Chapter 36 Julia
Julia
The first thing I felt was the shaking.
Not the building—me.
My hands trembled as we rode the lift back up, the taste of ozone still lingering in my mouth, Reese’s last scream echoing in the hollow places he’d tried to hollow out even further.
Hawk’s grip on my fingers was the only thing that felt solid.
We didn’t talk.
We didn’t have to.
The lift doors slid open onto Level 1 and light spilled in—too bright, too normal for what we’d just done. The hallway we’d entered through earlier now buzzed with life: boots pounding, shouted commands, the sharp bark of Aaron’s voice.
“Jensen! Marlow!”
I barely had a second to brace before Aaron closed the distance, his gaze skimming over us in one hard sweep. Boone and Logan were behind him, weapons up, covering angles out of habit even though the main threat was already dead six stories below.
“You two in one piece?” Aaron demanded.
Hawk answered, because my throat had gone tight. “We’re here.”
Miles jogged up from behind, tablet clutched to his chest, face flushed. “We lost comms halfway down. Systems went dark. All I could see was a cascading shutdown. I thought—”
He cut himself off when his eyes met mine.
“Hey,” I managed. “We’re hard to get rid of.”
Boone gave a low whistle. “Whole facility went offline like someone pulled the plug on God.”
“That’s basically what happened,” Miles muttered.
Aaron’s gaze sharpened. “Status on Echo?”
“Terminated,” Hawk said. “Reese used himself as the architecture. We used him as the kill switch.”
Aaron let out a long breath, some of the tension in his shoulders bleeding away. “And Veridian?”
“Dead with him,” Miles said. “I’m seeing cascaded failures through every node it touched. It’ll take weeks to comb through the mess, but Echo’s gone. No more automated war god pulling strings.”
Boone clapped Hawk’s shoulder. “Nice work.”
Hawk didn’t answer. His thumb was rubbing slow circles over the back of my hand, like he needed to keep confirming I was still there.
Aaron’s gaze flicked to our joined hands. Something unreadable passed through his eyes, but he didn’t comment. Instead, he jerked his chin toward the exit corridor.
“Med checks, both of you,” he ordered. “Then debrief. Jensen—Joint Command’s already frothing. They want you in D.C. as soon as you can stand up straight.”
My stomach dipped.
“D.C.?” I repeated.
Hawk’s jaw flexed. “They can wait.”
“No,” Aaron said quietly. “They can’t. This wasn’t just a field op, Hawk. You shut down a rogue AI that infiltrated federal infrastructure. There are questions. They’ll want your statement, your read, your recommendations for what comes next.”
Recommendations. That meant committees. That meant closed-door meetings with men in suits who never smelled cordite in their lives.
It meant distance.
“How long?” I asked, before I could stop myself.
Aaron hesitated. “A couple of days at least. Maybe a week. Depends on how ugly they want to get.”
A week.
After everything we’d just done, the idea of Hawk being anywhere I wasn’t felt wrong in my bones.
Hawk squeezed my hand. “First things first,” he said. “You need to get that bruise looked at.”
I scowled. “What bruise?”
Miles lifted a brow. “The one taking up half your face.”
I reached up and hissed when my fingers brushed my cheek. Heat. Swelling. Right. Reese’s gun.
“It’s nothing.”
Hawk gave me a look that said he’d let me get away with a lot, but not that. “Med. Now.”
Aaron jerked his head toward the corridor. “Go. I’ll deal with Command.”
We stepped away from them, moving down the hall. My legs felt strangely weightless—like I might drift up and away if I didn’t focus on each step.
“You okay?” Hawk asked quietly.
“No.”
He nodded once. “Me neither.”
It shouldn’t have made me feel better.
It did.
The makeshift infirmary was set up in a side room that smelled like antiseptic and exhaustion. A young medic in fatigues checked my pupils, prodded my cheekbone, and made a sympathetic noise.
“Good news—nothing fractured,” she said. “Just a nasty contusion. You’ll look like you lost a bar fight for a few days.”
“How about if I say I won?” I asked.
Hawk made a sound suspiciously close to a laugh.
The medic smiled faintly. “From what I heard, yeah. Try some ice when you can. I’ll send you home with anti-inflammatories.”
Hawk had a cut above his eyebrow and bruises blooming along his ribs where Reese’s hits had landed. The medic cleaned and taped the cut, then shot him the same measuring look she’d given me.
“You two look like hell.”
“Feels accurate,” Hawk said.
She stepped back. “You’re cleared, for now. They’ll want a more thorough look once you’re back at base.”
Then I looked at Hawk and felt the rest of it barreling in behind.
He caught my gaze. “What?”
“D.C.,” I said. “You really have to go?”
His eyes didn’t flinch, but the muscle in his cheek ticked. “Yeah.”
“For how long?”
“Don’t know yet.”
The answer I hated.
Non-answers had killed more relationships than truth ever did.
The medic moved on to another patient, leaving us in a bubble of dim light and beeping monitors.
I stared at the tape on his brow. “Last time you left like that…”
“Julia.”
“…you disappeared for years. I kept waiting for you to come back home and ask me out to dinner.”
His breath left him slow. “That was different.”
“Why?” I asked. “Because you’re older now? Because Command sends emails instead of letters?”
He stepped closer. Not enough to crowd me, but enough that I could feel the heat rolling off him.
“Because back then I didn’t have anyone waiting for me at home,” he said. “Now I do.”
The words hit me right in the chest.
“And you’re sure,” I said quietly, “that they’ll let you come back?”
He hesitated.
I saw it. Felt it.
“Lucas,” I whispered, using his first name the way Reese had, only softer. “What aren’t you saying?”
“They’re going to ask me to stay on longer than I want,” he admitted. “Consult. Advise on new protocols. They’ll want a golden boy to stand next to them and say it’s all under control.”
“Is it?”
He held my gaze. “No. But I’m also the one who knows exactly how bad it was. That matters.”
“So what?” I asked. “You go to D.C., sit in a room with people who’ll never understand what happened down there, and try to convince them not to build another Echo with better PR?”
“Something like that,” he said dryly.
“And if they ask you to stay?” I pushed. “If they say it’s your duty? That you’re the only one who can keep the next version from going rogue?”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“Then I say no,” he said at last.
Some tiny, tightly coiled thing in me loosened.
“You’d walk away?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?” The word came out too fast, too raw.
He didn’t even blink. “Because I’ve already spent a good part of my life belonging to a system instead of a person. That ends now.”
My heart stumbled.
“A person,” I repeated.
He stepped close enough that our boots touched. His thumb brushed the uninjured side of my face, calloused and careful.
“You,” he said simply. “I belong to you. And you belong to me.”
Tears pricked my eyes before I could stop them. Damn him.
“You better tell Command that,” I rasped.
A ghost of a smile tugged at his mouth. “Pretty sure it’s not standard briefing language.”
“Make it standard.”
His gaze dropped to my lips. “You ordering me, Detective?”
“Absolutely.”
He kissed me—slow this time, not desperate, the kind of kiss that tasted like a promise instead of a goodbye.
For a moment, the world shrank to that touch. The infirmary, the facility, the dead man six floors down—everything else faded.
Then Aaron’s voice crackled over the comm:
“Bird’s wheels down in thirty. Jensen, I need you prepped to move.”
Hawk rested his forehead against mine for half a heartbeat, exhaling slowly, like he could stall time with breath alone.
“Briefing,” I said.
“Briefing,” he agreed.
And even though he’d just promised me everything, a part of me still whispered the same old fear into the quiet:
He’s leaving.
What if he doesn’t come back?