Page 44 of Fated in A Time of War
I speak again, softer this time. “That kiss…”
His head jerks, eyes snapping to mine. A flash of fire, then fear, then something else. Something rawer.
“Forget it,” he growls.
“No.” My voice doesn’t rise, but it hardens. “I won’t.”
His nostrils flare. His claws flex against his rifle grip. “It was a mistake.”
I shake my head, steady. “Maybe. But it happened.”
For a long moment, we just stare at each other. His eyes burn, amber in the fractured light, alive with things he’ll never admit. My chest rises slow and heavy, but I don’t look away.
He’s the one who does.
He turns, slamming himself down onto the wrecked bench across from me, his back to the wall. He props his rifle against his knees and leans forward, elbows braced, face buried in shadow.
“You don’t understand what this means,” he says finally, his voice rough, almost broken. “What it costs.”
“I understand enough,” I reply. My hand finds the edge of the seat, fingers curling against cold steel. “And I’m not afraid of the cost.”
He exhales, sharp and ragged, a sound between a laugh and a growl. His shoulders sag just slightly, that perfect soldier’s frame buckling under weight he can’t carry anymore.
For a long time, we sit in silence again. But it isn’t empty. It isn’t cold. It’s the quiet of something alive between us, something neither of us can kill no matter how hard we try.
The kiss still lives on my lips. In the air. In the space between our breaths.
And though the mag-train is silent, broken, rusting into earth, I can hear it. The hum of something moving forward. Something inevitable.
Even if neither of us has the courage to say it yet.
The scrape on his arm isn’t much. Not compared to the gouge across his side that I stitched together with nanites. Not compared to the bruises blooming across his ribs from that last skirmish. But it’s bleeding sluggishly, red streak mixing with that darker undercurrent of his Vakutan blood. He doesn’t even seem to notice it—like it’s just another tick mark on the tally of pain his body carries.
I notice.
“Hold still,” I murmur, pulling my kit closer.
His eyes flick to me, skeptical, but he doesn’t pull away when I peel back the torn edge of his armor. The metal’s jagged, bent in, sharp enough to have ripped him worse if it had struck deeper. I trace the cut with careful fingers, dabbing away the grime with a strip of cloth before uncapping antiseptic.
The moment the cool liquid touches his skin, he flinches hard, a growl caught in his throat.
“Damn it,” he hisses through his teeth.
I raise an eyebrow. “That’s the point. It’s supposed to sting.”
His mouth curls—just barely—into something almost like a smile. A shadow of humor ghosts across his face, the kind of expression I never thought I’d see from him.
“So that’s how you lot do it,” he mutters, voice low, almost amused. “Soft Ataxians prefer slaps to medicine.”
The words catch me off guard. A joke. Not cruel. Not cutting. Not another dagger of blame between us. A joke.
I blink at him, then let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. My lips twitch upward into a smile—small, tired, but real. “Maybe we just like watching big, tough Vakutans squirm.”
His golden eyes meet mine, steady, unflinching. But they’re different now. Softer at the edges. Alive with something other than suspicion or rage.
I tape the bandage down with hands steadier than they should be after all this. For a moment, neither of us speaks. The silence between us isn’t jagged anymore. It’s not a battlefield. It’s something gentler. Tentative.
He leans back against the cracked frame of the bench, stretching his arm experimentally before settling again. His breathing evens out. He doesn’t thank me. He doesn’t need to. That little smile—gone now but burned into my mind—is enough.
