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With an irritated huff, she slapped on the faucet and tugged me closer. “Put your elbow under there.”

I did as she said, letting the running water wash away as much of the blood and debris as possible. “Are you mad at me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Why would I be mad?” Her brows pinched together. She still wouldn’t look at me.

Shit. She was definitely mad.

“About last night?” I pressed. My heart twisted uncomfortably in my chest. Don’t say it was a mistake. Don’t say you regret me.

She blinked, looking surprised, like that hadn’t even occurred to her. “Last night was fine.”

“Fine?” I repeated, stunned. My eyes narrowed. “Last night was not fine. Last night was⁠—”

“Nothing,” she said crisply. “Last night was nothing. It was…good. We got it out of our systems, and now we can…whatever.” She waved a hand dismissively, then shut off the water.

Those words had sounded awful last night, and they sounded even worse now. “I don’t want whatever. I want you.” Saying that out loud felt like I had ripped my heart right out of my chest and offered it to her in my hands, bloody and still beating.

“Because it’s October?” she said softly.

I reeled back. “What?”

Slowly she lifted her gaze to mine.

She knew. Oh, shit, she knew.

“Can we talk about this?” I captured her wrists and pulled her in front of me. “Please.”

“The time to have this conversation was four years ago,” she said wearily. “Not now, when your lip is bleeding.”

“Please, baby,” I begged softly.

“Don’t call me that.” Her eyes narrowed to angry slits. “Let go of me, or I will bite you.”

The fucked up part of me wanted to goad her into it. There was a razor-thin line between rage and lust, and it was tempting to push Lila right over it. Save this terrible conversation for another day—or, better yet, never.

But I owed her more than that. If I was ever going to fix this thing that I had broken, I had to tell her the truth.

I dropped her wrists. She flexed her fingers, then turned away and busied herself with digging through the first aid kit.

“It was October. Five months before we met.” Lila heaved a sigh, but I kept going. “A reconnaissance operation, that was all. Plant devices and get out without exchanging gunfire. But everything went wrong. There was a fisherman—” I broke off, shaking my head. She didn’t need the details, and I couldn’t give them to her anyway. But that part had made the news.

Lila flipped on the faucet, dampened a cotton ball, and added a squirt of hand soap. “Hold still. You’ve got a nasty scratch right under your collarbone.” She leaned forward and got to work.

Her face was temptingly close to mine. I loved the dusting of brown freckles across her nose. The way she bit her bottom lip when she was concentrating hard. Her pale peach eyelashes that looked dipped in gold.

It was all too distracting, so I closed my eyes. “None of my team survived,” I went on. “Ten lives were lost on our side, and dozens more on theirs. Civilian casualties, too. And I…I was done. My contract was up a month later. I took an honorable discharge and went to work for my dad—ouch, shit.” My breath hissed as Lila dabbed the soapy cotton ball to my wound, clearing away the dirt.

“Sorry,” she said automatically, then bit her lip like she wanted to take it back. “Almost done with this one.” She ripped open a large bandage and gently pressed it to my skin. “There you go.”

“Lila.”

“What?”

“Please listen to me.”

Her lips thinned. “I am listening. If you want to tell me how fucked up you were after losing your whole team, you can do that. But you don’t have to. I get it. I really do. God, Seb, what you went through—” Her voice cracked.

My gaze snapped to hers, hope flickering in my chest. She called me Seb. That had to mean something, right? “I was a fucking mess back then, Lila. I don’t even know how to explain it. I was alive, but I wasn’t. Not really. I ate my meals, and I couldn’t taste the food. I was at my parents’ house for Christmas, and Mom asked me to get the mail. It was snowing. I stood out there, looking at the snowflakes, watching them melt on my skin, knowing I should have been cold and wet, but not feeling it. When I came back inside, she freaked out. I’d gone out in the snow barefoot and didn’t even notice until she said something. I didn’t feel a damn thing.”