But she’s alive.
They wouldn’t talk like that if she weren’t.
A breath shudders through me. Relief sinks low and fast into my chest like a stone dropped into deep water, tangled in chains and guilt. She’s alive. Bruised, broken maybe. But alive.
Larkin’s already scrambling, snapping to attention as she starts pulling files from the table and shouting coordinates toward the tactical comm line outside. Voices answer her through the half-open door, boots thudding as people move. “We’re preparing a strike team,” she says, voice clipped and automatic, like she’s already built the operation in her head.
But I’m shaking mine before the words even finish leaving her mouth.
“No.”
She stops, blinks at me. “What?”
I take a breath that hurts to hold. My hands clench against the edge of the table until my knuckles blanch.
“This mission is mine.”
“Jon—”
“I’m not asking,” I snap, voice low and raw. “I’m telling you. Don’t fight me on this.”
Her brows knit, concern bleeding into her face, but I keep going, the words tearing loose before I can cage them.
“I’d rather die out there looking for her than spend one more fucking night knowing I didn’t do everything I could to bring her home. I sent King. I stayed behind. I watched from a fucking screen, Lark.” I pause, breath catching. The admission tastes like blood. “I won’t do it again.”
The silence that follows is heavy. Too heavy. She sees it—what I haven’t said. What I won’t. Every unspoken confession sits between us like blood on the floor.
But neither of us says a word.
Finally, Larkin nods once, crisp and controlled. “Then suit up.”
She doesn’t ask why. Doesn’t push. Maybe because she’s known me too long. Maybe because she’s seen the way I watch Delilah when I think no one’s looking. Or maybe because she finally understands what I’ve known since the moment that girl walked into my office and made me feel something I thought I buried years ago.
This isn’t just another mission.
Hell, it never was.
Chapter 6
Delilah Barrinheart
The door slams open and the world comes at me in a rush of sound and pain.
Hands like iron haul me forward before my eyes can focus, boots scraping stone as I’m dragged across the corridor and thrown back into the cell. My knees hit the floor first, skin tearing on the concrete, and for a heartbeat everything goes white. The impact jars straight up my spine, knocking what little air I had left from my lungs. I hear King curse under his breath as they shove me inside, but the clang of the lock behind us swallows his voice until there’s only the echo and the copper taste of blood in my mouth.
I stay on my knees, breathing through the pounding in my ribs. Every inch of me hurts in ways I can’t catalogue—bruises blooming like ink beneath my skin, muscles trembling from too many hours of questions and fists and the kind of cruelty that wants to erase a person piece by piece. They want me hollow. They want me broken. They want me emptied out until there’s nothing left but a shell that answers when spoken to.
But I’m not.
Not yet.
I force air into my lungs until the room stops spinning enough to hold still. The cell smells of rust and sweat and something darker that clings to the walls like smoke. Damp concrete. Old blood. Despair with a body count. King is slumped against the far corner, his shirt stiff with dried blood, one eye swollen shut. He shifts when he sees me, but the movement is small, a ghost of the force he usually carries, like even pain has had to ration itself in him.
“You look like hell,” he rasps, voice scraped raw.
“So do you,” I whisper back. My throat burns. Even that much speech feels like dragging glass over skin.
For a while we just breathe, the quiet between us heavier than the cold. It settles low and mean, pressing against my chest until I want to scream just to prove I still can. I want to collapse, to let the hours of torture pull me under and finish what they started, but something sharper hums beneath the exhaustion. A thread of defiance. Of purpose. Something ugly and stubborn enough to keep my head above water.
