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Felix’s eyes snapped open, wide, black holes of panic that saw nothing. He moved faster than I expected. His hand shot up, locking around my wrist with a crushing grip, and he twisted, using his hips to leverage himself up, driving a knee toward my stomach.
I blocked it, barely, and the cold professional corner of me scored it as it happened. Wrist control, hip drive, knee to the body, clean as a drill card, launched out of a dead sleep. Nobody’s sleeping hands ran sequences unless waking up had been dangerous for a very long time.
I shoved him back against the headboard. “Calm down!”
His spine hit the wall as he thrashed and scrambled backward. He dragged his knees up to his chest, putting a barrier between us, gasping for air, staring at me with the wild, unseeing eyes of a cornered animal.
“Identify,” he croaked.
It was a military command, stripped of all emotion, hammered so deep it still stood watch when everything else in him was trapped in the dream.
“It’s Leander,” I said, holding my hands up where he could see them. “You were screaming.”
Felix blinked. Slowly, the room came back into focus for him. He looked at my hands. Then he looked down at his own bare chest.
The mask slammed back into place.
It was terrifying to watch. One second he was a trembling mess, and the next his face smoothed out. The fear vanished behind a wall of ice. Felix did it in one breath, straightening his legs, pushing the sheet away with disdain.
“I wasn’t screaming,” he said. His voice was hoarse, but steady. “I don’t scream.”
“You were begging,” I corrected him. “You were begging them not to flush you.”
He froze. His hand flew to his neck, fingers covering the yellow bruise. All that terror hanging out in the open, and the first thing he moved to hide was my mark.
“Get out of my space, Regillen.”
He pointed at the tape line.
“You crossed the boundary.”
His fingers were still trembling against his neck.
I looked at him, backed into his own headboard with my bite under his hand, and I finally looked at the thing I had been dodging since the sideline. I had called the bag soft. Spineless. A king folding at the first shove. The word had refused to sit flat all night, and now I knew why, because soft men didn’t have nightmares about being scrapped for parts. Soft men didn’t wake up trying to break a wrist.
He wasn’t a coward. He was haunted.
It earned him no forgiveness for the drill. That file stayed sealed. I had closed it myself, and I wasn’t reopening it at three in the morning over one bad dream. But coward came out of his file for good. Whatever Felix Cento was doing, he wasn’t doing it because he was weak. Something in this building scared him worse than kneeling did, and I had just heard him beg it for his life.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
I turned around and stepped back over the line. I walked to my bed and sat down, keeping my back to him.
“Go back to sleep, Felix. Try not to wake me up next time you’re dying.”
CHAPTER 16
FELIX
The silence in the room had changed overnight. Yesterday it was a suffocating weight that kept us in our corners, a dead load pressing down evenly on both sides of the tape line. Today it was charged, a tension that threatened to snap the moment either of us moved.
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and pulled up the collar of the compression shirt I wore under my uniform. My hands were steady, a stark contrast to the trembling mess that had woken up screaming last night.
I studied my reflection until it gave me what I needed. I looked like myself again, even if I felt like a fraud.
Leander’s hands froze on his laces the moment I stepped out into the main room. I had braced for the sneer, for whichever insult he had ready. Instead he watched me with the calculating gaze he usually reserved for dismantling a defensive line.
I ignored him, because acknowledging the stare would have been an admission of weakness, grabbed my datapad, and headed for the door with the effortless stride the cameras loved, pretending my heart wasn’t filing a very different report through the monitor on my wrist.
