I watch the green lights cycle and try to remember the last time I woke up without a task list compiling behind my eyes.
I can't. The absence is disorienting in the way that silence is disorienting after years of alarm bells.
Tommy sleeps beside me. Glasses on the nightstand next to the laptop I've stopped reaching for first thing in the morning. His hair is a disaster, his arm is heavy across my waist, and hisbreathing carries the deep, even rhythm of someone who is, for the first time since I've known him, not listening for an alarm.
His face in sleep is different from his face awake.
The humor is absent, which removes the primary layer of defense, and what's underneath is quieter, younger, carrying the bone structure that people don't notice behind the glasses.
His mouth is slightly open. There's a pillow crease across his left cheek.
The sheets have slipped to his waist, and the lean muscle of his chest and shoulders is warm in the low light, rising and falling with each breath.
I know that chest. Know the exact pressure that makes him inhale sharply, know the spot below his ribs that makes him laugh and then immediately deny it, know the texture of the scar on his right hand when his fingers thread through mine in the dark.
My body carries the memory of his like code carries function, embedded so deep it runs without conscious instruction.
The pull to stay in this bed is physical. Gravitational.
His arm tightens across my waist in sleep, pulling me closer, and the warmth of him against my back sends a flush through me that has nothing to do with the ambient temperature and everything to do with the fact that Tommy unconsciously reaches for me even when he's not aware he's doing it.
I could stay. Press back against him, let his body wake up before his mind does, feel the moment when his breathing changes and his arm goes from reflexive to intentional.
Instead, I get up. Slip out from under his arm. Pull on some clothes and his hoodie, because his hoodies are warmer than mine and because the smell of him in the fabric has become baseline. Home.
The operations center is quiet when I pass it, but Kane is already there.
He stands at the tactical display, the screens cycling through green diagnostics, but Kane isn't watching them.
He's looking at the display the way a man looks at something he built with his hands and isn't sure he recognizes anymore.
The tactical table in front of him is clear. No maps marked with red zones. No target packages or mission briefs. Nothing but clean surface and the absence of war.
"Commander." I stop in the doorway.
Kane turns. His face does something I haven't seen from him before, a settling, like a structure releasing tension it's held so long the release itself takes adjustment.
"Dar."
"Early morning?"
"Old habit." He looks back at the screens. "Morrison used to say that the first man awake controls the narrative. He was wrong about most things, but he was right that mornings are quieter."
Morrison. The name lands in the operations center like a stone dropped into still water. The original Committee leader, killed during the operation that created Echo Ridge. Webb inherited Morrison's empire and spent years trying to make it invincible.
Yesterday, Victoria proved it wasn't.
"The evidence is with the appropriate authorities," Kane says, reading the question I haven't asked. "Reagan's investigative work, Victoria's intelligence, your digital haul. The Committee's crimes will be prosecuted through channels."
"Echo Ridge's role?"
"May never be publicly known." His mouth curves, barely. "The team is fine with that. We didn't start this for recognition. We started it in a cave with six operators and a kid who deserved better than what the world gave him, and we built something that outlasted every weapon they aimed at us."
The words carry the weight of years I wasn't present for but inherited when I walked through the door.
"Thank you," I say, "for asking what I needed instead of telling me what I owed."
Kane nods once. Recognition. Welcome. The acknowledgment of a woman who earned her place and a commander who built a team worth earning a place in.
