"We've got time before anyone needs us," Breaker says, wrapping his towel around his waist. His voice is low, satisfied, still rough from everything we just did. "Come lie down with me."
The smile that spreads across my face is involuntary, unstoppable. Just the thought of curling up beside him, of feeling his arms around me, of existing in that perfect pocket of peace we create together — it's everything I never let myself believe I could have.
"I'll be right there," I tell him. “I’m just going to clean up a little.”
He presses a kiss to my forehead, lingering there for a moment like he's breathing me in, and then he's gone, padding barefoot toward the bedroom. I watch him go, my heart so full it almost hurts.
I gather the wet clothes from the shower floor — my soaked shirt and jeans, his glitter-dusted shirt and jeans. Something tumbles from the pocket of his jeans, landing on the wet tile with a soft slap.
I bend to pick it up, and my fingers freeze.
It's a photograph. Crumpled. Stained.
Stained with something dark and rust-colored that I recognize immediately, which sends ice flooding through my veins even as the bathroom air stays thick with steam.
Blood.
The photograph is of me.
I can't breathe. My lungs have forgotten how to work, and my hands are shaking so badly the image blurs, but I know what I'm looking at. It's me in the parking lot. Here.
He is so close. Watching me. Following me. Able to get to me whenever he wants.
A thousand questions crash through my mind, each one more terrible than the last. Each one wrapping itself around my throat, squeezing, choking, in the same way he used to do.
The blood — whose blood is it? What does it mean? Is he killing others now? How long until he does it to me?
With shaking hands, I shove the photo back into Breaker’s pocket and leave the clothes in a pile on the floor. My heart thuds in my chest like a wild animal, but I keep my face still as I slip into the bedroom and lie down beside Breaker, who is already on the verge of drifting off into smiling sleep. He slips a large arm around me, pulling me to his bare chest and planting a gentle kiss against my cheek. It isn’t long before his breathing deepens, and I know he’s asleep.
I shut my eyes and try to join him. Try to feel safe enough to sleep.
But all I can see behind my eyelids is that photo of me, covered in blood.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Breaker
The world explodes.
It’s the same every time. Light, then total blackness. Heat, then the collapse of all sensation. Screaming metal, followed by a silence so perfect it could only exist in the second after death. For a heartbeat, I’m neither here nor there, just floating in a pit — a hollow, pressurized pit — and then I hit the ground. Dust pelts my skin. Smoke shreds my lungs. The air vibrates with a chemical tang: cordite, diesel, and burning meat. I open my mouth to shout, but I taste blood and spit out nothing but crimson. Suddenly, I’m back in the desert, with sand raining down, the smell of smoke in the air, blood on my hands, and Viper shouting my name. I look around for the source of the sound, and don’t see my brother, just someone else not shouting anything at all because they don’t have a mouth anymore, only a gaping, mangled hole in their face where their mouth used to be.
I drag myself to my knees, hunching low because I know the kill zone isn’t done with us. Out past the haze, I can see the rest of my team trying to regroup. One of them is crawling, trailing a length of intestine like a sacrificial streamer. Another is just sitting there, cradling his hands — or what’s left of them. The ground is littered with shrapnel, spent ammo, and limbs that don’t seem to belong to anybody.
My fault.
A trap I should’ve seen. Disarmed. It doesn’t matter that it was set by someone that the CIA and the military have had near the top of their ‘Most Wanted’ list for years; I should’ve seen it.
Gunfire erupts.
That’s when I finally wake up.
My whole body convulses off the mattress, like my soul just got defibrillated. I claw at the sheets, gripping them so hard the fabric bites into my palms. Sweat slicks every crease of my skin. I choke, gasp, and realize I’m making a sound — a kind of animal whine I haven’t heard come out of my mouth since the first time the dreams hit.
For a second, I’m still nowhere. The room is too dark, too silent, the air too still for a world where people are allowed to survive. The afterimages linger: blood on my hands, the sharp salt of terror in my nose, the bodies and limbs around me. My eyes scan the room, waiting for it to rearrange itself into something familiar.
And then I see her.
Riley. My Sparrow. She’s curled up beside me, one arm tucked under her cheek, her mouth slightly open, a hairline of drool tracing the edge of her lower lip. Her hair is a riot of tangles, spilling across the pillow and onto my bare chest. She’s alive. She’s whole. No holes in her face, no shrapnel embedded in her body. Just the gentle, rhythmic rise and fall of her chest.
