Chapter 11
Rebecca poured whiskey like the compound hadn't been a war zone six hours ago.
Muscle memory. The body's oldest survival trick—when the world explodes, go back to what your hands know. Her hands knew bottles and glasses and the exact angle of a pour that said I see you, I've got you, sit down and breathe.
The bar was full. Brothers lined the counter and filled the booths, some bandaged, all exhausted, carrying the post-combat energy that hummed through the compound like a live wire nobody could unplug.
They drank hard and talked louder than usual and laughed at things that weren't funny because laughing meant they were still alive to do it.
Static sat at the far end with his arm in a sling, left-handing a beer with the grim determination of a man who refused to let a bullet through the shoulder slow down his drinking.
Forge had gauze wrapped around his forearm and was arm-wrestling a brother half his size with his good hand, winning easily, grinning like the shrapnel hadn't happened.
Rebecca poured and wiped and listened and kept her hands busy because if she stopped moving, she'd start shaking, and if she started shaking, she might not stop.
She'd run ammunition through a firefight.
The thought kept circling, disconnected from the reality of it, like a fact about someone else's life.
She'd loaded magazines into firing slots while bullets punched through walls ten feet away.
She'd wheeled a cart of twelve-gauge shells down a corridor with the sound of men dying on the other side of the drywall.
She'd sat in the aftermath with a gun in her lap and empty crates around her and not a single scratch on her body.
She should be falling apart. Every reasonable response to what she'd lived through today pointed toward collapse—crying, shaking, the kind of delayed shock that sent people to emergency rooms.
Instead, she was pouring drinks.
"Another round?" she asked Forge, already reaching for the bourbon.
"You're something else." He shook his head, sliding his glass forward. "Most people would be catatonic right now."
"Most people haven't worked a Friday night at a roadhouse outside Fort Liberty." She poured three fingers instead of two because the man had taken shrapnel and earned it. "This is practically calm by comparison."
Forge laughed—the deep, surprised sound of a man who hadn't expected humor tonight. "Cargo picked well."
"Cargo didn't pick anything. I showed up bleeding on his doorstep."
"Yeah." Forge's eyes crinkled. "That's how it works around here."
She moved down the bar, refilling glasses, checking on brothers who'd been in the fight.
Each one got a clean pour and a steady look and nothing that resembled pity, because these men didn't want pity—they wanted whiskey and normalcy and a bartender who treated a post-assault evening like any other shift.
She could give them that. It was the one thing she had to offer that didn't involve ammunition carts or stolen manifests.
Hannah appeared at the bar around nine, sliding onto a stool with the quiet authority of the president's old lady. She didn't order. Just watched Rebecca work.
"You okay?" Hannah asked, low enough that no one else could hear.
"I will be."
"That's not what I asked."
Rebecca's hands paused on the bottle she was shelving. Just for a second. Then she resumed, because stopping meant feeling, and feeling could wait.
"I ran ammo through a firefight and I'm pouring drinks six hours later," she said. "I don't know what that makes me, but 'okay' probably isn't the right word."
Hannah nodded like that was the most honest thing she'd heard all day. "It makes you one of us." She reached across the bar and squeezed Rebecca's wrist. "The falling apart comes later. When it does, let it. And let him be there for it."
Rebecca looked down the bar toward the doorway. Empty. Cargo hadn't appeared yet—he was still out there somewhere, sweeping the perimeter for the third or fourth time, making sure every body was accounted for and every breach point was sealed.
Controlling what he could control, because today his control had been tested and he needed to prove it still held.
"He'll come," Hannah said, reading her gaze. "They always come to us after. It's the only thing that brings them back down."
The bar emptied in stages. Brothers peeling off in ones and twos, exhaustion finally winning over adrenaline, heading for bunks and quarters and the crash that follows every fight. Static was the last to leave, hoisting his beer in a one-armed salute as he shuffled toward the door.
"Hell of a shift," he said.
"Hell of a day," she answered.
Then it was quiet, and Rebecca was alone with dirty glasses and the smell of whiskey and gunpowder, and her hands finally started to shake.
She gripped the edge of the bar and breathed. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way she'd taught herself at fourteen, when the third foster home had gone bad and the bathroom lock was the only thing between her and a man who drank too much and forgot which doors were his to open.
Survive first. Fall apart later. Later was here.
The trembling climbed from her hands to her arms to her chest, her whole body vibrating with the delayed shock of everything she'd swallowed during the day—the gunfire, the screaming, the sound of bodies hitting the ground outside the walls she'd been running behind.
She'd held it together because people needed her to hold it together, and now nobody needed anything and the dam was cracking.
She heard him before she saw him.
Not his footsteps—Cargo didn't make footsteps. But the shift in the air. The displacement of silence by something solid and alive and radiating heat like a furnace.
He stood in the doorway. Filthy. Blood on his shirt—not his—and gun oil on his hands and something wild in his eyes that she'd never seen before. Not the controlled assessment. Not the clinical evaluation. Something underneath all of that. Something feral and raw and barely contained.
"Everyone's gone," she said. Her voice came out steadier than her hands.
"I know." He didn't move from the doorway. Just stood there, coiled tight, vibrating with the same energy she felt—adrenaline with no target, survival instinct screaming that they were alive and demanding proof.
"Are you—"
"Don't ask me if I'm okay." The words came out rough, scraped raw. "I watched you run through a building full of gunfire. Don't ask me if I'm okay."
"I was going to ask if you're hungry."
Something cracked in his expression. Not a smile. Something more dangerous.
"No," he said. "I'm not hungry."
He crossed the bar in five strides. Not the measured, deliberate pace she was used to. Fast. Urgent. The movement of a man who'd run out of distance and patience and the ability to keep his hands to himself for one more second.
He reached her and his hands closed around her waist, lifting her onto the bar in one motion, settling between her thighs with a possessiveness that knocked the breath out of her.
"I watched you," he said, his voice barely above a growl. His hands gripped her hips, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. "Running ammunition. Through my compound. During a firefight."
"I told you I would—"
"And I almost lost my mind." His forehead pressed against hers, his breathing ragged, his whole body strung tight as a wire. "Every second you were out of my sight, I couldn't think. Couldn't focus. Almost got Ghost killed because I was tracking your position instead of the enemy's."
"Cargo—"
"I can't do this." The words tore out of him. "I can't protect the compound and protect you and function. You break every protocol I have. Every system. Every—"
She grabbed his face and kissed him.
Not the way she'd kissed him in the armory—that had been an offering, gentle, deliberate.
This was a collision. Teeth and tongue and the copper taste of a split she'd reopened on his lower lip.
She kissed him with the fury of a woman who'd spent six hours pouring whiskey while her body screamed for the one thing that would make her feel alive again.
He made a sound against her mouth—something between a groan and a snarl—and then his hands were everywhere.
Rough. Desperate. Nothing like the careful inventory of their first time. He pulled her shirt over her head and tossed it somewhere behind the bar, his mouth dropping to her throat, her collarbone, the curve of her shoulder, biting down hard enough to make her gasp.
"Mine," he said against her skin. Not the awed whisper from the armory.
A growl. A claim staked with teeth and bruising hands and the full force of a man who'd watched his woman walk through a war and couldn't hold back the animal underneath the operator.
"You ran through my compound during an assault, and you're mine, and if you ever—"
"Shut up." She pulled at his shirt, tearing it when the buttons didn't cooperate, needing skin, needing the proof of him alive and whole and here.
Her hands found the scars on his chest—the ones she'd mapped that first night with gentle fingers—and dug her nails into them because gentle wasn't what either of them needed.
He hissed through his teeth and lifted her off the bar, her legs wrapping around his waist, his hands gripping her thighs hard enough that she'd carry the marks for days.
She didn't care. Wanted the marks. Wanted evidence burned into her skin that she'd survived this day and ended it in the arms of a man who looked at her like she was the only thing in the world worth keeping.
He got them as far as the back hallway before his control shattered completely.
Her back hit the wall and his body pinned her there—solid, scorching, shaking with need that had nothing to do with finesse and everything to do with the primal demand to feel another heartbeat against his own.
"Derek," she breathed, and felt the shudder roll through him. His name doing what it always did—cutting through every layer of armor to the man underneath.
"Say it again."
"Derek." She wrapped her fingers in his hair and pulled his head back, making him look at her. His eyes were black, blown wide, and the expression on his face was wrecked. Absolutely wrecked. "I'm alive. You're alive. Stop thinking and feel it."
He stopped thinking.
What followed was nothing like the armory.
No careful inventory. No methodical mapping.
This was collision and combustion—two bodies burning through the terror of almost losing each other, proving they were whole through the most fundamental evidence available.
Hard and fast and loud enough that she was glad the bar was empty, glad the hallway was deserted, glad that the only witness to the sound she made when he found exactly the right angle was the man who'd torn it out of her.
She matched him. Every desperate movement, every bruising grip, giving as hard as she got because she wasn't fragile and she wasn't cargo and she would not be handled gently when what she needed was to feel the raw, uncontrolled force of a man who'd killed for her and almost died for her and was now shaking apart against her because the adrenaline had finally found its target.
"Don't stop," she said. Demanded. "Don't you dare stop."
He didn't stop.
He came apart against her with his face buried in her neck and her name on his lips—not Rebecca, not the measured syllables he usually used. Just Bec, broken and desperate, a name he'd never called her before, shortened the way you shorten something that's too precious for formal address.
She followed him over the edge with her hands fisted in his hair and his heartbeat slamming against her chest, and for one white-hot second, nothing existed but the two of them and the impossible fact of being alive.
They ended up on the hallway floor.
Rebecca wasn't sure how. Gravity, probably, and the complete structural failure of her legs.
Cargo sat with his back against the wall, and she sat in his lap with her face against his neck, and neither of them moved because moving would mean acknowledging the real world and neither of them was ready for that yet.
His hand traced lazy paths up her spine. Gentle now. The roughness burned out of him, replaced by the kind of tenderness that only surfaces after everything else has been stripped away.
"I'm not leaving," she said.
His hand stilled on her back.
"I know what you're going to say." She pulled back enough to look at him. "That it's dangerous. That Slade is still out there. That staying makes me a target."
"I wasn't going to say any of that."
"Then what?"
He studied her face in the dim hallway light. Gun oil on his fingers. Her lipstick smeared across his jaw. Both of them wrecked and half-dressed on a concrete floor that couldn't possibly be comfortable and neither of them caring.
"I added you to every supply list I maintain," he said. "Food, water, ammunition, medical. Every cache in every location. Your name is on all of them."
She stared at him. "That's your version of asking me to stay."
"That's my version of telling you that you're permanent inventory." His hand came up to her face, thumb tracing her cheekbone. "You don't ask inventory to stay. You secure it. Maintain it. Make sure it never runs out."
"You're comparing me to ammunition."
"I'm comparing you to the thing I protect with everything I have.
" His eyes held hers, and underneath the exhaustion and the post-combat crash and the raw vulnerability of a man sitting on a hallway floor with a woman in his lap, she saw something absolute.
"Ammunition keeps my brothers alive. You keep me alive. The math is the same."
She should have laughed. Should have told him that comparing a woman to weapons supplies was possibly the least romantic thing anyone had ever said.
Instead, her eyes burned, and her throat closed, and she pressed her forehead against his because she understood what he was actually saying.
You're essential. You're irreplaceable. I will maintain this with everything I am.
"Okay," she whispered. "I'm on your lists."
His arms tightened around her, and they sat together on the cold concrete floor while the compound slept around them, two people who'd found each other through violence and fear and the stubborn refusal to be broken.
Permanent inventory.
She'd been called worse things.
This one, she'd keep.