NOAH
The only reason we haven’t been overrun by what I’m sure are the Border Wolves is because of calculated shots and conserving ammo. I borrowed Sykes’s mags—he doesn’t need them right now, pale and groaning from pain—and Callahan and I tried to mimic Wilder’s tactic of making every shot count.
About an hour since an answer from Kestrel came through, filled with static and barely understandable, I hear the humming of drones coming from the direction of the base.
Liu whoops. “Hell yeah, that’s what I’m talking about!”
Callahan clicks his tongue and wipes his brow, sweating despite the cold. “Contain yourself, Specialist. It’s not over until the enemy are gone.”
“Yes, sir,” Liu replies, still grinning. “But I’m still damn happy to see them.”
“So am I, Specialist,” Callahan murmurs. “So am I.”
The high-pitched whine of the drones cuts through the ridgeline for about thirty minutes, the volleys slowing considerably. Then the muzzle flashes start creeping closer again.
“The drones are leaving,” I say, my voice flat and exhausted.
“And it’s not because they’re not out of targets,” Callahan adds bitterly. He keys the radio, but only static answers, same as it has since that first garbled reply.
Then, ten minutes after the drones have left, the radio finally crackles with something that isn’t dead air.
“Callahan, this is Kestrel.” Okafor’s voice, hard and clipped even through the static. “Drone element is bingo fuel, returning to base. Ground element is inbound but hasn’t reached your position. Hold what you have.”
“Copy,” Callahan answers, but I can see on his face he’s not liking our odds.
The drones did buy us some ground, though, and Wilder confirms it by firing a shot and not getting an answer back.
“They gave up the east push,” he says. “Repositioning. I’d wager we’ve got maybe an hour before they try again.”
Callahan crawls to check on Sykes, then looks at Liu, blood dried up to his elbows.
“Sykes can’t walk on that leg,” he says after a moment. “Not fast, not far. I want him moving now, while they’re still figuring out where to hit us next.” He looks at me. “Reyes, you and Liu get him down the mountain. I’ll hold here with Wilder, buy you distance.”
“I’m not leaving you two to—”
“That wasn’t a request, Specialist.”
Fuck. Callahan’s down to just me and a sniper, and now he’s sending me away? But he outranks me, and the math is the math—Sykes needs two men to carry him.
“Yes, Sergeant,” I say, hating the words even as they leave my mouth.
Getting Sykes upright takes both of us, and Sykes bites down on sounds he doesn’t want to make the entire time. His leg is wrapped tight, but it’s already soaked through, and every time his boot brushes against a rock, he goes green.
“Sorry,” he keeps saying. “Sorry, sorry—”
“Shut up and walk,” Liu tells him, not unkindly, and we start walking down.
It’s slow. Slower than feels survivable with an unknown number of Border Wolves somewhere behind us, ready to push again.
Sykes’s arm is heavy across my shoulders, his weight transferring to me every time he has to take a step with his hurt leg, and every twenty minutes we stop so he can breathe through the pain before going again.
Dawn comes gray, no sun yet, just enough to see by. We’re moving on instinct, following the same ground we climbed up yesterday and hoping it leads back to where we started this patrol and not somewhere new and worse. Nobody talks except Sykes, who keeps apologizing for getting shot.
“You didn’t do this on purpose,” I tell him around the tenth apology. “Save the guilt for something you actually chose.”
“Feels the same,” he mutters.
“Well, it’s not.”
We go quiet after that, just three sets of boots picking through the shale, my free hand never leaving my rifle, even though my arm is screaming from Sykes’s weight on the other side. I lose track of time. I lose track of most things except the next twenty meters and the one after that.
Movement ahead. I hear it before I see it—boots on rock, more than one set, coming from the fold in the terrain we’re about to walk into.
I lower my half of Sykes without saying anything, and Liu does the same on his side, easing him down onto a shelf of stone.
My rifle is up, and my heart is going crazy inside my chest, and I brace myself for a fight we don’t have the bodies to win.
Then the shapes round the bend, and it’s not the enemy at all.
It’s Hayes. Delgado. Petrillo. Maddox’s whole team behind them, and Gabriel out front looking like he walked the entire climb on pure will alone.
The sensation that goes through me is so strong it’s almost violent, pins and needles crawling up my arms and into my scalp, my rifle dropping an inch before I even register lowering it.
I don’t have a name for the feeling. It’s bigger than just relief—more like the ground steadying itself under my feet after an earthquake.
Gabriel’s eyes find me first, and for one unguarded moment his whole face changes, something raw moving over it, something that has no business being on a colonel’s face in front of nine other soldiers.
Then it’s gone, folded back behind a veneer of command, just like a knife folds back into a handle, so fast I’d doubt I saw it at all if I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for.
“Report,” he says, already crossing the distance toward us. “Where is Callahan? Wilder?”
“Holding up the OP, sir.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “They covered us so we could get Sykes out.”
Bishop and Petrillo are already moving past me toward Sykes, cutting away the dressing to look at what’s underneath, Liu filling them in fast and clinical.
Gabriel’s eyes drop to my side, my hands, back to my face, the same fast inventory he’s always done after I’ve been in a firefight. “You’re not hit.”
“No, sir.”
His shoulders ease a fraction. Then he looks past me at the mountain, and his jaw goes tight.
“Maddox, Quinn, Walker, Delgado, push ahead, find Callahan and Wilder, help them extract.” He turns to Hayes. “We get Sykes to the vehicle. Move.”
They scatter into motion, Bishop, Liu, and Petrillo rigging a stretcher out of two rifle slings and a poncho while Hayes stands guard. For one moment, nobody is looking at us.
Gabriel’s hand closes over my arm, and he pulls me off the trail into a stand of scrub pine, and before I can ask what he’s doing, his mouth is on mine.
It’s not careful at all. His fist bunches in the front of my jacket like he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he doesn’t hold on, and I melt into him without a single thought of stopping it, my own hands finding his collar, his jaw, anywhere I can touch to prove to both of us that I’m still here, still breathing.
“I thought—” His voice breaks as he speaks against my mouth. “Callahan said one casualty and didn’t say who, and I have been walking for hours not knowing if—”
“I’m fine.” I pull back just far enough to look at him. “Gabriel, I’m fine.”
“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life not knowing you’ll be there in the morning,” he says, and it comes out rough. Not at all like he rehearsed it—as if it surprises him as much as me. “I can’t do that again. Wondering…”
“Gabriel—”
“I love you.” It tears out of him, both hands gripping my jacket now, holding on like the mountain might tip and shake us off. “I love you, Noah.”
I go completely still.
I’ve been shot at. I’ve been pinned down and hopeless.
But I’ve never felt anything like this… this cold spreading fear that has nothing to do with bullets and grenades.
I’ve been surviving those for years. This is different.
This thing took my mother apart, piece by piece.
It’s what turned my father into a man who could walk out on his family and not look back.
It buries you deeper than any round ever could.
If I say it back, I’m handing him the exact thing that gets used to break people. I know how the story goes. I’ve lived through the ending before.
Gabriel watches me as the silence stretches, his eyes going distant as he visibly retreats.
“You don’t have to say it back,” he says quietly. “I know what… If you can’t—”
“Shut up, sir.”
He blinks at me.
“Just… shut up.” My voice cracks, but I don’t care.
I’m realizing it’s far too late for me—Gabriel already broke through all of my defenses.
“I love you too. I’ve loved you since the first night you held me in your arms. I just didn’t want to say it out loud because saying it out loud means it can be taken away and I don’t…
I don’t know how to survive that again, but I…
I can’t not say it either. Not after this.
Not after thinking I’ll never get the chance to be in your arms again. ”
I’ve never seen such a big smile on Gabriel Wolfe’s face. It changes his face completely, wiping away two decades of worry, and I’m the only one who gets to see it.
“Noah…”
He kisses me again, hard at first, hungry, and desperate, both of us shaking.
Then it softens, turns slow and unbearably tender, his hand coming up to cradle my jaw like I’m something precious that survived a fall he didn’t think I would.
I make a small, helpless sound against his mouth, and he answers it with one of his own, low and private, meant for no one but me.
“Colonel, Wilder is—”
Hayes rounds the scrub pine mid-sentence, already talking before he clears the branches, and then he doesn’t finish the sentence.
He freezes, eyes wide, mouth still open on a word that never comes out, staring at the two of us wrapped around each other with absolutely no room left to pretend it’s anything else but what it is.
We jump apart. Too late. Miles too late.
Hayes breathes out, long and slow, like a balloon leaking air. “Fuuuuck.”