10. Feral
Feral
Steve
There’s too much blood on my shirt.
Not enough to kill her. Liberty has said that twice, and Jan said it once before Liberty told her to stop diagnosing herself and lie still.
But my shirt is balled against my wife’s side, soaked dark where my hands pressed too hard, and my brain doesn’t care about the difference between superficial and catastrophic.
Jan is stretched out on the dining table in the hotel suite we've just turned into a field station. The medical kit is open with towels stacked nearby. Saline ready beside Liberty’s gloved hands.
Liberty works with calm, practical focus, cutting away the torn edge of Jan’s shirt while Nikolai stands on the other side of the table with gauze, clamps, and the quiet readiness of a man who’s patched wounds in worse places.
“Talk to me,” I say.
“Shallow graze,” Liberty says. “Lateral. Messy, but not deep.”
“Again.”
Jan turns her head toward me, pale but awake. “Steve.”
“Again,” I say, because if Liberty says it enough times, maybe the words will get past the blood in my head.
Liberty lifts her eyes. “She’s not bleeding like someone with internal damage. Pulse is steady. Blood pressure’s holding. She needs cleaning, closure, antibiotics, and rest.”
“Rest sounds ambitious,” Jan mutters.
Liberty presses gauze to her side with more authority. “So does arguing with the person holding your skin together.”
Jan shuts her mouth.
Good. Someone managed it.
Nikolai’s gaze flicks to mine. “Breathe, Hollands.”
“I’m breathing.”
“No. You’re preparing to kill the wall.”
My fist is half-raised. I hadn’t noticed.
The plaster beside the table is white, smooth, and extremely punchable. I lower my hand before Jan comments. Except she’s Jan. Wounded or not, she misses nothing.
“Don’t you dare,” she says.
“Wasn’t planning to.”
“Liar.”
Liberty glances between us. “If anyone punches anything before I finish, I’m sedating them.”
Nikolai hands her fresh gauze. “I support this.”
Jan’s mouth curves, faint and tired. “Traitors.”
The room should feel lighter after that.
It doesn’t.
All I can see is the rock exploding beside her. Her hand coming away red. The way she tried to sound irritated instead of hurt because she knew I’d hear the difference.
My body wants movement. Violence. Impact. Something direct enough to answer the seconds between seeing Jan hit and getting my hands on the wound.
Instead, I stand beside the table and do nothing because Liberty needs space.
Doing nothing might be the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Liberty irrigates the wound, and Jan’s face tightens before she can hide it. I move without deciding to, one hand closing around the edge of the table.
“Easy,” I say.
Jan’s eyes cut to mine. “Do not say easy to me while someone pours fire into my side.”
“It’s saline,” Liberty says.
“It has ambitions.”
Nikolai almost smiles.
I don’t.
Liberty finishes cleaning the wound and studies the damage. “No sutures. Steri-Strips should hold. We’ll dress it, start antibiotics, and monitor fever, swelling, and bleeding.”
I stare at her. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“She needs a hospital.”
Jan pushes up on one elbow. “I absolutely do not.”
Liberty eases her back down. “You need to stop making my job harder.”
Nikolai looks at me. “Hospital creates records. Records create questions. Questions find Petrakis before we’re ready.”
“I don’t give a damn about Petrakis.”
Jan’s eyes sharpen. “Yes, you do.”
“No, Jan. Right now, I don’t.”
The room stills.
I step back before I reach for her too soon. My shoulder hits the wall hard enough to rattle a framed print. Not a punch. Barely.
Still, Jan hears it.
“Steve.”
I close my eyes, then open them again because the port is waiting behind my eyelids.
Liberty smooths the dressing into place. “Done.”
Jan is alive. Awake. Annoyed. Patched up on a hotel dining table under bad light while my ruined shirt sits in a red heap on the floor.
She reaches for me.
Not far. Just fingers lifting from the table.
That’s all it takes.
I cross the room and take her hand like I’ve been ordered to survive.
“I’m here,” she says.
I nod because words are dangerous.
Her thumb moves once against mine. “Superficial.”
I look at the bandage. Then at her face.
“Don’t make it smaller for me.”
She goes quiet.
I bend over her hand and press my mouth to her knuckles because kissing her anywhere else might turn into something I can’t stop in front of everyone.
The rage is still there, waiting with teeth.
But beneath it is something worse.
The knowledge that I saw blood on my wife and became a man I barely recognized.
And if Petrakis is smart, he’ll pray he never meets that man face-to-face.
Elysion Hotel, Holland’s Command Suite, Mytilene, Lesbos, Greece. 0020 hours
Jan’s eyes open before Liberty finishes taping the dressing into place.
She looks at me first. Then Liberty. Then Nikolai. Then the three women huddled near the sofa with Cole and Jax crouched in front of them, speaking low, hands visible, movements careful.
Of course she sees them.
Of course my wife is bleeding on a dining table and still tracking who else needs help.
“Steve.”
“No.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re going to.”
Her gaze holds mine, steady despite the pallor in her face. “Steve. Look at me.”
I am looking at her. That’s the problem. I can’t seem to look anywhere else. Her skin is too pale under the hotel lighting, her shirt cut open at the side, Liberty’s dressing covering the place where a piece of metal tried to take her from me.
“Look at me,” she says again, softer this time.
I drag my focus up to her eyes.
There she is.
Clear. Sharp. Angry enough to live forever if stubbornness gets a vote.
“I’m fine,” she says. “It’s a scratch.”
“It’s a ricochet wound.”
“It’s shallow.”
“You bled through my shirt.”
“Your shirt was very dramatic.”
“Jan.”
“We have a mission.”
“No.”
Her eyes narrow. “Excuse me?”
“You’re done. You’re going home.”
The suite goes quiet enough that I know everyone heard it. Cole’s head dips. Jax suddenly finds the medical tape fascinating. Liberty doesn’t look up, which tells me she’s listening very carefully and wisely choosing survival.
Jan pushes up on one elbow.
Liberty plants a hand on her shoulder. “Absolutely not.”
Jan glares at her. “I’m arguing with my husband.”
“You can argue flat.”
Nikolai’s mouth twitches.
If I weren’t one bad breath from losing what’s left of my control, I might appreciate it.
“Like hell I’m going home,” Jan says, lying back because Liberty’s hand doesn’t move. “Those women still need assessment, Solace is still missing, Petrakis is still breathing, and we’re sitting inside the best lead we’ve had.”
“You were shot.”
“Grazed.”
“Hit,” I snap. “You were hit.”
Her mouth closes.
Good.
Let the word sit there. Let it be ugly. Let it be what it is.
Behind me, one of the rescued women whispers something in Arabic. The youngest answers in hesitant English. “We… stay here?”
That breaks the room open again.
Cole turns toward her immediately. “For tonight, yes. You’re safe here.”
She looks at me, then at Jan, then at the bloody towels Liberty is stuffing into a waste bag. Safe probably feels like a word people in clean rooms say when they haven’t seen enough.
Jan’s face changes.
Not soft. Focused.
“Tell them no phones,” she says. “No windows. No calls to anyone until Victor clears it. Meridian may still have names, photographs, contacts.”
“I’ve got it,” Cole says.
“No social media,” Jan adds. “No family messages from hotel Wi-Fi. Nothing traceable.”
Jax nods. “We’ll brief them.”
“You should be lying still,” Liberty says.
“I am lying still. Efficiently.”
Crew appears at the suite door in jeans, boots, and a T-shirt he clearly pulled on in the dark. “Night manager’s awake. Not thrilled, but awake. I’ve arranged the suite across the hall for the women under a cash booking and a fake conference overflow story.”
“Security?” I ask.
“Hall camera looped by Grayson. Staff elevator locked to our floor. I’ll take first watch.”
Nikolai looks toward the women. “They need food, clean clothes, and quiet. No police. Not yet.”
The woman who asked about staying nods slowly. Her English is broken, but her understanding isn’t. “Men from port come?”
“No,” I say. “They won’t get near you.”
I mean it so completely that Jan looks back at me.
There it is again.
The argument waiting beneath the work.
Liberty finishes the disposals and strips off her gloves. “Steve, she can sit up for five minutes. Then she rests.”
“Thank you,” Jan says.
“That wasn’t permission to run the mission from the table.”
“It sounded like permission with conditions.”
Liberty gives her a flat Army-nurse look. “Don’t test me.”
Jan sighs, then turns back to me. “I’m not leaving.”
“You’re not going into the field.”
“Fine.”
The answer comes too quickly.
“No,” I say. “Don’t you fine me in that tone.”
“What tone?”
“The tone that means you’ve already found twelve loopholes.”
Her lips press together.
I point at her. “There. That face. That’s the loophole face.”
Jax coughs once from the sofa.
Cole stands. “We’re going to move the women across the hall.”
Wise man.
The room shifts around us as Crew opens the door and Jax helps the women up one by one. Cole carries the injured woman, careful with her ankle, while Nikolai murmurs something in Greek that makes the oldest woman nod.
Then it’s just Jan on the table, Liberty packing the kit, and me standing too close to breaking.
Jan reaches for my hand. I give it to her because I’m not strong enough not to.
“We have a mission,” she says.
“I have a wife.”
“You have both.”
“I nearly didn’t.”
Her fingers tighten around mine.
That’s the only answer she gives.
And it’s the one that scares me most.
Elysion Hotel, Holland’s Command Suite, Mytilene, Lesbos, Greece. 0035 hours
Liberty doesn’t leave Jan until she’s checked the dressing twice.
Only then does she close the medical kit and look toward the door. “I’m going across the hall to assess the women.”
Jan shifts like she’s about to sit up.
“No,” Liberty says.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You breathed like you were planning something.”