I tell him I’m busy. I tell him classes are heavy, that Europe is colder than I expected, that the time difference makes everything weird and hard to schedule. I keep my voice light, warm, affectionate, the way I’ve been trained to do since I was old enough to understand that loving him meant protecting him from the truth. That sometimes care looks a lot like concealment. He tells me he’s proud of me, that he misses me, that I should call more often. I promise I will, even though we both know I won’t—not like he deserves. Not in the way a daughter with nothing to hide would.
When the line goes dead, I let my arm fall to the ground beside me and stare up at the sky, rain still clinging to my lashes, the sun breaking through in thin, golden seams that feel almost cruel in their beauty. The clouds look torn open. The light feelsborrowed. Everything out here is too soft for the way my body still remembers steel and concrete.
Jon’s voice echoes in my head. Not the sharp edge of it. Not the anger. Not the way he stood over me like command was the only language he trusted himself to speak. The other part. The moment earlier when it softened despite himself. When he’d stood over me on the hill and told me to call my dad like it mattered, like I mattered, like he hadn’t spent days building walls between us stone by stone. For a split second, I’d seen him—the man who used to sit beside me during late-night training sessions, correcting my grip with patience, the one who’d let me steal one earbud to listen to music under the stars after missions went sideways. The one who scared the hell out of me because every soft thing in him felt like a secret he resented me for noticing.
That version of him had felt close enough to touch.
And then reality slammed back into place, heavy and unforgiving, as it always does.
I push myself up from the ground and head back toward the base, my body moving on autopilot while my mind stays tangled somewhere between resentment and longing. My side protests with every step. My shoulder still aches if I swing my arm too far. The damp fabric of my clothes clings cold to my skin, and I can feel the weakness in my legs in that quiet, humiliating way that only shows up when no one’s around to see it. The gates loom ahead, steel and concrete and routine, but something feels wrong the moment I step inside.
It’s too quiet.
The kind of quiet that doesn’t belong to a living base. No overlapping conversations. No boots scuffing in every direction. No shouted orders bouncing off the walls. Even the usual hum of irritation and sarcasm that lives in a place like this feels stripped out. The mess hall lights are on, but the room is mostly empty,chairs shoved in unevenly, trays abandoned, the air carrying only the stale smell of coffee and whatever passed for dinner an hour ago.
And that’s when I see King.
He’s standing near the far wall, coffee untouched in his hand, posture stiff despite the fact that he should still be on restricted movement. His face is all angles and bruises now that the mask is gone, and there’s something about seeing him upright and silent that sends a chill across my skin. His eyes flick to me, sharp and knowing, and my stomach drops before my brain catches up.
Where is everyone?
The answer hits me all at once, brutal in its clarity.
An op.
My chest tightens as the pieces slide into place—the chopper, the urgency in Larkin’s voice earlier, Jon’s absence now. I scan the room again, hoping I’m wrong, hoping he’s just… somewhere else. In briefing. In storage. In another room pretending to ignore me.
He’s not.
Something inside me fractures.
I’m standing there, frozen, trying to breathe through the sudden rush of betrayal and fear and anger, when someone slams into my shoulder hard enough to knock me sideways. Pain flashes hot down my arm. My ribs scream.
“Move,” a woman snaps sharply, irritation cutting through the air.
The word hits wrong. Too close to other voices. Other rooms. Other hands. Too much command in too small a space.
Something snaps.
I spin on her before I can stop myself, my heart pounding, vision narrowing. “Watch where you’re going,” I bite back, myvoice louder than it should be, sharper than I recognize. It comes out too fast. Too hard. More animal than measured.
She—Hannah, I realize dimly—rolls her eyes, clearly unimpressed. She’s young, broad-shouldered, annoyed in that easy way people get when they haven’t clocked that someone else is one bad second from detonating. “You were in the middle of the—”
“Don’t,” I warn, stepping into her space, my hands trembling. “Don’t talk to me like that.”
Her posture stiffens, annoyance flaring into something defensive. “You don’t get special treatment just because—”
The rest of her sentence dissolves into static as my pulse roars in my ears. For a heartbeat, I’m not in the mess hall anymore. I’m back in the cell, backed against cold stone, being told to stay still, stay quiet, behave. I can smell damp rust. I can feel hands where they don’t belong. I can hear Russian syllables snapping at me like commands meant for a dog.
I lunge forward, shoving her hard in the chest.
Gasps ripple through the room. Someone shouts my name. A chair scrapes against the floor. Coffee spills somewhere to my left.
Hands grab my arms, pulling me back just as Larkin’s voice cuts through everything like a blade.
“That’s enough.”
She’s there in an instant, eyes blazing, fury radiating off her in waves. She takes in the scene—the startled soldiers, Hannah’s flushed face, my shaking hands, the way I’m breathing like I’ve just come out of a fight instead of a hallway. Her jaw clenches so hard I can see the muscle jump.
