Chapter 1 #3
"The calculation I made. The ninety seconds. The thirty percent." His marks pulse faster now. Emotion bleeding through. "It wasn't about you not mattering. It was about the mission mattering more. To me. In that moment."
"I know." The truth, cold and clean. "I know exactly what it was about. You valued the objective over my life. You made a choice. You chose correctly by every tactical measure."
His mouth opens. Closes.
"That's what makes it unforgivable," I continue. "Not that you left. That you'd do it again. Given the same situation, the same math, you'd make the same choice."
Silence.
Because I'm right. We both know I'm right.
"Yes." His voice is rough. "I would."
The honesty is another knife.
I step around him. Reach the door. Palm the panel.
"But I'm here now." His words follow me into the corridor. "And I'm not leaving. Whatever you do with that—however you need to hurt me for what I did—I'm staying."
I pause. Don't turn.
"Forty-eight hours," I say. "Operations plan on my desk. Tactical assessment. Threat scenarios. Everything."
"You'll have it in twenty-four."
"Good."
I walk away.
Behind me, the door cycles shut.
My palm is still sticky with his blood. I look at it under the corridor lights—blue against my pale skin, drying darker at the edges.
I should wash it off.
I don't.
Not yet.
It's the first blood I've drawn from him. It won't be the last.
And forty-eight hours from now, I'm going to hunt the man who sold us with the man who left me, and one of them is going to pay for what I've become.
Maybe both.
My quarters are dark when I enter. I keep them that way. Lights off, just the blue glow of the station seeping through the viewport, the stars wheeling beyond like they're not watching everything burn.
I drop the files on my desk. Strip off my gear. The routine is automatic—weapons secured, armor stacked, the careful inventory of what came back with me versus what went out.
Everything accounted for.
Except the blood on my hand.
I stand at the sink. Run water. Watch blue spiral down the drain, and remember.
Venn is down. Unable to retrieve. Mission complete.
The water runs clear.
I dry my hands. Check the time.
Twenty-three hours until Dexter's assessment is due.
Forty-eight hours until we deploy.
Six years since I learned what I'm worth in someone's equation.
I pull out the box I keep under my bunk. The one I've never opened on station, the one I brought from three postings ago and carried through everything.
Inside: mission patches. A cracked comm unit. A photograph.
The unit. All of us. Before.
Dexter is in the photograph. Younger. Smiling. His hand is on my shoulder.
I remember when it was taken. Two weeks before Sigma-9. After a successful operation, celebrating in the grimy bar on whatever station we were staging from. Someone made a joke. He laughed. His hand settled on my shoulder like it belonged there.
I was twenty-four. I thought I had time to figure out what that touch meant.
I didn't.
My door chimes.
I know who it is. The timing is too late, the station too quiet. Past midnight cycle. No one visits at this hour unless it's emergency or stupidity.
I check the camera anyway.
Dexter. Standing in my corridor like he has a right to be there.
I should ignore it. Let him stand there until he gets the message. Let him learn that some doors don't open twice.
I palm the panel instead.
The door slides open. He's still in his tactical gear, marks pulsing faint along his temples. Reading me. Tasting the copper-ice that's become my signature.
"This is a bad idea," I say.
"I know."
"You should go."
"I know that too."
He doesn't move. Neither do I.
The photograph is still on my desk. Visible from the door. His eyes find it, hold.
Something crosses his face. Something that might be pain.
"We were good," he says. Quiet. The resonance in his voice doing things to my chest I refuse to name. "Before."
"Before you left me to die."
"Before that. Yes."
The honesty is killing me.
I should close the door. End this. Go to bed alone like I have for six years, like I will for sixty more because trust is suicide and attachment is death and the only way to survive is to need no one.
"Come in," I hear myself say instead.
He does.
The door closes behind him.
And the box is still open on my desk, and his blood is still drying under my nails, and six years is collapsing into this moment where we're both standing in my dark quarters staring at who we used to be.
"Why are you here, Dexter?"
He looks at me. Really looks. And his marks pulse with something I can't read, something complicated and tangled and probably as fucked up as what I'm feeling.
"I don't know," he says.
"That's not good enough."
"I know."
The silence stretches. I'm counting again. Seconds until I throw him out. Seconds until I do something stupid. Seconds until—
"I saw the light under your door," he says. "Felt the echo of your emotional state. Something leaking through your walls. Something like grief."
"And you couldn't not come."
"No."
"Why?"
His jaw tightens. The muscles in his throat work.
Then: "Because I've spent six years feeling you missing from my range. And having you close again, even hating me—it's better than the silence."
The confession lands like a blade between my ribs.
I should tell him to leave. Should make this professional. Should remember that he's the man who calculated my worth in percentages and came up short.
I pick up the photograph instead.
Hold it out.
He takes it. Studies it. His thumb traces the edge where his hand rests on my shoulder.
"I remember this." His voice is rough. "Two weeks before Sigma-9."
"Two weeks before you left me."
"Yes."
He sets the photograph down. Looks at me.
And the space between us is three feet and six years and the width of a choice he'd make again.
"I loved you then," he says. "I've never stopped."
The words should mean nothing.
They mean everything.
And I'm so tired of carrying this alone.
"Get out," I say.
He goes still.
"Get out before I do something we'll both regret."
"Astra—"
"Tomorrow. Operations plan. Professional distance." My voice is cracking. I hate that he can probably feel it. "But tonight—get out. Because if you stay, I'm going to hurt you. And I'm not sure I'll stop."
He looks at me for three seconds that stretch like hours.
Then he nods. Turns. Walks to the door.
It opens.
He pauses in the frame.
"Twenty-four hours," he says. "You'll have the assessment."
"Good."
He leaves.
The door closes.
I'm alone with the photograph and the empty box and the ghost of his scent in my quarters.
My hands are shaking.
I make it to the bathroom before I break.
The shower runs cold. I don't change the temperature. Let it punish. Let it remind me that feeling anything for Dexter Torrence is choosing pain, choosing the wound reopening, choosing to bleed.
But the water doesn't wash away what I felt when he said I loved you then.
Doesn't change that part of me, the part I've tried to kill for six years, wanted to close the distance and find out if his mouth still tastes the same.
I dry off. Dress. Stare at myself in the mirror.
The scar on my back is visible. The burn that covers my shoulder blade, twisted tissue in the shape of what they did to me while he completed the mission.
I trace it. The way I do when I need to remember.
This is what trust costs.
This is what happens when you let someone in.
My console chimes. Message incoming.
I check.
It's from Dexter. Timestamp: three minutes ago.
The tactical assessment. Complete. Detailed. Twenty-three hours early.
And at the bottom, a single line:
I'm sorry I can't be sorry for the choice I made. But I'm sorry for what it cost you. That's the only truth I have. —D
I read it twice.
Delete it.
Sit at my desk and open his assessment files, because the mission matters more than my feelings, because I learned that lesson from him, because in forty-eight hours we're hunting the man who sold us and I need to be ready.
The data is good. Better than good. He's anticipated scenarios I hadn't considered, identified vulnerabilities I missed, proposed contingencies that actually make sense.
He's still the best tactical mind I've ever worked with.
That doesn't change what he did.
Doesn't change what I've become.
But maybe—for forty-eight hours, for one mission, for the chance to find Webb and get the answers that might let me sleep—maybe I can work with the man who left me.
As long as I remember:
He'd do it again.
The math hasn't changed.
And neither has the part of me that would kill him for it if the situation required.
Professional, I remind myself.
Coordinated.
Tactical.
Just two soldiers hunting a traitor.
That's all this is.
That's all it can ever be.
I close the files. Stare at the photograph still on my desk.
His hand on my shoulder. My smile. The people we were before ninety seconds taught us what we'd become.
I should put it away.
Instead, I leave it out.
A reminder.
Of what was lost. Of what can't be recovered.
Of exactly how far I've come from the woman who thought love meant someone would choose you when it mattered.
Tomorrow, we start hunting.
Together.
The word tastes like blood.