Chapter 10
Captain Jonathan
The training field stretches out in front of me like a living diagram—lines of recruits moving in disciplined arcs, boots striking dirt in synchronized rhythm, commands echoing sharp and clean across the open air.
It should be enough to anchor me. It usually is.
There’s comfort in structure, in watching people who don’t yet understand how badly the world can break you still try to master it anyway.
In order. In repetition. In the lie that control is something you can build with enough drills and enough bruises.
Today, though, my focus keeps slipping.
I stand with my arms crossed, jaw set, eyes tracking movement while my mind refuses to stay where I put it.
Every time I force my thoughts toward Mikhail—toward supply chains, movement patterns, retaliation windows—they veer off course, drifting someplace I don’t want them to go.
Somewhere sterile and white and quiet. Somewhere that smells like antiseptic and iron and fear.
Somewhere full of monitors and half-swallowed panic and the sound of her telling me I don’t get to save her.
The med bay.
I exhale slowly through my nose and tighten my grip on my own arms, grounding myself in the bite of fabric beneath my fingers.
She’s fine. I repeat it like an order. Like something I can enforce if I say it often enough.
Delilah is alive. She’s breathing. She’s healing.
That’s the end of it. Anything beyond that is a liability I don’t have room for right now.
I watch a recruit hesitate before clearing an obstacle, his timing off by half a second, and I almost bark at him before catching myself.
Not my unit. Not my call. I’m just standing here, pretending I’m supervising, pretending I’m not counting down the hours until the nurses finally discharge her because apparently threatening medical staff only works once.
I had tried. God knows I’d tried.
Turns out trauma protocols trump rank, and the looks they’d given me when I suggested “another night of observation” told me exactly how transparent I’d been.
They see it. The attachment. The problem.
They don’t say it, but I know. Larkin knows too.
Hell, I know. That’s why I’m out here instead of pacing the hallway outside Delilah’s room like a man waiting for a verdict he already dreads.
I straighten, roll my shoulders back, and force my attention forward. Mikhail doesn’t disappear because I’m distracted. He doesn’t stop moving just because she survived him. If anything, he’s counting on this—on hesitation, on emotion clouding judgment. I can’t give him that. I won’t.
You don’t think about her because thinking about her doesn’t help the mission, I tell myself. And if it doesn’t help the mission, it doesn’t matter.
The lie sits heavy in my chest.
I tell myself she’s safer with distance.
That whatever almost happened between us—whatever lines blurred and twisted under pressure, in med bays and panic and that loaded silence by her bedside—needs to be buried before it turns into something that can get her killed.
Again. If I pull back now, if I go cold enough, maybe it’ll undo the damage.
Maybe she’ll hate me for it. That would be easier.
Hate I can manage. Hate is clean. Hate doesn’t tempt me into touching what I shouldn’t.
I’m watching two recruits spar when my phone vibrates against my palm. The interruption is sharp enough to snap me out of my spiral, and I glance down before I can stop myself, thumb already hovering over the screen.
Moe.
My chest tightens, reflexive and instinctive, the same way it always does when his name lights up my phone.
It still catches me sometimes, how immediate it is.
How fatherhood came to me too late and hit anyway.
I step away from the field, moving toward the perimeter fence where the noise fades just enough to think, and answer.
“Talk to me,” I say, voice rougher than I mean it to be.
There’s a pause on the other end, then Moe exhales. I can picture him perfectly—shoulders hunched, fingers flying across a keyboard, eyes bloodshot from staring too long at patterns that refuse to make sense. He’s always been stubborn like that. Gets it from me, unfortunately.
“I’m still running it,” he says. “The map. The one you sent. I thought it was noise at first—overlap, coincidence—but it’s not. It’s layered.”
My grip tightens on the phone. “Layered how?”
“Mikhail doesn’t move in straight lines,” Moe continues, voice sharpening with focus. “He cycles. Doubles back. Uses older routes as misdirection while shifting the actual operation east, then south, then back again. The scribbles—Delilah’s marks—they’re not just locations. They’re timing.”
I close my eyes for a brief second, something hot and dangerous flaring behind my ribs.
Of course she saw it. Of course she did.
Even without realizing what she was mapping, she’d been tracking him in her own way, piecing together fragments no one else thought to connect.
Even half-buried under reports and sketches and that restless mind of hers, she’d still been doing what she always does—seeing the pattern under the noise.
“Can you pin it?” I ask quietly.
“I’m close,” he says. “Give me a few more hours. Maybe less. If I’m right, he’s not running—he’s consolidating. Preparing for something bigger.”
That tracks. Mikhail never burns a board unless he’s already set up the next one. Men like him don’t retreat. They reposition. They bait. They punish.
“Send me everything you’ve got,” I tell him. “The second you’re confident.”
“You got it,” Moe replies, then hesitates. “And, uh… for what it’s worth. I’m glad she’s alive.”
The words hit harder than I expect. Probably because he means them without complication. Probably because I don’t. For me, relief always shows up with guilt stitched into its throat.
“Yeah,” I manage. “Me too.”
The line goes dead, and I lower the phone slowly, staring at the dark screen as if it might give me answers I’m not ready to face.
Delilah had handed us the key without even knowing it.
Left it sitting on her desk like a breadcrumb trail, trusting that someone would be smart—or stubborn—enough to follow it.
I look back toward the training field, toward the orderly chaos of recruits still moving through drills, and for the first time since she was taken, something like clarity settles into my bones. Not peace. Nothing that generous. Just purpose with sharper edges.
Mikhail made a mistake.
And Delilah—whether she knows it yet or not—just handed me the leverage I need to end this.
I straighten, slipping the phone back into my pocket, my thoughts finally aligning into something sharp and dangerous. The mission comes first. It always does. But this time, the mission and the reason are tangled together in a way I can’t ignore.
She’s being released soon.
And when she is, the world is going to change—whether I’m ready for it or not.
I turn away from the field and start toward the main corridor, boots echoing against the concrete as the noise of training fades behind me.
The base always feels colder once you step inside, like the walls are designed to strip anything human out of you the moment you cross the threshold.
Fluorescents hum overhead. Air vents push recycled chill down long gray halls.
I welcome it. Cold is easier to manage than everything clawing at my chest right now.
My office is two levels up, past operations, past medical, past the places I’ve been avoiding all morning.
I tell myself I’m not detouring. That this is the most direct route. That anything else is coincidence. That my body turning toward her before my brain signs off on it doesn’t mean a damn thing.
The med bay doors slide open just as I pass.
I don’t stop. I don’t slow. I don’t turn my head.
And still, I see her.
Delilah is standing just inside the threshold, jacket draped awkwardly over her arm, posture stiff in that way that tells me she’s still hurting more than she’s letting on.
Her hair is pulled back, face too pale against the harsh lighting, eyes sharper than they have any right to be after what she survived.
There’s a nurse talking to her, lips moving in what I’m sure is a list of instructions she’s half listening to, half filing away like intel.
One hand is braced lightly against the wall, subtle enough that no one else would notice she needs it. I do. Of course I do.
She looks… smaller. Not weak. Never that. But changed. Like something essential was shaved down to the bone. Like survival took a knife to the softer parts and left the edges exposed.
My chest tightens hard enough that I almost stumble.
I don’t say her name.
I don’t look at her.
I walk past like she’s a stranger and keep my pace steady even as every instinct I have screams to stop, to make sure she’s standing on solid ground, to ask if she’s sleeping, if the nightmares have started yet, if she’s still angry, if she knows how close I came to losing my mind while she was gone.
If she knows how close I came to putting my mouth on hers instead of telling her to breathe in that med bay bed.
You don’t get to do that, I remind myself sharply. Not anymore.
The doors slide shut behind me, cutting off the antiseptic smell, and I don’t let myself breathe fully again until I’m halfway down the hall. My mind fractures into competing lines of thought, each one demanding priority, each one sharp enough to cut.
Mikhail first.
Always Mikhail.
I replay Moe’s words, the patterns, the timing, the way Delilah’s unconscious brilliance gave us a foothold.
I need to move fast, decisively. If he’s consolidating, then he’s vulnerable.
Supply lines tighten before they disappear.
People get sloppy when they think they’re repositioning unseen.
That’s where I strike. That’s where men like him stop being legends and start bleeding.
Then the thought shifts, unwanted but relentless.
Her father.
My best friend.
The lie I’ve been telling for years sits like a live wire in my gut.
I imagine the call—his voice warm and unsuspecting, talking about Delilah’s classes in Europe, about how proud he is that she’s “finding herself,” while I sit there knowing she was bleeding out on a concrete floor because I helped hide the truth from him.
Because I let her stay. Because I wanted her close and called it protection.
I deserve the ass chewing. Hell, I deserve worse.
I picture myself standing there, taking it, letting him rage, letting him call me every name under the sun because at least then the secret is gone.
At least then Delilah doesn’t have to carry it alone anymore.
But the moment I imagine his face when he realizes how deep this goes—how long it’s gone on, how many missions, how many lies, how many times I looked him in the eye and said she was fine—I feel something twist violently in my chest.
Because telling him doesn’t just expose the lie.
It exposes her.
And she’s fragile right now in a way she’d never admit.
I saw it in the way she held herself, in the way her eyes tracked exits, in the way she flinched at raised voices in the med bay, in the panic that ripped through her hard enough to drag me to her bedside like gravity.
She survived, but surviving isn’t the same as being okay.
I know that better than most. Hell, I’ve built half my life around pretending I didn’t.
I think of Moe. Of the med bay years ago. Of the machines, the blood, the helplessness I’d buried so deep I convinced myself I’d moved on. Of how seeing him like that cracked something in me that still hasn’t sealed right.
Trauma doesn’t disappear. It waits. It settles into your bones and learns your name and then one day it reaches up and reminds you it never left.
My office door looms ahead, heavy steel, familiar and impersonal.
I stop in front of it for half a second longer than necessary, pressing my palm flat against the cool surface as if I can ground myself through it.
Through metal. Through routine. Through the one version of myself that still knows how to function.
You can’t save everyone, I tell myself. You can only choose what breaks you.
I step inside and let the door seal shut behind me, cutting myself off from the rest of the base, from Delilah’s quiet exit, from the version of me that wants to follow her and make sure she doesn’t walk this alone.
Wants to take the jacket from her arms, put a hand at the small of her back, tell her she never has to prove a goddamn thing to me again.
Instead, I turn toward my desk, toward maps and files and plans of violence, and force my mind back where it belongs.
The office smells like stale smoke, paper, and the coffee I forgot to finish hours ago.
Her first question in my office all those years ago flashes through my head unwanted and perfect. What’s war like? Christ.
Mikhail is still out there.
And until he’s dealt with, nothing else—no guilt, no truth, no feelings I shouldn’t have—gets to come first.