“Sloane—”
“No.” I point at him, my hand shaking. “You don’t get my name right now.”
His mouth shuts.
The silence that follows is worse than the argument. Because in it, pieces start rearranging. The missing details in Phoenix’s records. The strange change in his voice before his final deployment. The way his letters grew shorter. Cleaner. Less him.
The things he didn’t say.
My stomach had known, long before the men in uniform came to my parents’ door, that something about my brother had already gone somewhere I couldn’t follow. I press a hand to my mouth.
Rhys watches me with the expression of a man witnessing damage he caused and can’t undo.
I hate him for that. I hate him for being here. For being alive.
For being bandaged under my hands. For carrying my brother’s last battlefield on his skin. For telling me just enough truth to make every lie I’ve told myself start bleeding.
“I came here because I thought I knew what happened,” I say. My voice sounds far away now.
Rhys doesn’t answer.
“I thought I knew who you were.”
His eyes darken.
“I thought I knew who he was.”
That one almost ruins me.
The wind shifts outside. The last light slips lower over the mountain, turning the cabin dim and gold and haunted.
Rhys finally steps away from the door.
It should feel like victory. But it doesn’t. How can it? I don’t know what I’ve won.
I look at the photo on the small shelf. First Recon. Phoenix looking hard, different, like the world had already changedhim. Rhys beside him, competent, protective, a man carved by survival.
Two men in one frame. Two versions of a story. And me standing between them with no idea which one I’m supposed to believe.
“I don’t know which version of my brother is real anymore,” I whisper.
Rhys’s face tightens. But he says nothing. And somehow, that’s the cruelest answer of all.
Chapter
Fourteen
SLOANE
The mountain traps sound. Wind through the pines. Water dripping from rock. The low creak of old wood settling against the cold.
I lie awake listening to all of it. And to Rhys moving too near… not sleeping either.
The cabin feels smaller after last night. Like the truth took up physical space between us, pushing against the walls, stealing oxygen.
I stare at the ceiling, wrapped in my sleeping bag, trying not to replay every word.
He wasn’t following orders.The sentence loops endlessly.
