Chapter 17
Chapter
Seventeen
Dax
The base is louder tonight. Generators rumble like dying metal beasts. Distant artillery thuds against the horizon like a heartbeat trying to restart itself.
The air smells like dust, disinfectant, diesel, and the kind of heat that never really cools after sundown — the kind that carries sweat and smoke and the metallic breath of fear.
Canvas walls flap. Boots stomp. Somebody argues with a corpsman outside about painkillers. Someone else sobs softly behind the comms room, muffled like it’s supposed to stay private.
This place eats people alive and somehow I’m still breathing.
I’m not even supposed to be here. One week embedded to ‘observe’ intel patterns, and now I’m knee-deep in blood, hauling kids I didn’t train with out of ambush zones.
The words echo off the metal bed frame as I drop into the chair beside Mason’s cot. The tent feels too small for what’s happened today — too narrow, too stifling, too full of the ghost of the explosion still ringing in my ears.
Mason is still lying there hooked to machines. Not moving. Not speaking but still breathing.
That’s more than most men get out here.
She’s there.
Pretending she’s busy. Like folding gauze or checking monitors is enough to ignore the fucking gravity between us but I can feel her watching me.
I feel it like shrapnel in my spine.
Fuck, Butterfly.
Why did you have to be here.
Of all the fucking places in the world.
You had to be here.
The tent lights flicker overhead like they’re struggling to stay alive. Med equipment hums. The air conditioner coughs out one useless blast of cool air before giving up.
I sit beside Mason’s bed, arms on my knees, head down. My boots are still crusted with his blood. My shirt’s stiff with it. It’s dried into my skin like war paint.
His chest rises. Falls. Slow. Mechanical.
Like the machines are breathing for him because he can’t anymore.
“You always did take the front seat, didn’t you, asshole,” I mutter, my voice so low it barely reaches my own ears. “Now look at you. Bedridden and still giving me shit.”
The beeping of the monitor is steady. It pisses me off.
I’d rather it scream. I’d rather it stop. I’d rather feel something other than this quiet suffocating helplessness.
Outside, a helicopter passes low over the tents, rotors slicing the air like a warning. Dust shakes loose from the rafters. Somewhere, someone curses at a radio.
I glance at her.
Still pretending.
Her hands are moving but her eyes?
Locked on me.
On us.
Fucking hell.
I shift in the chair and scrub my face with my palms. “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”
Silence.
She freezes. Then moves again.
Like I didn’t just land a punch to her ribs.
“Cass,” I growl.
Nothing. Just the clatter of metal as she opens a drawer and slams it shut.
“I said—”
“I heard you,” she snaps, finally turning. Her eyes are glassy, but she’s not crying. Not yet. “I’m his medic. This is my somewhere.”
That stings more than it should. She won’t look at me now. Too busy checking the IV bag. Like it’s more important than the man whose blood still stains my chest.
More important than me.
“I’ll take over his watch,” I say, my voice colder than I feel. “You’re dismissed.”
“You don’t outrank me here.”
“You don’t belong here at all.”
The words are poison. I spit them like venom and the second they land, I hate myself for it.
She freezes. The IV bag sways in her hand and when she turns to face me, it’s like looking into a storm I don’t know how to survive.
“I do belong here,” she says softly. “You just didn’t expect to see me again.”
“I didn’t want to see you again.” That lie hurts more than any wound I’ve ever stitched.
Her throat bobs. “Well… tough shit.”
The tent seems to shrink around us, the air crackling with heat that has nothing to do with the broken AC. Medics murmur on the far side, trying to pretend they’re not listening.
I stand. Move toward the door. I need air. Space. Distance but the sandstorm outside is snarling again, wind brushing the tent walls like fingernails.
Before I reach the flap, I hear her whisper something under her breath.
“What?” I snap, turning.
She’s standing over Mason, her hand hovering just above his.
“You always run when it gets hard,” she says.
Quiet. Controlled. Brutal and that’s the thing with her. She doesn’t need to shout to cut me wide open.
“I don’t run,” I say, jaw tight.
She turns to me. “Then stay.”
“Then stay,” she says.
The words echo like a shot.
As if she doesn’t know what she’s asking for. As if I didn’t already die the first time I left her standing in that kitchen with syrup on her skin and a war in her eyes.
I stare at her.
At her scrubs.
At the smudged mascara beneath her eyes.
At the stupid strand of hair falling out of her bun like it doesn’t care we’re in a fucking war zone.
“Stay?” I laugh—dry, mean. “Why? So you can play nurse and pretend you’re not in over your head?”
She flinches but I’m not done.
“Or is this just some Florence Nightingale fantasy for you, Cass? Gonna bandage broken men and collect love letters like souvenirs?”
Her lips part.
Pain flashes in her face—but she doesn’t cry.
She never cries when I expect her to.
Only when I’m not looking.
“You don’t mean that,” she whispers.
I step closer. My voice drops. “Don’t I?”
We’re eye to eye now. Too close. Too much history choking the air between us.
“I left you in that kitchen for a reason, Butterfly,” I say, voice like a blade. “You weren’t supposed to follow me.”
“I didn’t follow you,” she says, quiet but fierce. “I enlisted.”
“Same thing.”
“No,” she snaps. “It’s not. I didn’t come here for you.”
I smirk. “Sure. That’s why you’re standing in this tent, watching me like you still dream about my mouth.”
She gasps.
Good.
Let it sting.
I turn my back on her. “This was a mistake.”
“You don’t get to say that,” she breathes.
I spin around. “I do when I’m the one who had to walk away.”
“You didn’t walk. You ran. And you didn’t even say goodbye.”
I freeze and that’s when I feel it. That familiar split down the middle of me. The part that wants to grab her by the throat and scream don’t ever leave again, and the part that wants to shove her out of this tent so I never have to feel this again.
So I choose the part that hurts her because it’s safer. Easier to bleed her than admit I’m the one dying.
“I didn’t say goodbye,” I say coldly, “because I didn’t give a fuck.”
Silence.
It’s worse than a slap.
Her hand curls at her side. Her eyes well up—but she doesn’t let them fall.
Not yet.
She’s too proud for that.
“Got it,” she says softly.
I swear to God, I feel something crack but I don’t stop because if I stop, I’ll touch her and if I touch her, I’ll never let go.
So I walk past her.
Out into the heat. The dust. The silence.
Where it’s easier to be the bastard than the boy who still dreams about her every fucking night.
I don’t stop walking until the air burns my lungs.
The sun’s dropped behind the mountains, but it’s still hot as hell—still smells like sand, diesel, blood. The sky is a dead purple bruise. Gunfire pops in the distance — controlled, routine, the rhythm of another unit training two clicks out.
Radios hiss like angry insects.
I lean against the edge of the medical tent, scrape a hand down my face, and breathe through clenched teeth.
Fuck.
Why did she have to be here.
Why did I have to still feel.
I press my thumb into the inside of my wrist, hard. It grounds me. Barely.
That girl. That fucking girl.
She doesn’t know what she walked into. Doesn’t know what I’ve done. What I was before they dropped me here like a broken cog because I’m not even supposed to be on the front lines.
I’m supposed to be the ghost. The mind-breaker. The invisible threat with a calm voice and a clipboard full of secrets. Psychological Special Operations. That was the title. The cover. But the truth? I got too good. Too invested. Too close to the subjects I was meant to manipulate.
They sent me to unravel threats with words instead of bullets—get into their heads, pull them apart from the inside. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes… I didn’t care if it did because something cracked.
Maybe it was after that op in Kyiv. Maybe it was the face of a boy who wouldn’t speak, even when I told him he could live. Maybe it was the fact that I started seeing myself in them — the men I was meant to undo.
Whatever it was, command saw it.
Pulled me.
Reassigned me.
Said it was “temporary.”
Said they needed eyes embedded with field units, someone who could “observe.” I know what this is. This is punishment in camouflage. This is exile by another name and I deserve it.
I deserve the blood on my boots. The weight in my chest. The silence that follows me like a second shadow because I stopped following protocol the second I let her in and now she’s here.
Here, in the same hell I’ve been trying to outrun. She thinks I’m a soldier now. Just another body with a gun but I was never trained for this.
Not the brotherhood.
Not the mess.
Not the blood spraying in your face when your teammate gets hit.
Not the fucking hope that maybe you’ll make it home.
No—my job was always to destroy from the inside.
Not to care.
Not to feel.
And now?
Now I’m standing outside this tent, covered in Mason’s blood, with the echo of her voice in my head—and I swear to God, I want to rip my own heart out for ever letting her matter.