Chapter 15 #2
The man on the floor isn't moving. Blood pools beneath his body, dark and spreading on the wooden planks. His eyes are open, staring at the ceiling with the fixed emptiness of the dead. He has a face. Features. A person, once, before he became a threat to be neutralized.
"Clear!" Kane's voice echoes through the lodge. "All hostiles down. Report."
The responses come in sequence. Stryker, operational. Mercer, operational. Dylan, operational but his wound reopened. Willa, operational. Khalid, unharmed.
Me. What do I report? That I'm alive? That I killed someone? That the weight of it is already settling into my bones like lead?
"Reagan's okay," Willa answers for me. "She's okay."
Part of me wishes Odin were here instead of back at Echo Base.
Dylan says the Malinois has a way of grounding Khalid that none of us can replicate.
I'm not okay. I'm standing in a room full of bodies, holding a weapon I used to end a human life, and the second wave of releases is still scheduled for morning like any of that matters now.
The next hour blurs past in disconnected pieces. Willa checking wounds, Dylan refusing treatment until everyone else is cleared. Kane and Stryker outside, dragging bodies and sanitizing the scene. Mercer maintaining overwatch from the loft, rifle still ready even though the threat has passed.
The man I killed gets dragged out with the others.
Stryker pulls him by the arms, leaving a dark trail across the porch.
His face catches the moonlight for just a moment.
Younger than me. A person who made choices that led him here, to dying on a hunting lodge floor because a journalist put a bullet in his throat.
I wonder if he had a family. Parents who'll never know what happened to him. A girlfriend who'll spend years wondering why he never came home.
Then I stop because that path leads somewhere I can't go.
The porch is cold. I don't remember walking outside, but here I am, sitting on the steps with the pistol still in my lap. Unloaded now. Willa took the magazine, checked it, handed it back empty.
The door opens behind me. Footsteps, careful and measured. Dylan lowers himself onto the step beside me, moving slowly to protect his wound. He doesn't speak. Doesn't try to offer comfort or platitudes.
He just sits there, his presence solid and grounding in a way words couldn't be.
The silence stretches until I can't hold it anymore. "I keep seeing his face. When he fell. He looked so surprised."
Dylan nods slowly. "They usually do."
"Does it get easier?"
He's quiet for a long moment. Long enough that I think he might not answer. Then he exhales, slow and heavy.
"No. It doesn't get easier. You just learn to carry it better."
"How?" My voice cracks. "How do you carry something like this?"
"You chose who to protect." His hand finds mine, warm against my cold fingers. "That's all any of us can do. Make a choice and live with it. Everything else is just noise."
"He was going to kill Khalid."
"I know."
"I didn't have a choice."
"You did." Dylan's voice is gentle but honest. "You could have frozen. Could have missed. Could have let Willa handle it. You had a choice, Reagan. And you chose to protect someone who couldn't protect himself."
The tears come without warning. Not sobbing, not breaking down, just a steady stream tracking down my cheeks. Dylan doesn't comment on them. Doesn't try to wipe them away or tell me it's okay.
He just holds my hand and lets me cry.
The door opens again. Lighter footsteps this time. Khalid appears at the edge of my vision, hesitant, uncertain. He stands there for a moment, watching us, and then his shoulders drop, tension releasing.
"Thank you." His voice is soft but sure. "For protecting me."
I look up at him. At this fifteen-year-old boy who's survived horrors I can barely imagine, who testified before Congress about watching his family die, who keeps going despite everything the world has thrown at him.
"You don't have to thank me."
"I know." He sits down on my other side, close enough that his shoulder brushes mine. "But I wanted to say it anyway. No woman has protected me like that since my mother."
The silence after his words stretches long. His mother, who died in a chemical attack. His sisters, who burned while he hid in a well. And now me, a journalist who never fired a weapon in anger until tonight, who shot a man to protect a boy I barely know.
"I'd do it again," I say. The memory is burned into my brain, and the cost sits heavy in my chest. But if that moment came again, with Khalid in danger and a weapon in my hands, I'd make the same choice.
I've crossed a line tonight. One I can never uncross. But sitting here between Dylan and Khalid, watching the first hints of dawn lighten the eastern sky, I don't feel like I've fallen.
I feel like I've finally arrived somewhere real.
Kane's voice drifts from inside the lodge. He's on comms with Tommy back at Echo Base. The words are too quiet to make out, but the tone carries weight.
"We need to move." Kane steps onto the porch, his expression grim. "Webb burned this team. Eight assets, all expendable. He's sending a message that he's willing to throw away people to get to us."
"The releases," I start.
"Can wait." Kane's voice is firm. "Your sources will proceed if they don't hear from you. The story has momentum. What it needs is witnesses still alive and willing to testify when this goes to trial."
"So where do we go?" Dylan asks.
Kane looks out at the treeline, at the mountains rising in the distance, at the sky slowly turning from black to gray.
"Somewhere they can't find us. Somewhere we can actually hold." He keys his comm. "Tommy, start the protocols. We're coming home."
Echo Base. The place that doesn't exist on any map, that's survived every attempt to find it. The place where we might actually be safe.
I killed a man tonight. Tomorrow, I might have to do it again.