Chapter 9 #2
I grip the edge of my pocket, fingers closing over the card I’ve been holding.
My escape plan. My lifeline. My only tether to something that isn’t fear.
The warmth of that day at the range, the fragile, electric moment with Jon—it’s already fading, slipping into the shadows that have claimed this place.
I jerk awake with a sound caught somewhere between a gasp and a choke.
The ceiling is white again. The sheets are twisted around my legs.
My pulse is battering itself against my ribs hard enough to make the monitor beside me jump into a frantic, shrill rhythm.
For one disorienting second I don’t know where I am.
I just know I’m trapped. I just know I can’t get enough air in and there’s light in my eyes and my skin feels too tight.
The curtain shoves open.
A nurse appears first, startled, reaching for the monitor, but she doesn’t even make it to the bedside before Jon is suddenly there behind her, moving fast enough to make the room tilt.
“Out,” he says.
The nurse blinks. “Captain, I need to—”
“I said out.”
There’s something in his voice that sends her back a step before she can think better of it. She disappears with one last uncertain glance, and then it’s just him and me and the sound of my own breathing going wrong.
“Delilah.” His voice is lower now. Still sharp, but aimed differently. Controlled. “Look at me.”
I can’t. I’m staring at the blanket twisted in my fists like it’s the only thing holding me to the bed.
My hands are shaking so badly my nails keep slipping against the fabric.
My chest is caving in and expanding too fast, too shallow, like my body has forgotten how to do something as basic as live without supervision.
“Delilah.” Closer this time. “Eyes on me.”
I drag my gaze up because something in me still listens when he uses that tone. Still obeys. Still wants to.
He’s leaning over the bed now, forearms braced near my hips, not touching me but crowding out everything else.
His face is tense, exhausted, the hard lines of him thrown into relief beneath the med bay lights.
He looks angry. Terrified. Both. Like he’d rather punch through the wall than watch this happen and is settling for neither.
“You’re here,” he says. “Greenport. Med bay. No cell. No restraints. Just me. Breathe.”
The last word cracks like an order, and maybe that’s why it gets through when nothing else does. I pull in a breath too sharp, too fast.
“No.” He shakes his head once. “Slower.”
My vision is tunneling, the edges going gray. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.” His jaw flexes. “In through your nose.”
“I said I can’t.” The words come out raw, humiliating, thin with panic.
For a second, I think he’s going to snap back at me. Instead, something shifts in his face. Not softer exactly. Worse, somehow. More honest. Like whatever he’s been keeping bolted down just slipped a notch.
Then he does touch me.
One hand closes around my wrist—not tight, not restraining, just solid enough that I feel it all the way up my arm. The other braces on the mattress by my knee. Heat sinks through my skin like he’s the only warm thing left in the room.
“Match me,” he says.
I stare at him.
His thumb drags once over the inside of my pulse point, a deliberate, grounding stroke. “Now, Delilah.”
He inhales, slow and measured. Holds it. Exhales. Again. Again. The movement in his chest is steady, infuriatingly steady, and I hate that I’m following it without meaning to. Hate that my body still knows how to calibrate itself to him. Hate that it works.
The monitor begins to slow. Not enough to be dignified. Enough to be survivable. Enough that the room stops tilting and the edges of my vision stop trying to disappear.
“That’s it,” he says, quieter now. “Good.”
I swallow hard, throat burning. My lashes are wet. I don’t remember deciding to cry. The tears just sit there, hot and humiliating, refusing to fall.
His gaze catches on them and goes strange. Darker. Rougher. Like it costs him something to stay where he is and not do more. “You’re alright.”
The lie is so obvious it almost makes me laugh, but nothing about this feels funny. “Don’t.”
His eyes narrow slightly. “Don’t what?”
“Say things like that.” My voice shakes anyway. “Don’t stand there and talk to me like I’m something fragile and then leave every time it gets inconvenient.”
The words land between us like broken glass. Sharp, glittering, impossible to take back.
He goes still. Not frozen—worse. Controlled in that frightening, military way where you know every emotion has just been shoved behind steel doors. “You think that’s what I’ve been doing?”
I give him a look that probably says more than anything my body is currently capable of. “What would you call it?”
He lets go of my wrist. The loss of contact is immediate and stupidly noticeable, my skin cooling too fast where his hand had been. He straightens just enough to put space back between us, and I hate that too.
“I’ve been giving you room,” he says.
“No.” I push myself up a little higher despite the pull in my side. “You’ve been avoiding me.”
His mouth tightens. “You were hurt.”
“And you’ve seen hurt before.”
“Not like this.”
The words come out before he can catch them. He knows it as soon as I do. I watch it hit him—the brief flash of regret, the instinct to pull it back. But it’s too late. The room has already heard it. So have I.
I stare at him. “What is that supposed to mean?”
He scrubs a hand over his jaw, rough and impatient, like he’s trying to sand the honesty off himself. “It means you almost died.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting tonight.”
A humorless laugh slips out of me, thin and brittle. “Funny. That seems to be a theme with us.”
His head lifts, eyes locking on mine. Something hot passes between us—anger, frustration, the shape of a confession neither of us is willing to bleed for.
“You want honesty?” he says, voice low. “Fine. You scared the hell out of me.”
The room goes very still. Even the machines seem quieter for a second.
My breath catches. “Jon—”
“I’m not done.” His tone sharpens, not enough to cut me, enough to keep himself in line.
“You were in that place for seven days, Delilah. Seven. I listened to tapes I can’t get out of my head.
I had your father on the phone asking me if you’d picked up his Christmas box.
I walked into your quarters and smelled your shampoo on the pillow because you never came back to use it.
” He stops there, throat working once. “So forgive me if I handled the aftermath badly.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t know how to hold all of it at once—his anger, my anger, the image of him in my room, the mention of my father hitting like a bruise pressed too hard. The fact that he was there. That he noticed. That he broke enough to say it.
“You still don’t get to make decisions for me,” I say finally, softer than before, but no less true.
He nods once. “I know.”
“Do you?”
His gaze flicks to the monitors, then back to me. “Not as well as you want me to.”
The honesty in that is worse than defensiveness would’ve been. It leaves nowhere to hide. No villain to push against. Just a man who’s trying and failing and bleeding through the cracks.
I look away first, staring at the blanket pooled around my waist. My hands have stopped shaking, but I still feel wrung out, hollow in that exhausted, post-panic way that makes everything seem both too sharp and very far away.
“I hate that they keep asking for details,” I admit, the words scraping out before I can stop them. “I hate that every time I close my eyes, it all comes back in pieces. I hate that King got to walk out and I’m still in here proving I’m not broken enough to be inconvenient.”
Jon is quiet for a long moment. When he speaks again, his voice is different. Less command. More something I don’t want to name.
“You don’t have to prove anything to me.”
I let out a tired breath. “That’s not true.”
His expression shifts. “You think I see you as weak.”
“I think you see me as a problem.”
His eyes flash. “That’s not the same thing.”
“Close enough.”
He steps back, just one pace, but the distance feels deliberate. Necessary. “You’re angry.”
I almost laugh at the understatement. “Brilliant assessment, Captain.”
“And you’re allowed to be.” The line of his shoulders tightens. “But don’t confuse me trying to keep you breathing with me thinking less of you.”
I turn my head toward him again. “Then what do you think of me?”
The question slips out before I can stop it. Too direct. Too bare. The second it’s in the air, I want it gone. I want to swallow it back down and pretend I’m still better at this than I am.
He stills. The whole room seems to hold its breath with him.
For one reckless second, I think he might answer. Not with something safe. Not with rank or protocol or one of the many walls he knows how to build. Something real. Something dangerous enough to ruin us both.
Instead, he looks at me like I’ve stepped too close to the edge of something neither of us is ready to survive. “You should rest.”
And there it is. The retreat. The controlled step backward. The familiar cruelty of self-preservation dressed up as restraint.
I laugh once, soft and mean. “Coward.”
His eyes narrow, but not in anger. In warning. In ache. “Careful.”
“Why?” I ask, because I’m too tired and too raw and too angry to stop myself. “You gonna dial it back for me again?”
The corner of his mouth twitches—not a smile, not even close, but something dangerously near it. “You really do love making bad situations worse.”
“And you love acting like you don’t enjoy it.”
That does something to him. I see it. In the shift of his breathing. In the slight lowering of his head. In the way his gaze drops—just for a second—to my mouth before dragging itself back up like it’s hauling weight.
The air between us changes.
Not softer. Hotter. Thicker.
I become painfully aware of everything—my pulse, the ache in my ribs, the scratch of the sheets against my legs, the fact that he’s standing close enough that I can smell soap and smoke and the sharp, clean scent of the outside air still clinging to his uniform.
He looks exhausted. Dangerous. Unfairly solid.
I should say something. Mock him again. Push him back. Rebuild my own walls before his crack me open.
Instead I just watch him.
So does he.
For a long, loaded moment, no one moves. The whole room seems to tip toward something neither of us is saying.
Then the curtain shifts and a medic clears his throat from outside. “Captain? Larkin’s looking for you.”
The spell shatters.