That’s all it takes.
“Larkin, lock it down!” I bark. “King, with me! Get eyes on the terrace—now!”
I don’t wait for permission. I don’t wait for approval. I move because this is what I do. This is who I am.
Rounds spark against stone. Smoke fills the air. The party is gone—burned away in seconds, replaced by controlled chaosand muscle memory and blood-pumping clarity. My father is shouting something behind me. My mother is crying. Jon is already moving on my flank. None of it reaches me fully. Not now. There’s only the pattern. Only the threat. Only the next three seconds and the one after that.
And in the middle of it all, as Mikhail finally shows his hand and hell breaks loose exactly the way I knew it would—
I’m not afraid.
I’m ready.
Chapter 23
Captain Jonathan
I’m in love.
The realization hits me in the middle of chaos, somewhere between the first return volley and the moment Delilah takes control of the entire goddamn ballroom like she was born with command stitched into her spine. It doesn’t arrive with drama. No lightning strike. No cinematic pause. Just one brutal, bone-deep certainty settling into place while bullets chew through plaster and people scream behind overturned tables.
Wildly inconvenient timing.
There’s no time to sit with it. No room to peel it apart and examine all the ways it can destroy us. There’s only the fight. The room. The woman in white standing in the middle of gunfire like she was made from something stronger than fear.
“Left!” Will barks beside me, already moving, already familiar in the way only shared wars make you.
We fall into formation without thinking, shoulders nearly brushing as we take cover behind an overturned table that used to hold champagne flutes and centerpieces. Now it’s splintered wood and shattered glass, the smell of gunpowder replacingfrosting and flowers. Expensive linen blackens at the edges where sparks caught. Someone’s anniversary champagne is soaking into the carpet under our boots like this room was ever going to survive the night clean.
Just like old times.
I return fire in controlled bursts, mind sharp and clear in that way it only gets when everything else falls away. Target. Angle. Cover. Movement. The world narrows to lines and exits and breath and recoil. “They’re probing,” I say. “Testing response time.”
Will snorts, grim even as he reloads. “Mikhail was never subtle.”
“No,” I agree, sighting down the barrel again. “But he’s patient.”
Another explosion rattles the far end of the building. Screams echo, then cut off as trained voices take over, herding people down, out, away. Retired operators who’ve spent years pretending they’re civilians again snap back into old instincts with terrifying speed. Some of the younger spouses freeze. Older wives don’t. They grab wrists, shove bodies low, move kids and champagne-drunk uncles like they’ve done this before or always feared they would.
I glance across the room—and there she is.
Lilah. My Delilah.
Standing on a chair like she owns the place, blood on her lip that isn’t hers, eyes blazing with focus. Her white dress is streaked now with smoke and dust and somebody else’s panic, the pendant I gave her flashing once against her throat as she turns. She looks like a contradiction the world should not be allowed to make—beautiful and brutal and entirely in command.
“Listen to me!” she shouts, voice carrying clean and sharp over the noise. “If you don’t have combat training, you move now.Spouses, families, civilians—follow the green markers and do not stop. Veterans, you know the drill. Cover them.”
Someone hesitates. Panics. A man in a navy blazer grabs at his wife instead of moving, confusion locking his feet in place.
She doesn’t soften.
“Move!” she snaps, pointing. “This isn’t a request!”
And they do. Because they recognize command when they hear it. Because something in her tone says survival is not optional. Because even the people who don’t know her know, instinctively, that she is not bluffing.
My chest tightens hard enough to hurt.
I want to worry about her. Every instinct in me is screaming to pull her back, put my body between hers and the threat, keep her safe the way I promised myself I always would. But that instinct collides headfirst with memory—mission after mission, city after city, the way she moved through danger like she understood it intimately but refused to let it own her.
