9. Silent Past
Silent Past
The silence inside Beast was thick, not tense exactly, but defenetly heavy.
Seth kept his eyes on the road, hands steady on the wheel, as the world outside rolled like the trailer for a disaster movie. Behind him, Layla hummed quietly, tapping her boots together to a rhythm only she understood.
Beside him, Josie sat stiffly upright, fingers knotted on her knees. She tried once, then twice, to swallow quietly before finally clearing her throat.
"Seth... can I ask you something?"
He didn't look over, but he blinked. "Sure."
She hesitated, choosing her words like someone navigating a minefield. "What branch were you in?"
He shot a look her way. "That obvious, huh?”
A small, tired smile touched Josie's mouth, she scooped under her shirt and pulled out her dog tags. "Air Force, six years. Soldiers always recognize other soldiers.”
"Marines," he said at last. "Ten years. Too many deployments. Afghanistan, mostly."
Josie nodded, absorbing rather than reacting. "That tracks."
He snorted. "That tracks?"
She shrugged lightly. "You move like someone trained. Not just someone who wore a uniform. You assess every angle, every sound. And—" her eyes softened, "—you carry grief like it belongs to you and that you've stopped noticing the weight."
That landed harder in his chest than he expected.
He cleared his throat, staring out at the broken landscape. "Yeah, well, some things you just learn to carry."
Josie didn't pry. She didn't offer condolences or empty platitudes. She simply sat with it, her quiet presence a silent acknowledgment that some things need no words.
After a long moment, she spoke again, her voice quieter. "I lost people too. Overseas and back home. It never stops hurting. It doesn't matter how strong you are."
Seth's grip tightened on the wheel. "Yeah."
"And yesterday," she went on gently, "you didn't hesitate. You protected me and Layla like instinct took over before thought could. That wasn't just a soldier. That was..." She swallowed. "A good man."
He shook his head sharply. "I did what needed doing."
"Yes." She looked at him fully now. "But a lot of people wouldn't have."
Seth didn't know what to do with any of it. It made his chest ache.
She seemed to sense it. She eased back in her seat, turning her gaze toward the passing world.
"You don't have to tell me anything," she said. "But if you ever want to... I'll listen."
Why the hell had he said that?
The words sat in his brain, heavy and stupid. Marines: Ten years. He hadn't meant to offer it; he hadn't meant to open the door to anything about himself. Josie had just... asked. Softly, carefully, like someone genuinely curious instead of nosy.
Still stupid. He didn't owe her anything.
Seth stared out the window at the broken world passing by—rusted cars, collapsed fences, weeds punching through pavement—anything to avoid looking at the woman beside him. He tightened his grip on the map until his knuckles whitened.
Her words shouldn't have mattered. Yet, his mouth had opened anyway.
He glanced at her. She didn't look military.
No hard edges, no barked cadence, no dead-eyed stare that said, I've buried too many friends to pretend otherwise.
She looked smart, sharp, too put together to have ever been screamed at by a drill instructor or slept in the dirt for weeks.
Hell, she looked too kind to have ever worn a uniform.
But she'd said it so casually, like telling him her favorite color. Suddenly, he felt like an idiot for assuming she belonged to some soft, safe version of the world before. Maybe that's what rattled him most. He hadn't expected her to understand.
And yet she did. She'd spotted him for exactly what he was, instantly and effortlessly.
He dragged a hand over his face. Idiot.
He didn't talk about his service anymore. Not out of shame—hell no—but because it hurt, and every piece of it tied back to everything he'd lost: Molly, AJ, the life he'd believed waited for him after leaving the Marines.
And now he'd handed this stranger—this woman with sad eyes —an opening he never meant to give.
Keep it together, Seth.
No attachments. No weakness. No slipping.
He could sense Josie watching him carefully, trying to gauge whether she'd said something wrong.
She hadn't.
I did, he thought grimly.
"What did you do in the Air Force?" Seth asked.
The safest question he could think of. Military to military. Distance maintained. Professional. Safe.
Josie glanced at him, then out the window at the barren miles sliding past.
"I was—well, I am—a trauma surgeon," she said. "I put myself through medical school and paid the debt off by serving in the military. Six years in. Mostly fieldwork, stabilization units, forward surgical teams."
Seth turned his head, eyebrows lifting despite himself. "You're a doctor?"
She gave a small, almost self-deprecating laugh. "A surgeon. But yes, doctor works."
Silence stretched between them.
Then Seth blurted, "You don't look old enough."
She blinked—surprised, maybe even a little amused. "I just turned forty." Her mouth tugged into a real smile, the first genuine one he'd seen from her. "But thank you for the compliment."
Seth gave a single, sharp nod but didn't respond, his gaze fixed on the ruined asphalt while something churned inside his head.
"Why the hell did I say that?"
He'd never been one to comment on a woman's age like some awkward teenager.
And why should he care how old she looked?
None of his damn business. She carried herself with too much calm, too much composure, too much quiet intelligence—if "looking smart" counted as a real thing, she somehow managed it effortlessly.
He gripped the wheel a little tighter.
Keep it together, Seth.
This wasn't flirting. This wasn't interest. This came down to logistics. Safety. Keeping the mission moving.
But the truth pressed at him anyway: something about her tugged at a place inside him he'd believed died with Molly.
He shoved the thought down fast, forcing his voice level. “Surgeon, huh?" He nodded once. "A hell of a lot more useful than any of us."
Josie didn't argue, didn't preen—she simply watched the road ahead, her expression softening by degrees.
Outside, the wind rattled broken signs beneath a sky rolling with gray. Inside the SUV, the silence settled again. This time, it wasn't an absence. It was a space they were both choosing to share.
Josie watched the landscape blur past the window. The miles crawled by. She tried counting fence posts, tracking clouds, studying how the afternoon light fractured through cracked glass. Anything to keep her mind anchored in the present.
But the present had a way of slipping through her fingers.
Her breath fogged the glass. Layla snored softly in the backseat. Seth kept his eyes on the road, unreadable.
And inside Josie's chest, something old and bruised ached.
Not now... please, not now.
She blinked hard, forcing herself to focus on the grind of the engine, the vibration under her feet, the distant thump of the trailer bouncing over potholes. She lifted her hand to rub her temple—
—and the motion alone triggered it.
A smell rose from memory, sudden and vivid.
Disinfectant.
Burnt plastic.
Iron-heavy blood hanging in the air.
Six years in the Air Force, then the civilian trauma unit—she'd seen ugly things, treated wounds that should have ended lives, held composure through chaos that broke stronger people. But nothing had prepared her for that day.
No. Don't go there. Don't—
But the road droned on, a hypnotic vibration that weighted her eyelids.
The warmth of the vehicle wrapped around her, a dangerous comfort that coaxed her under despite every instinct screaming to stay awake.
Her vision blurred, her head lolling back against the seat as the present dissolved into the drone of the road...
The last time she'd felt this tired, she was pulling into her own driveway, sirens wailing somewhere in the distance...
She pulled into the driveway just as the fifth police cruiser in two miles tore past, sirens wailing into the distance as if something were chasing them.
Josie's hands trembled on the steering wheel.
She'd never seen this much emergency response outside a natural disaster—yet the sky remained calm, the neighborhood still.
Too still.
She forced herself to focus, lowering the garage door before helping Layla out of her booster seat. The moment they stepped into the mudroom, instinct pricked along her skin. The house didn't sound right—no TV, no footsteps upstairs, no clatter from the kitchen.
"Mark?" she called, loud enough to carry.
No answer. Just silence, thick and unnatural.
Fear ran down her spine.
She took Layla's coat off and forced a smile which she didn't come close to meaning. "Let's get you downstairs, sweetheart. I've got a surprise for you."
It wasn't a surprise—it was safety. The basement had no windows. She flipped on a cartoon and settled Layla on the couch with her stuffed rabbit.
"Mommy will be right back. You stay here, okay? No matter what."
Layla nodded, already absorbed in the screen.
Josie sprinted upstairs, grabbing her medical mask from her bag and tying a scarf over it for good measure. She refused to take chances. Whatever this sickness turned out to be, the ER staff had been overwhelmed, terrified—and they'd warned her in no uncertain terms:
Don't come in. Don't expose yourself. Get home and stay home.
She reached the top of the stairs—and froze.
Coughing. Wet. The kind that spoke of real damage, of lungs tearing themselves apart. Not Mark's normal cough.
Her heart slammed in her chest.
"Mark?" she whispered.
She pushed open the bedroom door and the smell hit her first even through the mask—metallic, sour. Mark lay on the floor, curled in on himself, blood spatter across the hardwood beneath him.
His head snapped up at the sound of her voice. Bloodshot eyes, pupils blown wide and unfocused, found her face. He reached a trembling hand toward her—