Page 145 of Jax
“You won’t lose me,” I said. “I don’t play hero. I play precise.”
She swallowed hard. “I don’t want a martyr.”
“Good,” I told her, voice low. “I don’t want a headstone.”
Her laugh was brittle, sharp around the edges, but it was real. A fracture in the grief that hadn’t fully landed yet. Herfingers didn’t let go. If anything, they curled tighter, holding on like touch was the only thing she still trusted.
“I’ve never had someone like this,” she admitted. “Someone I was afraid of losing. Someone I trusted to come back.”
I didn’t answer.
I couldn’t. Not without lying, or falling apart, or doing something reckless like staying.
Instead, I studied her.
The tremble in her shoulders. The way her fingers twitched but never released my vest. The battle between fight and freeze was still playing out behind her eyes. She’d meant what she said. Every word. And not just because she was scared, but because she was still here. Because she hadn’t run from it. From me.
“I keep trying to think of the right thing to say,” she whispered. “But I’m not good at… this.”
“Neither am I,” I said, voice low. “I know formulas. Strategy. I don’t know how to say goodbye.”
She laughed, but it was a broken sound. “This isn’t goodbye.”
“No,” I said. “But it’s a risk.”
Stella let go of my vest and pressed her hand against my chest, right where my heart beat too fast, too loud. She held it there, fingers splayed, not gentle. Not hesitant.
“You’re not a risk,” she said. “You’re… the whole fucking equation.”
That stopped me cold. Not because I didn’t understand her. But because I did. More than she’d ever know. I reached up slowly, covering her hand with mine. Held it there. Anchored it. “This mission doesn’t care that I’ve got someone to come home to now,” I said. “But I do.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s what terrifies me.”
She reached into the pocket of her hoodie and pulled out a folded piece of paper and tucked it into my tactical vest right over my heart. Her lips parted. “I wrote some things down.Things… I don’t know how to say out loud yet. If something happens, if you’re bleeding out in some compound basement somewhere, I don’t want my last words to be a question. I want you toknow.”
“I do know.”
“But do youbelieveit?”
I hesitated.
Not because I doubted her. But because part of me still didn’t know how to hold on to this thing we were building. Didn’t know what it meant to be kept.
“I believe in you,” I said finally. “More than I trust the intel. More than I trust the mission plan.”
Her breath hitched. She blinked fast, like she could hold back everything that was building behind her eyes through sheer force of will.
“Say something else,” she whispered. “Anything. Just not goodbye.”
I leaned in, nose brushing hers. I could feel the heat of her breath, the uneven rhythm of it, like she was breathing for both of us.
“I’ll count your heartbeats on the way back.”
“That’s not a promise.”
“It is,” I said. “It’s just not the kind of promise that depends on me surviving.”
She frowned. “You’re not allowed to be poetic right now. I’m trying to hold it together.”
