The word echoes, hollow and wrong. My fingers curl into the sheets, grounding myself in the texture, the coolness, the pull of fabric against my skin. I can feel my heartbeat now, steady but loud, like it’s pressing against the inside of my chest, demanding attention. Safe feels like a story people tell you so you stop asking questions.
“Delilah,” Larkin says again, softer this time. “I need you to tell me what happened. Anything you remember.”
Something in her tone shifts—subtle, but enough that I notice. This isn’t concern anymore. This is intel. This is command wrapped in softness.
My stomach tightens.
At first, the memories come like shadows at the edges of my vision. Blurred. Distant. Easy enough to ignore if I don’tlook directly at them. I open my mouth to speak, to give her something neutral, something safe, but the moment I actually try to form the words, it’s like a door opens somewhere deep in my head.
And I fall through it.
Hands.
Pressure.
The weight of a body too close, too heavy.
A voice in my ear—low, amused, wrong.
My chest tightens sharply, breath stuttering as my heart rate spikes without my permission. The monitor beside me reacts instantly, the steady beep accelerating into something frantic, exposed, humiliating in its honesty. My body betrays me before I can bury anything back down.
“No,” I gasp, more to myself than anyone else. The word tears out thin and wrecked. I focus on the ceiling, on the fluorescent light above me, on the present moment, trying to anchor myself the way they trained us to. Inhale. Exhale. Count. Stay here. Don’t go back there. Don’t let them pull you into the memory until it becomes more real than the room.
“Delilah,” Jon’s voice cuts in, closer now, urgent in a way that slices straight through the fog. “Hey. Look at me.”
I turn my head toward him despite myself. He’s at my side now, one hand gripping the edge of the bed like he’s holding himself back from touching me. His eyes search my face, dark with something that looks dangerously close to panic. There’s blood under one of his nails. A bruise darkening the line of his jaw. He looks wrecked, and somehow that only makes this worse.
“You’re here,” he says, like he needs to hear it out loud. Like maybe he’s saying it for himself too. “You’re okay. Just breathe. Slow it down.”
I try. I really do. I try to follow the steadiness in his voice, the shape of it, the way he says my name like it means something heavier than it should. But the second I start to reach for calm, Larkin presses again.
“Delilah, did Mikhail say anything to you? Did he move you after initial contact?”
The name hits like a blow.
My vision blurs again, edges warping as my pulse races faster, the sound of the monitor bleeding into the memory until I can’t tell which is which. Mikhail in the courtyard. Mikhail looking at me like I was an object he’d already decided how to use. Mikhail’s voice, cultured and cold, telling them to keep me intact.
“That’s enough,” Jon snaps, turning on Larkin so fast it startles me. “She’s not ready.”
“We don’t get to decide when ready is,” Larkin shoots back. “If she has information—”
“She’s fucking traumatized,” Jon cuts in, his voice rising now, sharp and uncontrolled. “Look at her. You’re pushing her into a spiral.”
“And you’re letting your feelings cloud your judgment,” Larkin fires back, just as sharp. “She’s an operative, Jon. Not—”
“Stop.”
The word comes out of me before I realize I’m capable of speaking that loudly. It hurts, scraping my throat raw, but it works. They both freeze, attention snapping back to me. The room goes still except for the frantic beeping at my side and the ragged sound of my own breathing.
“I said stop,” I repeat, quieter now but no less firm. My heart is still racing, but I force my breathing to slow, one deliberate inhale at a time. “Both of you.”
Silence falls, heavy and tense. It hangs between us like a drawn wire, ready to snap.
Then a curtain is yanked open on the other side of the bay.
“Well,” King drawls, his voice dry and unmistakably him, “this is cozy.”
I blink, startled, and see him lying in the bed beside mine, propped up on one elbow, bruised and bandaged but very much awake. His mask is gone, his expression tired but intact, like pain is just another inconvenience he’s learned to live with. He looks like shit. Familiar, infuriating shit.
