Chapter Twelve
Morning came soft and gray, filtering through the compound's windows like an apology for the violence of the day before.
Kristin woke to the sound of quiet movement—brothers walking past Ripcord's door, voices murmured low, the particular rhythm of a community tending its wounds. She lay still for a moment, feeling the warmth of his body beside her, the steady rise and fall of his chest.
Alive.
They were both alive.
Ripcord stirred, his arm tightening around her waist automatically. Even in sleep, he reached for her. Even unconscious, he held on.
"Morning." His voice was rough with sleep.
"Morning." She pressed a kiss to his shoulder. "How are you feeling?"
"Like I killed a lot of people yesterday and then had the best sex of my life." A tired smile crossed his face. "Mixed signals."
"I can relate."
They lay there for a while, neither willing to break the cocoon of warmth and safety they'd built. Outside, the compound was slowly coming back to life—engines starting, voices rising, the sounds of recovery after battle.
"I need to tell you something," Ripcord said eventually.
Kristin shifted to look at him. "You already told me about Kyle."
"I told you what happened. The basics." His eyes found the ceiling, not quite able to meet hers. "I didn't tell you what it did to me. How it broke something that's never healed."
She waited.
"The jump was supposed to be routine." His voice was distant now, traveling back three years to a moment that had defined everything since.
"Thirty operators, mass tactical insertion, the kind of thing we'd done a hundred times.
Kyle was my partner. We'd gone through training together, deployed together, trusted each other with everything. "
"You said his chute didn't open."
"It should have." Something raw crept into his voice. "Same batch of silk, same rigger, same packing procedures. We jumped together—literally side by side, exiting the aircraft within seconds of each other. And then..."
He stopped. Kristin could feel the tension radiating off him, the effort it took to keep speaking.
"I heard him scream my name." The words came out broken. "Looked over and saw him fighting with his main, trying to cut away and deploy his reserve. But nothing was working. The silk was tangled, fouled—later they said it was a packing error, one in a million chance."
"Kenny—"
"I tried to reach him." His hand found hers, gripping hard. "Tried to close the distance, grab him, do something. But freefall doesn't work that way. You can't just swim through air. I was falling correctly and he was falling wrong, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't—"
His voice cracked.
"I watched him hit the ground. From three thousand feet, I watched my best friend die, and there was nothing I could do except fall correctly while he fell wrong."
Kristin pulled him close, feeling the tremors running through his body. This wasn't just memory—this was reliving. Three years of guilt and pain and unanswered questions, pouring out of him in the safety of her arms.
"The worst part isn't that he died." His face was pressed against her hair, words muffled.
"The worst part is the math. Same batch.
Same rigger. Same everything. It could have been my chute that failed.
Should have been, by any reasonable odds.
But it wasn't. And I've spent three years trying to figure out why I'm the one who survived. "
"There isn't a why." Her voice was gentle. "Sometimes terrible things happen and there's no reason. No fairness. Just chance."
"I know that." He pulled back to look at her, eyes red-rimmed. "Knowing it doesn't make it easier. Doesn't stop me from seeing his face every time I close my eyes. Doesn't keep me from chasing altitude because freefall is the only place the guilt goes quiet."
"Because when you're falling, you can't think about anything else."
"When I'm falling, I'm too focused on survival to remember that I shouldn't have survived." A bitter laugh escaped him. "Great coping mechanism, right? Throw yourself out of airplanes because it's the only way to escape your own head."
Kristin was quiet for a moment, processing. Then she sat up, pulling her knees to her chest.
"I crashed when I was twenty-three."
Ripcord's expression shifted. She'd mentioned the crash before—briefly, in passing—but never the details.
"Single-engine Cessna. Beautiful day, perfect conditions, routine flight from Kansas to Nebraska for a friend's wedding.
" Her voice went flat, the same distant quality his had carried.
"The engine quit at eight thousand feet.
No warning, no sputtering—just silence. One second I was flying, the next I was falling. "
"What happened?"
"I tried to restart. Tried everything I'd been trained to do. But sometimes engines fail and they don't come back." She stared at the wall, seeing a memory instead of plaster. "I had maybe two minutes to find somewhere to land. No airport in range, no open fields—just trees. Endless trees."
"You went into the forest."
"I picked the smallest trees I could find and aimed for them." A humorless smile crossed her face. "Textbook emergency landing, right up until the point where the wings sheared off and the fuselage tumbled three hundred feet through branches and came to rest upside down against an oak tree."
Ripcord's hand found her back, warm and steadying.
"I should have died. Everyone said so—the rescue crews, the doctors, the FAA investigators. The aircraft was destroyed. Nobody survives that kind of impact."
"But you did."
"But I did." She turned to look at him. "I remember hanging upside down in the wreckage, blood running into my eyes, thinking 'this is it.
This is how I die.' And then I remember waking up in a hospital two days later with broken bones and the worst headache of my life and no understanding of how I was still breathing. "
"Survivor's arithmetic," Ripcord said quietly.
"I spent months doing that math. Every pilot I knew who'd died in crashes—better pilots than me, more experienced, more skilled. And somehow I was the one who walked away. It didn't make sense. Still doesn't."
"So you built an airfield."
"I went back to flying." She met his eyes. "Everyone said I was crazy. My mother begged me to quit. My friends thought I'd developed some kind of death wish. But I couldn't stay on the ground. The sky was the only place I felt like myself."
"Running toward the thing that almost killed you."
"Running toward the thing that makes me feel alive." She reached out, touched his face. "Sound familiar?"
Something shifted in his expression. Recognition. Understanding.
"We're both doing the same thing," he said slowly. "Chasing altitude because it's the only place the survivor's guilt goes quiet."
"Different methods, same escape." She moved closer, fitting herself against his side. "I understood you the moment you told me about Kyle. Not because I knew the details—because I knew the feeling. That terrible arithmetic of survival. Why me and not them."
His arms wrapped around her, pulling her close.
"I'm tired of running." The words came out rough. "Three years of jumping out of airplanes to escape my own head, and it hasn't fixed anything. Kyle's still dead. I still don't know why I survived. The guilt is still there every time I stop moving long enough to feel it."
"Then stop running."
"I don't know how." Vulnerability cracked through his voice. "It's the only coping mechanism I've got. Without the altitude, without the freefall—what am I?"
"You're a man I love." She pulled back to look at him. "A man who's more than his trauma. A man who's capable of connection and tenderness and building something instead of just escaping something."
"You make it sound simple."
"It's not simple. Nothing about healing is simple." She touched his face again, tracing the lines that grief and guilt had carved there. "But maybe it's time to stop chasing altitude and start finding something worth staying grounded for."
His breath caught.
"Like what?"
"Like this." She gestured between them. "Like us. Like the life we're building in the middle of a war, with people who've chosen to protect each other." She paused. "Like helping me rebuild my airfield when this is over. Learning to associate the sky with something other than escape."
"You want to teach me to fly."
"I want to show you that going up doesn't have to mean running away." Her voice was fierce. "You can love the sky without using it to hide from yourself. I had to learn that after my crash. Maybe I can help you learn it too."
Silence stretched between them.
Then Ripcord pulled her into a kiss—slow, deep, full of something that felt like hope.
"Okay," he said when they broke apart.
"Okay what?"
"Okay, I'll try." His forehead rested against hers. "I'll try to stop running. Try to find something worth staying grounded for." A small smile crossed his face. "You're a pretty compelling argument for solid earth."
"Damn right I am."
He laughed—real laughter, the kind she'd only heard from him a handful of times—and the sound settled into her chest like a promise.
"We're a mess," she said. "Both of us. Broken in ways that probably can't be completely fixed."
"Maybe broken isn't the worst thing to be." His hand found hers, fingers intertwining. "Maybe broken people understand each other better. Know how to be gentle with the cracks."
"That's almost poetic."
"Don't tell the brothers. They'll never let me live it down."
She smiled against his shoulder. Outside, the compound had come fully alive—engines and voices and the sound of a community preparing for another day of war. There would be planning sessions and threat assessments and the grim work of finishing what they'd started.
But right now, there was just this.
Two people who'd spent years running from survivor's guilt, finally finding something worth staying for.
"I love you," she said again. It came easier now, more natural.
"I love you too." His arms tightened. "And I'm not going anywhere. Not anymore."
"Good." She pressed a kiss to his chest, right over his heart. "Because I've got plans for you. Once we've finished destroying a drug empire and reclaiming my airfield."
"Big plans?"
"The biggest."
She didn't elaborate. Didn't need to.
Some things were better shown than told.
And they had the rest of their lives to figure out what "grounded" really meant.