Epilogue
Delilah Barrinheart
The rotors fade into the distance behind us, their thunder slowly dissolving into nothing but wind and open sky.
Another mission is over, another extraction complete, another ending that could have become the beginning of something terrible and, by some miracle, wasn’t.
I sit on the edge of the transport ramp with my boots dangling over open air, my helmet resting beside me, sweat cooling against my skin as the last of the adrenaline begins to loosen its grip on my body.
The horizon stretches wide in front of us, painted in soft gold and bruised purple, the kind of sunset that makes you believe in peace even when you know better than to trust something so beautiful.
The metal beneath me hums faintly with the memory of motion, vibrating through my thighs in a low, steady pulse.
Behind me, soldiers move through the practiced choreography of post-mission recovery, unloading gear, stripping harnesses, checking weapons, trading exhausted jokes like they didn’t just walk through hell and drag someone else back out of it.
Radios crackle. Boots thud against steel.
Someone laughs too loudly, the sound edged with relief.
The air smells like fuel, warm machinery, sweat, and the faint bite of gunpowder that never really leaves us, no matter how many showers we take or how much time passes.
Jon drops down beside me, close enough that our shoulders brush. That tiny line of contact sends something warm and familiar through the center of my chest.
“Good work out there,” he says.
I glance at him, smiling faintly. “Always is.”
He snorts. “Cocky.”
“Accurate.”
That earns me one of those almost-smiles of his, the kind that barely touches his mouth and still somehow changes his whole face.
We fall quiet after that, not awkwardly, but in the easy way that comes from having survived too much together to need constant noise between us.
We listen to the hum of the engines and the chatter behind us, watching soldiers move through the fading light like they belong to it.
It still amazes me, sometimes, how quickly people in our world move from violence back to banter, from blood to routine, from almost dying to arguing over whose turn it is to buy drinks later.
Maybe that’s how we survive it. Maybe refusing to let war keep all of us is the only rebellion that ever mattered.
After a while, Jon clears his throat, and something in the sound makes me immediately suspicious.
“So,” he says, his tone carefully casual, “I’ve been thinking.”
I turn my head and look at him more fully. “Oh no.”
He huffs out a laugh. “About retirement.”
I blink and stare at him. “Retirement?”
“Yeah.”
I shift so I’m facing him more squarely now, one leg folding up beneath me as I search his face for any sign that he’s joking. “Retirement?” I repeat, because apparently my brain has decided that if I say it enough times, it might start to make sense.
His mouth twitches. “You repeating it like that isn’t making me younger.”
“You’re forty-one, not ninety.”
“Rude,” he mutters. “But accurate.”
I study him quietly after that, and the truth is, for all my teasing, he does look older than the man I first met.
Not old. Never that. But time has settled into him in ways it hadn’t before.
The lines around his eyes are deeper now, cut there by command and grief and sleepless nights and years of carrying too much.
There’s more silver in his hair than there used to be, more scars on his hands, more stillness in him too, as if he’s finally begun to understand that not every battle has to be met at a full sprint.
He looks older, yes, but he also looks lighter.
Less hunted. Less like he’s forever bracing for the next disaster.
“I thought you’d die in this job,” I say, but there’s no cruelty in it, only the soft kind of truth people who have lived too much can say to each other without flinching.
“Still might,” he replies. “Just later.”
That makes me smile, but the weight beneath it is real. He means it. Not the death part, maybe, but the later. The possibility of a future beyond all this. The wanting of it.
“You’re serious?” I ask more quietly.
He nods and turns his gaze back toward the horizon. “We’re set for life. Between contracts, pensions, and about a thousand favors owed, we’d be fine.”
My heart lifts before I can stop it. “Like really fine?”
He glances at me, and his voice softens. “Like summers on the beach with your parents. Barbecues. No radios. No blood. No one calling in the middle of the night because somebody opened the wrong crate in the wrong country. Just life.”
Something in my throat tightens at that. The way he says it makes it sound less like a fantasy and more like a blueprint he’s been quietly building in his head for a while now.
“And visits from Moe and Raylen,” I add, because if I let myself sit in the tenderness of his words too long, I’m going to do something embarrassing like cry. “Without anyone side-eyeing us like it’s weird that I’m basically his age.”
Jon chuckles. “Still weird.”
“Rude.”
He bumps his shoulder against mine. “True.”
I imagine it then, not in pieces, but all at once.
I imagine long days where the ocean is louder than gunfire and the only thing in my hair is salt instead of ash.
I imagine my mom forcing Jon into family photos while pretending she isn’t secretly thrilled she finally gets to keep him in them.
I imagine my dad grumbling about him on principle and then asking him to help fix everything around the house anyway.
I imagine Moe and Raylen showing up with all the chaos they carry between them and somehow making it feel like home.
I imagine King, rumor finally confirmed, showing up one day in civilian clothes with some woman from Seaborn at his side and his mask missing often enough to prove he finally learned how to live without it.
I imagine Larkin still running Greenport like an iron queen, terrifying recruits and saving lives in equal measure.
I imagine Jon remembered forever as the captain who won wars no one will ever write books about.
I imagine myself standing beside him, not because I was forced there, not because war backed me into it, but because I chose him and he chose me.
A life built on something other than survival. A life shaped by choice.
“I’d go with you,” I say, and I don’t even need to think about it.
He turns to look at me then, really look at me, his expression unreadable for a beat. “You wouldn’t miss this?”
I let my eyes drift around the base, over the soldiers, the flags, the machinery, the endless and familiar choreography of conflict. This place made me. It sharpened me. It tested me. It hurt me, too. But for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel owned by it.
“I’ve given enough to it,” I say softly. “I’d like to give something to myself now.”
His hand finds mine and squeezes. His palm is warm, rough, familiar, and the touch feels like a promise neither of us needs to say out loud. We fall quiet again after that, and this time the silence feels full instead of unfinished.
Later, when the base lights begin flickering on one by one and the world settles into another uneasy night, my thoughts drift backward to a place they have returned to more times than I can count.
Back to the beginning. Back to the first time I sat on the floor of his office and asked him a question I had no business asking.
“What’s war like?”
The words slipped out before I could second-guess them, before I could soften them into something safer or easier to dismiss. They hung in the air between us, reckless and fragile, and for half a second I wondered if I had just crossed a line I wouldn’t know how to step back from.
I was sitting cross-legged on the polished hardwood floor beside his desk, my back against the cool wood, my boots kicked off and resting somewhere behind me.
I probably looked completely out of place in there, too young and too curious and too soft for a room that smelled faintly of gun oil, leather, old paper, and too much responsibility.
I remember glancing up at the man behind the desk and thinking that up close, Captain Jonathan Cash looked even more intimidating than the stories had made him seem.
He was all sharp edges and quiet authority, broad shoulders straining slightly against his uniform, brown hair already touched with silver at the temples, jaw set so hard it looked like it might crack if he ever let himself relax.
He looked tired in the way only certain men ever do—not sleepy tired, but soul tired, like exhaustion had seeped into his bones and built a home there.
“I don’t think you need to worry that pretty little head of yours about it,” he muttered without looking up, his eyes still fixed on the paperwork spread across his desk.
His tone was dismissive and protective and a little condescending, enough of all three that I didn’t know whether I wanted to smile or roll my eyes.
Instead, I pressed my lips together and tapped my fingernails against the floor in a slow, deliberate rhythm.
Not because I was nervous. Because I was thinking.
I have always been thinking. Thinking about things I wasn’t supposed to, about worlds my parents tried to keep hidden from me like they were afraid curiosity itself might get me killed.
“Come on, old man,” I said, tipping my head back to look at him. “I want to hear the war stories. It’s boring out there.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. Barely. A smirk he definitely had not meant to give me.
God help me, I noticed. I noticed everything. The way his shoulders loosened a fraction. The way his fingers stilled over the report like he’d forgotten what he was doing. The way his eyes finally lifted to mine, sharp and assessing and far too aware.