I took mine, raised it to the room. “To family,” I said.
Jojo toasted, his glass clinking mine. “To family.”
We drank. It tasted like fire and forgiveness.
Outside, the cleanup was just beginning. But inside, the war was over.
I’d always been the black sheep. The fuck-up, the loose cannon.
But tonight, I was something else.
I was a protector.
And nobody—nobody—was ever going to take that away.
Chapter Nineteen
~ Jojo ~
The first thing I noticed was the silence, but not the bad kind. Not the pre-dawn, gunmetal silence I used to brace for, but the low, humming quiet of a house at peace. Autumn sunlight spilled across the hardwood, doing its best to bleach out three months’ worth of mud and trauma, but the house always wins those battles.
I lay in bed for a while, hands cradling the rising swell of my stomach, and watched the dust motes float like lazy satellites. I’d started sleeping on my back, which meant my dreams were vivid and my mornings a negotiation between bladder, gravity, and the relentless pressure of whatever football-sized fruit I was now growing.
The clock on the nightstand said 6:17, but the activity in the rest of the house suggested at least 0800. Boots on old wood, the distant thud of a cabinet closing, the faintest pulse of voices arguing over the relative merits of feed corn versus hay. The baby turned once, a polite but insistent reminder that I had a shift to start, so I levered upright and waddled to the door.
The kitchen had always been the center of the house, but now it was more of a forward operating base. Every surface was scrubbed, the scars of our last stand concealed under a layer of fresh whitewash. Even the bullet holes in the paneling were gone, patched by Macon with a fastidiousness that bordered on OCD. The only evidence of what happened was a new ceramic rooster on the sill—Burke’s idea of a joke, and the only chicken on the ranch immune to predators or crossfire.
Speaking of Burke: he was already at the table, elbows braced wide as he loaded scrambled eggs into his face. He wore a faded tee shirt that said “COUNTRY BOY UP,” which I suspected he’d bought as a dare.
He caught me in the doorway, grinned, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Look at you, up and at ’em. Must be a big day.”
I padded barefoot to the stove, scanning the counter for anything that would pass as “safe for expectant mothers.” The new refrigerator had a checklist taped to it—a relic from the siege, when Jackson had taken to logging every egg, every bottle of Tylenol, every unaccounted-for chocolate bar. There were seven names on the sheet now: myself, Rawley, Macon, Burke, Decker, Hooper, and Jackson. Nine, if you counted the baby and the rooster.
Burke stood, reaching for a mug, and filled it with the decaf I’d begrudgingly switched to under threat of violence. He set it on the table, then pivoted, eyes searching my face. “You sleep okay?”
I sipped, savoring the illusion of real caffeine. “Only got up twice. Think I’m adapting.”
He nodded, then lowered his voice. “Saw Rawley hit the gym at 0400. He’s pacing like a caged bear. You want me to—?”
“No,” I said, too fast. “Let him.”
We both knew what Rawley was doing. He wasn’t just burning off energy, he was patrolling the perimeter—again, and again, and again. Three months hadn’t been enough to shake the vigilance. He trusted his team, but not the world outside. Not yet.
Burke just shrugged and went back to his breakfast. I admired his capacity for adaptation: two years ago, he was in Yemen shooting out the tires of armored convoys. Now he was arguing over the correct way to boil eggs and learning to needlepoint in his spare time.
The man was a chameleon.
I could hear the others waking up—Macon’s low drawl, the clatter of Jackson in the laundry, the distant whine of Hoopertuning up the tractor. If you’d told me last year that I’d be living with a bunch of former SEALs in a ranch house held together by bailing wire and trauma bonding, I’d have laughed you out of the bakery.
And yet, here we were.
I finished my coffee and went looking for the bread. The new batch was on the counter, covered with a towel. I lifted it, inhaled, and felt my whole chest bloom with happiness. I didn’t need a lot. Just a working oven, a handful of flour, and the certainty that nobody would die before lunch.
The moment I reached for a knife, I felt the shift behind me. Not footsteps—Rawley never made a sound when he moved—but the draft in the room, the pressure of his body in my orbit. He hovered so close I could smell the soap on his collarbone and the faint, singed edge of whatever protein shake Macon had bullied him into for breakfast.
“Hey,” I said, not looking back.
“Hey, yourself,” he replied, his voice lower than necessary. He didn’t touch me, not at first, just stood with his arms crossed, gaze fixed on the side of my head.
