THIRTY-FOUR
DAKOTA
The man moves way too fast, so I hit him first.
There isn’t a single thought in it. No plan.
No careful and smart little survival calculation drawn up in the exhausted back office of my skull.
There’s only movement, blood, too many hands, a body turning toward the open door, and the swift and relentless animal certainty that if I wait even one more second, something bad will happen. Something terrible.
So I make something terrible happen first.
My shoulder slams into his middle before he can fully face me, and the impact yanks a harsh sound from his chest. He’s bigger than I expect him to be, solid in a way that memory isn’t, and hard under ripped fabric and blood-soaked layers. He’s all muscle and bone and fever-hot survival.
He stumbles back into the metal table, and a medic swears from somewhere nearby.
Someone shouts my name.
Maybe Kota.
Maybe Dakota.
Maybe don’t.
I don’t even care.
The man’s hand snags onto my jacket, not grabbing to hurt, only reacting. My body doesn’t know the difference anymore, though. My knife is already in my hand, and I twist harder under his arm and slam my knee into the side of his thigh hard enough that his leg buckles.
Pain explodes through my own bad knee in retaliation. Rude and unnecessary if you ask me. Incredibly on brand for the shitshow of a day I’m having.
The guy recovers far too quickly. Even hurt, even bleeding, and even with his face gray under the harsh lights, he turns with the kind of instinct I know all too well.
It’s not clean training, and it’s definitely not soldier-pretty.
It’s an ugly kind of survival. Street survival.
The kind that’s only learned when hesitation costs skin, blood, or bone.
His elbow sails toward my shoulder, but I duck.
His hand reaches for my wrist, and I let him take it, using his grip against him. I step forward instead of back, and the movement surprises him.
Good.
Surprise is a gift that I accept with both hands and several emotionally unstable problems.
I jam my elbow into his ribs and he makes a broken kind of sound, his grip loosening, and I wrench my wrist free right before hooking my foot behind his ankle.
He goes down like a ton of bricks, landing hard.
But not because he’s weak. It’s because he's hurt. Because he’s tired.
Because I’m smaller, faster, angrier, and currently powered by six years of unresolved grief and whatever unholy chemical soup concoction my body has decided to cook fear into.
He hits the floor with enough force to force the medics into scattering back.
I drop with him, one knee to his chest, knife to his throat, and everything comes to a startling stop. Not slowly, but instantly. The room goes completely still around us, all white light, red alarm pulsing, and held breaths.
My blade rests under the guy’s jaw, close enough that one wrong swallow would brush against steel. He doesn’t move, which is the smartest thing he’s done up to this point. Finally, someone in this place has developed survival instincts.
His breath scrapes under me, rough and wet at the edges. Blood is darkening one side of his shirt, spreading under my knee, warm enough that it’s seeping through the fabric. His hands hover near the floor, palms half-open, not fighting now. Not yet.
With his face turned away from me, most of his face is shadowed, aided by the damp strands of pale hair and a smear of blood across his cheek. He smells like antiseptic, rainwater, sweat, blood, and something else my brain refuses to touch with a ten-foot barge pole.
Something green.
Something impossible.
Something buried under six years of dirt and grime.
“Don’t,” someone says from behind me.
Fletcher, maybe.
Hale, maybe.
Hell, could be the entire world for all the attention I’m paying.
I press the knife that little bit closer, and the man goes completely still.
“Kota,” Mercer says carefully, tone soft as if he’s speaking to a cornered animal who might lash out at any second. “Look at him.”
No.
Absolutely not.
Because looking is exactly how things become real, and I don’t need real. Real is overrated. Real is bodies in bathrooms and empty doorways and promises that rot long before they come home. Real can go fuck itself.
“He moved first,” I say.
My voice comes out all wrong. It doesn’t sound like me. It’s too calm, too far away.
A medic close to the table speaks with the furious bravery of someone who clearly wants to die today. “He was trying to stop you from getting between him and the bag.”
“That was a terrible decision,” I mutter.
“He’s injured.”
“So am I, yet I didn’t hear anyone clap for me.”
A small, strangled sound comes from somewhere in front of me. Ewan, likely. Not laughing. Not really, at least. Probably trying not to fall apart into whatever hell this room has rapidly turned into.
The man under me shifts his face by half an inch, and my knife follows. His breath catches, and then his eyes open.
Gray.
Not just gray.
Storm gray. Rain over cracked sidewalks. Clouds over asphalt. The kind of gray that once looked at me from across the kitchen table while black polish dried on my nails. The kind of gray that would stare and tell me to stop fidgeting or else he would paint my fingertips too.
My hand locks.
The room disappears.
No.
No, it doesn’t. It can’t.
The man’s eyes focus slowly, clouded with pain at first. Then they sharpen, confusion splitting through them at first.
Then something worse.
Recognition.
His lips part, but nothing comes out.
Once more, my lungs forget to do the only job they’re designed to do.
His gaze drops to my eyes, then jerks up to the brim of the faded hat on top of my head. The hat sitting low on my head. The hat that is still too big for me. The hat that still smells like smoke and old cloth and every single prayer I’ve muttered even if I refused to call them prayers.
His face changes then.
Not soft and not happy.
Absolutely destroyed.
“Kota?”
One word. Barely a sound. Barely even a breath.
And it hits far harder than a bullet would.
My knife doesn’t move.
My body doesn't move.
Nothing inside me moves other than the single crack splitting open from my chest to my throat.
No.
No, no, no.
Absolutely not.
That voice is wrong. It’s all wrong. It’s rougher. It’s older. It’s scraped by years I didn’t even get to witness. But under it, buried somewhere under all the blood and pain and time, something familiar peers its head out of the sand.
Kota.
He says it just like he’s said it a thousand times before. Like it’s lived under his tongue all this time, just waiting.
My hand starts to shake then, and the knife touches his skin. A thin red line appears under the edge of the blade, but he doesn’t flinch.
His eyes fill.
I hate him for that.
I hate him because I know those eyes. I had sixteen years with those eyes.
I know that scar through his left eyebrow and the story of how it came to be.
I know the shape of his mouth before it breaks.
I know the pale ash-blonde hair matted to his forehead, darker now only because the blood and rain have tried their best to make him unrecognizable.
But I’d know those eyes that are so similar to Dad’s.
I’d know that hair that’s a mirror color to mine.
I know him, but I don’t know him.
Both of those things are true, and both of them fucking kill me.
“It’s me, Kota,” he says.
His voice cracks down the middle, and the room tilts.
“Maine,” he breathes. “It’s me.”
The knife falls out of my hand suddenly. Not far, but enough that it clatters against the floor next to his shoulder, loud enough that three guards jerk as though I fired a gun instead.
I scramble backward.
Too fast.
Not graceful.
Not tactical.
Not anything other than pure panic that has limbs and a thundering heartbeat that I can’t calm.
My boot slips on wet tile and my bad knee buckles. Someone reaches for me, but I jerk away on pure reflex. The only problem is there’s nowhere to go, no escape route big enough for what is currently happening in the cavern of my ribs.
My back slams into someone’s leg.
Solid.
Warm.
Alpha.
I whip around, half ready to bite chunks out of his skin, only to find Kaito looking down at me with both of his hands lifted. He’s not touching me. He’s never touching, not unless I ask. His face is tight with pain, and not all of it is coming from the wound in his side.
“You’re safe,” he assures quietly.
Wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I’m not safe.
I’m a twenty-two-year-old sitting on a medical room floor with my brother’s blood soaked into my pants and his voice ringing in my ears and six years tearing itself open behind my eyes.
Maine is on the floor in front of me.
Maine is alive.
Maine is alive.
Maine is alive.
That sentence doesn’t even make sense to me. It doesn’t. It’s all wrong. The letters are all in the wrong order. It’s like a door where a wall should be. A body where a ghost has lived for six whole fucking years.
“Kota,” Maine says again, only softer this time. Afraid of me. Wait, no. Afraid for me. No. Both? I don’t know.
I look at him. Really look. He’s older, because of course he is.
Six years doesn’t pass by with a simple nod of its head or a crisp thumbs-up.
They carve into your bones, they hollow out everything good, and they take what they want only to leave nothing but teeth and claw marks on everything they leave behind.
His face is thinner than it was. It’s harder now.
The soft roundness of my brother’s younger face is long gone, now replaced with sharp cheekbones, a rough jaw, and scars I’ve never seen before.
There’s an exhaustion on his face now that looks so deep it seems like a permanent fixture.
His pale hair is longer than he used to wear it, too, chopped unevenly as if he didn’t like it and decided to cut it himself with a knife and shitty lighting.
There’s blood on him. Too much of it, too.
There are bruises at his throat.
A split through his lip.