Chapter 8
Delilah Barrinheart
I wake up like I’m surfacing through water that’s too thick to push through, my body heavy and uncooperative, my thoughts drifting in and out before I can grab onto them.
There’s light—too bright, too white—and it hurts behind my eyes, blooming into a dull ache that pulses in time with something steady and mechanical nearby.
Beeping.
The sound anchors me first. Slow. Rhythmic. Too close. Too clinical. The kind of sound that means I’m being watched by machines because my body has become something that needs measuring.
I try to swallow and realize my throat is dry, my tongue thick, my mouth tasting faintly of metal and antiseptic.
When I shift, even just a fraction of an inch, pain flares along my side and steals the breath from my lungs in a sharp, punishing reminder that my body remembers something my mind isn’t ready to touch yet.
It’s everywhere if I look for it—my ribs, my shoulder, my face, the ache behind my temple.
My skin feels too tight in some places, too loose in others, like I’ve been stitched back into myself badly.
My lashes flutter, vision swimming, the room coming in and out of focus like a camera refusing to settle.
Shapes move beyond the foot of the bed. Voices overlap, distorted, as if I’m listening through glass.
Someone is talking to me—I think they are—but the words slide past without meaning, syllables dissolving before they reach my brain.
The ceiling is white. The sheets are stiff.
Somewhere, something disinfected and sterile tries and fails to cover the smell of blood that still seems trapped in my nose.
I turn my head slightly, and that’s when I see him.
Jon stands in the hallway just outside the curtain, shoulders tense, posture rigid in a way I recognize instantly.
He’s talking to a nurse, his back half-turned toward me, one hand gesturing in short, clipped movements that tell me he’s trying very hard not to raise his voice.
His jaw is tight, his face drawn and shadowed like he hasn’t slept, like he’s been carrying something too heavy for too long and refuses to set it down.
His uniform is wrinkled. There’s dried blood on his sleeve. I can’t tell if any of it is his.
For a second—just a second—I feel something warm bloom in my chest.
Relief.
It’s instinctive. Immediate. Stupidly human. He’s here. He came. Some part of me unclenches before I can stop it.
Then it twists into something else.
Why is he here?
The thought lands strangely, sharp where it shouldn’t be.
I don’t know how long I’ve been out. I don’t know what he’s seen.
I don’t know what he thinks he knows. I don’t know how much of me came back in one piece and how much of me is still stuck in that cell with Mikhail’s hands and the smell of rust and fear.
And that lack of control sends a prickle of unease crawling up my spine.
The nurse steps away. Jon turns slightly, and our eyes meet through the narrow gap in the curtain.
His expression changes instantly—relief crashing into something rawer, more dangerous, something so naked it almost makes me look away.
He starts toward me, then stops short when Larkin steps into view at my bedside.
“Delilah,” Larkin says, her voice clear and calm, grounded in a way that feels unfair when everything inside me is anything but. Her hands are folded in front of her, posture composed, like she walked into this room already knowing she’d have to be the steady one. “Can you hear me?”
I nod. Or at least I think I do. My head feels too heavy to lift properly, my thoughts dragging behind the motion like they’re caught in mud.
“You’re safe,” she continues, and I hate how practiced it sounds, like she’s said it a hundred times to people who didn’t believe her either. “You’re back at Greenport. You’ve been unconscious for a while, but you’re stable.”
Safe.
The word echoes, hollow and wrong. My fingers curl into the sheets, grounding myself in the texture, the coolness, the pull of fabric against my skin.
I can feel my heartbeat now, steady but loud, like it’s pressing against the inside of my chest, demanding attention.
Safe feels like a story people tell you so you stop asking questions.
“Delilah,” Larkin says again, softer this time. “I need you to tell me what happened. Anything you remember.”
Something in her tone shifts—subtle, but enough that I notice. This isn’t concern anymore. This is intel. This is command wrapped in softness.
My stomach tightens.
At first, the memories come like shadows at the edges of my vision.
Blurred. Distant. Easy enough to ignore if I don’t look directly at them.
I open my mouth to speak, to give her something neutral, something safe, but the moment I actually try to form the words, it’s like a door opens somewhere deep in my head.
And I fall through it.
Hands.
Pressure.
The weight of a body too close, too heavy.
A voice in my ear—low, amused, wrong.
My chest tightens sharply, breath stuttering as my heart rate spikes without my permission. The monitor beside me reacts instantly, the steady beep accelerating into something frantic, exposed, humiliating in its honesty. My body betrays me before I can bury anything back down.
“No,” I gasp, more to myself than anyone else.
The word tears out thin and wrecked. I focus on the ceiling, on the fluorescent light above me, on the present moment, trying to anchor myself the way they trained us to.
Inhale. Exhale. Count. Stay here. Don’t go back there.
Don’t let them pull you into the memory until it becomes more real than the room.
“Delilah,” Jon’s voice cuts in, closer now, urgent in a way that slices straight through the fog. “Hey. Look at me.”
I turn my head toward him despite myself.
He’s at my side now, one hand gripping the edge of the bed like he’s holding himself back from touching me.
His eyes search my face, dark with something that looks dangerously close to panic.
There’s blood under one of his nails. A bruise darkening the line of his jaw.
He looks wrecked, and somehow that only makes this worse.
“You’re here,” he says, like he needs to hear it out loud. Like maybe he’s saying it for himself too. “You’re okay. Just breathe. Slow it down.”
I try. I really do. I try to follow the steadiness in his voice, the shape of it, the way he says my name like it means something heavier than it should. But the second I start to reach for calm, Larkin presses again.
“Delilah, did Mikhail say anything to you? Did he move you after initial contact?”
The name hits like a blow.
My vision blurs again, edges warping as my pulse races faster, the sound of the monitor bleeding into the memory until I can’t tell which is which.
Mikhail in the courtyard. Mikhail looking at me like I was an object he’d already decided how to use.
Mikhail’s voice, cultured and cold, telling them to keep me intact.
“That’s enough,” Jon snaps, turning on Larkin so fast it startles me. “She’s not ready.”
“We don’t get to decide when ready is,” Larkin shoots back. “If she has information—”
“She’s fucking traumatized,” Jon cuts in, his voice rising now, sharp and uncontrolled. “Look at her. You’re pushing her into a spiral.”
“And you’re letting your feelings cloud your judgment,” Larkin fires back, just as sharp. “She’s an operative, Jon. Not—”
“Stop.”
The word comes out of me before I realize I’m capable of speaking that loudly. It hurts, scraping my throat raw, but it works. They both freeze, attention snapping back to me. The room goes still except for the frantic beeping at my side and the ragged sound of my own breathing.
“I said stop,” I repeat, quieter now but no less firm. My heart is still racing, but I force my breathing to slow, one deliberate inhale at a time. “Both of you.”
Silence falls, heavy and tense. It hangs between us like a drawn wire, ready to snap.
Then a curtain is yanked open on the other side of the bay.
“Well,” King drawls, his voice dry and unmistakably him, “this is cozy.”
I blink, startled, and see him lying in the bed beside mine, propped up on one elbow, bruised and bandaged but very much awake. His mask is gone, his expression tired but intact, like pain is just another inconvenience he’s learned to live with. He looks like shit. Familiar, infuriating shit.
Despite everything, a weak huff of a laugh escapes me. “You’re alive.”
“Unfortunately,” he says.
Jon exhales sharply, scrubbing a hand down his face like the interruption knocked something loose. Larkin mutters something under her breath and steps back, clearly shelving the interrogation for now.
The room settles, but the tension doesn’t leave. It just changes shape. It coils tighter, quieter, slipping into places words can’t reach.
Jon turns back to me, expression guarded now, the softness replaced with something carefully controlled. The walls are back. I watch them go up in real time, brick by brick, and it does something ugly to my chest.
“Delilah,” he says, lower, steadier. “We need to talk about next steps.”
My stomach sinks.
“I need to call your father,” he continues. “He deserves to know what’s happened.”
The words hit harder than anything else so far. Harder than the memory. Harder than the pain. I push myself up on my elbows despite the way my ribs scream in protest, anger flaring hot and sudden, burning through the lingering haze. “No.”
Jon stiffens. “Delilah—”
“No,” I repeat, louder now, temper snapping into place like a shield. “You don’t get to decide that. You don’t get to bring him into this.”
His jaw tightens. “He’s your father.”
“And this is my life,” I shoot back, the edge in my voice sharper than it’s ever been with him.
I can feel myself slipping, becoming someone colder, more defensive, but I don’t stop it.
I can’t. If I soften now, I’ll break open.
“You don’t even know what you’d be telling him.
He doesn’t know I’m here. He can’t know. ”
Jon looks at me like he doesn’t recognize me, like something in him is recalibrating in real time. Or maybe he does recognize me and just hates what he sees. “You almost died,” he says quietly.
“And you don’t get to save me,” I snap, the words tasting bitter the second they leave my mouth. They hit him and me at the same time. “Not like this. Not by turning me back into someone’s daughter instead of someone who chose this.”
Something closes off in his expression then. Not anger. Worse. Distance. That military calm he uses when feelings become a liability. The version of him that can cut his own heart out and still complete the mission.
“Fine,” he says after a moment, voice flat. “We’ll talk about it later.”
But I know that tone. I’ve heard it on missions, in debriefs, in rooms where emotions don’t survive. It’s the sound of Jon putting walls back up, of him retreating into the version of himself that doesn’t bleed. The version that makes me feel like I imagined every soft thing between us.
And as he steps away from my bed, I realize with a sick twist in my chest that I don’t just feel scared anymore.
I feel betrayed.