This girl doesn’t belong in Greenport. She has no idea what this place will do to her. She doesn’t know what it’s like to come back from a mission and stare at the wall for hours because your soul didn’t make it back with you. She doesn’t know what it’s like to smell gunpowder in an empty room or hear screaming in the silence of a shower. She doesn’t know what this life costs.
She thinks it’s a movie.
My gut twists, sending a silent alarm screeching through my veins. The same instinct that’s pulled me out of ambushes andbad intel is clawing at the back of my neck, telling me danger isn’t always a man with a gun. Sometimes it’s a girl with wide eyes and the wrong kind of curiosity.
I know this feeling. I always trust my instincts—and right now, they’re screaming she doesn’t belong here. This isn’t a playground. Greenport breaks people. It chews them up and spits them out with blood under their nails and ghosts in their beds.
“What’s your name?” I ask, leaning back in my chair. The wood groans under the shift of weight, protesting like it’s as tired of my shit as I am. Suddenly, the room feels too damn small, or maybe it’s just that she’s too close. The air feels thicker, heavier, like the oxygen has decided to cling to her instead of filling my lungs.
Either way, my hands are sweating.
I’ve gutted men with these hands, held my own intestines in after a knife tore me open, wrapped them around throats and rifles and steering wheels slick with rain and blood—but this? This girl? This moment?
It’s the first time I understand the phrase sweating bullets.
She hesitates, and for a second I think she might lie. Then she smiles with a softness that doesn’t match the weight of this place, a smile that doesn’t belong among locked filing cabinets and classified files.
“Delilah.”
“Delilah,” I echo, testing it on my tongue like it’s something I shouldn’t say out loud. “Like the song?”
She chuckles, almost bashful, a sound that does something uncomfortable to my chest. “You know the song?”
“Of course I know the damn song. ‘Hey there, Delilah.’ Every idiot with an acoustic guitar butchered it in 2006. Don’t tell me your dad named you after that one-hit wonder.”
“No,” she grins, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear, exposing the curve of her throat for the briefest second. “It’s Lilah. You just heard me wrong.”
And just like that, everything in me goes still.
Lilah.
I blink as the name sinks in like a gut punch. The fluorescent light above us hums loud in the pause, a high, grating buzz that suddenly feels like it’s drilling straight into my skull.
No.
I sit up straighter, suddenly hyperaware of every breath I take, of the way the chair creaks, of the sound of distant boots in the hallway. I run through the pieces. The face. The voice. The too-familiar eyes. Just like that, my blood turns cold, dread settling heavy and uninvited.
“Wait. Lilah Kennedy?” My voice drops, low and deliberate, the kind of tone that has stopped grown men in their tracks.
She flinches—barely—but it’s there. The tiniest stutter in her composure. It’s that moment of knowing she’s been caught.
“Well. Yeah.”
Christ.
I drag a hand down my face, palm scraping over the roughness of my jaw, the weight of it all settling hard into my chest. Old memories flicker—Will’s crooked grin, smoke curling in a dim briefing room, the sound of his laugh over radio static. The way he talked about his kid in those rare, unguarded moments, like she was the one clean thing in his world.
“You’re Will’s daughter?”
She nods, calm as ever. Not sheepish. Not surprised. Like she expected this moment all along.
Of course she did.
She walked in here knowing exactly who I was. She knew what this would do. And she did it anyway.
I shift forward in my seat, elbows on my knees, locking eyes with hers. I let my captain’s voice bleed through, the one that doesn’t leave room for argument. “You have no business being in this office. Let alone asking about war.”
“I wasn’t—”
