20. Chapter 20
Sixty-seven graves took two days to dig.
The ground had thawed just enough at the surface to make it possible, frozen solid a foot down, every grave a fight against earth that didn't want to give up its hold easily.
Gunner dug the first one himself, alongside Tucker and Ray and anyone else who picked up a shovel without being asked.
Castillo. The woman whose name turned out to be Reyes—not the same Reyes who'd died covering Vasquez's retreat, just a cruel coincidence of two families sharing a name on opposite sides of the same battle.
Nine of the stabilized defectors, soldiers who'd been given a second chance and spent it buying time for people they'd known for less than a month.
Vasquez stood at the edge of the burial ground for all nine of them, bandaged shoulder stiff, saying nothing, the black veins on her forearms a permanent reminder of how close she'd come to being grave number sixty-eight instead of one of the people filling the dirt back in.
"They asked for something worth dying for," she said, the only thing she said the entire two days, to no one in particular, somewhere around the fortieth grave. "Got it. Doesn't make digging these any easier."
Tasha worked through both days without stopping, moving between patients in the medical tent and the growing list of names she needed for the burial ledger, her hands steady even when her face wasn't. She'd lost six patients she'd been certain she could save—wounds that should have been survivable, except enhanced bodies pushed past their limits sometimes failed in ways her models hadn't accounted for.
She didn't talk about it. She just kept working, the way she'd kept working through every loss since the war started.
Three hundred of Voss's soldiers had surrendered on the field, disarmed and marched back to North Haven under guard, the beginning of an integration process nobody had a plan for yet.
Twelve hundred people had become fifteen hundred almost overnight, and fifteen hundred would be closer to two thousand once word spread that North Haven had broken Cerberus and the soldiers who'd surrendered weren't being executed for it.
Rivera spent both days doing math that didn't balance—food stores, housing, the particular logistics nightmare of feeding an army that used to be trying to kill you.
Gunner walked the burial ground alone on the evening of the second day, after the last grave had been filled and the last name had been added to Tasha's ledger.
Sixty-seven markers in neat rows, some of them barely more than a name scratched into a board because there hadn't been time yet for anything better.
He stood there a long time, the cold settling into his bones in a way it hadn't during the fighting, when there'd been no room left for feeling it.
He thought about the math Rivera kept running, the numbers that never quite balanced.
Sixty-seven dead to keep two children alive.
Forty dead before that just to hold the wall long enough for the counterattack to matter.
He didn't regret a single decision he'd made—couldn't afford to, not with Phoenix's hand still pressed against the nursery window every evening, watching for fires that weren't coming anymore.
But the weight of it didn't lift just because the decisions had been right.
It just sat there, permanent, another thing he carried alongside everything else.
He stayed at the graves until full dark, until the cold finally drove him back toward the settlement, toward the sound of something he hadn't heard in North Haven in longer than he could remember.
Music.
The celebration had been building since the soldiers laid down their weapons two days ago, but tonight it finally broke loose all at once—fires burning in every open space the settlement could spare, food shared from stores that should have been rationed tighter but weren't, somewhere a fiddle and a guitar that had survived the collapse finding each other and making something that sounded almost like joy.
Twelve hundred people who'd spent months bracing for an army that was now feeding three hundred of its own surrendered soldiers in the mess hall instead of fighting them in the snow.
For the first time since Gunner had founded it, North Haven felt permanent.
Not a fortress holding against the next threat.
A place. A home, with enough people in it now that some of them would grow old here, would never have known anything else, would tell their children stories about the war that ended the year the settlement finally stopped being afraid.
He didn't join the fires directly. He stood at the edge of the light instead, watching his people celebrate something they'd earned with sixty-seven lives, feeling the strange and necessary duality of it—grief and relief occupying the same chest at the same time, neither one canceling the other out.
Suzuki found him there.
She'd been hard to recognize at first, a shape moving through the firelight that didn't immediately register as her until she was close enough that the silhouette resolved into something he knew.
She'd cleaned up properly. Found a dark green dress in the supply stores — the first non-tactical clothing he'd ever seen her wear. It clung to her lean, combat-hardened body and showed off everything her gear usually hid: defined arms, strong shoulders, long powerful pilot’s legs, and a tight athletic ass that made his cock twitch the second he saw her.
Without the vest and sidearm she looked younger, but still dangerous. Still fuckable as hell.
She didn’t say anything. Just grabbed his hand with a grip that said everything and led him away from the fires, back to his quarters.
The moment the door shut she turned on him like a woman possessed.
"I buried two people I trained myself," she said, voice tight. "Reyes covered Vasquez's retreat. Castillo died holding a line for thirty seconds." Her hand fisted in his shirt hard enough to stretch the fabric. "I don’t want gentle tonight. I want to stop thinking. Make me stop thinking."
"Then stop being careful with it."
Something in her snapped. She yanked him down and kissed him viciously, teeth and hunger, no control left. She ripped the dress over her head and let it fall. Gunner drank in the sight of her naked body — tight muscle, small firm tits with hard nipples, and a smooth, already dripping pussy.
He didn’t waste time. He slammed her back against the wall, pinned her wrists above her head with one hand, and shoved two thick fingers into her soaked cunt. She was fucking drenched. Suzuki cursed loudly and bucked against his hand like an animal.
"Harder than last time," she growled against his mouth. "I’m not made of glass."
Gunner spun her around, bent her over the edge of the bed, and drove his thick cock into her tight pussy in one brutal thrust. She cried out sharply, hands fisting the sheets as he split her open.
"Fuck—yes—" she snarled, pushing back onto him immediately.
He fucked her like he owned her — hard, deep, relentless strokes that made her strong body jolt forward. Her tight cunt gripped him like a vice, creaming down his shaft with every thrust. He kept her wrists pinned, one hand fisted in her hair, using her exactly how she needed to be used.
"That’s it," he growled. "Take this cock. Let it fuck the commander out of you."
Suzuki lost it completely. She was moaning and cursing, pushing back like a bitch in heat, every disciplined layer stripped away.
He railed her through the first orgasm, her pussy clamping down hard as she screamed into the bed.
He didn’t slow down. He kept pounding her raw until she came again, shaking and gushing around his cock.
When he finally came he buried himself to the balls and flooded her cunt with thick, heavy loads of cum, pumping rope after rope deep inside her.
"Stay," she gasped, still trembling, voice wrecked. "Don’t pull out. I want to feel it. I haven’t let anyone own me in three years. Don’t waste it."
Gunner stayed buried deep in her cum-filled pussy, hand splayed possessively over her flat stomach. He kept slowly grinding into her until her breathing finally evened out and sleep took her — completely, on her own terms.
***
Isabella checked the room sometime after midnight. She found them tangled together, Suzuki's head on Gunner's chest, both of them deeply asleep, the dark green dress still pooled on the floor where it had fallen.
She nodded once, satisfied, and closed the door quietly behind her.
She found Tasha in the nursery a few minutes later, nursing Phoenix in the low lamplight, Storm finally asleep in the crib beside them after a celebration that had clearly worn out even her boundless energy.
"The pilot's in," Isabella said.
Tasha looked up, a tired smile crossing her face. "Good. The pack needed a strategist."
"She needs to stop folding her clothes when she undresses." Isabella dropped into the chair beside her, suddenly exhausted in the particular way that came after two days of burying the dead and one night of celebrating the living. "It's weird, Tasha. Nobody folds at a moment like that."
Tasha laughed—quiet, careful not to disturb Phoenix, but real all the way through. "She'll learn."
"She better." Isabella watched her son's small hand curl around Tasha's finger, watched the steady rhythm of his breathing, and let herself feel, for just a moment, something that wasn't grief or vigilance or the constant hum of readiness that had carried her through the last two days. Just quiet. Just enough.
"Sixty-seven graves," she said.
"I know."
"Worth it?"
Tasha looked down at Phoenix, then toward the wall where she could just make out, faintly, the sound of Suzuki's breathing settling into something deep and easy for the first time in longer than any of them could remember.
"Ask me again in the morning," Tasha said. "Tonight I just want it to be enough."