Chapter 9
Allison couldn't sleep.
She'd tried. Two hours of staring at the ceiling, listening to the compound settle into its nighttime rhythm—engines cooling in the garage, the low murmur of brothers on watch, the distant hum of generators that kept the cameras running. Familiar sounds by now. Almost comforting.
But her mind wouldn't stop.
She pulled on jeans and the soft flannel she'd stolen from the clean laundry pile—too big, probably belonging to someone who'd never miss it—and padded barefoot down the hallway.
The main room was empty except for a prospect nursing coffee at the bar, eyes half-closed. He straightened when he saw her.
"Ma'am—"
"Just getting air."
She slipped through the back door before he could radio anyone.
The compound at midnight was a different world.
Floodlights turned the gravel lot into a pale stage, but beyond the fence, the Carolina pines were a black wall against a sky thick with stars.
The air smelled like pine sap and warm earth, heavy with the humidity that never quite broke, even in the small hours.
She found him at the northwest corner of the perimeter.
Of course she did.
Static was walking the fence line with the focused attention of a man checking positions for the tenth time, his hand trailing along the chain-link like he was reading it by touch.
He'd changed out of his cut—just a black t-shirt stretched across his shoulders, jeans, boots.
Without the leather and patches, he looked less like a biker and more like what he'd been before.
A soldier. Carrying something he couldn't set down.
"You're supposed to be sleeping," she said from ten feet away, not wanting to startle a man whose reflexes she'd seen in action.
He didn't startle. Didn't even turn. "Heard you coming from the back door."
"And you didn't say anything?"
"Wanted to see where you'd go." He turned then, moonlight catching the hard angles of his face. "You came to the perimeter."
"I came to find you." She crossed the distance between them, stopping when she was close enough to see his eyes. Tired. Restless. Haunted by something that lived behind the tactical focus. "You're checking positions that don't need checking."
"All positions need checking."
"Not at midnight. Not for the fourth time." She tilted her head. "What's keeping you out here?"
Static's jaw worked. She watched the muscles flex, watched him weigh whether to answer or deflect, and waited with the patience of a woman who'd spent three years learning his silences.
"Jackson," he said finally. "His name was Danny Jackson."
The paratrooper. The one he'd mentioned at the safehouse—fragments of a story he'd parceled out like ammunition, never spending more than he had to.
"Tell me," she said.
"It's not a good story."
"I don't need it to be good. I need it to be true."
He leaned against the fence, the chain-link bowing under his weight, and looked at the sky like the stars might have better words than he did.
"We were in a place I can't name. Extraction point was hot—enemy contact from a direction intel said was clear. I was rear-guard. My job was to hold the position until everyone reached the bird."
"The helicopter."
"Black Hawk. Fifty yards away. Rotors turning." His voice had gone flat, reciting facts stripped of everything except weight. "We were taking fire from the south. I called the withdrawal—everyone fall back to the bird, go now, move."
"And Jackson?"
"Was twenty yards behind me. Pinned down behind a wall that was coming apart under fire.
I saw him. He saw me. He was waving me off—go, go, I'll catch up.
" Static's hands curled into fists at his sides.
"I should have gone back for him. Should have held thirty more seconds, laid down covering fire, given him time to reach us. "
"But you didn't."
"I made the call. Pulled everyone to the bird. We lifted off and Jackson was still behind that wall." He swallowed. "We found his body three days later. They'd had three days with him before he died. Three days to do things I can't—"
His voice broke. Not dramatically, not loudly. Just a crack in the foundation, a fissure that showed how deep the damage went.
"I left him behind." Barely a whisper. "I was rear-guard. My one job was making sure everyone got out. And I left a twenty-two-year-old kid behind a wall in a country that doesn't officially exist, and he died over three days because I called the retreat thirty seconds too early."
Allison felt the words land in her chest like stones.
She'd grown up around this. Around men who carried the dead in their posture, who walked perimeters at midnight because sleep meant dreaming and dreaming meant remembering.
Her father had done it—pacing their quarters at Bragg, checking locks that were already locked, guarding a family that wasn't under threat because the alternative was lying still with his ghosts.
She knew what it looked like.
She'd never known what it felt like to want to take it away from someone so badly her hands ached.
"Isaac."
His real name. The one he'd told her on the second day at the safehouse, offered like a secret he didn't give to many people. She'd held it carefully since then, waiting for the right moment to use it.
This was the moment.
His whole body went still. Not the tactical stillness she'd seen before—the frozen attention of a man who'd heard something he wasn't prepared for.
"Isaac," she said again, and stepped close enough to put her hands on his chest. His heart was hammering under her palms, hard and fast, the heart of a man who could face down armed collectors without flinching but couldn't survive the sound of his own name in her mouth. "You didn't kill him."
"I left him—"
"You saved everyone else." Her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt. "Nine men on that helicopter who went home because you made the call. Nine families who got their sons back. You carry the one you lost. Do you ever count the ones you saved?"
His breath came out ragged. She felt it against her forehead, warm and unsteady, and realized he was shaking.
This man who'd killed Rayburn with a knife in the dark, who'd taken down armed collectors in her parking lot, who carried violence like a second skin—shaking under her hands because she'd said his name and asked him to forgive himself.
"Come inside," she said.
"Allison—"
"Come inside with me." She pulled back enough to find his eyes. "Not to check positions. Not to watch the door. Come inside and let someone watch yours for once."
He stared at her. She watched the war play out across his face—duty against need, discipline against desire, the ingrained reflex to guard against the desperate want to be held.
She didn't push. Didn't pull. Just stood there with her hands on his chest and her eyes on his and waited for him to choose.
He chose.
His hand came up and covered both of hers, pressing them harder against his heart. Then he let her lead him away from the perimeter, away from the fence and the positions and the endless patrol, across the gravel lot and through the back door and down the hallway to her room.
She closed the door behind them and the world shrank to four walls and the sound of his breathing.
"I don't—" He stopped. Started again. "I haven't let anyone this close in a long time."
"I know."
"I might not be good at this."
"Isaac." Third time. She felt him shudder at the sound of it. "Stop guarding yourself from me."
She reached for the hem of his shirt, and he let her pull it over his head.
The scars didn't surprise her. She'd expected them—military men wore their service in their skin.
But the sheer map of it stole her breath.
Shrapnel marks across his ribs. A long pale line tracing his collarbone.
Older wounds layered beneath newer ones, a history of violence written in tissue that had healed rough and hard.
She touched the scar on his collarbone. He flinched—not from pain, but from the tenderness of it.
"You don't have to—"
"Shut up." She said it gently, but she meant it. "For once in your life, stop telling me what I don't have to do. I'm here because I want to be."
"Why?"
The question was so raw it hurt to hear.
"Because you watched my six for three years without asking for anything.
Because you ate my terrible early burritos and never complained.
Because when someone hurt me, you didn't ask what I'd done to deserve it—you asked where they were.
" Her voice trembled, but her hands didn't. She traced the scar down to his chest, feeling the muscle beneath flex under her touch.
"Because you shake when I say your name, and that makes me want to say it every day for the rest of my life. "
Something broke in him.
She saw it happen—the moment the last wall came down, the final defensive position abandoned.
His hands found her waist and pulled her against him, and when his mouth found hers it wasn't gentle.
It was desperate. A man who'd been guarding everyone else's six for so long he'd forgotten anyone might want to guard his.
She kissed him back with everything she had.
Her fingers in his hair, her body pressed against the warm terrain of his chest, her mouth telling him things she didn't have words for yet.
He tasted like coffee and the Carolina night, and when his hands slid under the flannel she'd stolen, his fingers against her bare skin made every nerve she owned light up like a flare.
"Mine." The word rumbled from his chest into her mouth. Not a question. A fact he was discovering, turning over, claiming. "You've been mine since you remembered my order."
"Since before that." She pulled back enough to meet his eyes, her breath coming fast. "Since you started leaving twenties for six-dollar meals and walking away before I could argue."
His laugh was rough, broken, beautiful. She'd never heard him laugh before. Not really. It sounded like something he'd lost and just found again.
She pulled the flannel over her head and watched his expression change.
The tactical focus was gone. The rear-guard sweep, the constant assessment, the measured calculation of every angle—all of it burned away by something older and more powerful.
He looked at her like she was the only position that mattered, the only extraction worth planning, the only six he wanted to spend the rest of his life watching.
"You're sure," he said. Not asking. Needing to hear it.
"Isaac. Yes."
He lifted her like she weighed nothing—hands at her waist, then her thighs, her legs wrapping around him as he carried her to the bed with the same controlled strength he brought to everything.
But when he laid her down, his hands were shaking.
She felt the tremor against her skin, the fine vibration of a dangerous man coming undone because the woman beneath him had chosen to let him close.
She pulled him down and showed him what it felt like to be held instead of holding.
What followed was slow. Deliberate. A careful demolition of every wall he'd built since a paratrooper died behind a crumbling barrier in a country without a name.
She mapped his scars with her mouth and he learned the geography of her body with hands that trembled between rough and reverent.
When he finally sank into her, the sound he made was wrecked—broken open, stripped to the foundation, a man who'd spent years guarding the perimeter discovering what it felt like to come home.
She held on. Tight. The way she'd held on during the motorcycle ride from the safehouse, except this time the destination wasn't survival.
It was something she'd been afraid to name until his mouth found the curve of her neck and he whispered it for her.
"Stay."
"I'm here."
"Stay after." His forehead pressed against hers, his body moving with hers in a rhythm that felt like breathing, like heartbeat, like the tide coming in. "When this is over. When Kendrick's gone and you don't need protecting anymore. Stay because you want to, not because you have to."
"Isaac." She lifted her hips to meet his and watched his control shatter. "I'm not going anywhere."
He buried his face against her throat, and she felt the moment he let go completely—not just his body but his grief, his guilt, the crushing weight of a paratrooper he'd carried for years.
He poured it all into her, and she took it because she was strong enough and because nobody had ever offered to carry it with him.
After, they lay tangled together in sheets that smelled like laundry detergent and pine. His head on her chest, her fingers tracing slow circles on the back of his neck. His breathing had evened out—deep, steady, the breath of a man who might actually sleep tonight.
"You're the first person I've told the whole story," he murmured against her skin. "About Martinez. The three days."
"I know."
"How?"
"Because you told it like it was killing you to say the words." She pressed her lips to the top of his head. "Things that have been shared before get smoother. That was all edges."
He was quiet for a long time. His hand rested on her hip, heavy and warm, anchoring himself to her like she might drift away if he didn't hold on.
"I'm going to be impossible about this," he said finally. "About you. About anyone who looks at you, talks to you, stands too close to you."
"You're already impossible."
"It's going to get worse."
She smiled against his hair. "I've been handling impossible men my entire life. You're just the first one I chose for myself."
His arm tightened around her waist, pulling her closer, and she felt his mouth curve against her collarbone.
"Get some sleep," she whispered. "I'll watch the door."
A breath of laughter. "You don't know how to watch a door."
"I'll learn." She settled deeper into the pillow, his weight on her chest heavy and warm and exactly right. "I'm a fast study."
Silence. Then his breathing changed—deepened, slowed, the rhythm of a body finally surrendering to exhaustion.
Allison held him in the dark and listened to the compound breathe around them.
He'd spent years guarding everyone else's six. Tonight, she'd guarded his.
And for the first time since a collector kicked in her bathroom door, she wasn't thinking about what she'd lost.
She was thinking about what she'd found.