Chapter 19
RCMP WILD Headquarters, TOC, Gear Room, Outskirts of Kamloops, British Columbia
The gear room was quiet, the kind of quiet that seeped into a man’s bones after too many hours of adrenaline and not enough water.
The others had stowed their gear and peeled off toward the barracks, voices low and fading down the hall.
Breakneck heard Boomer mutter something about showers, heard Skull dragging Bones away from a half-empty box of rations, heard Kodiak’s tired laugh. Then even that died out.
He sat alone at the table, rifle laid out before him, the metal cold under the fluorescent lights.
Fatigue pulled at him like a goddamn black hole.
His torso ached like a son of a bitch, every breath stretching bruised muscle.
He was dehydrated, stung with dust, sore in places he didn’t want to examine, and he needed about ten hours of sleep and two gallons of water.
But none of that was what had him rattled.
It was the thoughts from the SUV. The sound of her voice in his ear.
The weight of her praise. The feel of her body under his hands when he’d shoved her out of the RPG’s blast path.
The way she’d looked at him afterward, eyes sharp and searching, as if she saw something inside him, he never meant for anyone to see.
He heard a scuffle outside the armory door.
“I’m not soft. I just don’t like the way you talk to the kid, Carver. You see the way he handled that RPG? Saved all of them. He’d do the same for us. Show some respect.”
The door opened.
Jones stepped in, stopped short when he saw Break at the bench. He glanced back into the hall, then cleared his throat like nothing had happened.
“You got a Tier 1 crush, Jones?” Breakneck asked without looking up.
Jones snorted. “Slow your roll, junior. I’ll get your autograph later.” He started stowing his weapon. “I see what’s in front of me. Carver can be a dick. That’s all.”
“Okay,” Break said evenly. “But Carver is a dick.”
Jones huffed a quiet laugh. “Yeah.” He shut his locker. “Good night.”
The door closed. Break went back to cleaning.
It opened again.
He didn’t have to look to know it was her.
Blair stepped inside, carrying a jar of something in one hand and a packet of painkillers in the other. Her hair was damp from a quick wash, cheeks still faintly streaked with soot, eyes leveled on him with an intensity that went straight through him.
He tried to push down this inconvenient attraction, tried to break down his rifle as he had a hundred times after missions, but his hands…
betrayed him. The pieces felt wrong in his grip.
His fingers hesitated, misaligned a pin that should have been second nature, fumbled a spring he could normally handle blind.
For one horrifying moment, it felt like he had never cleaned a rifle in his life.
“You’re done,” she said simply. “We’re going to get you slathered in Voltaren.”
“What?” Breakneck asked, genuinely thrown.
“It’s an anti-inflammatory. It reduces pain.”
“You can leave it,” he said, straightening. “I’ll take care—”
The jar hit the table with a sharp crack of ceramic against metal.
He froze mid-motion.
Blair’s voice dropped, quiet but edged with steel. “I’ve seen the bruises you’ve taken since last night. It’s been almost twenty-four hours. You will stop what you’re doing and take off your shirt. Now.”
He blinked at her, throat tightening with something that wasn’t pain.
He’d been ordered by officers who outranked him. He’d been screamed at by instructors who would have drowned him without blinking. He’d been hit, kicked, cut, burned, beaten bloody. He’d endured men who wanted him dead and men who wanted him broken.
None of that made him hesitate the way her words did.
She wasn’t barking at him, challenging him, or belittling him.
She was…taking care of him, and he had no idea how to process that.
No idea how to accept it. No idea how to let someone that close when his entire survival strategy was built on never letting anyone this close.
He stared at her for a beat too long, heart thudding like he’d been dropped into icy water.
Her eyes softened, barely, but enough to hit him somewhere under the bruises.
“Kelly,” she said, voice gentler now, “take off your shirt.”
Something inside him buckled.
He reached for the hem, slow and uncertain, the motion foreign as breathing in a new language.
Breakneck got the shirt halfway over his head before he winced, ribs pulling in sharp, unpleasant lines across his chest. Blair stepped closer without hesitation and tugged the fabric free the rest of the way, her fingers brushing the top of his shoulder as she did.
The contact shot through him like heat under his skin.
She sucked in a breath when she saw the bruises. He expected pity or shock. He got neither. What he saw in her eyes was anger on his behalf. Controlled, quiet, focused. It hit him deeper than pain ever had.
“Christ,” she murmured. “How are you even upright?”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t trust his voice to work. His ribs looked worse than he realized, mottled purple and black along his side, spreading up over his lower back like spilled ink.
Blair opened the jar, scooping the cream onto her fingers. The scent of eucalyptus and menthol cut through the metallic tang of weapon oil and dust in the room. She stepped into his space, close enough that her breath touched the bruises on his chest.
“Hold still,” she said.
Her hands went to his ribs.
Breakneck jerked from the slow and gentle way she touched him, the pain was distant, but her attention foreign. She applied the cream in smooth, circular motions, the glide of her palms warm and careful. His breath caught, ribs protesting under the pressure, but his body leaning toward it anyway.
He closed his eyes. He had been touched in many ways, rough hands, demanding hands, hurried hands that didn’t care if they hurt him, hands that wanted something from him and nothing of him.
His mind betrayed him with a flash of memory from Dusty’s, that woman’s nails digging into his shoulders, the predatory hunger in her eyes, the way he’d felt afterward.
Shame heated his skin, dark and familiar, empty and savage.
Nothing like this. Blair’s touch was soft in the places he had never known softness, giving. Steady in the places he had only known violence. Warm where he had learned to endure cold.
“Tell me if I’m hurting you,” she said quietly, fingers working over the sharpest bruise along his side.
“You aren’t,” he managed, though his throat felt scraped raw. It wasn’t true, not physically, but the ache wasn’t what mattered.
Something in his chest loosened, something he hadn’t realized he was clenching, something he wasn’t sure he knew how to hold steady now that it was slipping free. The shape of his breathing changed under her hands, the walls he had built without even thinking began to shift.
Blair moved to his back, fingers gliding along the bruises there, working the cream into swollen muscle. He felt her breath on his shoulder, soft and warm, and every nerve in his body lit up as if waking from a long sleep.
He swallowed hard. “You don’t have to do this.”
She didn’t stop. “Yes, I do.”
She was just so goddamned direct.
His chest tightened again. “Why?”
“Because you did everything you could to protect my people tonight.” Her hand paused at the edge of a bruise, thumb brushing lightly against his skin. “No one should hurt like this alone.”
His eyes burned for a second. He coughed to hide it.
He had no idea how to respond to that. He didn’t know how to hold that kind of tenderness. It felt like stepping into sunlight after living underground for years, too bright, too warm, too much.
She kept working, patient, methodical, sliding the cream up toward his lower back where the injury marks deepened. His breath faltered again, not from pain but from something deeper. Something frightening.
She stilled for a moment. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m not,” he said, but his voice betrayed him.
Her palms settled over the worst bruise, gentle pressure spreading warmth through the ache.
“Kelly,” she said softly, not Breakneck, not his callsign, but his name. “It’s okay to let someone take care of you.”
He almost flinched. Didn’t know how to hold it without breaking. But he wanted to. God help him, he wanted to.
Her fingers slid along the ridges of his ribs again, and a sound escaped him, low and involuntary, something between relief and surrender.
She didn’t comment, didn’t tease, didn’t stop.
She simply kept going. Slow. Gentle. Present.
Breakneck exhaled a shudder he couldn’t hide, his shoulders dropping despite himself.
For the first time in his life, care didn’t feel like a threat.
It felt like hope.
He stepped away from her. But instead of the relief he expected, her grip on him just tightened.
“I'm not done yet.” She reached for him, and he intercepted her, his fingers closing gently around her wrist. He moved, the kinetic edge tightening in him like he had a target in his sights, even his breathing slowing pulsing with hers.
Her eyes widened, her breath caught, like she was cornered by a dangerous predator. He didn't take any satisfaction in it. He needed her to back off, but the thought of that separation was nothing but pain.
He felt dizzy, everything honed down to a razor edge, chalking it up to dehydration, unable to catch his own breath or steady himself. "In the last twenty-four hours you've had your hands on me twice." He expected backpedaling, coyness, even a lie. But this woman stripped him down to basics.
"Yeah, well, you saved my life twice. I know you're hurting, and I've seen your dedication, selflessness, so too bad. Someone, me, cares. Deal with it."