Chapter 13
Chapter
Thirteen
SLOANE
Iturn away, ending the conversation. Because he’s already told me too much. Like a coward, I’m afraid he’ll tell me more.
Phoenix worked for someone else. A three-letter agency? Maybe as a spook?
And he was willing to compromise his own brothers-in-arms. That I can’t grasp.
The cabin quiets, the storm muted to distant dripping from the eaves and the tired sigh of wind against the walls. Evening light glimmers through the window, impossibly gentle after the violence outside.
Rhys sits beneath it, a man carved out of all the parts of the day that didn’t survive.
Shoulders taut. Bandaged arm. Scars under my fingertips. And those eyes. Watching me as if he’s already gone somewhere I can’t follow.
I step back first. Or maybe he does. Maybe we both do. Either way, the space between us changes. Goes colder. Wider.
Rhys lowers his gaze, jaw taut, and reaches for the shirt I left draped over the chair.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” he grunts.
I blink. “Bandaged your arm?”
“Come here.” The words land too hard.
I fold my arms, suddenly aware of the damp cling of my clothes. Mud dries on my jeans, and my legs ache from the climb back up the slope.
“I didn’t have much choice.”
His mouth tightens. “You always have a choice.”
“That’s rich coming from you.”
His gaze cuts to mine. There it is again. That darkness. That shut door.
He stands slowly, careful with his injured arm, then buttons his shirt one-handed with the same stubborn discipline he seems to apply to breathing. Each motion is precise and controlled. Infuriating.
“You need to dry off,” he says.
“And you need to stop changing the subject.”
“I’m not.”
My brow knits. “Yes, you are.”
He wheels back around, headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” I ask, pulse kicking.
“To check the slope.”
“No.”
His hand pauses near the latch, but I don’t reach for him this time. I learned outside that putting my hands on Rhys Ward only complicates everything.
Instead, I say, “If you walk out that door, you’re not fixing anything.”
His shoulders stiffen.
“You’re running.”
The room feels heavy, and Rhys shifts uneasily on his heels.
When he turns back, his face looks colder, tighter than I’ve seen it since arriving. “You think that’s what this is?”
“I think every time I get close to something real, you find a reason to leave the room.”
“Maybe you should take the hint.” The words should hurt less than they do.
I nod slowly, swallowing around the tightness in my throat. “That’s what you want.”
His gaze narrows, and he shakes his head. “Don’t, Sloane.”
“Don’t what? Ask questions?” I arch an eyebrow. “Notice the gaps? Point out that nothing you’ve told me matches with what I read?”
His shoulders drop. So does his tone. “The reports told you what they needed to.”
“No,” I say too sharply. “They told me what someone wanted preserved.”
His expression doesn’t change. Somehow, it’s worse than anger.
I step closer. Not enough to touch him. Enough to make him look at me. “You said Phoenix was working something off-book. Above your pay grade. You said he left you. You said the coordinates on your arm are where everything changed. So don’t stand there and tell me the reports were enough.”
“You’re leaving things out,” he grits out between clenched teeth.
“Of course I am.” The bluntness steals the next breath from my lungs.
Rhys looks away first, not as a man ashamed, but as one holding a door closed with both hands.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because there are things you don’t get to unknow.”
I huff a sarcastic laugh. “And you don’t get to decide what I can handle.”
His laugh is low and bitter. “That’s exactly what everyone says before they find out.”
My fingernails dig into my palms.
The logical part of me knows he’s trying to warn me. The grieving part wants to claw every answer out of him until there’s nothing left between us but the bare, ugly shape of what happened.
“My brother died,” I say. “Whatever you’re protecting me from already happened.”
Rhys doesn’t move, his face shrouded in shadows.
Outside, raindrops drum from the roof in slow, uneven beats, like the world’s shaking off the weather.
Inside, Rhys’s breathing changes. “That’s where you’re wrong.” He doesn’t look at me now.
My stomach tightens. “What does that mean?”
He doesn’t answer.
I take another step. “Rhys.”
His mahogany eyes find mine, and for one second, I see it flicker. It isn’t what I suspected, guilt or deceit. No, it’s something I can’t explain—regret with teeth. “He wasn’t following orders.”
The room tips.
I wait for more. But nothing comes.
“What?”
“Phoenix.” His voice scrapes over the name. “He wasn’t where he was supposed to be.”
My pulse pounds once. Hard.
“No.” I’ve already sensed this, read between the lines. Felt something off. And yet, still, my knee-jerk reaction is to protect him… protect my brother’s memory.
Rhys’s expression doesn’t move.
The refusal leaves me before I can stop it because some part of me is twelve years old again, barefoot in a field with my twin racing ahead of me through the dandelions, golden hair bright in the sun, turning back to shout, Come on, Sloane.
Phoenix was reckless with laughter… not lives.
“But the reports,” I whisper. “That’s not what they say.”
“I know.”
“That’s not what the interviewees said, either.”
“I know.”
“You wrote those reports.”
His eyes close for one moment. “Yeah.”
Anger burns in me. “Then why would you leave that out?”
“Because don’t you see? Dead men don’t get to defend themselves.”
I flinch. He notices… like he notices everything. I hate it.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s all you’re getting.”
“No.” I shake my head. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to tell me just enough to wreck one version of him and then stop.”
His face hardens. “I didn’t destroy him.”
“No? Then what are you doing?”
“Trying to protect what’s left.”
The words reach the center of me. For a second, I can’t speak.
Rhys turns back toward the doorway. Not because he wants the Jeep. Not really. I see that now.
He wants out of this room. Out of my questions. Out of the truth pressing against both of us.
I force my voice steady. “Did he endanger your men?”
His hand tightens on the latch. That’s answer enough. But I need words. I need them because silence has ruined enough of my life already.
“Rhys.”
He keeps his back to me.
“Did Phoenix make a choice that put the team at risk?”
The floorboards squeak, the walls heave, as if the cabin’s suddenly unsteady around us. “Yes.”
One syllable cracks something open inside me. It isn’t grief. That I know intimately. Its texture, its weight, the way it makes rooms feel too large and beds too cold.
This isn’t that. This is the ground moving beneath the grave I’ve knelt beside for two years.
“He said, ‘You weren’t supposed to stop me.’ Then, he told me to leave him.” It comes out slowly, as if he’s fighting for every word.
“You’re lying,” I say. I want it to sound certain. But it doesn’t.
Rhys turns then, slow and grim. “I wish I were.”
My throat burns. “Phoenix wouldn’t do that.”
“You don’t know what he was doing.”
“He was my brother.”
“And he was my Marine.” The words land like a thrown blade.
I step back.
Rhys’s face changes immediately, regret flickering through the harshness. But he doesn’t take it back. Maybe because he can’t. Maybe because it’s true.
“He was not yours,” I say.
“No.” His voice drops. “But for those days, his choices were.”
The first tear comes fast, furious, unwanted. I wipe it away before it can fall.
Rhys hesitates, as if he wants to move toward me. But he doesn’t.
Good.
If he touches me now, I might break in a way I can’t afford. “What did he do?” I ask.
Rhys shakes his head.
“What did he do?”
“Not tonight.”
A laugh tears out of me, sharp and ugly. “Of course. Of course not tonight.”
“Sloane—”
“No.” I point at him, my hand shaking. “You don’t get my name right now.”
His mouth shuts.
The silence that follows is worse than the argument. Because in it, pieces start rearranging. The missing details in Phoenix’s records. The strange change in his voice before his final deployment. The way his letters grew shorter. Cleaner. Less him.
The things he didn’t say.
My stomach had known, long before the men in uniform came to my parents’ door, that something about my brother had already gone somewhere I couldn’t follow. I press a hand to my mouth.
Rhys watches me with the expression of a man witnessing damage he caused and can’t undo.
I hate him for that. I hate him for being here. For being alive.
For being bandaged under my hands. For carrying my brother’s last battlefield on his skin. For telling me just enough truth to make every lie I’ve told myself start bleeding.
“I came here because I thought I knew what happened,” I say. My voice sounds far away now.
Rhys doesn’t answer.
“I thought I knew who you were.”
His eyes darken.
“I thought I knew who he was.”
That one almost ruins me.
The wind shifts outside. The last light slips lower over the mountain, turning the cabin dim and gold and haunted.
Rhys finally steps away from the door.
It should feel like victory. But it doesn’t. How can it? I don’t know what I’ve won.
I look at the photo on the small shelf. First Recon. Phoenix looking hard, different, like the world had already changed him. Rhys beside him, competent, protective, a man carved by survival.
Two men in one frame. Two versions of a story. And me standing between them with no idea which one I’m supposed to believe.
“I don’t know which version of my brother is real anymore,” I whisper.
Rhys’s face tightens. But he says nothing. And somehow, that’s the cruelest answer of all.