?”
After that, the operation would go hot—full tactical teams moving in, and anyone at the compound would either surrender or die. But I couldn’t tell her that.
“After that, we figure out how to get you out.”
“We?” Her voice was flat.
The single word hit harder than Snake’s threats. I’d earned that distance, that distrust, not just with the past twenty-four hours but with what happened six years ago. Still didn’t make it easier to swallow.
Miles of mountain road passed in silence, nothing but the sound of tires on weathered asphalt and the occasional crackle of the radio. Pine trees pressed close on both sides, their shadows making the morning feel like twilight. The temperature dropped as we climbed higher, frost still clinging to the shaded spots.
I knew we needed to talk. I knew this would be the only chance we had.
The words started building in my throat, pressure like a dam about to break. I’d promised myself I’d never explain, never make excuses, never burden her with my failures. But here we were, trapped in this rolling cage headed toward something worse, and I owed her something. Even if it wasn’t everything.
“I know you must hate me.”
The words escaped before I could stop them, rough as the gravel roads we’d left behind. She didn’t respond, didn’t even shift in her seat. Just kept watching the mountains pass like they held answers to questions she hadn’t asked.
“For leaving like I did. No real explanation.”
Still nothing. Her profile could’ve been carved from stone, beautiful and cold and completely closed off from me.
“Hate’s a strong word.” Her voice was carefully neutral, the tone she used to use when trying not to start a fight about something that mattered.
I gripped the steering wheel tighter, knuckles white under the skin. The next words felt like pulling shrapnel from old wounds, each one tearing something on the way out.
“That last deployment went sideways.” I couldn’t give her details, not the classified parts. “Mission went wrong. Lostseveral guys under my command. My call, my route, my decision that got them killed.”
She shifted slightly, just enough that I knew she was listening.
“Got back stateside a few weeks later and found out my buddy Danny killed himself.” The words scraped raw. “Remember Danny? I told you about him—the guy who could make jokes in a firefight, who kept us all sane over there?”
A slight nod. She remembered.
“Left a note saying he couldn’t quiet the voices in his head. That he hated what he’d become. He was…he was supposed to be the strong one. The one who had his shit together. If he couldn’t handle it…”
I couldn’t finish. Couldn’t voice what Danny’s death had proven—that we were all broken beyond fixing, that the war had hollowed us out and sent us home as walking corpses who just hadn’t stopped breathing yet.
“I was falling apart.” The admission felt like stepping off a cliff. “Drinking too much. Not sleeping. Started having…episodes.”
That was a clean word for it.Episodes. A better word would beblackouts, where I’d come to standing in my backyard at three a.m., holding my service weapon, looking for threats that existed only in my head. Orrageso pure and sudden that I’d put my fist through a wall because someone dropped a plate in a restaurant.
I risked a quick glance at her. She was looking at me now, really looking, those honey-brown eyes I’d fallen into six years ago finally seeing me again.
“I told myself I was protecting you by leaving. Truth is, I was a coward.”
There it was. The truth I’d been running from for six years, laid bare on a mountain road with nowhere to hide from it.
“Couldn’t let you see me like that. Broken. Dangerous. I was afraid of what I might—” I stopped, swallowed hard. “I was afraid of what I was becoming. What I might do if I stayed.”
The radio crackled, Diesel’s voice breaking through. “Road work ahead. Slowing down.”
