Prologue
Captain Jonathan
“What’s war like?”
Now, that’s a hell of a question.
I glance at the girl sitting cross-legged on the floor beside my desk. The cheap overhead light paints a halo on the hardwood, catching on the strands of black hair that have fallen across her shoulder. She’s leaning back on her hands like she owns the place, boot heel scuffing a mark into my floor, and somehow she looks like she belongs here. Like this office grew around her instead of the other way around.
There are a hundred things I could say—half-truths and polished answers meant to sound heroic. I could tell her war makes your blood electric. That it’s exhilarating, powerful, the kind of thing that turns men into gods with rifles in their hands and missions under their belts.
I could say war clears the mind—shuts down all the noise in your head—because when the bullets fly, there’s only one thing that matters: survival. No bills, no old regrets, no past mistakes. Just target, cover, breathe.
But that would be a lie.
War is terrifying. It doesn’t just change how you see the world—it rewires how you breathe. It crawls into your lungs and settles there, a permanent weight, so even on quiet days you inhale like something could explode at any second. It turns men into machines, into ghosts, into monsters. It doesn’t make you noble. It makes you numb, cold, and stained in ways bleach or prayer can’t fix.
I’ve lived most of my life in the shadows of it, and I’ve tasted the ugliest parts—missions no one wanted, the kind we don’t write down. The kind that come in blackout folders and burn after reading. The kind that don’t come with medals or salutes, only nightmares and closed-door debriefs where everyone pretends they did what they had to do.
That’s the thing about Greenport. We’re not Navy, not Army, not even special forces in the traditional sense. We’re the cleanup crew for a world rotting from the inside out. A secret society dressed in medals and mission briefs, putting out fires before the rest of the world ever sees the smoke. Let the others chase headlines and glory—we’re the reason they get to pretend the world isn’t burning.
In other words, we operate in the shadows—like ghosts cleaning up messes no one wants to admit exist. A quiet little cult of necessary monsters babysitting a world that insists it’s fine while the floorboards are already ash.
Still, none of that makes it something a girl like her should be asking about.
My eyes stay glued to the paperwork cluttering my desk. Contraband seizure reports. Missing persons from Sector B. Some half-baked suspicion of a mole buried beneath a stack of inventory logs. The edges of the pages are soft from too many hands, coffee rings bleeding into the ink. All of it is background noise now, just black and white smudges, because there’s a twenty-one-year-old sitting on my floor, staring a hole into theside of my head like she’s counting how many breaths I’m taking per minute, and I can’t seem to ignore the way her presence hums against the edges of my thoughts.
“I don’t think you need to worry that pretty little head of yours about it,” I mutter without looking up, pen scratching a meaningless line in the margin.
She doesn’t flinch at the condescension. Hell, she doesn’t even blink. She simply taps her nails on the hardwood floor in a slow, deliberate rhythm. It’s not a jittery beat; it’s measured, almost bored. It’s in no way anxious, and it’s definitely not fidgeting.
She’s thinking, and that’s what gets me.
It’s not her voice, or her eyes, or even the fact that she strolled into my office like it was a fucking Starbucks. It’s the quiet way she takes up space. The unbothered way she leans back against the leg of my desk. It’s like she doesn’t need permission. It’s like she’s already decided she belongs here and is just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
“Come on, old man. I want to hear the war stories,” she says, voice lighter now, laced with a grin I don’t dare look at. “It’s boring out there.”
I smirk despite myself, the corner of my mouth betraying me before my brain can shut it down.
God help me.
I don’t believe in love. The first woman I ever cared about used my feelings against me the moment I stopped being useful to her. She smiled while she twisted the knife, and I let her, because back then I still believed wanting someone made you worth something. That experience taught me everything I needed to know about keeping people at arm’s length.
But if there were a softer world—one that didn’t take advantage of people for wanting things—maybe this is how it would begin.
Not with logic or perfect timing. Not with people of the same age who share careers or similar lifestyles. Perhaps it starts with a girl who is too young for you, sitting on your floor and asking questions she has no business asking in an office in a hallway that no one else thought to explore.
“You’re a bold one,” I say, finally cutting my eyes to her. “Waltzing into my office like you own the place, and I’ve never seen your face before. What are you? A new recruit with more guts than sense?”
She blinks up at me, black hair spilling like ink over one shoulder, sapphire eyes too bright, too blue for this world. They stand out against the drab gray walls and the framed commendations like someone colored outside the lines. She looks like a question I shouldn’t answer. Like something dangerous wrapped in softness.
“One can only hope,” she murmurs.
The words barely register, but they hit something low in my gut.
Hope.
It’s the way she says it that pulls the air from my lungs—a little too soft, a little too raw, as if hope is not just a word but a thing she’s been chewing on for years and is only now daring to say out loud. That’s not a throwaway answer. That’s a secret—a wish—and suddenly, I know I should shut this down. Now.
