Behind me, she rises quietly from the floor. I feel her approach before she speaks again. “Rhys.”
When I turn, she’s standing only a few feet away, firelight flickering across her shadowed face. “You said he told you to leave him.”
Every muscle in my body locks hard. The room disappears for half a second.
Dust. Blood. Phoenix gripping the front of my vest hard enough to bruise.
“You weren’t supposed to stop me.”
Yeah, even if it meant losing all my Marines. Couldn’t do that. Promised to keep them safe to the last man.
Even the reckless one. The one acting on orders, I’ll never understand. The one who endangered our mission for his own.
I blink once and force the memory down before it takes the rest of me with it. Sloane sees the shift anyway.
“Why would he say that?” she asks softly.
I look at her for a very long time. Then past her. Then nowhere at all. Because the answer is pressing against the inside of my skull harder every day she stays here.
And if I let it out, there’ll be no putting any of this back together. Not for her. Not for either of us.
Thunder shakes the cabin again. Closer.
“You said he knew something was coming,” she leads.
I nod.
Her breath catches slightly. “What kind of something?”
The silence stretches between us, heavy enough to drown in.
Sloane watches me carefully now. Like someone realizing the shape of the disaster is bigger than they imagined.
And the worst part?
She’s right. Way too right. Because she’s getting too close to the truth. And I don’t know how to stop her.
Chapter
Sixteen
SLOANE
The rain starts again just after dark. It drums softly against the cabin roof while fog crawls over the mountain like something alive, swallowing the trees one by one beyond the windows.
Rhys sleeps in the chair. Or pretends to. It’s impossible to tell with him.
The fire burns low between us, casting amber light over the cabin walls and catching on the fresh bandage wrapped around his arm. His head tips back against the chair, eyes closed, one boot stretched toward the hearth. But even sleeping, he looks tense. Like his body forgot how to stop bracing for impact.
I sit cross-legged on the sleeping bag near the coffee table, surrounded by papers again. My laptop screen glows dimly beside me, illuminating the photograph I can’t stop staring at.
First Recon.
Seven Marines shoulder-to-shoulder beneath a brutal Afghan sun. Dust-covered and exhausted, but alive.
Phoenix stands near the edge of the frame. Rhys beside him. Close enough to suggest trust… or at least responsibility.
My eyes drift toward the sleeping figure across the room. Then lower to the edge of his collar. The scar disappears beneathit. The tattoo beneath those scars. First Recon on his chest. And the coordinates burned permanently into his skin, like penance.
