Chapter Twenty Three #2
Leo shifts on the fifty, his barrel locked on rooftops that look too quiet, too clean.
Even the new kid, Harris, has gone pale under all that grit, his Adam’s apple jerking like he’s trying to swallow down death.
The desert stares back at us. Empty. Waiting. Sweat slides down my spine, slow as blood. The air tastes like copper. Like the second before lightning strikes. Like the second before your heart decides it’s done.
Every instinct in me screams to move—forward, back, anywhere but here but training pins me still.
Boots sunk into dust. Rifle steady. Every muscle wound tight enough to snap.
One more second.
One more heartbeat.
One more thought—Her.
Cassandra’s voice, sharp and soft all at once, cutting through the desert: “At least if I die here, I’ll die fighting for something.”
My hand trembles on the trigger because fuck, maybe that’s exactly what’s about to happen.
And then—The silence caves in.
The desert holds its breath.
Nothing moves. Not the kids on rooftops. Not the dogs that usually bark like sirens at strangers. Not even the wind.
Just us.
Five men frozen in the sun.
I can hear Harris breathing too loud through his mask. Hear Reese muttering under his breath—maybe a prayer, maybe a curse, maybe both. Hear the soft tick of Leo’s scope adjusting as he scans windows that stare back hollow.
My fist is still up. My whole arm burns with the weight of it.
One signal and we’re running. One twitch and someone dies.
I force my eyes back down. The line under the sand is thinner than a vein. C4 rig. Wire strung across the path like a smile waiting to split us open and Christ, it wants to.
I can feel it.
That hunger in the silence.
My mouth is dry. My tongue tastes like ash and all I can think is Butterfly. Her hands shaking as she pressed gauze to my side. Her voice breaking when she whispered, “You’ll leave again.”
The desert tilts around me. Sunlight turns white, blinding.
One breath.
One heartbeat.
One mistake.
And then—Click.
It’s so small. So fucking small I almost convince myself I imagined it but my stomach knows before my head does. The world’s already falling apart.
Click.
Then silence.
Too much silence.
The kind that swallows sound instead of carrying it. The kind you only get in the half-second before the universe decides you’re done.
My lungs seize.
My body knows.
Every cell screaming—move but the ground moves first.
BOOM.
The blast tears the world wide open. Sand erupts, a screaming wave of heat and metal swallowing the convoy whole. My ears implode—no sound, just a ringing so sharp it feels like knives in my skull.
Light—white, blinding.
Heat—searing, crawling under my skin.
Force—slamming into me so hard my bones rattle like dice in God’s hand.
I hit the ground chest-first, breath knocked clean out. Dust fills my mouth, my eyes, my veins. My rifle’s gone. My helmet’s half off. All I can hear is ringing. Ringing and the faint echo of voices that might be men, might be ghosts.
I push up—arms shaking, body refusing. The sand’s slick. Not just sand. Blood.
Fuck.
Harris is down, a smear of red where his leg should be. Reese is screaming, clutching his side, eyes blown wide in terror. Leo’s gone—no, not gone, just a shadow on the far side of the crater, limp, unmoving.
I stumble toward him, half-blind, half-deaf, dragging air into my lungs like it’s made of fire. The world is chaos. Shrapnel sings through the air like angry bees.
Another boom in the distance—secondary charge—someone yells but I can’t hear the words.
All I hear is her voice. “At least if I die here, I’ll die fighting for something.”
My knees buckle. I slam my palm against the sand, force myself upright.
Not yet.
Not fucking yet.
I stagger forward, toward Leo, toward the smoke, toward the ruin we just walked into. The desert has teeth. And tonight, it’s biting down. The ringing won’t stop.
It’s in my teeth, my skull, my fucking bones. Everything’s vibrating, everything’s shaking, like the blast didn’t just rip the desert open — it ripped me open too.
The sand burns under my palms. It’s not just sand. It’s grit mixed with iron.
Blood.
My head jerks, desperate for sound, for orientation, but all I get is fragments.
Screams.
Gunfire.
Another boom far off.
My own heartbeat, hammering like it’s trying to escape.
I blink against the haze. My lashes are thick with dust and sweat, and the world is painted in sepia — firelight, smoke, shadow.
Reese is still screaming. The kind of scream that tells you he’s alive but not for long. He’s half-folded, blood streaming down his side, his hands pressed tight but it’s spilling anyway.
Harris is writhing. There’s nothing below his knee, just a torn mess of bone and meat. His helmet’s gone, his eyes are glassy but wild, like he doesn’t even know which part of him to hold first.
I want to move.
Need to move.
But my knees give when I push up, slamming me back into the sand.
Fuck.
Too loud.
Too bright.
I claw at my chest, try to breathe, but my lungs won’t expand, not enough, not fast enough. My mouth fills with grit. The taste of iron coats my tongue.
Somewhere — voices. Barking. Orders? No. Shouts. Foreign. Too sharp, too close.
Gunfire cracks overhead. The sand spits beside my head, spraying hot across my cheek. Instinct takes over, forces me down lower, face pressed to the ground.
I choke on the dust.
My vision tunnels, spinning, blurring. All I see is flashes — Harris’s leg, Reese’s blood, the crater like a wound in the earth.
And then I see her.
Not here. Not real.
But in my head.
Cass.
Her mouth swollen, tears streaking down her cheeks, whispering “You’ll leave me… you’ll break me all over again.”
My chest convulses. I slam a fist against the ground. Once. Twice. Hard enough my knuckles split.
Not now.
Not like this.
Not with her voice in my head and my brothers bleeding into the dirt.
Another boom shakes the air. Smaller. Secondary. I flinch, ears ringing sharper, eyes watering. My heart claws at my ribs, frantic, feral and all around me — chaos.
Smoke.
Screams.
The taste of blood.
The stench of burnt flesh.
The desert isn’t just biting down. It’s chewing and I don’t know if any of us are making it out of its fucking mouth.
The world is teeth.
Biting down.
Chewing.
I can’t move.
Every nerve screams at me to get up, to crawl, to drag myself toward the men screaming, but my muscles won’t answer. My body’s locked, like the shockwave welded me to the ground.
The ringing in my skull sharpens until it’s not sound anymore, it’s pressure. A spike shoved behind my eyes, throbbing with every ragged beat of my heart.
My fingers claw uselessly at the dirt, nails splitting against stone. I want to dig myself out, but the earth keeps swallowing me whole.
Move. Fucking move.
But I don’t.
I stay pressed into the sand like I’m part of it, like I’ve already been buried.
The air’s thick with smoke. Charred rubber, diesel, burnt flesh. My throat closes around it. I gag, cough, choke. The taste is everywhere — in my mouth, in my lungs, in my skin.
Something warm spatters across my cheek. Not sand. Not ash.
Blood.
Reese’s voice breaks again, high and raw, a sound I’ll never get out of my head. He’s begging. Pleading. Words broken into jagged shards.
Please. Fuck. Please—
I can’t look at him.
I can’t look at any of them because if I see their eyes — I’ll see hers.
Cass.
Her face flashes in front of me, clear as daylight through the smoke. Not the way she looked in that chapel, mouth swollen, thighs shaking. No. The way she looked the night I left her. Barefoot in the kitchen. Syrup on her skin. Heart in her throat.
“You’ll leave me.”
And here I am.
Leaving her again.
My chest seizes, a violent spasm that rips the air out of me. I slam my forehead into the dirt just to feel something other than fear. A shadow moves past in the smoke. Shouts in Arabic cut the air. Too close. Too fucking close. I can’t even reach for my rifle. My arms are dead weight.
My body’s not mine anymore. It’s just a carcass waiting to be filled with lead and in that heartbeat, in that half-second stretch of eternity—I know.
If this is it—She’ll never know.
Never know I loved her. Never know she was the only thing keeping me upright out here. Never know that every mission, every trigger pull, every fucking breath—was her.
The desert presses harder. Like it’s daring me to give up. The ringing folds in on itself, a high-pitched scream collapsing into silence.
For a second, I think I’ve gone deaf.
Then—hands.
Fists in my vest, jerking me off the ground hard enough my head whiplashes. Sand and glass cut my cheek. My ribs grind like broken teeth.
“Kingston!” The voice cuts through the fog. A snarl, guttural, familiar. “Get the fuck up!”
I blink, my vision tunnelling, smoke stinging so deep it feels like knives behind my eyes. A face swims into view. Mud. Blood. Helmet tilted, jaw clenched.
Torres.
His mouth moves fast, too fast, but only shards break through the static in my head.
“—ambush—”
“—move—”
“—cover—”
He drags me, half-carrying, half-hauling, boots slipping over dirt slick with blood. My stomach lurches with every jolt. My rifle bangs against my thigh like a dead limb.
I try to find my voice, but it’s buried under the ringing. My throat only works enough to rasp one word. “Reese—”
“Gone!” Torres barks, spitting smoke. His grip on my vest tightens. “Move, motherfucker, or we all go down!”
The blast site burns behind us, the MRAP coughing black fire into the night. Shadows scatter. Some ours. Some not. Gunfire sparks in the haze—short bursts, controlled, answered by screams I can’t translate.
My boots drag trenches through the dirt as he yanks me behind what’s left of a wall. My body slams against it, pain ricocheting down my side where shrapnel sliced deep.
I gasp. Finally. A sound.
Torres crouches low, his eyes blazing. “You with me, Doc?”
I nod once. Barely.
But the truth?
I’m still pinned in the blast.