Chapter 28
Captain Jonanthan
I don’t sleep.
Not really.
I lie in bed staring at the ceiling until it stops being a ceiling and starts being a collection of shadows that look like maps I can’t read anymore.
Every line in the plaster becomes a route that dead-ends.
Every dark corner turns into the outline of a cell that should still be occupied.
Every time I close my eyes, I see that empty room again—the hanging door, the humming fluorescent light, the dark floor, the absence where answers should’ve been.
Where closure should’ve been.
Where justice should’ve had a face, a voice, a body to drag through consequence.
Instead, all I’ve got is silence and the echo of King’s flat voice saying handled it like he was talking about spilled coffee instead of the end of the one man I’d spent years hunting.
I roll onto my back again, then onto my side, then back again.
Pointless. The sheets twist around my legs.
The room stays dark. Somewhere outside, Greenport keeps breathing in that low, machine-fed way military bases do through the night—vents, generators, distant boots, a door slamming two buildings over.
It all feels too normal. Too intact for what shifted yesterday.
Because that’s the part I can’t stop chewing on.
Mikhail being dead is one thing.
King being the one who decided how it happened is another.
But the part that won’t leave me alone is how little it shocked me once the anger burned through.
Not because I expected it from him exactly.
Because some ugly corner of me understands it.
Because there is a version of me—bloodied, furious, grieving, stripped down to instinct—that might have done the same thing and called it justice on the way out.
That’s the part I don’t want to look at too long.
By morning, I’m done pretending any of this will fix itself.
The sun is barely up when I head for the training bay.
Greenport is quieter this early, the kind of quiet that only comes before drills and orders and whatever fresh disaster the day plans to bring.
The halls smell like coffee and metal and the faint antiseptic tang that never really leaves a place like this.
My shoulders already ache with exhaustion.
My mouth tastes like bad sleep and worse decisions.
King is in the training bay when I find him.
Hitting a heavy bag.
Hard.
Over and over.
Each strike lands with a dull, brutal thud that echoes through the room.
No wasted motion. No technique for show.
Just punishment. He’s stripped down to black training pants and a sweat-dark shirt that clings to him, outlining every brutal line of a body built for impact and war.
His knuckles are split. Blood stains the wraps. He doesn’t care. He never does.
The bag swings hard enough to whine at the chain. His breathing is rough but steady. Like this has been going on for a while. Like maybe he’s been here all night.
“Finished beating the hell out of it yet?” I ask quietly.
He stops mid-swing.
Doesn’t turn.
“Come to lecture me, Cap?” he mutters.
“I came to talk.”
“That’s new.”
He finally faces me.
Sweat slicks his hair. His mask is gone.
His eyes are dark. Exhausted. Haunted. The scar through his brow pulls harder when he narrows his gaze at me.
He looks like a man who hasn’t slept in weeks, maybe months.
A man who’s been held together by violence, habit, and pure refusal for so long that stopping would feel like dying.
“Close the door,” he says.
I do.
The click echoes.
Silence settles between us.
We’ve stood in silence together a thousand times. In stairwells after firefights. In med bays. In briefing rooms after body counts got too high to joke about. In funeral lines where neither of us had anything useful to say.
This one is different.
This one feels like choosing where to put the blade.
“I’m pulling you from active duty,” I say.
Straight.
No preamble.
No cushioning.
His head snaps up. “What?”
“You’re being medically and psychologically retired,” I continue evenly. “Effective immediately.”
For a second, he just stares at me. Then he laughs.
Sharp. Bitter. Empty.
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I already did.”
He takes a step toward me, the air in the room changing with it. “Because of one kill?”
“Because of what it meant,” I snap.
He stiffens.
“You executed a prisoner, King.”
“He wasn’t a prisoner,” he fires back. “He was a monster.”
“He was intelligence.”
“He was a threat!”
“He was our lead!”
His chest heaves. Mine isn’t much steadier. The heavy bag swings lazily behind him, chain creaking, like the room itself is holding its breath.
“You would’ve done it too,” he says.
The accusation lands low and dirty because it isn’t just bait. It’s a question he already thinks he knows the answer to. A question I hate because I hate how much I have to force the truth through my own teeth.
“No,” I say quietly. “I wouldn’t have.”
He stares at me. Long. Hard. Trying to read whether I mean it or whether I’m just wearing rank like a shield.
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
We hold eye contact.
Years of trust, blood, and survival.
Fracturing.
“You think I’m broken,” he says slowly.
“I think you’re tired,” I answer. “I think every war finally caught up to you.”
He scoffs. “Funny. Didn’t seem to bother you when I was pulling your ass out of fire.”
“Don’t,” I warn.
“No, let’s do that,” he shoots back, anger finally breaking through the flatness.
“Let’s talk about all the times I was good enough.
Good enough to clean up your messes. Good enough to disappear into the dark and come back with blood on me so everyone else could keep pretending they were clean.
But I cross one line and suddenly I’m too damaged to function? ”
“This isn’t one line.”
“It was one decision.”
“It was murder.”
His mouth twists. “That’s rich, coming from you.”
I step closer before I realize I’m doing it. “You think I don’t know what I am?”
“I think you know exactly what you are,” he says. “I also think you’ve decided I don’t get to be the same.”
“That’s not what this is.”
He laughs again, but there’s no humor in it. “Then tell me what it is, because from where I’m standing, this sure as hell looks like you found a line after all—and I’m the one you’re leaving on the wrong side of it.”
The words hit harder than I want them to.
Because part of me knows exactly why he’s saying it now.
Why the bitterness has that extra edge. It isn’t just Mikhail.
It isn’t just command. It’s everything else wrapped around it.
Delilah. The fact that she came back from the dark and I stayed beside her.
The fact that I’m fighting like hell to keep her human while deciding he doesn’t get the same chance inside uniform.
“You’re fine with Delilah having nightmares,” he says, and there it is, raw and ugly and finally honest. “With her spiraling. With her freezing up. But I cross one line and I’m done?”
There it is.
Jealousy. Raw and ugly and unspoken until now.
“She’s healing,” I say.
“So am I!”
“Not like this.”
He gestures wildly, blood-specked wraps flashing in the harsh lights. “So what? She gets sympathy and I get a pink slip?”
“She didn’t murder a captive,” I snap.
He flinches.
Just barely.
But I see it. The hit landed.
“You’re choosing her,” he mutters.
The words land heavier than he meant them to. Maybe heavier than I can let them without telling him something worse.
I inhale slowly. “This isn’t about her.”
“Bullshit.”
“This is about trust,” I say. “And you broke it.”
He stares at the floor. Breathing hard. Sweat sliding down his neck. The bag behind him finally stills.
“You think I wanted to do it?” he asks quietly.
My anger wavers.
Just a little.
Because no, I don’t think he wanted it. I think he needed it in the ugliest, most final way a man like him knows how to need anything.
I think he looked at Mikhail and saw every wound that never closed, every scream he couldn’t stop, every person who didn’t come back whole.
I think he made one choice and then another and then none at all.
“I think you didn’t stop yourself,” I reply.
Silence.
The kind that follows a truth neither of us can argue with.
The bag creaks softly behind him.
“When did I become disposable?” he asks.
The question hits so clean it almost makes me dizzy. It strips all the anger out of the room for a second and leaves only the thing underneath it. Fear. Exhaustion. Hurt so old it learned how to wear sarcasm as armor.
“You didn’t,” I say immediately. “You became someone I’m scared for.”
He laughs again. This time it cracks halfway through. “Great. That’s comforting.”
“You’ve given everything,” I continue. “Your body. Your sanity. Your life. There’s nothing left to take.”
“And you’re deciding that for me?”
“Yes.”
His jaw tightens. Hard enough to make the muscle jump.
“I saved her,” he says suddenly.
I look up.
“That day,” he continues. “In that cell. When she was gone. When she wasn’t responding. I kept her alive.”
The words are flat, but beneath them there’s something like accusation. Like he needs me to remember the ledger before I sentence him.
“I know,” I say.
“And now I’m the villain.”
“You’re my brother,” I correct. “Which is why I’m stopping you before you destroy yourself.”
He wipes his face roughly, dragging a hand through sweat and frustration and whatever else he’s too proud to let show cleanly.
“You don’t get to be my conscience.”
“No,” I admit. “But I get to be your commander.”
He turns away.
Stares at the wall.
For a long time.
I let him. Because this isn’t the kind of choice you rush a man through. Because what I’m really saying is you can’t stay here and keep being what this place made you. Because what he’s hearing is the only life you know doesn’t want you anymore.
“Where do I go?” he asks finally.
The question is so stripped down, so bare, that it takes me a second to answer.
“Home,” I say. “Somewhere quiet. Somewhere safe.”
He snorts. “I don’t know how to live like that.”
“I didn’t either,” I confess. “Once.”
He glances at me then, suspicion and curiosity fighting for space in his face.
“You talking about Moe?”
“Yes.”
“And Delilah?”
I hesitate. He sees it anyway.
“…Yes.”
He shakes his head. “Figures.”
We stand there, two soldiers past our prime pretending this isn’t goodbye. Pretending this is temporary. Pretending I’m not cutting out a piece of the structure that’s held Greenport up in the dark for years.
“I don’t hate you,” he says quietly.
“I know,” I reply.
“I just hate that she’s the reason you’re still fighting,” he admits.
I meet his gaze.
“She’s the reason I’m still human.”
That shuts him up.
Not because he agrees. Because he understands exactly what it costs me to say it out loud.
I extend my hand.
He looks at it for a long time. At the offer. At the insult buried in it. At the history.
Then he takes it.
We grip tight.
No ceremony. No speech. Just two men who survived too much and know exactly how close they came to not surviving this part either.
His hand is rough, bruised, blood tacky at the knuckles.
Mine isn’t much better. It feels less like a handshake and more like holding a fault line shut with bare fingers.
“I’ll see you around, Cap,” he murmurs.
“You better,” I answer.
He lets go first.
Then he leaves without looking back.
And I stand there long after the door shuts, staring at the place where he was, wondering how many good soldiers this war is going to take from me before it’s done.