21. Gabriel
GAbrIEL
By the time we limp to where Maddox’s team parked Humvees, it’s morning and light comes over the ridge, gray and weak. I feel every bump in my shoulder. And there are a lot of bumps.
As soon as we’re through the wire, Okafor starts triage before I can even open my mouth.
“Uninjured showers and racks,” he says. “Everybody else, med hut.”
Nobody argues with him. Hayes and Delgado peel off toward the showers, Reyes hesitating a moment before joining them. He looks over his shoulder once, and I can see in his eyes he’d rather stay with me. He can’t.
Petrillo has Spencer on a stretcher, hauling him off to the med hut with Bishop from Maddox’s team. I’m walking under my own power, which earns me a look from Okafor that says he’d rather I didn’t.
“I’m fine, Sergeant,” I assure him.
“You’re gray, sir,” he counters.
I scoff. “It’s morning. Everyone’s gray.”
He doesn’t laugh. He does fall beside me, close enough to catch me if the adrenaline finally runs out and I stagger. And it nearly does at the entrance to the med hut, my knees deciding they’ve had enough of my pride.
The doctor—Ainsley, though half the base just calls her Doc—takes one look at my shoulder and orders me onto a table like she’s done this with worse men and lost patience for our bullshit a long time ago.
“Through and through,” she says after cutting off the sleeve and taking a closer look. “You’re lucky. Missed the joint by a finger’s width.”
“Lucky,” I repeat, but she doesn’t dignify it with a response.
Liu works beside her, prepping stitches as she irrigates the wound, and I clutch at the table edge. Across the room, Petrillo and Bishop move around Spencer. My attention keeps drifting there no matter how many times Ainsley tells me to hold still.
“Round caught the edge of his plate,” Liu says, following my eyes. “Just a fragment wound along the ribs. He’s going to hurt like hell for a month and complain the whole time, but he’ll walk out of here.”
“He doesn’t complain,” I mutter.
“Everybody complains,” he counters. “Some just do it internally.”
Ainsley’s needle bites into my shoulder, and I focus on the ceiling.
“You need twenty stitches and forty-eight hours of not being an idiot,” she says. “The stitches I can do. The other part is up to you.”
“I’ve got a base to run.”
“You’ve got a sergeant first class who’s run bases before.” She ties off the last suture and reaches for the gauze. “Kestrel survives a few nights without you standing in the mud personally.”
I don’t answer that, because the answer is that it’s not Kestrel I’m worried about surviving without me standing in the mud, and that’s not a sentence I can say out loud in a room with a doctor and medics, and Sergeant First Class Okafor standing four feet away with his arms crossed.
She wraps the shoulder, slings the arm, and tells me the sling stays on if I want the stitches to hold. She delivers that less like medical advice and more like a threat. It’s almost like rank matters nothing to her at all.
“You’re staying here for observation,” she says with finality. “Tonight, at minimum.”
“I have a bunk fifty meters away.”
“And I have a table right here.” She snaps her gloves off.
“Colonel, I’ve seen the way you run this base.
You don’t sleep enough on a good day. You’re not sleeping in a hut alone tonight with a hole in your shoulder and nobody checking if you go pale in the middle of the night.
If the border corridor were open to medevac birds, you’d be having this conversation with a surgeon in Landstuhl instead of me. ”
I open my mouth to argue again, but she looks at me much like Okafor looks at Hayes, which is to say like I’m wasting both our time.
“Fine,” I sigh.
“Fine,” she agrees, and joins Bishop and Petrillo on the other side of the room.
By noon, the med hut has cleared out. It’s just me on a cot in the corner, and Spencer two beds down, awake now, staring at the ceiling like a man conserving energy for the pain that’s coming later.
“You did good work out there,” I tell him. It’s true, but he also earned hearing it before the drugs pull him under again.
“Gun jammed. Should’ve caught it faster.” It’s the most words I’ve heard him string together at once since he arrived at Kestrel.
“You caught it fast enough if you’re still here to complain about it.”
He doesn’t answer, just closes his eyes, so I let him rest.
Callahan comes by an hour later, still in his patrol kit, mud dried up to his knees. He stands at the foot of my cot with his cap in his hands like he’s paying respects at a funeral instead of checking on a colonel with a bandaged shoulder.
“Sir.” He doesn’t sit. “Wanted to say… If my team had stayed on that cache instead of moving on, we’d have had eyes on it when they set the ambush. Might’ve caught it before you walked in.”
I shake my head. “You didn’t know it was bait, Sergeant. Neither did I.”
“Still.” His jaw clenches. “We should have gone back and checked it ourselves instead of calling it in and letting you walk into it blind.”
“If your team had gone back in, you’d be the ones bleeding on this cot instead of me,” I say. “There’s no iteration of last night where somebody doesn’t pay. I’d rather it was me than four more men I just met.”
Callahan looks at me like he wants to argue but doesn’t have the ammunition for it.
“Wilder’s already reworking his position on the ridge,” he says instead. “Says if he’d had eyes on the gully instead of just the trail approach, he’d have caught the flankers before they set.”
I nod as he speaks. “Tell him I want to hear the new plan by tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
He leaves quietly, carrying a weight I recognize. I’ve carried it plenty of times myself, usually after watching men bleed on ground I picked for them. Maddox comes in not long after, still smelling like the cold air outside, Walker trailing behind him with none of his usual noise.
“Thanks for lending a hand with exfil,” I say.
Maddox nods. “With four fresh bodies on the trail, you cut the carry time in half.”
“Appreciate it.”
“Wasn’t a favor, sir. I wasn’t going to listen to the fight on the radio and do nothing.” He glances at Spencer’s cot, then the bandage on my shoulder. “We’ll be ready faster next time. If there’s a next time.”
“Well, it looks like the Wolves aren’t done with this base,” I say. “That’s the only thing I know for certain right now.”
Maddox nods like that’s the answer he expected. Walker says nothing the entire time, just looks at Spencer’s cot, then follows his team leader back out into the cold.
I watch the corrugated ceiling and think about the one visitor who hasn’t been by yet. He was fine. I saw that with my own eyes, checking him over before my brain caught up that I’m doing it like a mother hen in front of Okafor. Not a hit, not a scratch.
So why won’t my chest unclench? It hasn’t since he screamed my rank into the dark like it hurt him to see me fall.
It’s smart that he hasn’t come by the med hut. Careful, for once. And it shouldn’t disappoint me the way it does.
Ainsley clears me at 1900 after all, on the condition that the sling stays on and someone checks on me before midnight.
“I’ll live,” I tell her.
“You’ll live if you keep the sling on,” she counters. “Otherwise you’ll tear the stitches, and I’ll be doing this again in a worse mood.”
Okafor walks me as far as the door of my own hut, which is as close to an escort as I’ll tolerate, and leaves me there with a look that says he’ll be the one checking before midnight whether I want him to or not.
The hut is dark when I let myself in. I fumble for the lantern with my good hand, and when the light turns on, I go still in the doorway.
Reyes is sitting on the edge of my bunk.
He’s not lying back with his boots up like he owns the place. He’s sitting, spine straight, elbows on his knees, watching the door like he’s been watching it for a while.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. It comes out flatter than I intend, exhaustion doing most of the talking.
“Had to see you were okay,” he answers. “With my own eyes. Command channel and Okafor’s face weren’t cutting it.”
I close the door behind me with my good hand, and the weight of the day finally catches up all at once—the shoulder, the walk, the twenty stitches, every conversation I’ve had since dawn that required me to sound like a man in control of anything.
“I’m not in the shape to fight with you about last night,” I say, crossing the small room slower than I’d like. “About what you did out there. Running at an ambush, running at a jammed rifle like your life’s negotiable. We’re going to have that conversation, Reyes, but not tonight.”
“Okay.”
“And I’m definitely not in the shape to get you off, or myself, or whatever you came here expecting,” I continue.
He smirks at me then. It’s small, it’s tired, but it’s real.
“Those two things are best done together, sir,” he says. “The fighting and the other thing. I’ll wait for both.”
I sit down beside him because my body’s officially done with standing.
“Lie down,” he says quietly, giving me the order like I don’t outrank him.
I do it anyway, groaning, my stitches pulling tight and complaining. Reyes kneels at the foot of the bunk and starts working on the laces of my boots, quick and efficient.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know.” He pulls the first boot off and sets it aside, then starts on the second. “I’m also not in the mood to fight about it, so you’ll have to accept it.”
He gets both boots off and lines them up against the wall, then he stands and looks down at the bunk, at the narrow strip of mattress not currently occupied by a colonel with one working arm.
“Be a tight fit,” he comments.
“You don’t have to stay either.”
“Also not fighting you on that one.” He climbs in anyway, careful of my shoulder, folding himself into the space along my good side.
The bunk wasn’t built for two men. It groans under us as his body presses into mine, warm through our thin shirts, and that tightness in my chest, the one plaguing me since the ambush, finally unclenches.
We lie there in the lantern light, not talking. His breathing settles as I think about what’s happening right now. About the fact that I’m an adult man lying next to another adult man in a very narrow bed and… it feels the opposite of wrong. It feels too fucking right.
“Tell me about your life,” he says quietly after a moment.
I raise my eyebrows. “That was not a question.”
“Wasn’t trying to make it one.” He turns his head against my good shoulder, just enough that I feel it more than I see it. “I don’t know anything about you. Not really. I know how you run PT and how you hold a rifle and what you sound like when you come. That’s not the same as knowing a person.”
I hate that my dick twitches at his words. So I start talking before it makes me do something that’ll pull my stitches.
“My father was career Army,” I say instead of entertaining my cock. “Infantry, then armor, retired a lieutenant colonel after twenty-six years. Strictest man I’ve ever known, before or since.”
Reyes puffs air out of his nose, just a small scoff of amusement. “That explains a few things,” he says, but there’s a smile in his voice.
“He ran the house like a firebase. Boots by the door, lined up. Bed made before school, corners you could bounce quarters off. He didn’t yell much. Didn’t need to. He had a way of saying things that scared me worse than shouting ever could.”
“Sounds familiar,” Reyes murmurs. I ignore it, mostly because he’s not wrong.
“My mother kept everything else standing while he was gone, which was most of the time. She never wore a uniform, but she ran that house like a command post. Bills, school, neighbors, all of it, alone, for months at a stretch, and never once complained where I could hear her.” I breathe easier, thinking about her.
She always had that effect on me. “She used to leave the porch light on every night when he was deployed. Didn’t matter if it was raining, or if the bill came high that month.
Said it was so he’d always know which house was his, no matter how dark everything else got. ”
“That’s…” Reyes clears his throat. “That’s actually kind of beautiful, sir.”
“She was better at this life than either of us will ever be,” I say. “I had no brothers or sisters, just me in the house while she waited for a man who came home changed a little more every time.”
Reyes doesn’t say anything for a while. His hand finds mine, careful not to jostle me, and just holds it, no agenda in the touch for once.
“Is that why you run the base the way you do?” he asks eventually.
“Order kept that house from falling apart when he wasn’t there to hold it up,” I reply. “I suppose I never stopped believing I’d do the same for everyone else.”
“And now?”
I turn my head enough to look at him, at the mess of brown hair against my pillow, at the long dark lashes, at the eyes that don’t look at me with caution anymore.
“Now I got a specialist in my bunk and a hole in my shoulder, and I’m breaking every rule I built this house on,” I say. “And I can’t work out anymore if I’m furious about it or grateful.”
Reyes’s mouth curves. It’s slow, and it’s exhausted, and most importantly, it’s real.
“Pick grateful, sir,” he breathes sleepily. “It’s a better bedtime story.”
I don’t answer him. I just let my eyes close, his hand still folded around mine, and for the first time I can remember, I don’t feel alone in the dark.