Chapter 9
Nine
Ava
The mattress presses against my shoulder blades, firm and unforgiving, offering no give where I need it most. After a while, pretending I can rest feels pointless.
I slip back out into the main room and find Silas working on a laptop. The firelight carves his profile in bronze and shadow, his shoulders still angled toward the flames exactly as they were when I left. He doesn’t say a word about me not staying put.
Instead, he puts the laptop to one side and smiles. “Scrabble?” he says, like it’s a reasonable solution.
The normalcy of his suggestion is as comforting as his arms.
“Why not,” I say.
With a nod, he disappears into the spare room and returns with a battered box, and sets it on the coffee table between us.
"Fair warning," I say, settling into the chair across from him. "I take this seriously."
He opens the box and starts setting up the board, smiling. "So do I. Games got competitive in my home. Even worse at Jericho."
The tiles click into neat rows under his palms, and when he glances up, his gaze holds mine for half a second longer than necessary before dropping to the bag beside him.
"Ladies first."
I draw my tiles, grateful for something to focus on besides the awareness humming between us. The first few turns are quiet. Focused. He plays STORM for fourteen points. I counter with QUIET for fifteen.
“One thing I’ve been meaning to ask,” I say, shifting my tiles. “Why the name Jericho for your headquarters?”
Silas doesn’t look up immediately. He studies his rack with the lethal stillness that parallels Reagan.
“People remember the walls,” he says, his voice low, gravelly. “They like the idea of a miracle doing the heavy lifting.”
“And you don't?”
He finally meets my eyes, and there’s a weary sharpness there. “I like the man who had to lead the march. Joshua didn't just wait for a handout. He sent the spies in first. He did the recon. He knew that even if the walls fell, you still had to be ready to clear the rubble.”
“That’s one of my favorite Bible stories,” I venture. “He was a great leader.”
He leans back, the lamplight. “He was. But most people forget the Gibeonites. They showed up in rags with moldy bread, acting like refugees, and Joshua fell for the ruse. He gave his word to a lie and put all of Israel at risk.”
He exhales, a sound like dry leaves skittering on pavement. “Jericho isn't about the victory for me. It’s about the vigilance. It’s a reminder that even the best commander can be fooled by a beautiful story if he isn't watching the perimeter.”
I look down at my tiles, but the letters have blurred into a different kind of code.
He doesn't want to be a king behind high walls.
He wants to be the scout who never sleeps, the one who knows that the greatest threat doesn't always come with a sword—sometimes it comes with a handshake and a desperate face.
While I consider that, he studies the board again.
"Your turn," he says finally, voice lighter than before.
I play NEURAL across a double word score. Twenty-four points.
"Showing off now?" he says, then promptly lays down ADZE.
I stare at it. "That's not a word."
Silas leans back in his chair, arms crossed, looking entirely too pleased with himself. "It is."
"A-D-Z-E?"
"Triple letter score on the Z." He grins. "That's forty-two points."
I narrow my eyes at him. "You're making that up."
"Want me to prove it?"
"Of course I do."
With a smile, he gets up, goes into his bedroom, and brings out an open dictionary, then turns the book toward me. Adze: a tool similar to an ax, with an arched blade at right angles to the handle.
"That's..." I scramble for an appropriate word. "Infuriating."
"I told you I was competitive." He marks down his score with obvious satisfaction.
"Where did you even learn that word?" I ask, rearranging my letters.
"Had to build a lot of things overseas. You pick up vocabulary."
“Did you pick up an adze too?”
He chuckles, and I find it impossible not to join him. For a while, the walls of the cabin feel less like a bunker and more like a vacation home.
But as the game goes on, my focus starts to splinter.
The clinical part of my brain is taking notes, but the rest of me is reacting to the sheer, masculine weight of his presence.
I try to keep my eyes on the wooden tiles, but they keep gravitating back to him, drawn by a magnetic pull I can't switch off.
My intellect and faith have always been my compass, but right now, my biology is screaming over the top of it. At thirty-four, I see it for what it is. It’s a hormonal ambush.
I look at my rack. I have the letters for CRANIAL. It’s the perfect word. Professional, high-scoring, and an easy anchor for my wandering thoughts. Cranial nerves. Keep it medical, Ava.
Still, I find myself tracing the hard, uncompromising line of his jaw, shadowed by a dark, rough-hewn stubble that catches the amber glow of the fire.
I reach for the tiles, my eyes still fixed on the hard, elegant line of his cheekbone. I'm spelling it out in my head—C-R-A-N-I-A-L.
I place the letters one by one, clicking them into place.
Silas’s voice drops into a low, dangerously amused register that makes the fine hairs on my arms stand up. "Interesting choice," he says.
I look up, meeting his eyes. He isn't looking at the board. He's looking at me with smoldering heat in his gaze that makes my breath hitch.
"What?" I ask, my face starting to burn.
He gestures to my play. I look down, and my stomach drops to my toes.
I didn't play CRANIAL. I played CARNAL.
It’s sitting there, hooked into his word STORM. A word that feels like a shout in the silence of the cabin. I have two I’s still sitting on my rack, useless. I’ve effectively stripped away every bit of my professional dignity in six letters.
"That's..." I scramble, my voice failing. "I was going for something clinical. A neurological term. Cranial. I must have been… distracted."
"Cranial," he repeats, the word sounding like a low vibration in his chest. He leans forward, just an inch, his gaze dropping to my mouth for a heartbeat before locking back onto mine.
Our eyes lock, and I can’t look away. My heart is tripping over itself, a chaotic rhythm that I’m sure he can hear in the silence.
"Or tired," he says finally.
I don't look at the board again; I can’t. I’m only looking at him, feeling the crushing weight of everything we haven’t said pressing into the small distance between us.
"Yes," I breathe, my voice trembling just enough to give me away. "That must be it."
Silas
Ava settles onto the couch with a medical journal, her posture as rigid as the spine of the book. While she tries to disappear into a world of science, I bring war into the kitchen. I spread the dark, scent-stained oilcloth across the table and begin the slow, rhythmic disassembly of my Glock.
The routine is ingrained habit—fieldstrip, inspect, clean, reassemble.
I’ve done it in the Monsoon season in Somalia and the humidity of the Sahel.
But tonight, my hands—hands that can take apart an M249 in the dark—feel heavy.
Unreliable. Every time I stroke the bore brush through the barrel, my mind drags me back to the Scrabble board.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Sure," I say. My voice is flat, the "Green Beret stare" firmly in place, even though my pulse is spiking.
“Does the violence of what you do bother you?”
"Every day," I say.
"Then how do you do it?"
I pick up the cleaning cloth, focusing on the cold, indifferent steel of the slide. "Someone has to be the wall between the wolf and the lamb."
"And you think that's you."
"I know it is." I reassemble the slide with the sharp, rhythmic clicks of a man who lives by the manual. "It doesn’t mean I’m a saint. It just means I’m willing to be the shield. No matter what."
She shifts on the couch, tucking her legs underneath her.
The fabric of her leggings pulls taut. I snap my gaze back to the table—a tactical pivot.
Set a guard, O Lord, over my eyes. I’ve spent a decade training my body to endure cold, hunger, and sleep deprivation. I thought I’d mastered the flesh.
"Is that why you're alone?" she asks softly.
I focus on the scent of CLP oil and not on why she’s asking. "Part of it. Special Forces doesn't exactly make for a stable home life. You see things that make 'normalcy' feel like a lie."
"But you still have faith."
"Faith is the only thing that keeps the mission from turning into something else," I say, my voice dropping an octave. "It’s the discipline. The boundaries."
"My father used to say faith was about trusting through the questions."
"He was a wise man." I look at her. "He’d be proud of you. The strength it takes to keep going."
"I don’t feel strong," she whispers. "I feel foolish."
I set the cleaning rod down on the table—the metal clack echoing like a hammer falling on an empty chamber. "You did nothing wrong, Ava. You were being kind, and a coward tried to exploit that. That’s on him. Never you."
She doesn’t argue, but she doesn’t look away. She’s watching me with the same quiet intensity she had across the Scrabble board.
My pulse jumps. All my training is telling me to identify the threat and neutralize it, but the "threat" is my own weak flesh.
I force my attention back to the Glock, sliding the magazine home with a sharp, mechanical click.
"I promise you," I say, my voice low and leveled. "I will do whatever it takes to keep you safe. You have my word."
Ava lets out a slow, painful breath. "I know you will," she says softly. "I've never doubted that."
I don’t look at her. I can’t right now. I just pick up the next round, keep loading, forcing my focus back where it belongs.