Chapter 7
Chapter
Seven
Dax
Ishouldn’t have fucking kissed her. I shouldn’t have fucking looked at her, but I did, and now it feels like I’m starving for something I can’t have — but oh, do I wish I could.
Fucking perfect little butterfly.
She shouldn’t have tasted that good; it should have just been a way to get her out of my system. Fuck, I had only just met her, and I was already fucking obsessed.
I pour myself a whiskey from the overpriced bar in my suite — the one I don’t want to pay for, the one that smells like polished wood and old money — but fuck, if I don’t drink, I will go find her, because my body is still fucking hot from having her pressed up against me, my cock is still pumping like she’s still breathing the same air as me, still looking up at me like I hung the fucking moon and she wants to be burned by it.
I down the glass. No ice. No thought. Just burn.
It doesn’t help.
Nothing helps.
I drag a hand down my face and growl into the silence. The kind of growl that belongs in the middle of a fight, or a fuck, or a goddamn war zone.
Not in a luxury hotel room in the city I never wanted to come back to.
But here I am.
Back where all the ghosts live.
Back where I swore I’d never be again.
And the only thing cutting through the static is her.
Her laugh.
Her scent.
The fucking innocence she thinks she’s hiding but wears like perfume.
Christ.
I stare at the empty glass in my hand like it owes me an answer.
Who the fuck is she?
She wasn’t meant to be anything.
Just a girl.
Just a night.
Just a moment I’d forget before morning.
But she’s in my blood now.
And I don’t know how to get her out.
Because I’m not just obsessed.
I’m starving.
And butterflies? They don’t survive men like me. They don’t get kissed in mirror rooms and walk away untouched. They don’t fly.
They fucking fall.
They don’t survive war zones either.
My jaw clenches as I stare out the window of this overpriced hotel suite like I’m still watching for movement, like someone’s about to step out of the shadows and take the shot. It’s muscle memory. Bone-deep. Baked into the blood.
I don’t sleep unless I’ve cleared the exits.
I don’t trust smiles.
I don’t trust softness.
I don’t trust peace.
Because the last time I thought I was safe, I watched my best friend’s brains splatter against the side of a truck, and I didn’t even have time to blink.
“Don’t touch her,” I mutter under my breath.
But it’s not about Cassandra anymore.
It’s about her.
About the girl in Kabul who gave me that same soft fucking smile before she opened her jacket and blew herself into a thousand pieces right in front of me.
Her eyes were the same too — wide, innocent, too fucking trusting.
And I let my guard down.
Just for a second.
One second is all it takes to turn someone you love into ash.
I can still taste the dust on my tongue. Still hear my CO screaming through the comms. Still feel the heat, the blood, the goddamn thunder of it in my chest as I carried what was left of Jenkins back to the Humvee, knowing there was no point.
And now here I am.
Back in civilian life.
Except I’m not living.
I’m waiting.
For the next hit.
For the next goodbye.
For the next soft smile to explode in my hands.
That’s what Cassandra doesn’t get. That’s what girls like her never get.
She thinks I’m just another brooding arsehole with a past and a dirty mouth.
She doesn’t see the blood under my nails.
She doesn’t smell the fucking guilt in my skin.
She doesn’t know what it’s like to hold your brother’s dog tags while his mother screams on the other end of the line.
And she never will.
Because I won’t touch her again.
I won’t kiss her.
I won’t let her fall into me, because I know exactly how this ends.
You don’t bring butterflies to a battlefield.
You bury them.
I turn away from the window, fists clenched, throat burning.
Don’t touch her.
Don’t even think about it.
But all I can see is the way she looked at me.
Like I wasn’t a monster.
Like I wasn’t already dead inside.
Fuck.
I’m going to break her.
And I’m going to love every second of it.
Unless I disappear first.
Unless I make her hate me before she ever figures out the truth.
Before she sees the blood on my hands and the ghosts behind my eyes.