Page 257 of Knot Their Soldier: Part Three

Shade is leaning over me, his expression tight with concern.

"Hey," he says quietly. I can barely hear him over my heaving, ragged breathing. "You’re safe."

It takes me a second to realize I’m half fighting him, my fingers locked around his wrist so hard it probably hurts.

I loosen my grip, and Shade settles his other hand against my cheek, giving me his steadiness.

"Bad dream?" he asks once my breathing slows.

I swallow against the lingering taste of smoke and blood at the back of my mouth and nod once.

Shade studies me for another beat, then scoots closer to me and holds his arms out in offering.

I don’t hesitate and curl into him immediately, pressing my face against his chest while he wraps an arm around me and pulls the blankets back over us.

His heartbeat is slow and even beneath my ear.

It helps bring me back to reality. Shade is alive and real, and we're not on the road to Blackgate, fighting for our lives anymore. That was months ago.

Shade keeps one arm around me while the other rubs slowly up and down my back, patient as it takes a long time for the fear to leak out of my muscles and for my breath to stop quaking.

"What was it about?" he asks quietly.

I stare at the blankets tangled across my lap for a long second before answering.

"The battle."

Shade hums to encourage me to keep going, never stopping the reassuring rub.

"I was back on the road to Blackgate," I say. "Fighting and killing." My throat tightens around the word. "At first they didn’t have faces. Then every time I shot someone, I could suddenly see them properly afterward."

"I couldn’t stop," I say, hating how thin my voice sounds. "If I stopped fighting, everyone I loved died. So I just kept..." I swallow hard. "Kept killing them anyway, even though I could see they were people just like us."

Blaze shifts in his sleep with a rough exhale, oblivious.

"I know they would’ve slaughtered us without hesitation," I murmur. "But sometimes I still think about how many people I killed, and it feels like there’s something wrong with me that I can live with that."

"There’s nothing wrong with you."

Shade says it immediately, firm with no room for semantics.

I finally look up at him. "Omegas don't kill people. We're supposed to be nurturers who value peace above all else."

"You survived a war." His thumb brushes slowly along my side through the blanket. "You did what you had to do to save our people. You know that, baby girl."

The words settle heavily between us.

I shake my head anyway. "Sometimes I think I was meant to find a way to use my Omega Command without bloodshed. I stumbled my whole way through discovering it, and by the time I could use it to its full capability, it was too late to avoid a fight."

"Maybe, but that's not on you alone. How could we have ever known what the Omega Command was capable of? We did our best with what we had."

"I killed so many, Shade. I'm a bad person," I whisper into the dark.

Shade studies me for a moment, calm and steady in his special way that always makes me feel like he’s seeing deeper than everyone else.

"The fact that this still haunts you tells me everything I need to know about the person you are," he says quietly. "Bad people don’t lie awake grieving strangers. They don’t dream about the faces of the dead."

My throat burns.