Then he turns and walks.
Not toward King.
Not toward Larkin.
Away.
I watch him go, feeling that hollow ache settle into my ribs. He doesn’t slam anything this time. Doesn’t bark orders. Doesn’t look back. Somehow, that’s worse. Anger I know how to read. Silence like that feels like damage.
Mikhail is dead.
But none of this feels like victory.
No relief. No triumph. No clean ending. Just a corridor that smells like bleach and old violence and the ugly knowledge that some wars don’t give you closure. They just keep carving people into shapes they didn’t ask to become.
And somehow, I think this might be the moment everything shifts for good.
Not because the enemy is gone but because something inside us just changed.
Chapter 28
Captain Jonanthan
I don’t sleep.
Not really.
I lie in bed staring at the ceiling until it stops being a ceiling and starts being a collection of shadows that look like maps I can’t read anymore. Every line in the plaster becomes a route that dead-ends. Every dark corner turns into the outline of a cell that should still be occupied. Every time I close my eyes, I see that empty room again—the hanging door, the humming fluorescent light, the dark floor, the absence where answers should’ve been.
Where closure should’ve been.
Where justice should’ve had a face, a voice, a body to drag through consequence.
Instead, all I’ve got is silence and the echo of King’s flat voice sayinghandled itlike he was talking about spilled coffee instead of the end of the one man I’d spent years hunting.
I roll onto my back again, then onto my side, then back again. Pointless. The sheets twist around my legs. The room stays dark. Somewhere outside, Greenport keeps breathing in that low,machine-fed way military bases do through the night—vents, generators, distant boots, a door slamming two buildings over. It all feels too normal. Too intact for what shifted yesterday.
Because that’s the part I can’t stop chewing on.
Mikhail being dead is one thing.
King being the one who decided how it happened is another.
But the part that won’t leave me alone is how little it shocked me once the anger burned through. Not because I expected it from him exactly. Because some ugly corner of me understands it. Because there is a version of me—bloodied, furious, grieving, stripped down to instinct—that might have done the same thing and called it justice on the way out.
That’s the part I don’t want to look at too long.
By morning, I’m done pretending any of this will fix itself.
The sun is barely up when I head for the training bay. Greenport is quieter this early, the kind of quiet that only comes before drills and orders and whatever fresh disaster the day plans to bring. The halls smell like coffee and metal and the faint antiseptic tang that never really leaves a place like this. My shoulders already ache with exhaustion. My mouth tastes like bad sleep and worse decisions.
King is in the training bay when I find him.
Hitting a heavy bag.
Hard.
Over and over.
