Chapter 16 Lucia
LUCIA
The cabin door swings shut behind us.
Nick’s bare, calloused hand leaves the small of my back before the latch even clicks.
One second it is there—warm, heavy, and still carrying the scent of the diesel and sex from the shed—and then it is gone.
He is already moving toward Daniel. He’d shoved his tactical gloves into his pocket the moment we stepped back inside, the professional Commander reassembling himself with chilling speed.
I stand near the door for exactly two seconds. Long enough to feel the cold air still clinging to my jacket. Long enough for the room to register my return.
It does.
Nothing obvious. Nobody stops working. Nobody looks up with wide eyes or pointed expressions.
But there is a shift, a quiet recalibration, the way a room changes when the barometric pressure drops before a storm.
Kaila’s fingers pause on her keyboard for a beat too long.
Oliver adjusts something on the equipment table that does not need adjusting.
Mia’s eyes track to me and away again, smooth and practiced, but the corner of her mouth does something complicated.
They know. Or they suspect. In this cabin, with this crew, the difference between the two is negligible.
I pull the winter jacket off and hang it on the iron rack by the door.
Then the goodbyes start.
They do not announce themselves as goodbyes. The team moves like water, efficient, overlapping, already in exfil mode before anyone calls it. Bags come out from under tables. Equipment gets broken down and packed into hard-sided cases with the same economy of motion they apply to everything.
Oliver finishes first. He slings a black duffel over one shoulder and stops in front of me on his way to the door. He looks at me with something that is not pity and not admiration but sits in the strange territory between them.
“You’re tougher than most of the men I’ve worked with,” he says. Simply. Like a fact he is reporting. Then he is out the door, and the cold air rushes in briefly and seals behind him.
Mia is next. She zips her technical bag closed and crosses to me, and for a moment I think she is going to say something carefully professional and forgettable.
Instead she stops close and says quietly, so only I can hear it: “I didn’t think I’d like you.
I was wrong.” She presses her lips together like she is debating whether to say the rest of it, then says it anyway.
“Tyra’s got good instincts. She picked the right men to trust.”
That one lands somewhere under my sternum and stays there.
Daniel is brief in the way Daniel is always brief, all compression, no waste. He passes me on his way to the door, gear already on his back, and he stops and gives me a single, curt nod. The kind of nod that carries a full paragraph inside it. I see you. You held. Good. Then he walks out.
Kaila is last.
She stops in front of me and does not say anything at all for a moment.
She looks at me with those clear, direct eyes, and then she reaches out and takes my hand in both of hers.
Her grip is firm. Certain. The grip of a woman who has survived things she does not talk about and recognizes the same architecture in someone else.
“You’re not alone in this anymore,” she says. “Whatever happens next, you’re not alone.”
She squeezes once and lets go.
The door closes behind her.
The cabin is quieter now. Nick and Rafe and the hum of equipment and the remaining weight of everything still unfinished.
I look up.
Rafe is standing near the far wall. He has not moved much since I came back in. He holds a water bottle loosely in one hand, and his golden eyes are already on me when I find them, like he has been watching the whole time and did not bother pretending otherwise.
We look at each other across the room.
He does not speak. I do not speak. There is nothing to say yet and we both know it.
His golden eyes move over my face, reading, cataloguing, storing, and something in them is not accusation and not relief.
It is a third thing I do not have a name for yet.
Something patient. Something that has already decided it is not going anywhere.
Then his gaze drops for a fraction of a second to the small of my back. Back up. He takes a slow drink from his water bottle and turns toward the tactical map on the counter.
That is all. That is enough.
The smell of pancakes drifts from the kitchen, and my feet are moving before I make the decision to move them.
The kitchen is small and warm and completely absurd.
Jude stands at the stove. He is in full tactical black, cargo pants, fitted long-sleeve, boots that could kick a door off its hinges, and he is flipping a pancake with the focused, unhurried attention of a man defusing something delicate.
The cast-iron pan is too small for his hands. He makes it work anyway.
Tyra sits on the counter beside him.
She is perched on a folded dish towel, both small legs dangling off the edge, kicking rhythmically at the cabinet face below.
Her grey stuffed wolf is propped against the backsplash between the paper towel holder and a jar of instant coffee, facing the stove like a very serious supervisor.
Tyra has a small spatula in one hand and a look of deep professional investment on her face.
“Now?” she asks.
“Not yet,” Jude says.
“Now?”
“Still no.”
“How do you know?”
“Bubbles,” he says. He points at the surface of the batter in the pan. “When the bubbles stop moving, it’s ready to flip.”
Tyra leans forward and studies the pan with the gravity of a scientist confirming a hypothesis. “The bubbles are slowing down,” she reports.
“Good catch.”
“Can I flip it?”
“You can flip it.”
Jude wraps his massive, steady hand over her tiny ones. “Together, trouble. On three.”
She grips the spatula with both fists, and with Jude’s guiding strength, she flips it. The pancake lands at an angle, slightly folded and more oval than round, but it stays in the pan.
Tyra stares at it.
“It’s not a circle anymore,” she says.
Jude studies it alongside her with complete seriousness. “That’s a happy pancake,” he says. “Happy things are never perfect circles. Perfect circles are boring.”
Tyra considers this with the full weight of her four years of life experience. “My wolf is not a perfect circle,” she says.
“Exactly,” Jude says. “And he is clearly very happy.”
She looks at the wolf. The wolf, apparently, agrees. She turns back to the pan fully satisfied.
I stay in the doorframe and do not say anything.
Something is happening in this kitchen that feels fragile and specific, the way certain moments do. So I stay and I take it in.
Jude answers every question Tyra asks. Not in the distracted, half-present way adults answer children when they are actually thinking about something else.
He answers like each question is a reasonable one, coming from a person whose curiosity is worth engaging.
He does not simplify unnecessarily. He does not rush her toward the next sentence.
He tilts his head when she asks something complicated. A small, unhurried tilt, patient and internal, while he formulates an answer worth giving.
Something moves through me when I see it.
Quick and sidelong, like catching a reflection in glass: familiar.
Not a memory I can locate. Not a face I can attach it to.
The shape of it presses briefly against something old and unexamined inside me, and then I push it away before I can look at it directly.
I step into the kitchen.
Neither of them makes a production of it. Tyra looks up and says Mama! and pats the counter space beside her like she is offering a reserved seat. Jude glances over, reads my face in that quick, precise way he has, and pulls a second plate from the cabinet without being asked.
We eat pancakes at the kitchen counter.
Tyra sits between us and talks without stopping.
She has syrup on her chin before the first plate is finished and does not notice or care.
She tells Jude about the grey wolf’s dietary preferences in authoritative detail, interrupts herself twice to report on the structural integrity of her own pancake, and at one point holds up a piece on her fork and addresses it directly before eating it.
Jude responds to every single thing she says.
He asks follow-up questions about the wolf with full seriousness.
When she explains that he also likes blueberries but only the big ones, Jude nods like this is important nutritional data he will retain.
Her feet kick the cabinet below her in a steady, happy rhythm the whole time.
I cannot stop looking at her face. The loose, unguarded brightness of it. She is not performing happiness. She simply is happy, the way children are happy when they are completely safe and completely seen, and the sight of it does something to my chest that I have no clean word for.
It is the most normal twenty minutes I have had in years, and it ends the way good things always end in the middle of a sentence about wolves, because Tyra’s jaw drops open in a massive, full-body yawn that interrupts her completely and leaves her blinking at herself in surprise.
“Nap,” I say.
“No.” She says it automatically, reflex before reason.
“Yes.”
She opens her mouth to escalate the negotiation.
Jude sets his fork down, reaches over, and lifts her off the counter with one arm.
No warning. No discussion. Just a single, easy motion, and she is simply in the air and then against his chest, her small body tucked against him like she was built to fit there.
He picks up the grey wolf from the backsplash and settles it under her chin.
Tyra forgets to protest.
“Come on, trouble,” Jude says.
She wraps one fist into the fabric of his shirt, tucks her face against his shoulder, and decides the negotiation is over.