“Still want that beach?” she murmurs.
“With you? Always.”
She hums, satisfied, settling closer until her heartbeat drums against my side. Outside, a distant roll of thunder promises more rain, but inside these four walls the war feels a little further away than it ever has.
And for the first time, I let myself believe that this—quiet, messy, ordinary, sacred—might be the peace we bled for.
We’ll keep choosing it.
Every damn day.
Epilogue
Delilah Barrinheart
The rotors fade into the distance behind us, their thunder slowly dissolving into nothing but wind and open sky. Another mission is over, another extraction complete, another ending that could have become the beginning of something terrible and, by some miracle, wasn’t. I sit on the edge of the transport ramp with my boots dangling over open air, my helmet resting beside me, sweat cooling against my skin as the last of the adrenaline begins to loosen its grip on my body. The horizon stretches wide in front of us, painted in soft gold and bruised purple, the kind of sunset that makes you believe in peace even when you know better than to trust something so beautiful.
The metal beneath me hums faintly with the memory of motion, vibrating through my thighs in a low, steady pulse. Behind me, soldiers move through the practiced choreography of post-mission recovery, unloading gear, stripping harnesses, checking weapons, trading exhausted jokes like they didn’t just walk through hell and drag someone else back out of it. Radios crackle. Boots thud against steel. Someone laughs too loudly, the sound edged with relief. The air smells like fuel, warmmachinery, sweat, and the faint bite of gunpowder that never really leaves us, no matter how many showers we take or how much time passes.
Jon drops down beside me, close enough that our shoulders brush. That tiny line of contact sends something warm and familiar through the center of my chest.
“Good work out there,” he says.
I glance at him, smiling faintly. “Always is.”
He snorts. “Cocky.”
“Accurate.”
That earns me one of those almost-smiles of his, the kind that barely touches his mouth and still somehow changes his whole face. We fall quiet after that, not awkwardly, but in the easy way that comes from having survived too much together to need constant noise between us. We listen to the hum of the engines and the chatter behind us, watching soldiers move through the fading light like they belong to it. It still amazes me, sometimes, how quickly people in our world move from violence back to banter, from blood to routine, from almost dying to arguing over whose turn it is to buy drinks later. Maybe that’s how we survive it. Maybe refusing to let war keep all of us is the only rebellion that ever mattered.
After a while, Jon clears his throat, and something in the sound makes me immediately suspicious.
“So,” he says, his tone carefully casual, “I’ve been thinking.”
I turn my head and look at him more fully. “Oh no.”
He huffs out a laugh. “About retirement.”
I blink and stare at him. “Retirement?”
“Yeah.”
I shift so I’m facing him more squarely now, one leg folding up beneath me as I search his face for any sign that he’s joking. “Retirement?” I repeat, because apparently my brain has decided that if I say it enough times, it might start to make sense.
His mouth twitches. “You repeating it like that isn’t making me younger.”
“You’re forty-one, not ninety.”
“Rude,” he mutters. “But accurate.”
I study him quietly after that, and the truth is, for all my teasing, he does look older than the man I first met. Not old. Never that. But time has settled into him in ways it hadn’t before. The lines around his eyes are deeper now, cut there by command and grief and sleepless nights and years of carrying too much. There’s more silver in his hair than there used to be, more scars on his hands, more stillness in him too, as if he’s finally begun to understand that not every battle has to be met at a full sprint. He looks older, yes, but he also looks lighter. Less hunted. Less like he’s forever bracing for the next disaster.
“I thought you’d die in this job,” I say, but there’s no cruelty in it, only the soft kind of truth people who have lived too much can say to each other without flinching.
“Still might,” he replies. “Just later.”
That makes me smile, but the weight beneath it is real. He means it. Not the death part, maybe, but the later. The possibility of a future beyond all this. The wanting of it.
