“Your ex-fiancé,” I say softly, watching her pulse jump, “walked six months ago. Left the service two days later. Did you know he’s off-grid?”
A beat. She masks the sting fast, but I see it—the shimmer falters, then blazes brighter. Grief, anger, pride. “Danny’s none of your business.”
“He is if he’s mixed up in something...”
She stiffens. “Danny wouldn’t... he may be a bastard and a coward, but he's too uptight to actually do anything illegal.”
“People burn strange when they’re desperate.” The words come out low and slow, like heat building behind a sealed vent—quiet, but dangerous. I let them hang in the air, curling through the silence like smoke before a flashover.“Tell me where he’s been, Liv. Before this gets hotter than either of us can handle.”
“I don’t know.” Her voice is rough, honest—and I can tell she hates that it is. “After he left, I didn’t try to contact him.”
“His transfer paperwork disappeared. No forwarding address. No exit interview. Technically, he quit—so no one’s filed a missing person’s report.”
I let the silence stretch, the implication heavy between us. I watch her face carefully, nodding once, cataloging the pain he left her with. Another crack in her armor—but also a door.
“Liv.” I drop my voice, letting command lace through every syllable. “Trust me with this. Let me keep you alive.”
She shakes her head, muttering a curse, but the fight dims. “I don’t break easily, dragon-man.”
My breath catches, sharp and sudden, a match striking dry pine. Dragon-man? A joke, maybe. A jab meant to sting, to tease. Or something deeper—intuition slithering beneath her skin, brushing against truth without ever seeing the whole of it. She can’t know. Not really. And yet the word curls beneath my ribs, a spark buried in kindling, heat spreading outward, slow and undeniable. Dangerous. Intoxicating. Fated.
“Good,” I rasp. “Easy things rarely survive wildfire.”
Footsteps clatter in the corridor—Charlie Diaz and two rookies hauling linens. Liv slips sideways, breaking the tension.
“Get your protocol done, Safety Officer,” she tosses over her shoulder, sarcasm coating the title like soot. “Audit is at sunrise.”
She disappears toward the trailers that serve as sleeping quarters for the crew, leaving the hallway smelling of sweat, ash, and her unique ember-and-honey scent that singes my restraint.
I head for the camp’s infirmary—a prefab rectangle lit by a single emergency bulb. Cabinets line the far wall, stocked with saline, gauze, and antibiotics. I scan the shelves, cross-checking supplies against the mental inventory I memorized during intake. One trauma kit sits slightly ajar, the latch not fully clicked. I ease it open, pretending to reorganize, and brush my fingers over the compact Blackstrike sensor tiles hidden beneath the gauze packs—right where they should be. Still undetected. Still active.
The tiles are already cycling—sweeping for RFID activity, logging chemical traces, queuing data to uplink once the satellite modem kicks in at dawn. I close the kit, quiet and precise. No one needs to know what else this infirmary is monitoring.
I’m zipping the med bag when the door creaks open with a slow, aching groan. Liv steps inside—shoulders squared, eyes alert, posture loose enough to pass for casual. Her hair’s a tousled knot slipping free, freckles darkened by smoke andexhaustion. She’s barefoot, the curve of her hip silhouetted in the faint infirmary glow. Vulnerability clings to her like heat haze—soft, disarming—but it’s a lie. There’s iron beneath. She’s not delicate. She’s fire banked low, waiting for the right spark.
“Didn’t expect you here,” I say.
“Insomnia,” she replies, but her gaze drops to my hands in the open kit. “That supposed to be standard issue?”
Think. Fast. “Inventory cross-check.” I lift a half-empty morphine vial. “Expiration labels don’t match the manifest.”
She rolls her eyes. “Whatever you say. You’re a walking catalogue of ready answers, you know that?”
“It’s a burden.”
A laugh escapes her—sharp and surprised, like she didn’t mean to give it up. It scrapes past the tension between us and slips under my armor before I can stop it, curling warm around the hollow spaces I thought long closed. It lingers, dangerous and disarming, and part of me wants to hear it again—wants to earn it.
I zip the kit, place it back. “You're going to need to get some sleep. Come sunrise, the Feds will pick your brain apart. It'll go better if you’re coherent.”
“I’m always coherent.”
“I’ve noticed.”
I step closer, slow and deliberate, like I’m approaching a live wire. My fingers lift, brushing an errant curl behind her ear, and the touch sparks more than static—it shoots lightning through every nerve ending. My knuckles graze her jaw, and her skin is warm, velvet-soft, trembling beneath the contact. Her breath catches, tiny and involuntary, but full of meaning. It’s the kind of reaction you don’t fake. The kind that says she feels it too. The dragon inside me rumbles, low and possessive, satisfied in a way that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with fate.
“You shouldn’t touch me like that,” she whispers.
“No?” My thumb strokes once, slow, just below her lower lip. It trembles. “Tell me to stop.”
