Chapter 26
twenty-six
Elliot Wilde was full of surprises.
”What kind of doctor?” she asked as he went back to the kitchenette.
He rinsed the pan he’d used for the cocoa, then opened several cans of soup and dumped them in. But he didn’t answer.
“If you had followed your dream,” she pressed, “what kind of doctor would you have been?”
His mouth quirked in a faint smile. “You act like I would’ve made it through med school.”
“You would’ve.” Of that, she had no doubt.
Still, he didn’t respond, focusing too hard on stirring the soup.
“I’m not going to let it go,” she said.
He sighed and turned to face her, leaning against the counter. “Trauma surgeon,” he said, his voice so quiet she almost missed it. “I wanted to work in a big city ER, where every day would be different, where I could...”
“Where you could save people,” she finished for him.
A flash of vulnerability crossed his face before he masked it with a shrug. “Something like that.”
He had always been the steady one, the planner, the guy who kept everyone else’s recklessness in check. She’d never once considered that he might have had dreams beyond Wilde Security.
The image hit her suddenly—Elliot in scrubs instead of tactical gear, those steady hands stitching wounds rather than field-stripping weapons. It fit him so perfectly that she felt a pang of loss for the path he hadn’t taken.
“And you gave it all up for your family.”
He didn’t answer immediately.
“When I was in college, Dad, Uncle Cam, and Uncle Vaughn were all pretty severely hurt during an op,” he finally said.
“Davey was a SEAL by then, so he was off Christ knew where. Most of my cousins were away in college or the military. Dom was in high school. It was just Cade and me there, so I took a semester off school and helped Uncle Reece with logistics. And Cade...” His mouth tightened.
“Well, Cade was doing what Davey does now. He basically stepped into Uncle Greer’s role, helping run the company while everyone recovered.
When I got back to school, I joined ROTC, changed my major to international relations, commissioned, and never looked back. ”
The Wilde family operated like a military unit, she realized.
One went down, one stepped up. No complaints.
No delays. No debate. Just the job, as natural as breathing.
She’d always known that about them, but hearing it laid out so starkly made her understand something fundamental about Elliot that she’d missed before.
“So you sacrificed your dreams for theirs,” she said, watching him measure cocoa powder into two chipped mugs with the same meticulousness he brought to everything else.
“It wasn’t a sacrifice.” The words came out too quick, too practiced, like he’d been telling himself that lie for years. “The company needed me. My family needed me.”
Rue shifted on the couch, wincing as her ankle protested the movement. “But what about what you needed?”
Elliot went completely still. When he finally spoke, his voice was carefully neutral. “What I needed was for my family to survive and succeed. Everything else was just... secondary.”
That was the thing that cut the deepest—how sincerely he believed it.
She’d spent her whole life running precisely the opposite direction, refusing to be that person who bent herself into a shape someone else needed.
For years, she’d believed that was the only way to come out alive.
To stay herself, no matter what. But here was Elliot, a living rebuke to that philosophy, and instead of seeming diminished by it, he just seemed…
more. More solid, more essential. More impossible to shake loose from her brain, which was probably half the reason she’d resisted him so stubbornly for so long.
He ladled the soup into mismatched mugs and brought hers over, crouching to set it on the tiny table next to her. “Careful, it’s hot.”
She cupped the mug in her palms and let the steam scald her nose. Chunks of potato and carrot drifted near the surface, hopeful as survivors.
“Thanks,” she said, and meant it more than it sounded.
He settled on the floor in front of her, back against the couch, one leg stretched out stiff, the other bent at the knee.
His shoulder was purpled with a faint bruise above the collar of his shirt.
There were at least three cuts along his knuckles, each one bandaged with haphazard strips of medical tape.
He looked as battered as she felt. She wondered if he’d even noticed.
She sipped. The soup was criminally salty but warm, and her stomach snarled at the first taste. “This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”
He half-smiled, the way he did when he didn’t believe her but wanted to.
They ate in quiet, the only sound the faint hum of the generator and the occasional creak of the wind rattling the station.
“You would’ve made a good doctor. You could still do it, you know.” She set her empty mug down, warming to the idea. “When all this is over. Go back to school, become Dr. Wilde. The world will always need more surgeons.”
He took a long pull on his soup before responding. “It’s not my dream anymore.”
“No?”
“No. I love my job.”
“Then what’s your dream now?”
“I want what my parents have. What Davey and Rowan found.” He lifted his gaze to hers, his eyes startlingly blue in the dim light. “I’m tired of being alone.”
His gaze held hers, and her chest tightened. For a moment, her lungs locked, and she couldn’t draw in a breath.
“You—” Words abandoned her, and she scrambled to find something to say.
Sex with him was one thing. She was good at physical intimacy, loved every second of it—especially with him—but the kind of connection he was talking about now scared her more than anything she’d ever faced on one of her expeditions.
“You mean… like, relationship relationship?” She regretted the words immediately, but her mouth was already off-roading without her permission. “Like, dinners and holidays and ‘let’s buy a succulent together’—all that?”
“Not the succulents. I always over-water them. Maybe a cat. I’ve always liked cats.” A smile ghosted over his lips. “But, yeah. All that.”
She tried to picture it. Elliot in a kitchen, making dinner.
Elliot sleep-rumpled and making coffee for them both after a night of sleeping side-by-side.
Elliot talking about taxes and dry cleaning and family dinners and all the little mundane things that made up a normal life.
She bet he’d fold his boxers into obsessive little squares and would complain because she was chaotic and messy.
Could she tolerate that for more than a week before she started hallucinating from boredom?
Probably not.
She didn’t know how to be what he wanted.
She knew how to lead expeditions and climb mountains and throw herself headfirst into adventures that would terrify most people.
But sitting still? Building a life with someone?
Stillness had always bothered her, and the kind of life he was describing sounded like mind-numbing stasis.
She thought about her parents, how happy they seemed, how content.
But also how... contained. Her dad had been a SEAL, and once he retired from that, he led an elite hostage rescue team into the worst corners of the world.
Her mom had been a free-spirited artist, living in a tiny cabin on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, where she wandered barefoot in the sand, painted all day, and swam with dolphins in the evenings.
But when they got together, that all changed.
Dad still traveled, but now it was to carefully vetted conference rooms in climate-controlled hotels.
Mom still painted, but her work had become safer, prettier—landscapes and still lifes that sold well in tourist galleries instead of the wild, abstract pieces that whispered of freedom and wild spirits.
Yes, her parents had found each other, but they also somehow lost themselves in the process.
“That sounds nice,” she said finally, the words coming out more stilted than she intended. “Really nice.”
Elliot’s expression shuttered, and she could see him drawing his shields back up to protect that tender heart of his. “Yeah, well. Pipe dreams, right?”
She wanted to reach for him, to tell him it wasn’t a pipe dream, that he deserved everything he’d just described, but it couldn’t be with her.
But the words stuck in her throat.
Dammit, he’d warned her. Back in the shower room, before he gave in to her seduction, before he let himself touch her, he’d told her what it meant to him and that he’d want more.
But she’d been too deep in her grief, too desperate for the distraction, to understand it wasn’t just his version of sweet nothings. He meant it.
The station felt smaller suddenly, the walls closing in around her.
Outside, the wind had picked up again, rattling the windows with a sound like skeletal fingers tapping against glass.
She longed to be out there again, pitted against the elements instead of trapped in this tomb of a research station with ghosts and frozen corpses and a man who wanted things from her she wasn’t sure she could give.
“We should get some sleep,” she said abruptly and stood, ignoring the throb in her ankle. “Long day tomorrow.”
Elliot watched her with those too-perceptive blue eyes, and couldn’t quite hide his disappointment. She was always disappointing him, wasn’t she?
He probably kept a list of them all, she thought bitterly.
“Rue—”
“I’m fine,” she said, cutting him off. She limped toward the residential wing, intending to find a bunk to crash in far away from him, but she stopped short and stared down the dark hallway.
Like at Thwaites, it split into a T at the end.
To the left where the bathroom, showers, and bunkrooms. To the right, piled in that cold storage room like sardines in a can, were the people who had once lived in those bunkrooms.
Maren was in there.
She froze, unable to take another step. The thought of sleeping in one of those bunks, knowing her friend was dead just steps down the hallway, sent a wave of nausea through her.
“I can’t—” The words caught in her throat. She hated the weakness in her voice, but the idea of being alone with those memories, with the knowledge that Maren’s frozen corpse lay just beyond the wall?—
Elliot was beside her in an instant, his hand warm on her lower back. “Let’s stay here,” he said quietly. “I’ll keep watch.”
The surge of relief made her dizzy. She allowed him to guide her back to the couch, where he’d already arranged the blankets into a makeshift bed.
She sank into it, leaden with exhaustion.
He didn’t take the floor like she thought he would.
He stretched out beside her, caging her between the back of the couch and his body.
She should’ve felt trapped, but instead his arms felt like sanctuary.
She nestled against his chest. His heart beat steadily under her cheek. And for a crazy moment, she thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to live that mundane life if it meant she could sleep in his arms like this every night.
The wind howled through the seams of the station, making the walls vibrate in their frames. She pressed her face to his chest, breathing in the faint scent of sweat and cocoa.
She should have been exhausted beyond thinking, but her mind refused to quiet. The image of Maren’s frozen body kept flashing behind her eyelids.
His hand traced small circles on her back, the gentle motion nearly hypnotic. “I can hear those gears spinning, Rue. Sleep. You need it.”
Easy for him to say. He’d always been able to compartmentalize, to set aside the horrors they’d witnessed and focus on what needed to be done next. It was what made him so good at his job—what would have made him an excellent trauma surgeon.
The thought circled back to what he’d said earlier. He’d given up medicine for his family without hesitation, reshaping his entire future to fit their needs.
And now he wanted to do the same for her, to build a life together.
Tears threatened again, and she squeezed her eyes shut against them. She’d cried more in the past few hours than she had in the past decade. Everything about this day had stripped her raw, left her without her usual armor of sarcasm and bravado.
Elliot’s breathing steadied, his chest rising and falling in a slow rhythm under her cheek. She wondered if he was already asleep, if his tactical training had kicked in, allowing him to grab rest whenever possible.
“I’m not built for stillness,” she whispered, not sure if she wanted him to hear or not. “I need to keep moving. I need...”
She trailed off, unsure how to articulate the restlessness that had driven her across seven continents, that had pushed her to climb higher, dive deeper, push harder than anyone else. The stillness was where the darkness lived—where doubt and fear and loneliness could catch up to her.
“Oh, Trouble,” Elliot murmured against her hair. His hand found hers in the darkness, fingers intertwining with a gentleness that made her throat tighten. He wasn’t trying to hold her in place. He was just... holding her. “I know. I’ve always known that about you.”
“Then why would you want me? I’m the exact opposite of everything you are. You’re all obsessive neatness and strategy and infuriating stillness. I’m chaos incarnate.”
He made a sound, half snort, half rumble, the vibrations running through the length of her. “Yeah, you are that.”
“It’s not funny. I’m serious! I bet you fold your boxers, don’t you? And I can’t remember the last time I folded anything?—”
“Rue.” He hooked a finger under her chin, lifting her gaze to his. “I don’t need you to be neat. I like your chaos. And I’d never ask you to stay still. I’m just asking you to let me go with you.”
Go with her.
Not trying to cage her or change her, but simply... matching her pace. The concept was so foreign that it took her a moment to fully process it.
Something bright and unfamiliar bloomed in her chest, spreading warmth through places that had been cold for so long she’d forgotten they existed. For the first time in months—maybe years—the restlessness that usually clawed at her insides went quiet.
“That’s not how it works,” she whispered, but even as she said it, doubt crept into her voice. “People don’t just... follow. They want roots. Stability. They want?—”
“I want you,” Elliot said simply, his thumb tracing over her lips. “I’ve always wanted you. However that looks. Wherever that takes us.”