Chapter 26
You’re Distracting Me
Mira
Iwas distracted.
That realization hit me three separate times before noon, and each one pissed me off more than the last.
The first happened in the med wing when Bo asked me for saline, and I stood there staring at the shelves for a full second too long before I realized I’d already passed it twice.
The second came when one of the lower-level fighters tried flirting with me while I stitched his eyebrow shut, and I barely registered half of what he said because my brain was somewhere else entirely.
The third was worse, though. Worse because it actually mattered.
I missed a camera rotation. Not fully. Not enough to expose myself.
But I caught it later than I should have, and realized too late that the west corridor surveillance sweep had shortened by six seconds since the last time I mapped it.
Six seconds.
That kind of detail used to come naturally to me. I noticed changes before they happened half the time. That was how I’d survived this long inside Ironhand without getting caught.
Now? Now my thoughts kept drifting back to him.
The way his hands felt on me up on that catwalk. The way his voice roughened when he said my name like I still belonged to him. The way he looked at me afterward, like he wanted to tell me something and hated himself for holding it back.
I slammed a cabinet shut harder than necessary, and immediately regretted it when the sound cracked through the med room sharply enough to draw attention. One of the nurses glanced over from across the room before returning to her work.
Focus.
I exhaled slowly through my nose. I forced myself back into the present while I reorganized supplies that were already organized. Busywork. Something to keep my hands occupied while my mind kept trying to spiral somewhere dangerous.
Because that was the problem. Not the sex. Not even the feelings attached to it. It was the fact that I was slipping back into him so easily, like my body and heart had been waiting two years for permission to stop pretending they were over him.
I hated that.
Hated how natural it felt to stand close to him again.
Hated how quickly anger dissolved the second he touched me in a way that felt familiar instead of strategic.
Hated that somewhere deep down, despite everything he’d done, a part of me still trusted him enough to fall asleep against his chest for a few stolen minutes before reality came crashing back in.
That was the part that scared me. Not Ironhand. Not Silas.
Aiden.
Because loving him had already ruined me once.
My fingers tightened around a stack of inventory sheets as I forced myself to keep moving through the room, checking expiration dates and supply counts with mechanical precision. In contrast, my thoughts kept dragging backward anyway.
I almost walked straight into someone in the hallway outside.
“Easy there,” the guy muttered, steadying the crate in his arms before it tipped.
“Sorry,” I replied automatically, stepping aside too late. Irritation flashed hot under my skin because that shouldn’t have happened either.
I didn’t miss the movement around me. Except apparently, I did now.
The guy gave me a strange look before continuing down the corridor, and my jaw clenched hard enough to ache once he was gone. Small mistakes. Tiny lapses most people wouldn’t notice.
But I noticed them. And if I noticed them? Someone else eventually would, too.
That realization settled ugly and heavy in my stomach as I leaned briefly against the cold concrete wall and closed my eyes for half a second longer than I should have.
This was what emotional attachment did inside places like Ironhand. It dulled instincts. Softened edges. Turned survival into a distraction.
And the worst part?
Even knowing all of that, even feeling myself slipping inch by inch back toward him, I still couldn’t make myself regret what happened between us.
Silas found me before I had a chance to fully reset my head.
I was halfway through updating inventory logs in one of the lower admin rooms when the door opened without warning, and his presence filled the space before he even said a word.
The room itself was small, little more than a converted office lined with old filing cabinets and glowing monitors tied into Ironhand’s internal systems. Quiet.
Isolated enough that his arrival immediately put me on edge.
“Lena.”
I looked up from the terminal calmly and forced my expression into neutral even as irritation curled under my skin at being caught off balance again today. “Something you need?”
Silas shut the door behind him with deliberate ease before crossing the room slowly. He didn’t crowd me immediately. Didn’t posture. That somehow made him more intimidating than he would have been if he had.
“I’ve been reviewing your work,” he said casually, as he rested one hand against the edge of the desk beside me.
Not praise. Assessment.
I leaned back slightly in the chair, keeping my tone flat. “And?”
His mouth twitched faintly. “And you’re efficient. Adaptable. You don’t hesitate when things get unpleasant.”
The transport. That was what this was about.
I kept my breathing even, refusing to react to the implication buried underneath the compliment. “You don’t keep people around here who hesitate.”
“No,” he agreed quietly. “We don’t.”
Silence stretched for a second before he slid a black folder across the desk toward me. My eyes dropped to it automatically, pulse tightening when I noticed there were no standard markings on the cover.
Restricted.
Interesting.
“New assignment,” Silas said. “You’ll start assisting with external routing verification.”
That got my attention despite myself.
I opened the folder carefully. I scanned the first few pages while trying not to let my focus sharpen too visibly. Shipping routes. Transfer schedules. Offshore movement codes. None of it was fully detailed, but enough to immediately confirm these weren’t standard internal logistics.
This was higher-level access.
“You’re giving me manifests now?” I asked lightly, like I wasn’t already mentally cataloging every line on the page.
“I’m giving you responsibility,” he corrected. His gaze stayed fixed on me as he spoke, studying every reaction with quiet precision. “Don’t confuse the two.”
There it was again. The test. Not whether I could do the work, but whether I’d question it.
One page detailed rerouted shipments tied to coded classifications that didn’t bother disguising what they were anymore, once you understood the pattern. Human inventory moved alongside weapons and narcotics, like all three belonged in the same category.
My stomach turned cold, but I didn’t let it show. Instead, I flipped the page calmly. “What exactly am I verifying?”
“That route stays clean,” Silas replied. “That product arrives where it’s supposed to. That nobody involved starts developing a conscience halfway through the process.”
His eyes held mine when he said it.
Watching. Waiting. Measuring whether morality still existed somewhere under the surface.
I forced myself to hold his stare evenly, shutting the folder with controlled calm before sliding it back toward me. “If the work needed conscience,” I said quietly, “you wouldn’t be running it through Ironhand.”
For the first time since entering the room, Silas smiled slightly. And somehow that felt worse than if he hadn’t smiled at all.
The strangest part was how normal it started to feel.
Not safe, never safe. Nothing about Ironhand allowed for that illusion long enough to survive it.
But after the catwalk, after the transport, after letting ourselves cross lines we both knew we shouldn’t have crossed again, the tension between Aiden and me shifted into something quieter.
More dangerous. Because we weren’t constantly fighting it now.
We moved around each other through the day with a kind of controlled familiarity that should’ve terrified me more than it did.
A glance across a room lasted a second too long.
His shoulder brushed mine in a corridor, and neither of us immediately stepped away.
Small touches passed between us in fleeting moments nobody else would notice unless they already knew where to look.
And maybe that was the problem.
It looked natural. Too natural.
I felt it again later that evening while reviewing manifests in one of the lower offices.
The room was mostly empty except for the low hum of computers and the occasional voice drifting in from the hallway outside.
I was halfway through cross-checking route numbers when someone stepped into the doorway behind me.
I knew it was him before he spoke.
“You missed a line.”
His voice settled low against the back of my neck, calm and steady in a way that instantly made my pulse shift despite myself. I looked down at the screen and realized he was right. One route code sat unverified while the rest were already completed.
Another mistake. I hated that he noticed.
But instead of calling attention to it, instead of turning it into an argument or another lecture about distractions, he stepped closer. He leaned one hand beside the monitor, pointing quietly at the line in question.
Close enough that heat rolled off him. Close enough that I could smell smoke, soap, and him.
“Thanks,” I murmured without looking up.
His fingers brushed lightly against mine as he moved away from the keyboard. Not accidental. Not entirely intentional either. Just enough contact to linger.
And somehow, standing there pretending to work while his presence settled around me like something familiar, felt infinitely more dangerous than all our screaming matches combined.
I stayed in the office long after Aiden left.
The manifests blurred together after a while, lines of numbers and coded routes bled into each other, no matter how many times I forced myself to reread them.
My focus kept slipping backward, replaying the quiet moments of the day with an intensity that made me increasingly uncomfortable the longer I sat with it.
Not because they were explosive, but because they weren’t.
That was the problem.
Somewhere between the fights and the arguments and the sex, we’d slipped into something softer around the edges without meaning to. Not fixed. Definitely not healthy. But familiar in a way that made it dangerously easy to forget what he’d done to me before he disappeared.
My fingers paused over the keyboard as that thought settled more heavily in my chest.
Easy to forget… No. Not forget. Forgive.
That realization hit hard enough to steal my breath for a second.
I leaned back slowly in the chair, staring at the dim glow of the monitor while my pulse thudded unevenly against my ribs because the truth was sitting there now, whether I wanted to admit it or not.
I was starting to trust him again.
Not completely. Maybe not even rationally. But it was happening anyway, sliding quietly under my skin through stolen touches and lingering looks and the simple fact that every time things got dangerous, some part of me expected him to show up. Expected him to protect me.
And worse? Part of me believed he would.
My stomach twisted sharply at that realization.
Ironhand didn’t scare me the way it should have anymore. Maybe it should’ve after what I saw on the transport, after realizing how massive the trafficking network actually was, after Silas started pulling me deeper into operations I had no business surviving.
But fear inside Ironhand felt simple. Predictable. Trusting Aiden again wasn’t.
Because I remembered exactly what it felt like when that trust was shattered the first time. Remembered the hollow grief of believing he was dead. Remembered learning how to survive around an absence so brutal it nearly hollowed me out from the inside.
And now he was back. Standing too close. Touching me like he still knew me. Looking at me like I mattered enough to destroy himself over.
My eyes closed briefly as I pressed the heels of my palms against them. Exhaustion dragged at me harder than usual tonight.
This was how people got killed in places like Ironhand. Not through weakness but through attachment. Through believing someone else wouldn’t let you fall.
Aiden was becoming that weakness for me all over again, slipping through every defense I rebuilt during the two years he was gone.
And the worst part was, no matter how much I recognized the danger in it, I still found myself gravitating toward him anyway.
Like some broken part of me had already decided that surviving didn’t matter as much as having him back.
That thought terrified me more than anything I’d seen inside that truck.
More than Silas.
More than Ironhand.
Because Ironhand was honest about what it was. Aiden wasn’t. He made destruction feel safe.
And I was starting to forget why I should be running from it.