Nothing came out.
Then the pain arrived.
Hot.
White.
Mean enough to make my knees forget their job.
I went down beside him.
The sky above me was black and full of stars that had no business looking that calm while men bled under them. Gunfire kept cracking. Voices moved around me in fragments. Callum roaring orders. Someone calling for extraction. Someone else saying cops were too close, border patrol might be moving, we had to get out now.
Nate’s hand found my sleeve.
“Don’t die,” he rasped.
I laughed, or tried to. It came out wet and wrong. “You first.”
“Copycat.”
The world started tilting at the edges.
I knew wounds. I had seen enough men bleed to know when the body began making decisions the mind had not approved. Warmth spread under me. Too much. My fingers pressed against the hole in my side, but blood did not care about my hands or my stubbornness or the fact that I still had things unfinished.
Georgia.
Her face came first because it was supposed to.
Blonde hair catching sunset in La Jolla. Blue dress fluttering around her knees. Hands pressed to her mouth when I opened the ring box. The way she said yes before I finished asking, laughing through tears, like joy had outrun manners. Her mother crying in the kitchen. Her father clapping my shoulder and telling me he trusted me with the most precious thing in his life.
I had put a ring on Georgia’s finger.
I had promised.
Maybe not with a date. Maybe not with invitations or vows spoken in front of families. But a promise was still a promise,even if a man made it while trying to outrun another woman’s ghost.
Georgia deserved to be my last thought.
I tried to hold her there.
Her ring.
Her laugh.
Her soft hands on my face.
Her voice saying, You disappear sometimes.
I’m right here, I had told her.
Liar.
My eyes closed against the desert.
Destiny came anyway.
Not walking.
