Page 29 of Damian
“You should be asleep,” I said before I could file it as a question.
“So should you,” she answered, barely a whisper. Her recorder lay idle on the table like a talisman. She folded her fingers around a mug that steamed softly, clinging to the warmth the way she clung to a vow.
I crossed the room and sat at the edge of the couch, close enough that her shoulder brushed mine when she shifted. The contact was small and ordinary and it undid something in me I didn’t know I’d been holding.
“You were…” I swallowed against the memory of steel and smoke and the way she’d moved tonight. “You were steady. Better than steady.”
Her laugh was a small, broken thing. “I’m good at humming,” she said. “And making up songs I don’t know the words to.”
“Steady’s not the right word,” I corrected, softer. “You were brave.”
She turned toward me then, and in the half-light I could see the way the evening had left its marks — the faint smear of soot at her temple, the tremor at her fingers. But her eyes were bright, raw as newly cut glass. She looked at me like she’d found some place in the dark she trusted. The way she looked at me felt dangerous. It felt like home, the kind that moves and rearranges everything you thought was set in stone.
I wanted to tell her everything I felt. I wanted to tell her how unfair it was that a laugh could split me open, how ridiculous it was that holding a child’s hand could make the world seem fragile and suddenly worth defending. Instead, I reached out and tucked a damp strand of hair behind her ear — a small, intimate map of a gesture I’d given to no one for a long time. My thumb hovered at the warm edge of her cheek.
“Don’t stand in the doorway of danger,” she said, the joke rough around the edges. “You’ll invite trouble.”
“You should know by now trouble isn’t a thing you invite,” I said. “It’s the thing that sits at the table and pretends it belongs.”
She smiled then, the expression folding her whole face. There was a softness there that made every careful line I’dbuilt for myself feel unnecessary. “You don’t have to keep everything in a box, Damian. Not everything is a mission.”
I wanted to argue — to remind her I’d kept boxes because living without them would mean letting people in and losing them to the night. But in my chest something thinner than an argument answered: you want her. Not like a plan, not like an objective — like a man missing his own fault line. The admission scared me more than anything else on a battlefield ever had.
Her hand found mine on the couch, warm and solid. She didn’t fumble with commands or protocols. She trusted me in a way that had nothing to do with medals and everything to do with nights and small mercies.
“Promise me something,” she said, voice small as a confession. “When this is over — when Ruby’s home — you let the rest of you out. You let the part that can laugh. The man who notices small things, not just the numbers.”
It was an impossible request and a necessary one. I wanted to promise the moon and then spend the rest of my life paying for the air it took. Instead, I did the only thing I knew I could keep: I gave her the truth I kept for myself.
“I promise I’ll try,” I said.
She closed her eyes, letting the words settle between us. When she opened them, the look she gave me was not needy; it was fierce and honest. “Try hard,” she said. “I’ll keep recording. I’ll write down the names of the kids who sleep on blankets tonight and the names of the people we don’t forget. You do your part.”
I almost laughed at the absurd adultness of trading promises like rationed supplies. Instead, I nodded and let the small contact of our hands be the ledger we both read from. It was quiet and sacred and enough to hold us both for a sliver of a night.
A breeze slipped through the cracked window, carrying the scent of rain and wet earth into the room. I could feel the approach of movement, the way the world shifts to make room for what must be done. The ledger in my mind — names, routes, the raw, overwhelming possibility of Ruby’s name on paper — sat there, heavy and glowing like an ember.
“You be careful,” she said again, softer now, the sentence more prayer than order.
“I will,” I said, and it was more than protocol. It was the kind of promise that means you would walk into a burning house for someone and not calculate the cost. It meant I would not let the ledger be the only record of mercy.
She leaned her head on my shoulder then, briefly and ordinarily, and intimately, as if the tilt of her face could anchor the chaos that waited outside. For the first time in a long, long while, I let myself believe that the world we were trying to save could hold more than fear and lists. Maybe there could be a pocket in it for small human things: laughter, a hand to hold, the right of two people to be a little reckless with their hearts.
We didn’t speak after that. Words felt like noise. Instead, we sat shoulder to shoulder in the glow of the farmhouse light, two people united by a small, impossible plan: we’d go all out and clean, follow the clues until they unraveled names, and when the work was finished, we’d try to be human again.
When I rose to check the van and the maps and the breath of the rest of the team, she squeezed my hand like an anchor. It was a small pressure, a seal. I left the farmhouse with that pressure still at the base of my fingers and something else — a thin, stubborn hope — settled deep into the place I had kept for missions.
Outside, the road was dark and waiting. Inside the house,the recorder hummed in the kitchen like a quiet witness. I drove away with that sound behind me and the memory of her close enough to keep me steady.
35
Damian
We came back in on a thread of tired triumph—the Del Mar ledger in Cyclone’s hands, a route to follow, a small, sharp radiance of hope I hadn’t let myself name. The farmhouse smelled like wet blankets and coffee and the kind of relief that makes muscles finally unclench. The kids slept like they’d been given a miracle, and the house moved in small, quiet rhythms around them.
I should have been in the map room, poring over the new coordinates, turning this fresh lead into something that would bring Ruby home. Instead I found myself near the kitchen, where Morgan stood by the sink, the recorder dark and forgotten on the counter. She was rinsing a cup with the slow, automatic care of someone who knew the power of small rituals.
She looked up when I leaned in the doorway. For a moment we just watched each other—not the quick exchange of plans or the guarded measurements of soldiers, but something softer, more dangerous. The light caught at the damp of her hair and at a small smear of ink on herthumb. She watched me the way someone watches the horizon, with patience and that odd, ache-filled hope.
