Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
SLOANE
The rain starts again just after dark. It drums softly against the cabin roof while fog crawls over the mountain like something alive, swallowing the trees one by one beyond the windows.
Rhys sleeps in the chair. Or pretends to. It’s impossible to tell with him.
The fire burns low between us, casting amber light over the cabin walls and catching on the fresh bandage wrapped around his arm.
His head tips back against the chair, eyes closed, one boot stretched toward the hearth.
But even sleeping, he looks tense. Like his body forgot how to stop bracing for impact.
I sit cross-legged on the sleeping bag near the coffee table, surrounded by papers again. My laptop screen glows dimly beside me, illuminating the photograph I can’t stop staring at.
First Recon.
Seven Marines shoulder-to-shoulder beneath a brutal Afghan sun. Dust-covered and exhausted, but alive.
Phoenix stands near the edge of the frame. Rhys beside him. Close enough to suggest trust… or at least responsibility.
My eyes drift toward the sleeping figure across the room. Then lower to the edge of his collar. The scar disappears beneath it. The tattoo beneath those scars. First Recon on his chest. And the coordinates burned permanently into his skin, like penance.
A wound he refuses to let heal.
The realization settles slowly. None of this looks like abandonment. Not the scars or the nightmares. Not how he reacts every time Phoenix’s name enters the room like a third person standing between us.
No.
This looks like a man who outlived something he still doesn’t understand.
I replay every conversation we’ve had since I arrived. He wasn’t where he was supposed to be. He knew what was coming. You weren’t supposed to stop me.
The words scrape against each other until suddenly my spine straightens. Something cold slides through my chest.
Stop me… not leave me or save yourself. Stop me.
The distinction tears through everything. My gaze snaps back to the reports scattered around me.
The official narrative remains an ambush. Chaos. Losses sustained under enemy fire.
But none of it explains why Phoenix moved. Or why Rhys still looks destroyed by trying to stop him. I reach for another interview transcript, fingers shaking slightly now.
Lieutenant Brooks. I skim faster. Then stop cold. “Intel chain compartmentalized.”
My stomach drops. I read it again. Compartmentalized. Separate intel. Separate objectives.
My mind races. Phoenix wasn’t operating under the same information as Rhys. Maybe not the same mission either.
The fire pops softly behind me. Rhys shifts in the chair but doesn’t wake. Or maybe he’s listening.
I look at him anyway. “You knew,” I whisper.
His eyes open immediately. So he wasn’t sleeping. “Knew what?”
“That something about him didn’t fit.”
Rhys watches me silently. The firelight sharpens the hard planes of his face, leaving the rest in shadow.
I stand slowly, clutching the transcript. “The reports mention compartmentalized intel. Separate chains of command.” I swallow hard. “Phoenix wasn’t really part of your team anymore, was he?”
Rhys exhales through his nose. “That’s complicated.”
“No,” my voice sharpens. “It’s deliberate.”
The rain intensifies outside.
I step closer. “He was attached to your unit, but he wasn’t operating like recon.”
Silence.
“That’s why nobody would answer questions about him afterward.”
Rhys’s jaw tightens once. “Some questions don’t get answered.”
“That’s not a denial.”
“No.”
I stare at him. “At first, I thought you blamed him.” My voice drops quieter now. “But that’s not it.”
Rhys’s eyes dart toward the fire then away.
“You think he was trying to do something.”
His throat works once. “He was.”
“Something covert.”
He doesn’t answer.
I laugh softly, humorless. “God.”
The room suddenly feels too small. I pace once toward the window, fog pressing white against the glass. Everything starts rearranging again. The shorter letters. The gaps in communication. The strange wording in the reports.
The missing details.
Phoenix wasn’t just another Marine caught in an ambush. He was involved in something bigger. Something hidden.
And Rhys…
I turn back toward him sharply. “You stopped him.” The words leave me before I fully understand them.
Rhys’s face changes instantly.
“You thought he was breaking protocol.”
“He was.”
“But you didn’t know why.”
“No.” The answer is immediate this time. Painfully honest.
I move closer slowly. “And afterward… you realized he might’ve had a reason.”
Rhys looks at me for a very long time. “Yes.” The confession settles between us like smoke.
I press a hand hard against my ribs. My brother. My brilliant, reckless brother. Running toward something Rhys couldn’t see.
Maybe trying to stop something worse. Maybe trying to save lives. Maybe…
No.
I stop myself there because I still don’t know. That’s the worst part. I don’t know if Phoenix was right. I only know he chose.
“He chose this,” I whisper. My eyes flick back to the reports. Piles of them. Something else sticks out. “Acceptable damage,” I say.
Rhys doesn’t answer. Doesn’t deny it either. And the silence becomes its own kind of confirmation.
“That was First Recon.”
Rain lashes harder against the roof. The mountain disappears entirely beyond the windows now, swallowed by darkness and cloud.
I think about the tattoo burned across Rhys’s chest. Those coordinates. A man marking himself forever at the exact place everything fell apart.
“You’ve been punishing yourself for this the whole time,” I say quietly.
Rhys’s expression hardens slightly. “Don’t.”
“Why?”
“Because you still don’t know enough.”
“Then tell me.”
His eyes lift to mine, exhausted. Terrified in a way that has nothing to do with war zones, storms, or mountains collapsing beneath us.
“If I do,” he says roughly, “there’s no version of him left for you to hold on to.”
The words slice clean through me. Because part of me already knows that’s true. The hero version. The victim version. The uncomplicated version.
They’re all dying here. Slowly. Painfully. And somewhere beneath them is the real Phoenix. A man whose role I’m no longer sure I understood at all.
I sink slowly back onto the sleeping bag, staring at the reports scattered across the table and floor—the evidence, the omissions, the spaces between facts where people bury the things they can’t say out loud.
Anger twists through me, sharp and directionless. Only it’s not for the mountain man I hunted to Hollow Peak. Now it’s for the brother whose story I’ll never fully understand.
I came here to expose Rhys Ward. Now I don’t know who I’m exposing.