Chapter Eleven
The compound settled after midnight like a dog circling its bed—restless turns, a few last growls, then quiet.
Becca couldn't sleep.
She'd tried. Lay in the narrow bed on the upper floor and stared at the ceiling while the industrial noise faded to nothing, and the nothing was worse. In the nothing, she heard the echo of gunfire from the safehouse. In the nothing, she smelled smoke that wasn't there.
She pulled on jeans and a hoodie and padded downstairs in bare feet, following the faint sound of metal on metal to the garage.
Blast was hunched over a workbench in the far bay, surrounded by wire and components that looked like they belonged inside something designed to ruin someone's evening.
His scarred hands moved with a precision that contradicted everything else about him—the restless energy, the constant jokes, the way he filled every room like a man allergic to empty space.
Here, alone, his hands were surgeon-steady.
"You're up," she said from the doorway.
He didn't startle. Just glanced over his shoulder with that grin already locked in place, like he kept it loaded and ready.
"Sleep's overrated. I'm building something."
"At midnight?"
"Best time for it. Nobody asking stupid questions." The grin sharpened. "Present company excluded."
She crossed the garage, her bare feet cold on the concrete, and pulled herself up onto the workbench beside his project.
This close, she could see what he was doing—wiring a small device with components she couldn't identify, his fingers moving through connections with the automatic confidence of a man who'd done this a thousand times.
"What is it?"
"Proximity sensor. For the compound perimeter." He soldered a connection, the tiny flame reflecting in his eyes. "After the safehouse, I'm upgrading everything. Motion detection, noise charges, the works."
"Because of me."
"Because of the situation." He set down the soldering iron and looked at her. "You being here just makes the situation more important."
Becca watched his hands. The burn scars caught the workshop light, the skin mottled and ridged across both palms, climbing his fingers in patterns that told a story she'd only heard fragments of.
The missing finger on his left hand—the ring finger, she realized with a sharp pang—was a clean absence, healed smooth, like it had been gone long enough to stop being a wound and start being a fact.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You're going to anyway."
"The scars." She kept her voice careful. Not pitying—she'd learned that pity made him louder, faster, further away. "You told me about the bomb. The one in Iraq. But you told it like a joke."
"It's funnier as a joke."
"Keith."
His real name stopped him cold. The grin flickered—not gone, but dimmed, like someone had turned the voltage down on whatever generator powered his personality.
"Nobody calls me that."
"I know."
He stared at her for a long moment. Then he set down the wire cutters, pushed back from the workbench, and leaned against the bay wall with his arms crossed.
Defensive posture. She recognized it because she'd spent four years reading body language across a flower counter—brides who were about to cry, widows who were holding themselves together with fury, mothers who needed someone to tell them the quincea?era arrangements were perfect because nothing else in their lives was.
Blast was holding himself together with noise, and she'd just turned the volume down.
"His name was Danny Morrison," he said. "PFC. Twenty years old. From Manchester, Iowa, which is exactly the kind of place that sounds like it was invented for a country song."
His voice was different. Quieter. The manic energy still hummed underneath, but it was running at idle instead of redline.
"He was attached to my unit for a training rotation.
EOD work—learning how to find the things that blow up and make them stop.
" Blast's mouth curved, but it wasn't a grin.
"Kid was good. Steady hands, sharp eyes.
Used to hum while we worked. Keith Urban, mostly.
Drove me out of my mind, but it kept him calm, so I let it go. "
"What happened?"
"Routine disposal. IED on a supply route outside Fallujah.
I'd done a hundred of them—find the device, read the wiring, cut the right thing, go home.
" He looked at his hands. "This one had a secondary timer.
Backup detonator wired to a mercury switch that I didn't see because the primary was textbook and I got comfortable. "
Becca's chest tightened.
"I was cutting the last wire when the secondary kicked in. The blast took my finger clean and peeled the skin off both hands like a glove." He said it flat. Clinical. The way a doctor described a procedure. "Danny was standing three feet to my left. Observing. Learning."
"He was too close."
"He was exactly where I told him to stand." Blast's voice cracked on the last word. Just a hairline fracture, barely audible, but she heard it. "I positioned him. I told him where to be. And when the bomb went off, he was right there. Right where I put him."
"That wasn't your fault."
"I was the senior tech. He was my responsibility." His jaw tightened. "Twenty years old. Hadn't even been to a bar legally. His mom sent him care packages with homemade cookies, and he shared them with the whole unit because that's the kind of kid he was."
"Blast—"
"The blast happened in less than a second.
The silence after lasted forever." He looked at the ceiling, and she could see the effort it took him to keep his voice level.
"That's the part nobody tells you about explosions.
Everyone talks about the noise—the bang, the shockwave, the chaos.
Nobody talks about what comes after. The silence.
When you open your eyes and start counting, and someone's not there anymore. "
His hands were shaking.
Not much. A fine tremor that someone who didn't know him would miss entirely. But Becca had spent days watching those hands—steady on detonators, steady on weapons, steady when he touched her face with a gentleness that contradicted everything about his life.
They weren't steady now.
She reached out and took his left hand. The one with the missing finger, the worst of the scars, the hand that had been closest to the blast when everything went wrong. She held it between both of hers, feeling the ridged skin and the gaps where smooth tissue should have been, and she held on.
His breathing hitched.
"I keep moving because the silence is where he lives," Blast said quietly. "Loud, fast, always something happening. If I don't stop, I don't hear him humming. If I don't stop, I don't have to count who's missing."
"And when you stop?"
"When I stop, he's twenty years old and I'm holding a wire cutter and the world is about to end, and I can't—" His voice broke. "I can't make it not happen. No matter how many times I replay it."
Becca stood, still holding his hand, and stepped into his space. He was leaning against the wall, and she moved between his arms, pressing her palm flat against his chest where his heartbeat hammered through his shirt.
"You're here," she said. "Right now. In this garage, in this moment. Danny's not in the silence, Keith. He's in the past. And you're allowed to stop moving."
He looked down at her with eyes that held six years of grief and guilt and the kind of pain that men like him buried under noise and violence and the constant forward motion of a life lived at full volume.
"You make it sound simple."
"It's not simple. But you don't have to do it alone."
His free hand came up and cupped the back of her neck, his scarred fingers threading into her hair. He held her there, forehead to forehead, breathing the same air, and the tremor in his hands slowed.
Then he kissed her.
Not the way she'd expected. She'd imagined Blast would kiss the way he did everything—fast, loud, overwhelming. But this was slow. Deliberate. His mouth found hers with the careful precision of a man handling something volatile, and the tenderness in it made her knees buckle.
She kissed him back, her hands sliding up his chest to his shoulders, pulling herself closer. He tasted like bourbon and want and the sharp edge of grief that was finally, finally loosening its grip.
"Becca." Her name came out rough against her lips. "Tell me to stop."
"No."
"I'm serious. This goes further, and I'm not going to be able to—"
She grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled. "I said no."
Something shifted. The tenderness didn't vanish, but it gained an edge—his hands tightening in her hair, his mouth going harder against hers, the restless energy that defined him finding a new outlet.
He lifted her off the workbench and she wrapped her legs around his waist, feeling the strength in his arms, the heat of his body through too many layers of clothing.
"My room," he said.
"Your room."
He carried her through the garage and up the stairs, his mouth never leaving hers, navigating the compound hallways with the spatial awareness of a man who'd learned to move through hostile terrain in the dark.
His door opened under his hand—she heard the knob turn, felt the shift as he shouldered through—and then she was on his bed with his weight above her and his hands already working the zipper on her hoodie.
"Slow down," she whispered.
He froze. "I thought you said—"
"I said don't stop. I didn't say rush." She caught his wrist, bringing his scarred hand to her mouth and pressing a kiss to the center of his palm. "You don't have to be fast right now. You don't have to fill the space."
His breath shuddered out of him.
"I don't know how to do this slow."
"I'll show you."