“I want you to tell me why.”
“I made a tactical error. I saw the transport on the feeds and moved too fast without proper?—”
“Stop.” She leaned forward in the chair. “I am not one of your Warrior Security guys. I am not Maude. Do not manage me. I woke up, and you weren’t there.”
Her voice cracked on the last word. Just barely, just enough to hear the thing underneath the anger, and it gutted me. Because this wasn’t a debriefing. This was a woman who had woken up alone in my bed after the first night we’d spent together and found cold sheets where I should have been. I’d done that to her.
“You didn’t leave because you saw a transport on the feeds.” She pressed her palms flat against her thighs. Holding herself together. “You left because you woke up in that bed and I was in it.”
I would give anything if I could deny it. If I could tell her I happened by the command room and saw something and had to leave that very second. Anything if I could erase the look on her face. The look I’d put there.
But I couldn’t lie to her.
“So tell me.” She looked smaller than I’d ever seen her. Folded into that chair with her arms tight against her body, my blood still on her shirt, eyes wet and not bothering to hide it. “Was waking up next to me so terrible that you had to go get yourself killed?”
The question landed in the center of my chest and burrowed deep, its claws ripping and shredding as it did.
“Waking up with you wasn’t bad. Not at all.”
“Then what the hell, Travis?”
“It wasn’t bad.” My voice rose as I struggled to explain something I barely understood myself. “It was the opposite of bad. That was the problem. I haven’t felt that good in three years, and I couldn’t handle it.”
“That doesn’t make sense. You felt good so you went out and got yourself shot?”
The hives on my forearms were burning. I could feel my pulse in the wound along my side, a steady throb synced to myheartbeat. Everything hurt, which should have been exactly what I wanted, except it wasn’t enough.
It was never going to be enough again because the woman sitting across from me had broken the mechanism I hadn’t even been aware I’d needed. Just by her very existence in my life, she’d taken away some of the pain and misery that the Ghost missions had cost.
How was I supposed to say that I wanted that pain back? That I needed it?
I deserved it.
“The missions are supposed to hurt.” I said it to the ceiling first. Then I made myself look at her.
She didn’t respond. She sat perfectly still, her eyes fixed on mine, waiting for the next piece.
“Every mission I’ve run for eighteen months. The hives, the tremors, the hours of being wrecked afterward. I told myself it was the cost. My body fighting me because the work mattered. But that’s not what it was.”
“What was it?”
There was only one word.
“Penance.”
She didn’t move. Didn’t blink.
“The mission with you on comms, the pain didn’t come. Your voice in my ear all night gave my body something to hold on to, and the suffering just didn’t happen—not the way I was used to. Not the way I needed it to. That’s why I told you to leave, even though that wasn’t what I really wanted.” God, this explanation was a shitshow. “And then making love to you was so fucking good, and I woke up and felt…peaceful.”
“Was that so wrong?”
I stopped. Started again. “I need the missions to hurt, Sera. I need the cost. And it wasn’t there. So, I went looking for it. For the penance.”
“Penance for what?”
There it was. The question I’d been running from for three years. Running from in the dark on empty highways, running from into the fists of men who wanted to kill me, running from into the cold water of my pool at two in the morning.
Every mile, every scar, every night I’d spent putting myself back together over the bathroom sink had been running from this exact question.
