Fall Into Me (Chaotic Love #4)

Prologue

Captain Jonathan

“What’s war like?”

Now, that’s a hell of a question.

I glance at the girl sitting cross-legged on the floor beside my desk.

The cheap overhead light paints a halo on the hardwood, catching on the strands of black hair that have fallen across her shoulder.

She’s leaning back on her hands like she owns the place, boot heel scuffing a mark into my floor, and somehow she looks like she belongs here.

Like this office grew around her instead of the other way around.

There are a hundred things I could say—half-truths and polished answers meant to sound heroic. I could tell her war makes your blood electric. That it’s exhilarating, powerful, the kind of thing that turns men into gods with rifles in their hands and missions under their belts.

I could say war clears the mind—shuts down all the noise in your head—because when the bullets fly, there’s only one thing that matters: survival. No bills, no old regrets, no past mistakes. Just target, cover, breathe.

But that would be a lie.

War is terrifying. It doesn’t just change how you see the world—it rewires how you breathe.

It crawls into your lungs and settles there, a permanent weight, so even on quiet days you inhale like something could explode at any second.

It turns men into machines, into ghosts, into monsters.

It doesn’t make you noble. It makes you numb, cold, and stained in ways bleach or prayer can’t fix.

I’ve lived most of my life in the shadows of it, and I’ve tasted the ugliest parts—missions no one wanted, the kind we don’t write down.

The kind that come in blackout folders and burn after reading.

The kind that don’t come with medals or salutes, only nightmares and closed-door debriefs where everyone pretends they did what they had to do.

That’s the thing about Greenport. We’re not Navy, not Army, not even special forces in the traditional sense.

We’re the cleanup crew for a world rotting from the inside out.

A secret society dressed in medals and mission briefs, putting out fires before the rest of the world ever sees the smoke.

Let the others chase headlines and glory—we’re the reason they get to pretend the world isn’t burning.

In other words, we operate in the shadows—like ghosts cleaning up messes no one wants to admit exist. A quiet little cult of necessary monsters babysitting a world that insists it’s fine while the floorboards are already ash.

Still, none of that makes it something a girl like her should be asking about.

My eyes stay glued to the paperwork cluttering my desk.

Contraband seizure reports. Missing persons from Sector B.

Some half-baked suspicion of a mole buried beneath a stack of inventory logs.

The edges of the pages are soft from too many hands, coffee rings bleeding into the ink.

All of it is background noise now, just black and white smudges, because there’s a twenty-one-year-old sitting on my floor, staring a hole into the side of my head like she’s counting how many breaths I’m taking per minute, and I can’t seem to ignore the way her presence hums against the edges of my thoughts.

“I don’t think you need to worry that pretty little head of yours about it,” I mutter without looking up, pen scratching a meaningless line in the margin.

She doesn’t flinch at the condescension. Hell, she doesn’t even blink. She simply taps her nails on the hardwood floor in a slow, deliberate rhythm. It’s not a jittery beat; it’s measured, almost bored. It’s in no way anxious, and it’s definitely not fidgeting.

She’s thinking, and that’s what gets me.

It’s not her voice, or her eyes, or even the fact that she strolled into my office like it was a fucking Starbucks.

It’s the quiet way she takes up space. The unbothered way she leans back against the leg of my desk.

It’s like she doesn’t need permission. It’s like she’s already decided she belongs here and is just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

“Come on, old man. I want to hear the war stories,” she says, voice lighter now, laced with a grin I don’t dare look at. “It’s boring out there.”

I smirk despite myself, the corner of my mouth betraying me before my brain can shut it down.

God help me.

I don’t believe in love. The first woman I ever cared about used my feelings against me the moment I stopped being useful to her.

She smiled while she twisted the knife, and I let her, because back then I still believed wanting someone made you worth something.

That experience taught me everything I needed to know about keeping people at arm’s length.

But if there were a softer world—one that didn’t take advantage of people for wanting things—maybe this is how it would begin.

Not with logic or perfect timing. Not with people of the same age who share careers or similar lifestyles. Perhaps it starts with a girl who is too young for you, sitting on your floor and asking questions she has no business asking in an office in a hallway that no one else thought to explore.

“You’re a bold one,” I say, finally cutting my eyes to her. “Waltzing into my office like you own the place, and I’ve never seen your face before. What are you? A new recruit with more guts than sense?”

She blinks up at me, black hair spilling like ink over one shoulder, sapphire eyes too bright, too blue for this world.

They stand out against the drab gray walls and the framed commendations like someone colored outside the lines.

She looks like a question I shouldn’t answer.

Like something dangerous wrapped in softness.

“One can only hope,” she murmurs.

The words barely register, but they hit something low in my gut.

Hope.

It’s the way she says it that pulls the air from my lungs—a little too soft, a little too raw, as if hope is not just a word but a thing she’s been chewing on for years and is only now daring to say out loud.

That’s not a throwaway answer. That’s a secret—a wish—and suddenly, I know I should shut this down. Now.

This girl doesn’t belong in Greenport. She has no idea what this place will do to her.

She doesn’t know what it’s like to come back from a mission and stare at the wall for hours because your soul didn’t make it back with you.

She doesn’t know what it’s like to smell gunpowder in an empty room or hear screaming in the silence of a shower. She doesn’t know what this life costs.

She thinks it’s a movie.

My gut twists, sending a silent alarm screeching through my veins. The same instinct that’s pulled me out of ambushes and bad intel is clawing at the back of my neck, telling me danger isn’t always a man with a gun. Sometimes it’s a girl with wide eyes and the wrong kind of curiosity.

I know this feeling. I always trust my instincts—and right now, they’re screaming she doesn’t belong here. This isn’t a playground. Greenport breaks people. It chews them up and spits them out with blood under their nails and ghosts in their beds.

“What’s your name?” I ask, leaning back in my chair.

The wood groans under the shift of weight, protesting like it’s as tired of my shit as I am.

Suddenly, the room feels too damn small, or maybe it’s just that she’s too close.

The air feels thicker, heavier, like the oxygen has decided to cling to her instead of filling my lungs.

Either way, my hands are sweating.

I’ve gutted men with these hands, held my own intestines in after a knife tore me open, wrapped them around throats and rifles and steering wheels slick with rain and blood—but this? This girl? This moment?

It’s the first time I understand the phrase sweating bullets.

She hesitates, and for a second I think she might lie. Then she smiles with a softness that doesn’t match the weight of this place, a smile that doesn’t belong among locked filing cabinets and classified files.

“Delilah.”

“Delilah,” I echo, testing it on my tongue like it’s something I shouldn’t say out loud. “Like the song?”

She chuckles, almost bashful, a sound that does something uncomfortable to my chest. “You know the song?”

“Of course I know the damn song. ‘Hey there, Delilah.’ Every idiot with an acoustic guitar butchered it in 2006. Don’t tell me your dad named you after that one-hit wonder.”

“No,” she grins, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear, exposing the curve of her throat for the briefest second. “It’s Lilah. You just heard me wrong.”

And just like that, everything in me goes still.

Lilah.

I blink as the name sinks in like a gut punch. The fluorescent light above us hums loud in the pause, a high, grating buzz that suddenly feels like it’s drilling straight into my skull.

No.

I sit up straighter, suddenly hyperaware of every breath I take, of the way the chair creaks, of the sound of distant boots in the hallway. I run through the pieces. The face. The voice. The too-familiar eyes. Just like that, my blood turns cold, dread settling heavy and uninvited.

“Wait. Lilah Kennedy?” My voice drops, low and deliberate, the kind of tone that has stopped grown men in their tracks.

She flinches—barely—but it’s there. The tiniest stutter in her composure. It’s that moment of knowing she’s been caught.

“Well. Yeah.”

Christ.

I drag a hand down my face, palm scraping over the roughness of my jaw, the weight of it all settling hard into my chest. Old memories flicker—Will’s crooked grin, smoke curling in a dim briefing room, the sound of his laugh over radio static.

The way he talked about his kid in those rare, unguarded moments, like she was the one clean thing in his world.

“You’re Will’s daughter?”

She nods, calm as ever. Not sheepish. Not surprised. Like she expected this moment all along.

Of course she did.

She walked in here knowing exactly who I was. She knew what this would do. And she did it anyway.

I shift forward in my seat, elbows on my knees, locking eyes with hers. I let my captain’s voice bleed through, the one that doesn’t leave room for argument. “You have no business being in this office. Let alone asking about war.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You weren’t thinking,” I snap, the word cracking through the space between us. “That much is clear. You don’t belong in this world, kid. And you definitely don’t belong in this room.”

Her lips press together, the edges flattening, but her gaze doesn’t drop. She holds my stare like she’s been practicing for this exact moment in a mirror. That softness in her expression—it’s not weakness. It’s a front. Underneath it, there’s steel, a fight she hasn’t yet learned how to use.

“I’m not a kid,” she says quietly.

I hate it. The way the words slide under my skin.

That flicker of something low in my stomach is not desire—not exactly.

It’s an alarm. Recognition. A dangerous awareness that has nothing to do with age and everything to do with inevitability.

I know this girl already has a foothold in my mind, and if I don’t shut the door now, I never will.

I’ve built my life around being alone. It’s safer that way—no one to miss, no one to bury, and no one to be used against me when the world turns cruel, which it always does.

If there’s no one waiting for me to come home, it’s easier to step into danger without flinching.

Easier to pull the trigger. Easier to walk away.

She doesn’t get to change that.

“You’re twenty-one. You’ve got dreams. Soft skin.

No idea what it feels like to wash blood out of your shirt at three a.m.” I shake my head, swallowing the heaviness in my throat, the old taste of copper and soap that rises at the memory.

“You should be on a beach somewhere, drinking something stupid with your friends. Not in here.”

“My dad was in this world,” she says quietly.

“Which is exactly why you shouldn’t be.”

The room goes still. Even the buzzing light seems to hold its breath.

She finally lowers her gaze, just for a moment, lashes brushing her cheeks as if the weight of my words finally lands. Then, like a ghost of a thought, she says, “You know what’s funny? He said you’d say something like that…”

I blink. There’s a pinch behind my eyes I ignore.

“What else did he say?”

She shrugs, but it’s too careful, too controlled. “That you’d act tough. Pretend you don’t care. That you always cared too much.”

My throat tightens. The old wound Will left behind stirs, the one that never really healed, just scarred over enough to ignore most days.

Damn it, Will.

He always thought he knew me better than I knew myself.

Maybe he did. But if he knew what was going through my head right now—if he knew how my stomach dropped when she smiled at me, how the sound of her voice grates against every rule I’ve built for myself—he wouldn’t be so poetic about it.

He’d drag her out of this building by the back of her shirt and lock her in a house somewhere far away from all of this. From me.

I stand up suddenly, pushing away from the desk as if it might burn me. The chair skids back with a harsh scrape that makes her flinch again, the first real crack in her composure. I need space. I need air. I need something that isn’t her and her father’s ghost between us.

“This conversation is over. You shouldn’t have come in here.”

She stands up slowly, uncrossing her legs with an ease that makes it look like she has all the time in the world.

She brushes imaginary dust from her jeans, fingers smoothing over the denim like armor.

She doesn’t argue or plead; instead, she simply gives a quiet nod, as if she’s letting me have the illusion of control.

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have,” she admits.

She moves toward the door, footsteps soft against the floor, and the office suddenly feels too empty in advance, like the space is already missing her. Her hand wraps around the handle, fingers pale against the metal, and just before she pulls it open, she glances back over her shoulder.

Her voice is soft, but there’s a glimmer in it—a tease, a goodbye, and a new beginning wrapped into one. “I like Delilah better, anyway.”

And then she’s gone. Just like that.

The door clicks shut with obscene finality, leaving me alone with the hum of the light, the clutter on my desk, and the ghost of her presence tangled in the air.

I stand there, jaw clenched, hands still curled into fists, sweating, cursing, and realizing I’ve just met the one girl I should have never let walk into my life.