Chapter 7
The heat was wrong. It was desert heat, the kind that baked through kevlar and turned breath to sandpaper in your throat.
Maddox knew it wasn’t right even as the nightmare pulled her under.
Phoenix Ridge didn’t have deserts, and she hadn’t worn that uniform in eight years, but knowing didn’t stop it.
Titan moved ahead of her, seventy pounds of German Shepherd muscle, his dark coat rippling with each step. His ears swiveled, tracking sounds she couldn’t hear, and the sight of him working settled something in her chest the way it always had. He was the perfect partner, the best she’d ever had.
It was the standard protocol, one they’d done a dozen times, maybe more.
When there was a suspected IED inside a structure, potential insurgent activity, and civilian reports of a weapons cache, they send the dog in first to detect explosives, then follow only once he gave the all-clear or marked a find.
She looked down at Titan. His dark brown eyes met hers, waiting and trusting. Her hand moved to his vest, checking the familiar weight of it. “Ready?”
His tail swept once through the dust.
She gave the command. “Titan, seek.”
He surged forward, powerful and sure, disappearing through the doorway into the building’s shadows. She counted his steps in her head: five, six, seven. Her breathing stayed even and controlled as she watched the doorway and waited for his bark or return.
The explosion was light first, then sound, a flash that whited out her vision followed by the punch of percussion that knocked her back two steps and left her ears ringing.
She was moving before the thought came up. Someone grabbed her arm—Morrison, maybe, or Kemball—but she shook them off. Titan. She had to get to Titan.
The doorway hung wrong now. Smoke poured from it, thick and dark, and the acrid stench of burning chemicals mixed with something worse underneath. Her boots hit debris, chunks of concrete and twisted metal, but she kept moving forward.
He was down just inside the entrance, not moving. She hit her knees hard enough on the wooden floor hard enough to feel the impact through her tactical pants, her hands already reaching for him. “Titan. Hey, boy. Hey.”
Blood, far too much blood, everywhere. His breathing came in wet, rattling gasps that meant bad things—things even combat medics couldn’t fix in the field. One of his rear legs bent at an angle that wasn’t natural, and when she touched his side, her hand came away slick and dark.
“I’ve got you,” she said, and her voice sounded steady, even though her hands were shaking. “You’re okay. I’ve got you.”
His eyes found her face, brown and warm and trusting despite the pain that had to be tearing through him. His tail tried to move, but he barely managed a twitch.
Medics pushed past her—when had they arrived?—and their voices cut through the ringing in her eyes.
“Too much damage…”
“...internal bleeding…”
“Nothing we can…”
She kept her hand on his head, fingers buried in his fur, feeling each shallow breath. He was trying so hard, fighting to stay, and she could see it in his eyes that he was scared but he trusted her to make it better.
“It’s okay,” she lied. “You’re okay.”
His breathing slowed. Each inhale took longer to come, and she felt the moment when his body finally gave up, when the tension left his muscles and the light went out behind his eyes.
The weight of him in her arms was unbearable.
She’d given the command; she’d sent him in; she’d killed him.
The dream looped and started over. The heat, the building, the command, the explosion, his dying eyes, the guilt crushing her chest, nothing she could do to stop it from looping again and again—
Something warm and wet dragged across her face.
Maddox jerked awake with a gasp that burned her lungs. Darkness surrounded her—the wrong darkness, no smoke—and for a disorienting second, she couldn’t place where she was.
Not on deployment, not the desert.
Home, her bedroom, Phoenix Ridge.
The wet warmth came again, this time across her cheek, and she turned her head to find Zeus’s face inches from hers. He whined, low and worried, his front paws planted on the mattress beside her pillow.
“Off,” she managed, but her voice came out wrecked.
He ignored the command entirely and climbed onto the bed, all seventy-five pounds of him pressing against her side. His nose pushed into her neck, and she felt his breath hot against her skin.
Her sheets were soaked through with sweat. Her heart hammered against her ribs hard enough to sting, and when she lifted her hands, they were shaking. No blood on them, just sweat and the familiar calluses on her palms.
Zeus licked her jaw again, then her temple, then pushed his muzzle under her chin with enough force to tilt her head back.
“I’m awake.” The words scraped out of her throat. “I’m fine.”
He clearly didn’t believe her because he settled more of his weight against her, pinning her to the mattress.
The pressure of him helped and grounded her in a way that cut through the lingering edges of the nightmare.
She could feel his ribs expanding and contracting with each breath, steady and even and nothing like Titan’s rattling gasps.
A different dog, different life, eight years ago.
But the guilt still sat in her chest like she’d swallowed concrete.
She wrapped her arms around Zeus and pressed her face into his fur, breathing in the familiar scent of him—clean dog and the faint residue of the shampoo she used during his baths.
His tail thumped once against her legs, and she felt more than heard the low rumble in his chest that wasn’t quite a growl but not contentment either.
Worry, maybe. Dogs could sense distress, and Zeus had always been particularly attuned to hers.
“You’re okay,” she whispered into his fur, and she wasn’t sure which one of them she was trying to convince. “We’re okay.” The lie tasted bitter.
She reached for her phone on the nightstand, squinting against the screen’s brightness.
4:06 a.m. Too early to get up, too late to pretend she’d get any more sleep.
Her alarm wasn’t set to go off for another two hours, but the thought of lying her in the dark with nothing but her thoughts for company made her skin crawl.
Zeus shifted, repositioning himself so his head rested on her stomach, his eyes fixed on her face, watching and waiting.
“Bad dream,” she told him, because talking to Zeus was easier than sitting in silence. Her voice still sounded rough but steadier now. “Old one.”
His ears flickered forward, listening.
She ran her hand along his spine, following the familiar ridge of muscle and bone. He was solid under her palm, warm and real and very much alive. Not bleeding out in a building halfway across the world. Not dying because she’d given a command that sent him into danger.
The nightmare had been worse than usual.
More vivid, more detailed, more visceral in a way that left the taste of dust and blood in her mouth, even though she was fully awake now.
She’d had variations of it for eight years.
Sometimes it was just flashes, sometimes it played out like a movie she couldn’t turn off, but tonight’s version had been particularly cruel.
She knew why. The therapy sessions were digging things up, pulling at threads she’d spent years carefully tucking away and refusing to examine.
And then there was Saturday’s coffee with Jade, the way that conversation had lingered longer than professional courtesy warranted and that charged moment when their eyes had met and something unspoken had passed between them that Maddox didn’t want to look at too closely.
Her walls were cracking, had been cracking for weeks now if she was honest, but Saturday had accelerated it. And when her walls cracked, apparently her subconscious decided to flood the gaps with every trauma she’d been avoiding.
She looked down at Zeus, who hadn’t stopped watching her. “Therapy today,” she said quietly. “Tuesday afternoon. You know what that means.”
His tail thumped once against the mattress, uncertain.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “That’s about how I feel about it too.”
The truth was she’d known since Saturday that this session was going to be different.
Something had shifted, some internal dam she’d been maintaining had started to leak, and she couldn’t pretend anymore that she was fine.
Jade had looked at her across that coffee house table, and Maddox had felt exposed in a way that had everything to do with someone actually seeing her.
And seeing her meant seeing all of it, including the parts she’d spent eight years pretending didn’t exist.
Zeus sighed and resettled himself, his weight pressing more firmly against her. She kept her hand on him, needing the contact, and stared up at the ceiling, the nightmare’s images still present at the edges of her vision.
Four hours until her shift started. Three hours until she had to function like a normal person. Thirty seconds before she had to decide whether to get up or keep lying here with Zeus as her only anchor.
She got up.
The house was too quiet as she moved through it, Zeus trailing at her heels.
She didn’t bother with the lights; her eyes had already adjusted to the dark, and the last thing she wanted was brightness forcing her fully into consciousness.
The kitchen floor was cold under her bare feet, grounding in its own way, and she filled Zeus’s water bowl more for something to do than because he needed it.
He drank the water anyway, lapping noisily while she leaned against the counter and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
She had therapy today, which meant she had to talk about something and the nightmares made it pretty clear what her brain was demanding she address.
No more deflecting, no more carefully constructed walls that kept Jade at a professional distance while Maddox pretended the sessions weren’t affecting her.