"Marcus, it's okay," she whispered, her voice thick with pain and fear. She pressed her palm flat between his shoulder blades, a desperate attempt to ground him, to pull him back from the edge. She stepped around him, forcing herself into the line of fire to face Vance.
Her cheek was already reddening, a cruel, angry welt blooming across the pale skin, the imprint of Vance's rings beginning to bruise purple. Her eyes were swimming with tears, but she blinked them back furiously.
"It was my fault," she said quickly, her voice pitching up. "I wasn't watching the tray. I'm fine, really." She put a hand on Marcus's chest, pushing gently against the tactical vest. Her eyes went wide, pleading with him silently. Please. Don't. He'll throw me out and I need this job. I need the money.
Vance heard the desperation in her voice and grabbed onto it like a lifeline. It gave him an out—a way to de-escalate without looking weak in front of his patrons.
"Yeah," Vance sneered, adjusting his shirt. "She needs this job. And she knows the rules about wasting product."
He puffed himself up, backing off half a step but jutting his chin out, trying to look like he was merely showing mercy rather than retreating. "You boys wanna drink cheap in my place, you don't tell me how to handle my own. You pay for the beer, and you pay for the damage to the table."
Marcus held his stare for a long, agonizing beat. His muscles were coiled tight, screaming for release. He could map it out in his head: a throat punch to crush the windpipe, a sweep of the leg to bring the big man down, a boot to the temple to finish it. He could take the guy apart in three moves and leave him gargling on the floor.
It would feel good. It would feel righteous.
It would also trigger a firefight in a crowded room. It would make life hell for his squad, get them barred from the only neutral zone in the sector, and possibly get them killed.
He let his hand fall slowly to his side, though his fingers remained curled in a loose fist.
"Then handle it without making a scene," Marcus said, the words tasting like ash in his mouth. "We'll cover the table."
Vance huffed, sensing he had won the standoff, if only on a technicality. "Buy another round or get out," he muttered.
Then, just to prove he could, Vance reached out and grabbed Raina's upper arm. He squeezed hard enough to turn his knuckles white, his fingertips digging into her soft flesh.
"Get in the back," he snarled at her. "You're off the floor. Kitchen duty until you learn how to walk without tripping."
He pulled her back toward the bar, dragging her roughly. Raina stumbled, struggling to keep her footing. She glanced over her shoulder once, her eyes locking with Marcus's.
For a second, the mask slipped. Something moved in those dark depths—humiliation, profound embarrassment that he had seen her struck, gratitude for the intervention, and something else. A flicker of fear that went deeper than just losing a job.
Then the door to the back room swung shut behind her, cutting off the connection.
Marcus stood there, breathing hard, the adrenaline slowly curdling into a sour pit in his stomach. The mood in the room never came back. The music seemed too loud, the lights too harsh. They played a few more distracted games, but the rhythm was gone. The beer tasted flat and metallic. Jokes stopped halfway and died in the air.
When they finally walked back to the base, the night air felt heavier, charged with the static of unfinished business. Marcus couldn't shake the image of Raina's bruising cheek, or the way her hand had felt trembling against his back. He knew, with a soldier's instinct, that this wasn't over.
Twelve hours later, the world had been stripped of color, reduced to the blinding white of the desert sun and the charcoal gray of smoke.
The only light that mattered now came from the muzzle flashes of enemy rifles.
The squad moved in a staggered line through scrub brush so dry it felt like walking through kindling. Every step crunched, a sound that grated on Marcus's nerves despite the ambient noise of the conflict. Heat rose from the cracked earth in shimmering, oily waves, distorting the horizon and turning the distant village into a mirage of concrete and misery.
Smoke rode the wind from somewhere ahead—dark, thick, and tasting of burning rubber and cordite. Gunfire rattled in uneven, staccato bursts, the sound echoing off low concrete shacks and rusted sheet metal fences, making it impossible to pinpoint the exact source.
"Contact still two blocks north," Rook's voice crackled in Marcus's earpiece, the digital distortion doing nothing to hide the tension. "Locals say mercenaries moved in last week. They're using the village infrastructure as a shield. Digging in like ticks."
"Copy that," Marcus murmured, his throat dry. He adjusted the grip on his rifle, his knuckles pale against the black polymer. "Eyes up, safeties off. We're ghosts on this one. Get in, secure the intel package, get out. No heroics."
He lifted a clenched fist. The line behind him froze instantly, boots planting silently in the dust, weapons traversing their sectors.
Under the mechanical chatter of automatic fire and the distant thump of a mortar, Marcus heard something else. It was thin, muffled, and entirely out of place in the cacophony of a skirmish. It was a sound you didn't forget once you'd heard enough of it in places like this.
Crying.
It wasn't a child's wail, but the low, exhausted sobbing of an adult who had nothing left.
Marcus tilted his head, the sensors in his helmet tracking the acoustic signature. Left. Down a narrow, trash-strewn alley wedged between a crumbling cinderblock wall and a stack of rusted, leaking chemical drums.
There, half-collapsed against the graffiti-stained wall, was a shack made of warped wooden planks and corrugated metal sheets that looked like they'd been scavenged from a junkyard. The sound came from inside—weak, but steady.
"Rook, Jaro," Marcus whispered, jerking his chin toward the alleyway. "On me. The rest of you, hold the perimeter. Watch the rooftops."
They moved up the alley, boots silent now, rolling heel-to-toe. They stayed tight to the walls, merging with the shadows. Stray bullets chewed up the masonry at the far end of the street, sending puffs of pulverized concrete into the air, but none were aimed their way yet.
The door to the shack wasn't really a door; it was just a rusted sheet of galvanized metal hung on a frayed rope loop. Marcus reached out with his boot, eased it aside without making a sound, and stepped into the breach first, his rifle snap-raised to eye level.
The interior was suffocating. Dim shafts of light pushed through gaps in the rotting walls, illuminating dust motes dancing in the stagnant air. It smelled of rusted iron, burned electrical equipment, and the sour tang of human fear.
And there, in the center of the dirt floor, tied to a heavy wooden chair with rough hemp rope that cut deep into her wrists, was Raina.
Marcus's heart slammed against his ribs. For a heartbeat, he thought he'd hallucinated her—that the stress of the mission and the lingering memory of her hands in his pants the night before had conjured her up. But the bruise from the manager's slap was there, blooming purple and ugly across her cheekbone, stark against her pale, sweat-streaked skin.
A dirty, oil-stained rag had been shoved between her teeth as a gag, tied brutally tight behind her head. Her hair, usually in that neat braid, was loose and wild, plastered to her neck with sweat.
She thrashed once at the ropes when she saw the silhouette of the soldier, a muffled, terrified sound tearing from her throat.
"Jesus," Jaro breathed from behind Marcus's shoulder. "Sarge, that's the bar girl. That's Raina."
Rook swore softly, scanning the corners of the room. "What the hell is she doing out here in the kill zone?"
"Later," Marcus snapped, the icy calm of the soldier warring with a sudden, hot rage. "Cover the door."
He slung his rifle across his chest and moved in, dropping to one knee beside the chair. His fingers flew to the knots. The ropes hadn't just been tied to restrain; they were tied to hurt. They were complex, cruel knots designed to tighten if she struggled. Whoever did this wanted her to fight them and feel every second of the abrasion. His jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached.
He pulled the gag out first. Raina spat, coughed violently, and dragged in a ragged, desperate breath that shuddered through her entire frame.
"You… you," she rasped, her voice wrecked, eyes wide and uncomprehending. "Marcus?"
"Yeah," he said. He forced a crooked, reckless smile, because if he didn't make a joke right now, his hands were going to start shaking with the urge to kill whoever had touched her. "You get into trouble everywhere, Raina, or is it just the places I drink?"
"Who did this?" he demanded, his voice dropping an octave, turning lethal.
"Guys from the hills," she whispered, her throat raw. "Mercs. Big talk about 'purifying' the town, throwing out off-world scum and collaborators. They took me… they grabbed me right after my shift." She swallowed hard. "They thought I knew where you kept your guns. Your supply caches. I kept telling them I only know where you keep your tips."
She tried to laugh, but it came out broken, shattering into a sob. Fear sat under the humor, clear and sharp as a blade.
Outside, someone shouted in a harsh dialect. A burst of automatic fire answered, too close. Dust sifted down from the ceiling.
"Time's up," Rook called from the doorway, his silhouette tense. "We got movement, three tangos, moving east to west."
Marcus pulled his combat knife from his vest. "Hold still."
He slid the cold steel between her wrist and the rope, sawing through the fibers with a single, brutal motion. He cut the ankle bindings next. Raina pushed herself up, but her legs were numb and unsteady. She stumbled forward.
Marcus caught her around the waist without thinking. His arm clamped around her midsection, pulling her flush against him. Her body was warm, soft beneath the grime, and shaking violently against his hard armor plating.
"Can you run?" he asked, looking down into her face.
Raina looked up. The fear in her eyes hardened into something flinty and resilient. She put one hand on his chest plate, right over his heart, steadying herself.
"I can do better than that," she said, her voice gaining strength. "I can show you where they won't be."
"Good enough," Marcus said. "Stay behind me. Talk later."
They ran.
They burst out the back of the shack, through a narrow gap in the rotting wood. Raina didn't hesitate. She pointed—left, right, down a drainage ditch, stop, go. She navigated the labyrinth of the shantytown with an instinct that no satellite map could match.
Twice she saved them. Once, she yanked Marcus back by his vest just as he was about to round a corner into a sniper's sightline he hadn't spotted. Another time, she veered them away from a main alley that filled with a devastating crossfire five seconds after they passed it.
By the time they reached a crumbling stone wall at the edge of the village, everyone was breathing hard. The air was scorching, filling their lungs with dust. Sweat ran down Marcus's spine, soaking his combat shirt. His helmet-mounted display flashed amber warnings about ammo consumption and core body temperature.
Raina bent over, hands on her knees, gasping for air. Her skirt was torn at the hem, her legs dusted with white ash. She looked up at him through strands of sweaty, dark hair, and for a second, laughed. It was a wild, adrenaline-fueled sound.
"That's twice now," she said, straightening up and wiping sweat from her forehead. "You keep showing up when I'm in trouble, Marcus. I'm starting to think you're stalking me, Sergeant."
"Yeah," Jaro puffed, checking the magazine on his rifle. "He planned this whole op just to see you again. He's romantic like that."
"Shut up, Jaro," Marcus said, but the corner of his mouth twitched upward.
He checked his digital map, then scanned the squad. They were intact, but they were exposed.
"All right. We're splitting," he decided, his tone shifting back to command. "Rook, Jaro, you take Raina to the secondary evac point. Get her on the next bird out. I'll loop back with the rest of the team to hit the data shack—"
"No."
Raina's voice was sharp, cutting through the tactical chatter.
"I'm not leaving yet."
Marcus turned on her, looming over her. "You don't get a vote, civilian. This is a combat zone."
"Think about it," she said, stepping closer, invading his personal space until the toes of her boots touched his. Her eyes locked onto his, fierce and unyielding. "You walk me to evac, you lose twenty minutes. You cut through the market to the data shack, they'll see you before you get within a hundred yards. Let me take a side route. I grew up in these streets. I know every rat hole, every cellar. I can be gone and safe before they even realize I'm missing."
She was close enough that he could see the individual flecks of gold in her irises. Close enough that he could smell her—sweat, dust, and that faint, stubborn scent of vanilla soap. Close enough to feel the warmth of her breath ghosting against the sensitive skin of his neck.
"And what if they grab you again?" he asked quietly, his voice a low rumble.
"They won't," she said, holding his gaze. "Because I won't be where they expect. And because I know you're watching my back."
Another shout echoed in the distance, closer this time. Another burst of heavy machine-gun fire chewed up the silence. The village was fully waking up around them, angry and lethal.
Marcus stared at her for a long second, weighing the risk against the tactical advantage. She was right, and he hated it.
"Fine," he growled. "You run. You stay low. If we make it out, you owe me a drink somewhere that guy can't slap you."
Her grin flashed, quick and sharp as a knife in the dark.
"Deal," she whispered, her voice husky and promising.
But instead of turning to run toward the gap in the wall, Raina surged forward. She grabbed the front of his tactical vest with both hands, her knuckles white, and yanked him backward into the deep shadow cast by the crumbling stone wall, dragging him out of the line of sight of his men.
"Hey—"
Her mouth hit his before he could form a question.
There was nothing careful, nothing tentative about it. This wasn't the kiss of a rescued victim; it was an ambush. She kissed him like someone who had fully expected to die in that shack ten minutes ago and was furious at the universe for making her wait. It was hot, messy, and desperate—all teeth and tongue and adrenaline. Her fingers curled into the short hair at the nape of his neck, pulling his head down, locking him against her.
For a split second, Marcus stiffened, his combat brain screaming about exposure, about sectors of fire, about the insane risk of distraction in a kill zone.
Then his body betrayed him. The adrenaline that had been fueling his fight response pivoted instantly into something darker and hotter.
He groaned, a low sound in his throat, and dropped his rifle, letting it hang by its sling against his side. His hands found her waist, then slid lower to grip her hips, his thumbs pressing into the soft flesh through her torn skirt. He dragged her closer, crushing her against him until there was no air left between them. She fit against him easily, her soft curves molding to the hard ceramic plates of his armor, her pelvis grinding against his thigh with a steady, demanding rhythm.
She broke the kiss just long enough to gasp for air, her lips brushing against his ear, her breath hot and damp.
"I watched you at the bar," she whispered, the words tumbling out fast. "The way you stepped in. The way you stood up to Vance when no one else would. The way you didn't back down even when the whole room turned on you. I couldn't stop thinking about you. About this."
Her hands slid under the edge of his vest, her cool, slender fingers finding the gap in his uniform shirt. She traced the line of muscle along his ribs, her nails drawing light, stinging lines over his sweat-slicked skin. The contrast of her touch against the brutal heat of the day made his head spin.
He groaned again, tipping his head back against the rough stone wall, eyes squeezing shut.
"Raina…"
"Shh. We don't get many heroes out here, Marcus," she murmured, her voice dropping to a seductive purr. "Let me thank you properly."
She pushed his shirt up higher, her hands exploring the hard planes of his chest. Her lips moved down his throat to the hollow of his collarbone, teeth grazing the sensitive skin, tongue following to soothe the bite. Heat built low and heavy in his gut, a fire that had nothing to do with the burning village around them.
He moved his hands to her backside, cupping her firmly, lifting her slightly to pull her fully against his erection. She gasped at the contact, rolling her hips, pressing into him like they were dancing to a rhythm only they could hear in the chaos.
Snap.
A bullet cracked off the stone wall inches from his head, spraying rock dust into his hair.
The world jumped back into lethal focus. The haze of lust vanished, replaced instantly by the cold clarity of survival.
"Down!" he barked.
He didn't wait for her to react. He grabbed her shoulder and dragged her with him as he dropped, throwing his weight forward. They hit the dirt hard, his body covering hers, shielding her from the sniper fire.
Raina lay beneath him, chest heaving, her eyes bright and wide. She reached out, her hand trembling slightly as she grabbed her fallen sandal from the dust.
"Guess the universe hates foreplay," she laughed, the sound breathless and jagged. She pushed at his chest, urging him up. "Go, Marcus. I know another way out. I'll cut through the drainage tunnel. I'll draw them off you."
"You're not going alone," he started to argue, pushing himself up to a crouch.
"Marcus!" Rook's voice shouted from fifty yards away, panic edging into the professional calm. "We've got incoming! Heavy movement on the east flank! Move!"
Raina grabbed his face between her hands, pulling him down for one last kiss—quick, fierce, tasting of smoke and unkept promises.
"Trust me," she said, her eyes locking onto his with an intensity that burned. "Third time's the charm."
Then she slid out from under him like water. She bolted down a narrow side path, her bare feet kicking up puffs of dust, disappearing between two broken walls before he could even reach out to stop her.
He swore, hard and viciously, and scrambled to his feet, pulling his rifle back into his hands. He checked the action, wiped the dust from the sight, and turned back to his squad.
"Rook, Jaro, with me!" he snapped, his voice cracking like a whip. "We take the data shack and we get the hell out of here. We regroup at evac in fifteen. Move!"
They never made it.
The building they designated as a fallback point was a one-room storage shed with bullet holes already peppering the front facade. They crashed through the door, flipping heavy wooden tables, shoving crates of rusted machine parts, building a rough barricade in seconds. They crouched behind cover, breathing loud in the sudden, terrifying quiet of the room.
For a minute, it worked. Enemy fire came in short, probing bursts, testing their defenses. Marcus counted three distinct shooters, maybe four. It felt manageable. They could hold this.
Then the rhythm changed.
The next volley wasn't random suppression. It was exact. Controlled. Shots moved across their cover in small, calculated steps, chewing through the wood right where their heads had been seconds before. Grenades bounced in the dust outside the door, detonating with concussive force—not close enough to kill instantly, but close enough to rattle their teeth and push them back from the entrance.
"They're herding us!" Rook shouted over the ringing in his ears, slamming a fresh magazine into his weapon. "How the hell do they know our angles? They're pre-firing every position!"
Marcus's stomach went cold, dropping like a stone.
He crawled to the shattered window, keeping his head low, and peered through a crack in the boarded-up frame.
At first, he saw only the chaos of battle—smoke drifting in thick gray clouds, the sharp flashes of muzzle fire, bodies moving in the haze.
Then the wind shifted, clearing the smoke for a single, devastating second.
And he saw her.
Raina stood in the doorway of a two-story building across the street, elevated and protected. There were no ropes on her wrists. No gag in her mouth. No fear in her posture.
Her wild hair was tied back tight and professional. She had changed out of the torn skirt into a pair of tactical pants and a fitted, lightweight top. She wasn't running. She was standing next to a tall, bearded man with a sniper rifle hanging casually on his shoulder.
She was talking to him, gesturing with the same hand that had traced the muscles of Marcus's chest minutes ago. She pointed—there, to the window Marcus was looking through. There, to the weak point in the wall where Jaro was crouched. There, to the rear exit.
The tall man nodded, lifted two fingers to his headset, and pointed at the shed.
A fresh wave of heavy machine-gun fire pinned them instantly, tearing through the thin walls like paper.
"Boss?" Jaro's voice shook, small and terrified in the noise. "Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me that's not her."
"It's her," Marcus said. The words tasted like bile and ash. "She's calling the shots."
Another grenade hit the wall outside, blowing the door inward in a shower of splinters and twisted metal.
They fought.
Of course they fought. They were soldiers. That was the job. They returned fire in short, controlled bursts, moving between crumbling cover, counting their shots, watching for patterns in the enemy assault.
They dropped two of the attackers when the mercenaries got careless and crossed an open lane. They pulled Rook back by his vest when a bullet punched through his leg, dragging him to safety while he cursed and wrapped a tourniquet. They held the line longer than any three men should have been able to.
It didn't matter.
Every time they shifted position, the enemy was already waiting. Every side route they tried to flank was blocked by heavy fire. Every escape path snapped shut like a steel trap.
Because she had told them. She knew how they moved. She knew their doctrine. She knew how Marcus thought because she had spent weeks picking his brain in the dark, learning the man behind the rank.
The shed finally gave under the pressure. The front wall collapsed inward in a cloud of choking dust and broken brick.
Jaro went down first, taking a clean, professional shot to the throat that dropped him before he could even scream.
Rook took two rounds in the chest plate that cracked his ribs, then another in his good arm. He fell back against a crate, still firing his pistol with his off-hand until the slide clicked empty on a dead chamber.
In the end, when Marcus burst through the back door in a storm of splinters, he was the only one still moving under his own power.
He ran without thinking. He ran on pure instinct, vaulting walls, scrambling down alleys, crashing through the backyards of families hiding behind thin curtains. Bullets followed him, snapping past his ears, kicking up concrete dust around his boots. He lost all sense of direction and time. The only thing that mattered was motion. Not stopping. Not thinking.
Somewhere behind him, he heard a voice shout for the shooters to hold fire. It might have been the tall man. It might have been her.
He didn't look back. If he looked back, he might see her face. He might see the triumph in those sharp, bright eyes. He wasn't ready for that. He would never be ready for that.
The mission was classified officially as "completed." The intel had been retrieved, technically.
Then came Marcus's discharge, and in his mind, the weeks that followed were a gray blur of bureaucracy and silence.
There were debrief rooms with flickering fluorescent lights and bad coffee that tasted like burnt plastic. There were officers who wanted simple reports for their files, clean stories of heroism and enemy combatants. They got a short list of dead and wounded—Rook, Jaro, the others. They got a much longer list of "unanswered questions about local assets" and "intelligence leaks."
The phrase "operational judgment" came up a lot in those meetings. So did the word "clouded." They looked at his record, then at the massacre, and drew their own lines.
In the end, they called it what it was: honorably discharged, fit for civilian life, but absolutely not recommended for redeployment. He was a liability. A man who let a pretty face walk his squad into a meat grinder.
He signed the papers because there was nothing left not to sign. The fight had gone out of him in that shed.
When they asked him where he was going next, he said he didn't know. He had no home, no plan, no squad.
A short while later, an old friend from basic training called with a crazy offer to help reopen a half-dead restaurant near a backwater station back home in Texas. It had a stupid name, a holdover from the previous owner.
The Slipgate.
Marcus said yes before he could talk himself out of it. He packed his bag, left the uniform in a pile on the floor, and got on a bus.
At a place like that, specializing in "comfort food" and quiet corners, all kinds of people showed up. Travelers. Locals. People running from things.
Maybe, he thought as he dreamed of the Texas landscape roll by, he'd finally learn to stop trying to save them. Obviously not..