Chapter 10
Tess
I wake up to an empty bed.
The space beside me is cold. Sullivan has been gone for a while. That knowledge does something to my stomach. I breathe through the discomfort, carefully listening until the sounds of him working in the kitchen drift from below.
I sit up in his loft and pull on his flannel over my t-shirt. Climbing down the ladder in his oversized wool socks, I find Sullivan sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of water and a face I’ve seen on him before.
It’s the same expression he wore on the porch step, the day after the hawk.
The face of a man who has been arguing with himself in the dark.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
“You’re up early.”
“I didn’t sleep much.”
I put the kettle on and turn to look at him. “You know what’s funny?”
He arches an eyebrow.
“Seventy-two hours ago, I knew exactly what was going to happen in your head.”
“Tess.”
“And you, Sullivan Mercer, proved me right.”
“Tess.”
“At four a.m. By yourself. In the dark. With a glass of water.” I hold his gaze. “Choosing not to wake the woman lying next to you. Choosing to be alone.”
He doesn’t smile. “I need to say something to you, and I need you to listen.”
I sit down across from him. “All right.” My voice is even. My hands are not. I press them flat on the table. “I’m listening.”
“I was scared yesterday.” His voice is rough. “Not because of what he did. Because of what I almost did.”
“Sullivan—”
“Hold on. Let me say it. I broke that man’s wrist in my head before I even got close to him.
I had a plan. I—” He looks at his hands like he doesn’t recognize them.
“Do you understand what I’m saying? For nine years, they taught me to take a man apart, and that training didn't leave me when I came home. I haven’t had to hold it back in two years.
Yesterday, I barely managed to restrain it.
And the only reason I did is because you said my name. ”
“Sullivan.”
“What if you’re not there next time? What if it’s the kid at the gas station and the wrong word and somebody who reminds me—”
“Sullivan Mercer.”
He stops.
I lean across the table and take his hands—his very cold hands. “Listen to me. I’m going to say this once. Are you with me?”
He blows out a shaky breath. “I’m with you.”
“You did not hurt that man. You held his wrist with control while telling him to take his hand off me. I was there. I felt how steady you were. You are not a man who is losing control of himself. You are a man who has convinced himself that he might. Your call sign wasn’t an accident.
You’re not a weapon, Sullivan. You’re a protector. ”
He doesn’t answer.
“You said you haven’t had to hold it back for two years. That’s not bad luck, Sullivan. That’s a man who’s done a lot of work on himself.”
His throat bobs as he swallows. “Tess—”
“I’m not done.”
He huffs a laugh. “All right, spitfire.”
My mouth tugs up despite the seriousness of this conversation.
“You came up to this cabin to keep the world safe from you. I get it. I do. I sat with my brother through enough of this to recognize it the day I met you. But listen to me carefully, Sullivan ‘Six’ Mercer—I am a woman who has spent twenty-four years being told to be smaller, and yesterday, when a man put his hand on me, you put yourself between us. You told him to take his hand off me, and you let him go when I asked. Do you hear what I’m saying? ”
He looks up.
“I’m not afraid of you, Sullivan.” My voice catches.
“You’re the first person in my entire life who has stood in front of me on purpose, asked permission to stay there, and stepped back when I asked.
And I refuse to let you tell me you’re bad luck.
I refuse, Sullivan. I refuse it in my brother’s name. ”
He looks at me as if I’ve just untied a knot he couldn’t reach. “Tess, I don’t know how to receive this. I don’t know what to do with it.”
“You don’t have to do anything with it.”
A tear slips down his cheek. “I’m not going to be a quick study.”
I dash at the wetness on my cheeks. “I know.”
Sullivan stands and retrieves something from one of the kitchen drawers before returning to the table. He looks at the photograph in his hand for a long moment, then passes it to me.
I look at the three men in fatigues with an unidentifiable horizon behind them. One of the three men is Sullivan, ten years younger and twenty pounds lighter, and the other two—
“The one on the left is Davis. Bones, we called him. He was the medic. Loved the original Star Trek.” Sullivan’s mouth twitches with a sad smile. “He could put a man back together in the dark.”
“And the other one?”
“That’s Hooper. Comms specialist. His call sign was Wire. That man could fix anything with a circuit board and a piece of gum. The picture was taken about a year before.”
I don’t need to ask before what?
“Wire was twenty-six. He used to read out loud to us in the bunkhouse. Cheap paperback thrillers with the covers torn off. He couldn’t sing for shit, but he tried every damn night. He was the brightest of us. He was the reason the team had a heart.”
“Bones was thirty-two. Married for a year to Carrie, a kindergarten teacher in San Antonio. He carried her picture in the lining of his helmet. Quieter than the rest of us. Smarter than me by a margin he was kind enough to hide. He was the one who’d sit up with you when you couldn’t sleep.
He knew the names of all the wives and girlfriends.
He kept track of birthdays. He was a reader too, but he liked the slow stuff.
Thick books, like doorstops. You’d ask him a question, and you’d get an answer eight hours later, and the answer was always right. ”
I don’t move, barely breathing as he talks.
“And I was Six. I watched everybody’s back. That was my job. I had eyes everywhere. I made the calls.”
“What happened?” I whisper.
“There was a village,” he says, his voice flat, “in a country I’m not going to name.
We had intel that a high-value target would be moving through it.
The intel came from a source I’d used before and trusted with my life.
Bones on point. Wire on overwatch. I was in the middle.
Soft approach. Eyes only. No contact unless contact came to us. ”
He swallows. “The intel was wrong. It wasn’t a soft target.
It was a setup. Somebody sold us out. We were a hundred yards into enemy territory before I knew, and by then, we were—” He stops to breathe.
“Bones took the first round. Right through the throat. He went down without a sound. Wire took the second round in the leg, the femoral artery, and I had thirty seconds to choose between getting him to a vehicle and trying to get to Bones, and I—” His voice cracks.
“I made the call. We left Bones. We carried Wire. We made it out.”
I swallow back a sob. “Oh, Sullivan.”
“I’ll never know if Bones was alive when we left him. I told myself for three years that he wasn’t. I’ve stopped lying to myself in the four years since. He was probably alive and bleeding out and watching us go.”
He scrubs a hand over his face. “Wire made it home. He spent six months in a hospital. Kept the leg.”
I exhale slowly. “Okay. Good.”
“He hasn’t spoken to me since the second month.” He says it evenly, like a man reading from a ledger. “The first month he tried.”
I wait.
“I wouldn’t take the call.” A beat. “I wouldn’t return a letter.”
“Sullivan—”
He shakes his head—not dismissing me, just not stopping. “He’s a good man, Tess. A much better man than I am, and the reason we don’t talk now is that I made it impossible to.” Something in his jaw sets. “That’s on me.”
I don't say anything. I have nothing that will help.
“The man whose whole job was keeping the lines open. And I cut them.”
“Do you think he'd take a call now?” I ask quietly. “If you made one.”
A shadow moves across his face. “I don't know. I haven't let myself think about it.”
He looks at the picture for a long moment.
“That’s the team. That’s the day. That’s why I haven’t slept through the night in nine years, why I came up here, and why I—” His voice has gone to nothing. “That’s why I haven’t let myself want anything.”
I don’t move. I don’t say anything. I just keep my hand on his where it’s clenched into a fist, and I wait.
Somewhere down the slope, the cabin I inherited sits in ruins. But the foundations are strong. I’m going to fix the cabin, and if he'll let me, I’m going to stand next to him while he fixes the rest.
His beautiful, shadowed gray eyes find mine. “I’m telling you because you said you wanted to know me. Because I’ve been carrying this for nine years, and because this morning at four a.m., I almost left a woman who has earned the truth from me.”
“They were yours,” I murmur. “Bones and Wire.”
“They are mine. Present tense, Tess. That’s the problem.”
“That’s not a problem, Sullivan. That’s love.”
He looks at me. “How is it love?”
I stand and circle the table, climb onto his lap, and cup his face. “You don’t stop loving people when they die. Carrying their memory isn’t a wound. It’s an honor.”
Sullivan wraps his arms around me and breathes out a long, broken breath. He turns his head and presses his mouth to the side of my neck where the flannel collar gapes.
We sit at his kitchen table in the cold morning while the wind moves the pines outside.
Later—an hour, maybe two—he makes more coffee, and I let him. We don’t talk. The silence is solid and warm, filled with everything he said earlier and everything he hasn’t found the words for yet
He’s behind me at the counter. I sense him before he touches me—his heat, his hesitation. Then, his forehead rests against the curve of my neck as his arms wrap around me, and I stop breathing.
“I’m sorry,” he says into my collarbone. “I had a whole speech.”
“What was the speech?”
“Goodbye.”
My laugh is small and painful. “Yeah, I figured.”
His arms clamp down, and I hold his hands because if he pulls back, I wouldn’t survive the pain in any way I know.