Chapter 17
CARTER
The pain arrives like the weather. It moves in, sets up camp, then pretends it owns the place.
The spare room Rebel puts me in smells like lemon cleaner and motor oil.
There’s a steel table shoved under the window, a beat-up dresser, and a full bed that complains every time I breathe wrong.
The shoulder burn is a steady drum, kept honest by the stitches, the gauze, and the way my body keeps trying to turn toward a fight that’s already over.
Rebel is the only soft thing in the room. If I tell her that, she’ll slit my throat, so I keep my thoughts to myself.
She sits on the edge of the mattress with a metal bowl of warm water and a roll of gauze balanced on her thigh.
Her long dark hair is up in a messy bun thingy.
Rebel shoves her sleeves past her elbows.
Back straight like she’s daring pain to argue with her.
The Harlots’ noise, laughter, boots, bass from the jukebox, bleeds through the walls, muffled and safe.
“Hold still,” Rebel says, which is funny, because she’s the hurricane.
“I am holding still,” I grumble.
“You’re vibrating like a generator.”
“That’s the charm,” I smirk and clench my teeth.
Rebel snorts, and the sound does more for me than the painkillers.
Fingers sure, she peels back blood-tacky tape and lifts the dressing.
Cool air hits the wound. My teeth click on instinct.
No worse than the last dozen holes I’ve collected, but it feels different because it happened with her heart beating under my hands.
“Through-and-through,” she murmurs, eyes tracking the angry edges Allura stitched clean. “Missed the artery by a whisper.”
“Lucky.”
She glances up. “No. Stubborn.”
Rebel’s touch is clinical until it isn’t. The cloth follows the line of my collarbone, slow, careful, almost reverent. She rinses the cloth, wrings it out, and sets it to work again. When she leans closer, soap and smoke and Rebel curl around me.
After a while, Rebel’s hands slow, the task forgotten.
The gauze hovers above the wound, and for the first time since the gala, her fingers tremble.
Not from fear, but exhaustion. Rebel blinks hard, jaw tight, like she’s fighting something she won’t name.
When her thumb brushes the inside of my shoulder, it isn’t a medic’s touch anymore.
It’s a woman making sure the man beneath her is still real.
The air shifts with less antiseptic, more heartbeat. Rebel exhales through her nose, steady but ragged, and I realize she hasn’t really stopped moving since the gunfire. She’s still in fight mode, and the only thing she knows how to do is fix.
So I reach up, catch her wrist, and let my thumb find the pulse there. “Hey, Vic,” I say, low. “You can stop now. I’m not bleeding out anymore.”
Rebel doesn’t look at me, not yet. “You could have.”
“But I didn’t.” That earns a tiny nod, the kind people make when they’re pretending they agree.
I keep her wrist in my hand until she finally meets my eyes. Her armor’s cracked. She’s running on fumes, wrapped in guilt.
“You need to sleep,” I offer.
“Bossy.”
“Just sharing my best medical advice.”
“You’re not a doctor.”
“Played one in a field once.”
“Let me guess,” she says, cutting the gauze with her teeth, “you didn’t ask for help then either.”
“Bad habit.”
She doesn’t ask why. She already knows. Men like me learn early that needing gets you killed, wanting just speeds it up.
The fresh dressing goes on with a clean press of palms, and my ribs relax by degrees. She tapes the edges down, smooths the last corner, and leaves her hand there, a wide, warm weight over my chest. We breathe like we’re syncing clocks.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Don’t make it a thing.”
“It is a thing.”
Her mouth tilts. “Okay. It’s a thing.”
I lift my good hand and hook a strand of hair behind her ear. It’s a small theft, touching her for no reason but wanting to. She doesn’t lean away. If anything, she leans in.
“Rebel,” I say, and the name is a request.
She answers by climbing onto my lap, careful as a lit fuse, one knee braced beside my hip, the other easing across the mattress so she won’t jar the shoulder. We fit, God help me, we fit like we were built in the same bad factory and shipped to different wars.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
“Only everywhere you’re not.” A ghost of a laugh. Then her mouth finds mine.
It’s not the desperate kiss from the warehouse or the bruised one from the gala.
This is slower. Patient. She tastes like coffee and salt and the kind of relief you earn with blood.
My fingers slide under the hem of her shirt to her warm spine.
She breathes in sharply and presses closer, careful of the dressing, careless of everything else.
When I break for air, she doesn’t move far. She rests her forehead against mine like we’re hiding under the same thought. “We can’t,” she starts, then shakes her head and smiles at herself. “At least not… all the way. Allura will kill me if I pop your stitches.”
“Not a fan of getting sewn twice in one night.”
“Good,” she says, voice gone low. “Then let me… help.”
“Rebel,” I groan.
“Let me,” she repeats, and there’s no bravado in it. No performance. Just the clean, stubborn truth of a woman deciding what she wants.
Consent is easy. It’s yes with my mouth and yes with my body. It’s yes with the way I shift back on the pillows so she can take her time, map my edges, test the places that ache and the ones that don’t. We kiss until I forget which of us is keeping the rhythm.
Rebel trails kisses down my body, mapping every inch of my skin with her tongue.
When she reaches the waistband of my jeans, I shift my hips so she can slide them down.
My erection springs free, and her hot, wet mouth is on me in an instant.
She smiles around my length when I choke on her name.
She hums approval, and the vibration of her throat as my shaft slides down it sends me over the edge.
I make promises without words because I don’t deserve the spoken kind, but she hears them anyway. We keep it quiet. We keep it gentle. The room stays ours.
After, she tucks herself along my good side, face pressed to my throat, heartbeat finding its place against my ribs.
My arm goes around her on pure instinct, palm spread between her shoulder blades, keeping her from any world that isn’t this one.
The ceiling has a crack that runs corner to corner like a route we might take when we’re done pretending we rest.
She breaks the quiet first.
“I have the dream,” she says, voice so small I almost miss it.
“Not every night. Enough. The gate hits the asphalt. The van rams through. The sound isn’t a sound, it’s a split.
I’m on the wrong side of the parking lot, and my legs won’t work fast enough.
I know how it ends, but I keep running like I don’t. ”
I don’t move. I don’t fix it. There’s nothing to fix. I give her the one thing Marines and Harlots both forget how to offer, silence that holds.
“I hate sleeping,” she continues. “I hate waking up more. I count the women. I count the kids. I count the money so the books don’t surprise me. I keep the door cracked so I can see the hinges. And I pretend that makes me safe.” A beat. “Mostly it makes me tired.”
I angle my head and kiss her hair. It tastes like rain and a little bit of whiskey. “You don’t have to earn sleep,” I say.
“That sounds fake.”
“It is,” I admit. “But you don’t have to.”
Rebel smiles without humor. “Says the man who hasn’t slept since Fallujah.”
“Afghanistan.”
“Figures.” Her hand curls in my shirt, the knuckles brush one of many scars. She doesn’t look up when she asks, “What about your dreams, soldier?”
“They’re louder,” I say. “But shorter. Teeth and smoke and doors that don’t open.
The ones with Alex… those are quiet.” Rebel stills, waiting.
“The night at the clubhouse,” I add, and my tongue feels like sand.
“He saved me. Not the other way around. I had the angle wrong. I would’ve caught the second burst. He shoved me into the vent casing and took it in the chest. By the time I dragged him out of sight, help was coming, and I was already gone. ”
Rebel’s breath snags like a thread catching. “You were there.”
“Yeah. I’ve never told anyone that.”
“And you didn’t tell me because…?”
“Because you deserved a brother who didn’t die in a story that ends with me.”
She lifts her head. Her eyes are wet, her mouth set like she’s ready to argue until one of us breaks. But she doesn’t argue. She just studies me like she’s collecting a truth she can’t ledger. “Say it again,” she whispers.
“He saved me.”
She shuts her eyes. A single tear slips, small and traitorous. I catch it with my thumb before it can travel. Her lashes shiver against my skin, then settle.
“You’re allowed to be the one who lives,” I tell her. “That doesn’t mean you left him.”
“It feels like I did,” she says, barely a sound.
“Me too.” I let the two words sit. A matched set, heavy and honest. “But I’m still here. And I’m not running.”
Her laugh is shredded at the edges. “You really picked the wrong club if you wanted to run.”
“I picked the right woman.” Rebel exhales like she’s been holding that line for years. No quip. No armor. Just a nod, she hides in my chest, and the smallest shudder as something in her lets go.
We stay quiet long enough to hear the building change gears. Someone rolling a jack in the garage, Sloane’s boots passing the door, the jukebox clicking to a new track. Life is carrying on in circles while we rest in the center.
“Carter?” she says after a while.
“Mm?”
“If I let you stay…” She stops, starts again. “If I let you be here, not just for the job, but for the ugly parts, the counting, the nights I’m not okay… You don’t get to leave when it’s inconvenient.”
“I don’t leave,” I say.
“You left the roof.”
“Yeah,” I admit. “And I’ve been trying to climb back ever since. I’ll spend the rest of my life not leaving.”
“That’s dramatic.”
“Like you’re surprised.”
She laughs into my throat, and this time it’s real. “Okay,” she says. Then, quieter, “Okay.”
I trace the line of her shoulder with my knuckles, careful of nothing except the need to be careful. The mask she wears with everyone else is off. No Treasurer. No enforcer. No ledger saint. Just Victoria sleep-starved, grief-heavy, alive anyway.
“Divine’s going to call,” I say eventually. “She’ll have a new route, a new node, a new way to knock the banker’s teeth out through a spreadsheet.”
“Probably,” she agrees.
“And Bones?”
“Is a problem for the part of me that isn’t lying in your arms,” she finishes, not angry, just tired.
“Copy that.” The cell on the crate nightstand buzzes once. We both look. Neither of us moves.
“Let it,” she says, and for one breath the room goes weightless, a planet without gravity. Free.
“Rebel,” I say, because I have to.
“Yeah?”
“You belong to your sisters. To this place. To the promise you made him. I know all that.”
She lifts her head, eyes steady. “And you belong here,” she answers, like she’s measuring the words as she spends them. “By my side. For as long as you keep saying it and meaning it.”
I kiss her once more, slow, certain, unhurried, not because we can’t have more, but because we already have what matters. When we break apart, she rests her forehead to mine again, breathless for good reasons this time.
The phone buzzes a second time, then a third. The world will crawl back through the door any second, wearing Divine’s voice and a map. It always does.
“For the record,” I say, reaching past her for the phone with my good hand, “I’m terrible at staying put.”
She smiles. “Good. I’m terrible at letting go.”
The screen lights our faces in thin blue. A message from Divine: NEW KEY. CALL WHEN ABLE.
I set the phone down without responding to it.
“Later,” Rebel says.
“Later,” I echo.
Outside the window, dawn is just a smudge on the edge of the city, trying to remember how to be light. Inside, Rebel’s fingers lace with mine. Pain is still here. So is the weather. But the room is warm, and we’ve got enough breath left to use.