“Excuse me?” I lower the can, bristling. The accusation stings. I’ve spent years proving I have the stomach for chaos. Years proving I belong in the trauma bay while the nurses whisper about how young I look.
He cuts a glance at me, then the firelight catches the dark amber of his eyes. Bottomless, intelligent, unyielding.
“You feel too much.” He sets the rag down. “I watched you in the garage. I watched you in the truck. You absorb the pain. You let it inside. You’re clutching that dead kid like he’s your own brother. Eventually, that reservoir overflows.”
“I save lives.” My voice tightens.
“That requires feeling. It requires caring whether they live or die. If I don’t care, I’m nothing more than a mechanic working on meat.”
“Does that work?”
“I protect lives. I don’t have to care about them to do it.” He reassembles the slide, the metal seating home with a definitive sound. “In fact, it helps if I don’t. Caring causes hesitation. Hesitation gets you dead.”
“So you’re empty.” I set the soup down, the can clicking against the stone hearth. “Just a hollow machine following programming. Is that how you sleep at night? By convincing yourself they’re just assets? I’m an asset?”
“I’m efficient.”
“You’re lonely.”
The words hang in the air, weightier than the smoke off the fire. They’re a breach of protocol. A violation of the distance he guards so fiercely.
His hand goes still on the weapon. A muscle pulls tight at the corner of his jaw, then releases.
“Careful, Doc. You diagnose without a chart. That’s malpractice.”
“Am I wrong?”
He pivots fully toward me. The movement displaces the air, ferrying his scent with it: gun oil, woodsmoke, and that deep, raw musk of male sweat. He looks at me, and for a moment, the tactical mask slips. Something raw surfaces underneath. Something ravenous. Something appraising me not as a package to be delivered, but as a woman to be devoured.
“We’re all alone in the end.” His voice drops, quiet and final. “Some of us just admit it sooner than others. It’s cleaner.”
He sets the gun down on the rug. He shifts, resettling his position, and his knee grazes mine.
The contact sparks electricity. A shockwave ripples from my knee straight to my core.
I should pull away. I should retreat to my side of the rug. I should drag the blanket tighter and barricade myself against this dangerous gravity.
I don’t.
I stay. I let the point of contact burn through the denim of my jeans, anchoring me to him in the dark.
The secret rises, the one I never tell. Danny’s name is already in my throat, the whole ruined story right behind it. In the dark, with his knee against mine and the fire painting us in gold, it would be so easy to set it down at his feet.
I don’t.
Some wall in him is still standing, manned, watching. Mine answers it out of pure instinct. We aren’t there. Whatever this is, it hasn’t earned the inside of me yet, and I think he knows it, because he doesn’t push. He lets the silence hold instead, full of everything neither of us is ready to hand over.
Then, slowly, deliberately, he reaches out.
He fits his palm to the nape of my neck, his thumb resting on the pulse point under my jaw. His hand thaws the chill on my skin. Rough-calloused. Heavy. Engineered for slaughter, yet cradling me with a terrifying gentleness.
“You’re winning now.” His gaze locks with mine. “You’re still breathing.”
My pulse spikes. Something cracks open below my sternum, frantic and traitorous, pulsing against his thumb.
“Boyd.”
“Don’t.” He breathes the word into the silence. “Don’t analyze it. Don’t diagnose it. Just let it be.”
