I know how to do this. I’ve done it before. Pressure here. Stabilize there. Keep the airway clear. I have the training; my hands remember even if my heart doesn’t. I carry her down the corridor, every step echoing, the white light too bright after the dark. Her hair brushes my throat. Her blood soaks warmer into my shirt. I hate how familiar this walk feels.
The med bay doors hiss open and I lay her on the table, fingers already finding a pulse, assessing the damage—fractured ribs, head trauma, dehydration, bruising everywhere. A deep cut at her side. Blood loss, but not catastrophic. Yet. My own voice sounds distant when I mutter numbers and vitals, like someone else is using my mouth while I drown a foot away.
Someone tries to take over—a medic with wide eyes and trembling hands—and I snap without looking up. “Don’t touch her.”
The room goes silent. They back away. I keep moving, cleaning, dressing wounds, setting an IV, my motions mechanical, stripped down to protocol and precision. It’s easier to stay numb. Easier to pretend this is another mission, another casualty, not the one person I swore I wouldn’t lose. Larkin’s voice is somewhere behind me, reporting status, demanding updates, redirecting personnel, but it’s all a blur of sound that never quite makes it through the fog.
When I finally stop, when the monitors steady and the color starts to crawl back into her face, I realize I’m still holding her hand. My thumb moves once over the inside of her wrist, tracing the faint beat there, and something in me gives way—quietly, like a wire snapping deep underground.
I lean my forehead to the edge of the table and let the breath I’ve been holding for seven days slip out of me in one ragged, shaking exhale. The only thing that matters is the pulse beneath my hand and the quiet vow that forms with it:
He took her once.
He won’t again.
“Jon!” Larkin snaps, and the sound cuts through the haze like a whip.
My head jerks up, muscles tensing as if I’m being pulled out of a nightmare I didn’t realize I was still inside. The med bay comes into focus in pieces—bright white lights, sterile air thick with antiseptic, the faint rhythmic beep of Delilah’s monitor matching the uneven pace of my pulse.
I step back, pacing before I even think to. My boots scuff the tile, harsh and restless. “He was there. Right there. Mocking, almost.” The words come out rough, low, like gravel dragged through my throat.
Delilah’s monitor picks up. So does my pacing. Every step closer to the bed feels like pressing on a bruise.
I drag a hand through my hair, frustration sparking under my skin until it starts to feel like fever. “He’s playing with me, Lark. With us. He knew I’d come. Knew I’d walk right into the fucking fire for her.” I stop beside the med bed, looking down at Delilah—her face pale under the glare of the lights, hair sticking to her temple, a bruise creeping down the curve of her jaw. “He knew what she meant to me.”
Larkin doesn’t speak. Maybe she doesn’t need to. Maybe she already knows this isn’t about strategy anymore. It hasn’t beensince the moment I saw her body limp in King’s arms. It hasn’t been since long before that, if I’m honest enough to bleed.
I reach out without meaning to, brushing the back of my knuckles against her hand just to feel the warmth still there. The way it trembles, faint and real, drags me somewhere else—somewhere I never thought I’d go again. Somewhere I’ve tried to nail shut in my head.
The same white lights. The same sterile air. The same hollow ache sitting behind my ribs.
Moe lay on the table then, pale and still, blood seeping through gauze that couldn’t seem to hold it. I’d known him for only a few days, trained him, yelled at him, and trusted him. But until that night, I hadn’t known he was mine.
I remember standing in a position so similar to the one I’m in now, frozen. Caspian’s voice somewhere behind me, calling for more plasma, more light. I remember the metallic smell of iron, the soft rattle of Moe’s breath as his chest struggled to rise. And I remember the moment it hit me—I had a son I’d never known about.
I’d spent years building walls to keep the world out, only to find my own blood dying under my watch.
I couldn’t save him then—not really. I could only watch them patch him up, keep him breathing, fly him off, and pray that fate didn’t take him too. Pray to gods I’d already betrayed too many times.
Now it’s her.
The same lights. The same helplessness clawing at my chest. The same goddamn sound of machines keeping time with a heartbeat that feels like it belongs to me.
Larkin’s voice fades into a blur of orders and codes as she coordinates the cleanup, but I’m barely hearing her. All I can focus on is the tiny flicker of movement beneath my fingers, the shallow rise of Delilah’s chest. Every breath she takes feelsstolen. Precious. Temporary in the way things always seem to be when I care too much.
I don’t know if I’m angry or terrified. Maybe both. Maybe they’re the same thing now. Because when I look at her—when I see how fragile she looks against all this metal and light—it feels like that night all over again. Like the universe’s way of reminding me I can’t outrun the things I love. They always find their way back just long enough to get hurt in front of me.
“She’s alive,” Larkin says, softer this time, breaking into the quiet.
I nod, but it feels automatic. My gaze stays on Delilah’s face. The bruises. The lashes stuck together with dried blood. The small scar above her brow that wasn’t there before. Every mark is a story I wasn’t there to stop. Every breath she takes is another reminder that she’s still here and I almost didn’t get her back.
My hand tightens around hers. “Not again,” I whisper, more to myself than to Larkin. “Not like this.”
Larkin crosses her arms, leaning against the counter, studying me with that wary kind of patience she uses when she’s trying not to push too far. “Jon. We’ll find him. But you need to let the medics—”
“I’ve got it,” I cut her off, sharper than I mean to. “She doesn’t need anyone else touching her.”
The medics outside the door hesitate. None of them argue. Maybe they remember what happened the last time someone tried to pull me away from a bed like this. Maybe they just know a man coming apart when they see one.
