Chapter 16 #2
“Yo, Kingston,” Mason says through a mouthful of protein bar, “you know this shit expired in 2019, right?”
I glance at him sideways, boots laced tight, dirt climbing my calves like ivy. “So did you, but we’re still choking you down.”
The guys laugh—low, bitter, bone-deep. It’s the kind of laugh you only hear out here. Half hysteria, half habit. None of it joy.
“Fuck you,” Mason grins, tossing the bar at my chest. “You love me.”
“I tolerate you.”
“Same thing in man-speak.”
I spit into the dust, shrug my rifle higher up my shoulder, and scan the compound like it might do something different today.
It won’t.
Same cracked walls.
Same rusted gate.
Same scent of diesel, BO, cheap coffee, and something sour that might be trauma or might be lunch.
Three months in this hellhole and it still smells like the first day of hell.
We’re stationed west of nowhere. Between borders, beyond comfort. Name’s classified. Coordinates blurred.
What you need to know is this: There’s sand in our food.
Sand in our showers. Sand in our beds. The kind of sand that never comes out.
The kind that gets into your molars and your mind.
We sleep four hours at a time, if we sleep at all.
We joke about death like it’s a girl we all dated once and every single man here knows that on any given patrol, his name might be the one someone doesn’t say loud enough because that’s how we handle grief—quiet. Fast. Gone.
“Five minutes out,” Leo calls from the tower, his voice crackling through the comm. “Keep your dicks in your pants, gentlemen.”
“Speak for yourself,” Reese mutters, cocking his rifle. “Mine hasn’t seen daylight since January.”
“Neither has your personality.”
“Shut up, Mason.”
We suit up without speaking. It’s muscle memory now. Bulletproof vests like second skin. Helmets worn like crowns of guilt. Boots that carry stories no one’s writing down.
I take point. Not because I want to because if someone’s going to eat the first bullet, it might as well be me.
Out here, I’m not a shrink. I’m not a trauma counsellor with inked fingers and a wall of degrees I never earned for the right reasons.
Out here, I’m just Dax.
Grim. Quiet. Observing.
The one they call when shit gets too dark even for them.
“Hey, Doc,” Mason says, walking beside me as we leave the wire. “Ever psychoanalyse yourself?”
“Every day.”
“Figure out why you’re such a prick yet?”
“Working on it.”
He laughs again.
It doesn’t reach his eyes.
We move through the village slow. Kids peek through shutters, wide-eyed and barefoot. The market’s empty. Too quiet. My gut tightens.
Leo’s voice crackles in my ear: “No movement northeast. Repeat—no movement.”
“Copy,” I say, but the words feel off.
Everything feels off.
Reese shifts beside me, tapping his index twice against the rifle. Our silent signal.
“Eyes up,” I mutter. “Stay sharp.”
And then, like clockwork, like the fucking nightmare that never changes—
BOOM.
The world splits. Dust explodes around us. Ears ring. Mason’s voice is gone. My knees hit the dirt before I realise I’m falling.
Someone’s screaming.
Maybe me.
Maybe not.
Blood hits my neck warm and fast.
Sticky.
Not mine.
I blink through the smoke.
Mason.
Mason.
He’s writhing on the ground, blood pouring from somewhere I can’t see. His leg—fuck, his leg—
“Doc! DOC!” Reese’s voice is hoarse. “We need you on him!”
I slide on my knees, gear slicing my side. My hands are already moving. Tourniquet. Pressure. Pressure. Pressure.
“Mason. Hey. You stay with me, you stubborn fuck.”
He’s sobbing, teeth gritted, eyes wide. “I can’t—I can’t feel my leg—”
“I’ve got you.”
I don’t even hear my own voice, just the way it shakes. It’s instinct now. The blood doesn’t register. Not yet. The screams don’t hit.
Right now, he’s mine. My responsibility and I’m not losing another one.
We drag him back to the MRAP under cover fire.
Leo’s got the fifty up top, spraying lead into shadows.
Reese is limping.
I don’t even know where I’m hit.
The med tent blurs into view, and I don’t remember how we get there, just the weight of Mason’s blood on my chest and the stench of burning flesh in my nostrils.
I slam through the flap, barking at whoever’s nearest.
“He needs compression now! He’s fading fast—MOVE!”
And that’s when I hear her voice.
Her.
“Dax?”
I freeze.
No.
No, no, no.
She’s not supposed to be here.
Not here.
Not in this fucking blood-soaked room, not with his blood on me, not with my world crashing and hers walking into it like some cruel twist of fate.
My hands are still on Mason but my eyes are locked on her.
Cassandra.
Hair tied back. Scrubs soaked. Face pale.
Cassandra fucking Monroe.
I blink once.
Twice but the blood doesn’t leave her face, and the ghost doesn’t vanish, and the room doesn’t stop spinning long enough for me to believe she’s real.
Not here.
Not now.
Not when I’m holding Mason’s blood in my fucking palms and screaming at the corpsman to hold pressure while his leg drowns the table.
Cassandra.
She looks like a fever dream in scrubs.
And all I can think is—
No.
She’s too soft for this. Too bright. Too whole. This place—me—we’ll rip her apart.
“Butterfly.”
The word tears out of me before I can stop it. Like my throat wants to remember what it feels like to say her name without saying her name.
She takes a step closer, tears already rising.
“I—I didn’t know you were—”
“Get the fuck away from me.”
Her mouth parts.
Eyes go wide.
“What?”
“You heard me.” My voice is a rasp now. A growl that doesn’t sound like mine. “Get away, Cassandra. Now.”
“But you’re hurt. You’re—Dax, you’re bleeding.”
“So?”
“You need to be treated—”
“I don’t want your fucking hands on me.”
Her jaw locks, and something in her eyes shifts.
Not the softness I remember. Not the girl with syrup on her thighs and stardust in her hair. No. This one’s steel wrapped in scrubs. This one’s been walking through fire since I left her.
“Then find someone else to clear you,” she snaps, chin tilted. “Because if I don’t sign you off, you don’t go back out there.”
“You think I give a shit about paperwork?”
She doesn’t flinch. She should. She doesn’t. She takes another step forward. Closer to the blood. Closer to the bastard I’ve become.
“I don’t care if you hate me, Dax. But I’m the only medic available right now. And I am not letting you bleed out in this tent because you’re too much of a stubborn asshole to let me do my job.”
I stare at her.
At the tiny freckle beneath her right eye.
At the way her hands shake just enough to betray the fire in her voice.
At the edge in her spine that says she doesn’t care, not really, but the storm in her eyes that tells me she does.
Fuck.
I feel it hit me like the blast from earlier.
She’s here.
She’s really here and I can’t breathe.
“I told you to stay away from me,” I whisper, voice cracked open like the rest of me.
She sets down her med kit, snaps on gloves, wipes a tear before it falls.
“And I told you I wasn’t leaving you again.”
Her hands are on me before I can stop her—ripping my vest off, pressing gauze against the split in my side.
Every touch is a curse. Every press of her fingers burns worse than the shrapnel.
I flinch.
Not from the pain.
From her.
From the way my chest remembers her weight.
From the way my throat aches to say something—anything—that isn’t cruel.
“You think I wanted this?” I bite, jaw clenched. “You think I wanted you to follow me into this hellhole?”
“I didn’t follow you.”
“The fuck you didn’t.”
“You left me.”
I go still.
Her voice breaks on the words.
Just slightly.
“You left me in that kitchen, bleeding and broken, without so much as a real goodbye.”
“I said goodbye.”
“No, Dax.” She meets my eyes. “You said butterfly. And then you vanished.”
I almost laugh.
Almost because she doesn’t get it. She never did.
I didn’t leave because I didn’t love her.
I left because I did because this war was always going to kill one of us and I’d rather it be me but now she’s here, in the middle of it, with blood under her nails and heartbreak in her eyes and I don’t know whether to scream or hold her or shove her back out the tent and into the safe world she was never meant to leave.
“You don’t belong here,” I rasp.
“Neither do you.”
“You’re going to get yourself killed.”
“Maybe I don’t care anymore.”
Something cracks inside me at that.
She finishes dressing the wound. Pulls the gauze tight. Tapes it with trembling fingers.
She doesn’t look at me when she says it—
“At least if I die here, I’ll die fighting for something.”
I don’t say what I’m thinking. That if she dies here, I’ll burn this place to the fucking ground.
“Anything else, Sergeant Kingston?” she asks, voice detached. Controlled.
I grit my teeth.
The war’s still roaring in my ears.
The blood hasn’t stopped pumping.
The ghosts haven’t shut up.
But her?
She’s already walking away.
So I say the only thing I can.
“You should’ve stayed gone, Butterfly.”
I watch her flinch.
I hate myself more than I ever have before.
The second she’s gone, the air changes.
Like the tent itself knows something sacred just snapped in half.
The flap of the tent swings closed behind her, and I just stand there.
Breathing.
Bleeding.
Choking on all the things I didn’t say.
“You should’ve stayed gone, Butterfly.”
God, I’m such a fucking bastard.
I drop down beside Mason’s cot, boots slipping in blood that’s not mine this time. His face is pale. Grey under the bruising and he hasn’t opened his eyes since the roadside ambush ripped our convoy apart and turned his thigh into something unrecognisable.
He saved me.
Stupid bastard. Always pushing too far forward, always laughing too loud, always standing between me and the bullet even when I didn’t ask.
Especially when I didn’t ask.
“Hey, man,” I mutter, fingers curling around the metal frame of the cot like I might crush it. “Still breathing?”
Nothing.
Not even a twitch.
Only the faint sound of machines beeping behind me.
The kind of rhythm you don’t trust.
The kind that could flatline with one wrong move.
I lean in closer.
Elbows on my knees.
Stare down at the soldier I’ve known since boot.
He’s the one who called me out when I got too quiet. The one who left notes in my boots when I forgot how to sleep. The one who told me—dead serious—if I didn’t tell that girl how I felt, he’d fly to the UK and do it for me.
“Yeah,” I whisper, dragging a hand down my face. “I fucked that up too.”
The light overhead flickers. The blood on my arm is dry now, cracking in patches like war paint. I don’t bother cleaning it off. Not until I know if he’s going to wake up.
I rest my forearms on the cot. Bow my head like I’m praying, even though I haven’t done that since the last time I thought God was listening.
“You can’t die, Mason. You hear me?” My throat tightens.“You’re the only one who still knows who I used to be.”
The tent’s too quiet.
Somewhere outside, a chopper starts spinning. The storm’s still blowing sand through every open gap, but in here, it’s like time has stopped.
Just the slow beep of the monitor. Just the sound of my breath trying not to break.
I close my eyes.
See her.
Cassandra, with her hands on my skin, tears in her voice, fire in her spine.
The way she looked at me — like she still saw something worth saving, even after everything I did to her. Even after I made her bleed just to prove I could walk away.
Fuck.
I press a hand to my chest like it might stop the ache. Like it might crush the part of me that still wants her more than I want my own survival.
She’s here and I ruined that too.
“You ever meet someone who made you forget what it feels like to want to die?”
My voice is rough.
Too low.
I don’t care if Mason hears.
Or if he’s somewhere else already.
“She kissed me like she wasn’t scared of the scars,” I say. “Like I was still human under all the shit I’ve done.” I scrub a hand down my face, eyes stinging. “She said my name like it meant something.” I look down at him again. “Don’t make me go through this war without you, man.”
Silence.
“You’re the only bastard who gets it.”
The only one who knows that I break people for a living and still laughed when I snuck her syrup packets from the mess hall.
The only one who saw me look at her and said:
“You’re already fucking gone for her, Kingston.”
And I was.
Still am.
So gone it hurts to breathe.
I lean back.
Pull the dog tags from my shirt.
His and mine, tangled together from the run.
“I’ll stay,” I mutter. “You’re not waking up without me here.”
I shift the chair closer. Pull off my gloves. Rest my hand on the edge of the bed and for the first time in weeks, I let the weight sit in my chest.
Let myself feel it.
The fear.
The guilt.
The ache of knowing the two people I care about most might bleed out before I can save either of them.
The last thing I say before the lights flicker again?
“Don’t make me lose both of you.”
I don’t move for hours because if he dies…and if she walks away again…
I don’t think I’ll come back either.