Chapter 3 Gideon #2
Once, I'd thought joining the military would make me a hero. I was seventeen and full of fire, my mother's shaky signature was still wet on the enlistment papers. Go make them proud, Gideon, she'd said. Go protect the world.
By nineteen, I was flying escort over France, shooting down men who looked just like me except for the flag on their wing. By twenty, my best friend Mark—another dragon—was gone, shot down somewhere over Saxony.
By twenty-one, the war was over.
And I was still here, fighting something that wouldn't die.
The noise level climbed as more crews staggered in.
English mixed with a smattering of Russian, and both blended with the sharp, clipped German of the locals.
People smoked, drank, fought, and made up in the span of a few sentences.
It was chaos, but it was a familiar kind.
You could pretend the world was normal here, if only for a little while.
Carter returned with a pitcher and six pints, distributing them like a priest giving out communion.
"To the Berlin Express," he announced, raising his glass.
The others echoed him, and for a minute, I almost felt like a person and not a machine.
I raised my own glass, said nothing, and let the beer do the talking.
A few minutes later, Carter nudged my shin under the table. "Check six, Griff. Two o'clock. That one's new."
I followed his nod past a haze of cigarette smoke and the hunched backs of half a dozen flight engineers.
Not much to see at first. A girl in a worn gray dress—nothing fancy—but her long chestnut hair caught the dim light and held it, like it refused to let go once it was noticed.
She wore it curled at the ends, old-fashioned, almost like something you'd see in a Life magazine ad back home.
Her face was carved thinner than it should've been, hollows under her cheekbones that weren't there for beauty, but for survival.
She was pretty enough.
Pretty in the brittle way of someone barely keeping ahead of gravity. Pretty in the way that made your chest ache if you looked too long, like something already half-lost.
Then the dragon stirred. Not a roar. Not fire. Just a low, unmistakable pull beneath my ribs, heat curling, scales shifting in warning or recognition, I couldn't tell which. My attention sharpened without my permission, my focus narrowing until the rest of the bar dulled around the edges.
She moved between tables, balancing a tray with practiced ease, ducking a grabby hand without breaking stride. She didn't look up often. When she did, her eyes were large and dark, shellacked with something harder than mascara.
Resignation, maybe.
Or the kind of cold that sank into your bones and never quite left, no matter how warm the room was. My dragon watched her the way it watched the sky before a storm. Alert. Intent.
Certain that something important had just crossed our path.
And for the first time since the war ended, since I'd learned how to lock every dangerous part of myself down tight, I had the uneasy, undeniable sense that whatever this was, I wasn't going to be able to walk away from it.
'"You see what I'm seeing?" Carter said, turning his glass so the pale beer made a warped lens between us. "That one's trouble."
"She doesn't look old enough to be here," I said, though she was probably my age, maybe a year or two younger.
"Old enough to break hearts," someone else said—Schmidt, I think, the only German-American in our squadron, blond and baby-faced and doomed to be a translation joke forever. "Or your teeth, if you get fresh."
More laughter, but it was a thin layer over something else.
The German girls made everyone just a little uncomfortable, even the ones who acted like kings in the ruins.
Some of the guys had wives waiting stateside, pictures folded into four and carried like talismans, and I'd seen more than a few promises unravel on the night tram to Steglitz or in the back rooms of bars like this.
The girls were never the problem. It was always us.
The second time the waitress passed by, I caught her eye, just for a moment. She didn't smile or give me a line. She just looked at me like I was another piece of broken furniture to step around and kept moving.
Carter noticed. He always did. He leaned over, pitched his voice low. "Bet you five packs of Lucky Strikes you can't get her name before midnight."
I grunted. "What makes you think I'm interested?"
"What makes you think you're not?" Carter's grin was all teeth. "I hear the new ones are looking for real connections. Nylons, chocolate, a way out. You got nylons, right? In your room? You always have everything, man."
He said it like a joke, but I could feel the eyes of the table swing my way, checking if maybe I did have something they didn't. In their heads, it was still a race, still a contest, even here at the edge of the world. The dragon didn't understand contests. He understood only claims.
So I lied. "I'm fresh out."
The lie tasted wrong the moment it left my mouth, like smoke swallowed the wrong way.
Carter clapped my shoulder, unconvinced. "Don't sweat it, Griff. She's out of your league anyway."
The others joined in, laughing, ribbing me the way men did when they were bored and restless and trying to forget where they were.
The warmth of it should've been good. Should've grounded me.
Instead, the dragon under my skin rolled and flexed, a low warning ripple that had nothing to do with Carter's words and everything to do with the girl across the room.
My shoulders tightened. All I wanted was air. Space. Sky.
The night moved fast after that. Glasses refilled.
Voices climbed. Smoke thickened. The tiny bar warped until it felt like all of Berlin had been pressed into one room, breathing the same sour steam, clinging to the same fragile hope that the Americans would leave enough behind to drink again tomorrow.
When the girl came by our table, Schmidt tried his German on her. She cut him off in perfect English. "We close in half an hour," her eyes flicked over him—then to me—and away again. "Last call."
The dragon stilled. Not relaxed. Focused.
Carter leaned in. "What's your name, anyway? For our friend here, not for us. He's shy."
She gave him nothing but the faintest shake of her head. "Inga," she replied, not looking at any of us.
Her name landed low and solid in my chest, like it had always belonged there.
"Inga," Carter repeated, rolling it around like a new flavor of gum. "Pretty name for a cold night, huh, Griff?"
I felt her glance at me, quick, sharp, assessing. A look that made something hot and instinctive coil tight under my ribs.
"We'll take one more round, Inga," I said, because I had to say something, keeping my voice level by force of habit alone.
She turned without a word.
Schmidt watched her move away and murmured, "That one… she is not like the others."
The dragon agreed.
"None of them are," I mumbled, but no one heard me.
By midnight, most of the crowd had thinned out. Carter and Schmidt were drunk enough to start singing, arms locked around each other's shoulders, God only knew what language it was supposed to be. I heeled my chair back against the wall and watched Inga wipe down the bar.
Her movements were spare. Mechanical. Efficient. She never smiled. Never flirted. She poured another drink only when someone asked and counted the cigarettes before she took them, every single time.
The dragon watched her, too.
It recognized something in the way she held herself, not weakness, but discipline. A refusal to break. Like if you looked close enough, you'd see the cracks, but she kept fitting the pieces together and daring the world to try her again.
When the bar finally emptied, I stood to leave. Carter was passed out cold, his cheek mashed into a puddle of spilled beer. Schmidt was arguing with the jukebox in slurred German. I left more money on the table than I needed to and thought about saying goodnight to Inga.
But she was gone, vanished through a door behind the bar.
I'd noticed the Russians all night. Noticed them noticing her too.
And now I didn't like the way they followed her out the back.
I told myself it wasn't my concern. That this would only bring trouble.
That I didn't care about Germans. Or Russians.
The dragon huffed at the lie. Because I knew exactly what those men were about to do.
And I knew—just as surely—that I couldn't let it happen. Not to her. Not to any woman. Not on my watch.