Chapter Twenty Five #2
Christ, I fight because I see her—barefoot in the kitchen, syrup shining on her skin. In scrubs, covered in blood, hands steady when mine shake. In the chapel, begging me not to let her fall alone.
Everywhere.
Always.
My ruin.
My resurrection.
My Butterfly.
And I swear—I’ll crawl out of the grave to keep saying her name.
The desert keeps breathing through me. Sand in my teeth. Blood in my lungs. I can’t tell if I’m choking on smoke or drowning in her name.
Butterfly.
It rips out of me again, hoarse, cracked. My chest seizes with it, the monitors spiking, alarms shrieking. Hands clamp down on my shoulders. Voices bark orders I can’t translate. All I hear is her.
“Stay with me, Dax.”
Her voice, soft.
Her voice, jagged.
Her voice in every corner of the room.
I try to move, to find her, but the straps bite. Leather. Steel. My wrists burn, my chest heaves, but I can’t reach her.
Not here.
Not in this hell.
Her face swims in the smoke. The chapel walls rise again—broken glass, stained light, her body shaking in my arms, her tears wet on my tongue.
“You’ll leave again.”
Her whisper slices.
“I won’t—” My throat tears on it. “I won’t leave—”
But then the blast comes again.
Always the blast.
Light—white, blinding.
Sound—gone.
Force—splitting me open.
I convulse against the cot. My ribs grind like broken glass. My stomach twists, bile rising hot. A mask slams against my face, oxygen flooding, burning like fire instead of air.
Hands shove needles into veins that don’t want to hold. Tape rips. Gauze presses. My blood pumps too fast, too thin.
The chapel bleeds into the battlefield. Her face into the crater. Her voice into the gunfire. “Don’t let me fall alone.”
I scream against the mask, soundless. My body arches, trembles, crashes back down.
I see Mason.
Strapped to machines. Eyes half open, whispering truths I wouldn’t admit.
“Cass, he doesn’t know how to survive it, but he can’t breathe without you.”
I see Torres. Hauling me, snarling in my ear, “On your fucking feet, Kingston!”
And then dropping me at her feet.
And I see her.
Always her.
Butterfly.
I try to tell her. Try to confess, raw and bleeding, but all that leaves my mouth is the word that owns me.
“Butterfly.”
Again.
Again.
The word shakes me, breaks me, until even the monitors seem to echo it.
And in the blur—I think I feel her fingers on mine.
Soft. Warm.
Anchoring.
But maybe it’s just another hallucination.
Another ghost to drag me deeper.
Because if she’s real—I don’t know if I’ll survive it.
The world won’t sit still.
Walls melt into sand. Lights turn into muzzle flashes. Voices split into echoes of men already buried.
I’m strapped. No—pinned. No—caught in the blast again, face-first in the dirt, lungs filling with dust. I can’t get them out. My brothers. My ghosts. Mason. Reese. I see them crawling. Hands outstretched. Skin peeling.
“Get up, Kingston—”
But it’s not Torres. It’s my father. It’s my CO. It’s the priest who shoved scripture down my throat when I was too young to bleed. Their voices braid together, pulling me down instead of up.
Butterfly.
She appears at the edges, always at the edges. Her face is smoke. Her mouth is blood. One second she’s reaching for me, the next she’s turning away, walking barefoot through the kitchen with syrup dripping down her thighs.
“You’ll leave me,” she whispers.
I try to answer but my tongue is nailed to the roof of my mouth. The tube down my throat is a gag. The oxygen hiss is the desert screaming.
Hands press my chest. They don’t stop. Too hard. Too deep. My ribs crack. I taste iron. For a breath, I’m certain I’m gone.
Then—beep.
A stuttering metronome.
Proof I’m still here.
I want to beg them to stop. I want to beg her not to go. My lips don’t move. My body’s not mine. I thrash, but my arms are tied, IVs and restraints tangling me tighter than barbed wire.
A mask presses down. My vision tunnels. The faces bend and twist—nurses, soldiers, Cassandra—every one of them wears her eyes. Blue fire. Always those fucking eyes.
I hear Mason’s voice. Too close, too raw.
“He doesn’t know how to survive it. But he can’t breathe without you.”
I choke. Scream. Maybe it’s just in my head.
The monitors spike. A shout goes up. I’m falling into static.
Butterfly leans close. She says my name. Soft, sharp, salvation wrapped in a sob.
Dax.
And I fight.
Through the fire, through the sand, through the broken glass and the hands trying to bury me alive—I fight because she’s here.
The ringing eases. The edges blur. The fire cools. The restraints don’t feel so heavy anymore. The monitor steadies.
One beep.
One breath.
Still here.
I sink back into the dark, not safe, not whole—but alive.
Alive.
And I swear I feel her hand on mine when the world finally stops burning.
The dark thins.
Not gone. Not safe. Just thinned out enough that I can breathe without choking on fire.
My chest still feels split. My ribs ache like they’ve been pried apart and stitched back wrong. My veins are heavy, dragging ice and fire in turns.
But there’s a sound.
Not the hiss of oxygen. Not the shrill of monitors.
A softer sound. Fragile. Familiar.
Butterfly.
I force my eyes open, lids cracked like they’ve been nailed shut. The light is brutal, stabbing. Shapes blur and swim. For a second it’s the desert again, smoke curling, shadows shifting, gunfire snapping too close.
Then the blur sharpens.
Her.
Cassandra.
Slumped in a chair, shoulders hunched forward, hair falling from her tie. Her hands are wrapped around mine, both of them, clutching like I might slip straight through her fingers if she lets go.
Her eyes are red. Puffy. The kind of swollen you only get from hours—days—of crying. But she’s still staring at me, wide and wild, like she doesn’t dare blink.
“Dax?”
Her voice. Christ. It cuts through everything—the drugs, the pain, the ghosts. It’s raw, jagged, beautiful.
I try to answer, but it’s just a rasp, a broken scrape of air past the tube in my throat. My chest heaves. Panic licks hot, but her hands squeeze tighter, grounding me.
“Shh.” She leans close, forehead nearly touching mine. “You’re here. You’re okay. You’re here.”
I blink slow. Force myself to hold her eyes. To believe her.
But the guilt is louder than the machines.
“You’ll leave me,” she said. “You’ll break me all over again.”
The words crawl up my throat like barbed wire, but they don’t make it out. All I can do is stare, my hand twitching weakly against hers, my pulse stuttering in the line taped to my arm.
Her tears spill fresh, sliding hot onto my skin.
“I thought I lost you,” she whispers, voice cracking. “I thought you left me again.”
God. It wrecks me. Shatters me more than the blast, more than the shrapnel still burning in my ribs because she’s right. I did leave. I always fucking leave.
But right now—her hands are on mine, her eyes are on me, her voice is breaking and still calling me back and I can’t look away.
Not this time.
Not ever again.
Her voice doesn’t stop.
It pours. Quiet. Shaking. Breaking.
Like she’s been holding a dam inside her chest and the cracks finally split the whole thing open.
“I sat there all night,” she whispers, her thumb stroking my knuckles like I’ll vanish if she lets go. “Watching the numbers on those monitors, begging them not to drop. Begging you not to leave me again.”
My throat works, but nothing comes. The tube’s still there. My lungs drag air shallow and ragged, like they don’t trust me to keep going.
Her hair falls against my cheek when she leans closer, and fuck, I can smell her. Soap. Sand. Salt from her tears. It’s like being punched in the chest, the way my body remembers her before my brain catches up.
“I hate you,” she says next, her voice splintering. “I hate you for leaving me in that kitchen. For walking away like I didn’t matter. For breaking me so many times I don’t even know who I am without you.”
Her tears drip hot onto my skin.
My hand twitches. Useless. Weak.
Her grip only tightens.
“But I love you more,” she chokes. “And that’s the part I can’t survive.
Because even when you’re cruel, even when you’re drunk, even when you rip me open—I still love you.
And it terrifies me more than this war ever could.
” Her forehead presses to the back of my hand.
Her shoulders shake. “I can’t lose you, Dax,” she breathes.
“Not like this. Not to them. Not to the silence. Not when I just got you back.”
My chest seizes. Not from pain this time. From her. From every raw word cutting through the fog I’ve been drowning in.
I try to move. Try to lift my hand. My body answers with the weakest twitch, a scrape of nails against her palm.
Her head snaps up. Her eyes find mine and for the first time since the blast, the dark pulls back just enough for me to see her clearly—every tear, every crack, every piece of her breaking over me.
I let it wreck me because if I could speak, I’d tell her that she’s wrong. That I never stopped. That I can’t fucking breathe without her.
But I can’t.
Not yet.
So I just hold her eyes, fragile as glass, and pray she hears all of it anyway. Her words keep spilling. Like she’s scared if she stops, I’ll slip right back into the dark.
“You think you ruined me?” Her voice is sharp and broken all at once, shaking like the rest of her. “You did. God, you did. But you’re also the only thing that’s ever made me feel alive. Do you hear me, Dax? Do you hear me?”
Her hands shake against mine. Her nails bite the back of my knuckles just to prove I’m still real.
“I can’t breathe when you’re gone. I can’t fucking breathe,” she whispers, tears sliding down, hot against my skin.
“I’ve tried. I tried to hate you. I tried to let you go.
But you’re under my skin, in my veins, in every breath I take—and if you die here, if you leave me in this place, then you take me with you. ”