And there it is. The retreat. The controlled step backward. The familiar cruelty of self-preservation dressed up as restraint.
I laugh once, soft and mean. “Coward.”
His eyes narrow, but not in anger. In warning. In ache. “Careful.”
“Why?” I ask, because I’m too tired and too raw and too angry to stop myself. “You gonna dial it back for me again?”
The corner of his mouth twitches—not a smile, not even close, but something dangerously near it. “You really do love making bad situations worse.”
“And you love acting like you don’t enjoy it.”
That does something to him. I see it. In the shift of his breathing. In the slight lowering of his head. In the way his gaze drops—just for a second—to my mouth before dragging itself back up like it’s hauling weight.
The air between us changes.
Not softer. Hotter. Thicker.
I become painfully aware of everything—my pulse, the ache in my ribs, the scratch of the sheets against my legs, the fact that he’s standing close enough that I can smell soap and smokeand the sharp, clean scent of the outside air still clinging to his uniform. He looks exhausted. Dangerous. Unfairly solid.
I should say something. Mock him again. Push him back. Rebuild my own walls before his crack me open.
Instead I just watch him.
So does he.
For a long, loaded moment, no one moves. The whole room seems to tip toward something neither of us is saying.
Then the curtain shifts and a medic clears his throat from outside. “Captain? Larkin’s looking for you.”
The spell shatters.
Chapter 10
Captain Jonathan
The training field stretches out in front of me like a living diagram—lines of recruits moving in disciplined arcs, boots striking dirt in synchronized rhythm, commands echoing sharp and clean across the open air. It should be enough to anchor me. It usually is. There’s comfort in structure, in watching people who don’t yet understand how badly the world can break you still try to master it anyway. In order. In repetition. In the lie that control is something you can build with enough drills and enough bruises.
Today, though, my focus keeps slipping.
I stand with my arms crossed, jaw set, eyes tracking movement while my mind refuses to stay where I put it. Every time I force my thoughts toward Mikhail—toward supply chains, movement patterns, retaliation windows—they veer off course, drifting someplace I don’t want them to go. Somewhere sterile and white and quiet. Somewhere that smells like antiseptic and iron and fear. Somewhere full of monitors and half-swallowed panic and the sound of her telling me I don’t get to save her.
The med bay.
I exhale slowly through my nose and tighten my grip on my own arms, grounding myself in the bite of fabric beneath my fingers. She’s fine. I repeat it like an order. Like something I can enforce if I say it often enough. Delilah is alive. She’s breathing. She’s healing. That’s the end of it. Anything beyond that is a liability I don’t have room for right now.
I watch a recruit hesitate before clearing an obstacle, his timing off by half a second, and I almost bark at him before catching myself. Not my unit. Not my call. I’m just standing here, pretending I’m supervising, pretending I’m not counting down the hours until the nurses finally discharge her because apparently threatening medical staff only works once.
I had tried. God knows I’d tried.
Turns out trauma protocols trump rank, and the looks they’d given me when I suggested “another night of observation” told me exactly how transparent I’d been. They see it. The attachment. The problem. They don’t say it, but I know. Larkin knows too. Hell, I know. That’s why I’m out here instead of pacing the hallway outside Delilah’s room like a man waiting for a verdict he already dreads.
I straighten, roll my shoulders back, and force my attention forward. Mikhail doesn’t disappear because I’m distracted. He doesn’t stop moving just because she survived him. If anything, he’s counting on this—on hesitation, on emotion clouding judgment. I can’t give him that. I won’t.
You don’t think about her because thinking about her doesn’t help the mission, I tell myself. And if it doesn’t help the mission, it doesn’t matter.
The lie sits heavy in my chest.
I tell myself she’s safer with distance. That whatever almost happened between us—whatever lines blurred and twisted under pressure, in med bays and panic and that loaded silence by her bedside—needs to be buried before it turns intosomething that can get her killed. Again. If I pull back now, if I go cold enough, maybe it’ll undo the damage. Maybe she’ll hate me for it. That would be easier. Hate I can manage. Hate is clean. Hate doesn’t tempt me into touching what I shouldn’t.
