Chapter 26
Captain Jonathan
I wake up slowly.
Not the sharp, instinctive jolt I’m used to.
Not the half-second scramble for weapons and exits.
Not the automatic catalog of ceiling corners, window lines, and the nearest thing I can use as a weapon if the room turns hostile before my second breath.
Just… awareness, drifting in through warmth and soft sound and something steady at my side.
Music.
Low. Faint. Filtered through cheap earbuds.
I don’t open my eyes right away.
I know she’s there before I see her. I can feel her—heat at my back, the subtle rise and fall of her breathing, the way the mattress dips ever so slightly under her weight.
It’s unfamiliar and familiar all at once, like something I’ve wanted for years and never let myself name.
Like some buried part of me has been waiting for exactly this and is now irritated it took so damn long.
The room smells like old wood, clean sheets, and faint traces of her shampoo.
Somewhere downstairs, I can already smell coffee, which means either her mother is awake or Will never slept.
Probably both. Morning light leaks thin and gold around the curtains.
For one dangerous, impossible second, I let myself lie still and pretend this is normal.
When I finally crack my eyes open, she’s on her side facing away from me, knees tucked slightly, phone in her hand.
One earbud is in, the other trailing loose over her shoulder.
Her hair is spread over the pillow and part of my arm, still a little damp at the ends from the shower she took last night.
One of those oversized hoodies is bunched around her waist now, riding up just enough to show the smooth line of her thigh where the blanket slipped.
She’s smiling.
Not big. Not for anyone else.
Just… soft.
To herself.
My chest tightens.
Goddamn it.
I shift, careful not to startle her, and reach up slowly, sliding the loose earbud from where it’s tangled in her hair.
She startles anyway.
“Hey,” she murmurs, glancing back over her shoulder. Her voice is warm with sleep. “Morning.”
“Morning,” I reply, voice rough enough to sound like gravel.
I slip the earbud into my ear.
The song settles in.
Soft. Melancholy. Intimate.
Wish I could go back to being younger…
It takes me a few seconds.
Then I snort.
She blinks. “What?”
I try to hold it in.
I fail.
I start laughing.
Full-on, chest-shaking, completely inappropriate laughter. The kind I don’t do often and definitely not first thing in the morning in a bed I probably shouldn’t be in with the daughter of my best friend lying three inches away.
“Jon?” she asks, offended and amused at the same time. “What?”
“It’s—” I gesture vaguely, the earbud cord tugging between us. “It’s just—of all the songs—”
She pulls her phone closer, suspicion already narrowing her eyes. “What?”
“Older,” I say. “Isabel LaRosa.”
Her eyes widen.
“Oh my God.”
“You’re twenty-one going on eighty,” I tease. “You know that, right?”
She smacks my arm. “Says the man who listens to classic rock and war ballads.”
“Those are respectable.”
“They’re depressing.”
“They’re seasoned.”
She laughs, real and bright, and for a moment the world feels… normal. Which is maybe the most dangerous feeling of all.
“You are not allowed to judge my music taste,” she says, trying and failing to sound severe. “You literally have songs that sound like they were recorded in a bunker during the Cold War.”
I put a hand over my chest. “That is slander.”
“It’s accurate,” she shoots back. “Half your playlist sounds like a man going through a divorce he hasn’t admitted yet.”
I bark out another laugh. “And you’re lying in bed listening to a song called Older like some tragic Victorian widow.”
She narrows her eyes. “Get out.”
“No.”
“Then suffer.”
She turns the volume up one click just to be spiteful.
I grin, shake my head, and settle back against the pillow. “You’re impossible.”
“And yet,” she says, tilting her chin just slightly, “here you are.”
That lands lower than she means it to. Or maybe exactly where she means it to. Hard to tell with her.
We lie there like that for a while, sharing earbuds, shoulders touching, neither of us in any rush to face reality.
The song changes once, then again. Her thumb moves lazily over the screen.
The silence between us isn’t heavy this morning.
It’s soft. Warm. The kind that asks for nothing except staying exactly where we are a little longer.
I watch the light shift higher on the wall. She traces idle patterns against the blanket with one finger. At one point, she yawns and tucks herself a fraction closer without seeming to realize she’s done it, and my whole body goes still around the instinct to pull her all the way in.
Eventually, reality wins.
It always does.
Downstairs smells like coffee and tension.
The kind that settles into furniture and never really leaves.
Will sits at the table, reading something on his tablet with the grim focus of a man who either found breaking news or is pretending very hard to.
Her mom is at the counter, humming quietly while making breakfast. The pan hisses.
Butter browns. Toast pops. It should feel domestic.
Instead it feels like walking into a room after a storm and pretending the windows weren’t blown open last night.
Neither of them looks up when we walk in.
I feel twelve years old.
Delilah squeezes my hand once before letting go, a quick press of fingers that says don’t make this worse and I know this is terrible and maybe something else I don’t let myself name.
“Morning,” she says.
Her mom smiles immediately. “Morning, baby.”
Will grunts.
Progress.
I move to the coffee pot because my mouth needs something in it that isn’t apology. I pour coffee. Black. Strong. Necessary. The mug is warm in my hands. The bitterness hits like punishment and mercy at the same time.
King’s chair is empty.
I scan the room again.
Nothing.
That gets my attention faster than the silence did. King does not miss breakfast when there’s free food and emotional chaos to spectate. Not unless something has him wound tighter than usual.
“Where’s King?” I ask.
Her mom glances up from the stove. “Left early. Said something about ‘unfinished business.’”
My stomach tightens.
“That’s not ominous at all,” Delilah mutters.
I take another sip of coffee. The taste goes flat in my mouth.
Bad feeling.
The kind that starts as a prickle and then works its way into your bones until your whole body is listening.
“Let’s head back,” I say quietly.
Delilah hears it in my tone immediately. Her mother does too. Will looks up at last.
“That serious?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. No room left for softness. “I think so.”
Delilah sets her mug down. “Give me two minutes.”
“You’ve got one,” I reply.
Her eyes flash at me, annoyed on principle, but she’s already moving. Her mother looks between us, worry sharpening her whole face. Will says nothing. He just watches. Military enough to know what my voice meant. Father enough to hate it.
***
Greenport feels wrong the second we step inside.
Not damaged. Not broken. Not bleeding.
Just… off.
It’s the kind of wrongness you can’t point to right away, the kind that settles under your skin and refuses to leave.
The gates slide shut behind us with their usual hydraulic hiss, and for a moment I almost expect alarms. Shouting.
Controlled chaos. Some visible sign that everyone else feels it too.
Instead, I get laughter.
A group of soldiers lounge near a supply truck, boots propped up on crates like they’re on vacation.
Someone has a speaker balanced on a railing, music thumping low and lazy through the air.
Two recruits stand near the barracks entrance arguing over protein bars like it’s the biggest problem in their world.
A lieutenant I know better than this is smiling.
Smiling. Like the man who orchestrated half the bloodiest operations in the region wasn’t supposed to be rotting in holding right now waiting for questioning.
No urgency.
No edge.
No tension.
No discipline.
Like they think it’s over.
Like they think we won.
I hate it.
My jaw tightens as we walk, my boots striking the pavement harder than necessary. Every instinct I have is screaming that this isn’t right. Victories don’t look like this. Not real ones. Not when the enemy disappears into silence and nobody’s got a body count they trust.
“What’s with everyone?” Delilah murmurs beside me, her eyes scanning the base the same way mine are. Alert. Uneasy. Searching for something she can’t name yet.
“Victory hangover,” I mutter. “Happens every time people think the worst is behind them.”
She frowns. “But it’s not.”
“No,” I agree quietly. “It never is.”
We move deeper into the compound, passing offices, armories, med bay entrances. Every step makes the pressure in my chest tighten. I keep waiting for something to snap into focus. For the wrongness to reveal itself. For somebody to say the one sentence I don’t want to hear.
Then I see him.
King is in the armory, sitting on one of the metal benches under harsh fluorescent lights. Weapons line the walls behind him in perfect rows. The room smells like oil and steel and gunpowder. Too clean. Too orderly.
He’s hunched forward slightly, elbows braced on his knees.
In his hands is his knife.
He’s cleaning it.
Slowly.
Carefully.
Methodically.
Like he has all the time in the world.
Like nothing is wrong.
Like he isn’t sitting at the center of the biggest unanswered question on this base.
My stomach drops.
He looks up when we enter, dark eyes lifting to meet mine.
“Hey, Cap,” he says casually.
Too casually.
My skin prickles. Something cold crawls up my spine. Delilah feels it too—I know by the way her steps slow beside me, by the way her breathing changes.
“You interrogate Mikhail yet?” I ask, keeping my voice even through sheer force of will.
King doesn’t look up again.
He keeps wiping the blade.
Slow, steady strokes. Cloth through steel. Like he’s polishing memory off it.
“Handled it.”
The word lands wrong.
It’s too vague. Too empty. Too final.
“That’s not an answer,” I say flatly. “What does that mean?”
He shrugs, still focused on the knife. “Means it’s done.”
My pulse starts to pound in my ears.
“Done how?” I press. “You didn’t bring him in?”
For a moment, he says nothing.
Then he finally looks up.
Really looks at me.
His eyes are flat. Empty. Not angry. Not guilty.
Just… closed.
“No,” he says.
It’s one word but it hits like a bullet.
My heart slams against my ribs. “What do you mean no?” I snap. “King, where the hell is he?”
He goes back to cleaning the blade. “Not here.”
That’s it.
That’s all he gives me.
My hands curl into fists so tight my knuckles ache. I don’t trust myself to say anything else—not without ripping into him in front of half the base. Not without dragging the knife out of his hand and demanding an answer I’m already starting to understand.
So I turn and walk. Fast.
Delilah jogs to keep up with me, her boots scuffing against the concrete. “Jon—wait. What’s going on? Talk to me.”
“I don’t know,” I snap, panic bleeding through my control despite my best efforts. “But I’m about to.”
We cut through two corridors and down into holding without slowing. The farther we go, the quieter it gets. No guards at the intersection. No voices from the observation room. No movement on the monitors. Just fluorescent hum and the sound of my own breathing starting to go thin.
The doors slide open.
And my stomach drops straight through the floor.
The holding cells are empty.
No guards.
No noise.
No movement.
Just cold concrete and steel bars and fluorescent lights humming overhead. The main cell door hangs slightly ajar. One of the cameras is dark. Another blinks on a loop that shouldn’t be looping.
Inside, the room is bare.
No cot. No restraints.
No prisoner.
Just a dark floor and faint stains that shouldn’t be there.
Stains that my brain doesn’t want to name.
My breath catches in my throat as I stop so suddenly Delilah almost runs into me.
“What the fuck,” I whisper.
It doesn’t feel real.
It can’t be real.
Delilah steps up beside me, her face draining of color as she takes it in.
“He’s… gone?” she asks quietly.
“Yes,” I answer, my voice hollow.
Gone.
Not escaped. Not transferred. Not relocated.
Gone.
My fists clench again, nails biting into my palms. This wasn’t protocol. This wasn’t procedure. This wasn’t an accident. This was someone deciding there are some monsters you don’t keep alive long enough for paperwork.
And King’s calm suddenly makes horrifying sense.
He knows exactly what happened and he’s made peace with it.
That realization is worse than any explosion.
Because now I have to ask myself the question I’ve been sidestepping for years: not whether he was capable of it, but whether part of me expected it.
Whether part of me is furious because justice died in a cell, or because I didn’t get to decide what shape it took.
Something is very, very wrong.
Whatever rules we were still pretending to follow?
They’re gone.
Whatever lines existed between justice and revenge?
They’re blurred beyond recognition.
And as I stand there staring at an empty cell that should hold the man who ruined so many lives, I feel it settle deep in my bones—
We just crossed into darker territory.
Not for Mikhail. Not for the enemy.
For us.
For King.
And maybe… For me, too.