Chapter 839
She offered a polite, respectful “Yes, ma’am,” thanked the doctor for her time, and walked out of the infirmary.
The sun was bright outside, but all she felt was a spreading, internal chill. Dr. Reed’s reaction had confirmed it. There was a secret. A big one. And Sloane Hawke was standing right in the middle of it.
Sloane Hawke didn’t bother with protocols. She didn’t request a meeting or go through his adjutant. After dismissing the trainees, she walked directly across the base, her polished jump boots striking the pavement in crisp, rhythmic beats, like the ticking of a clock.
She arrived at the door to Jarrod’s temporary quarters and pushed it open without knocking.
He stood with his back to her, staring out the window. The late afternoon sun cast his tall frame in a stark, lonely silhouette, the heavy medical brace distorting the line of his right shoulder and chest beneath the modified field jacket. His left hand, still trapped in its black splint, hung rigid at his side. The room was spartan, smelling of stale coffee and the faint, metallic scent of cleaned weaponry.
She leaned against the doorjamb, arms crossed. Her voice, when she finally spoke, carried a low, familiar drawl laced with amusement.
“Not even a ‘welcome back’ for an old friend, Colonel?”
Jarrod didn’t move, but his entire body seemed to harden. “You shouldn’t be here, Hawke.”
The use of her surname was a deliberate blow, a wall erected between them. He wasn’t speaking to the woman he knew. He was addressing a subordinate.
She laughed softly, a throaty sound that held no real humor, and pushed the door shut behind her, sealing them both inside the tense silence.
She crossed the room toward him, the click of her boots against the concrete floor the only sound, each step a deliberate punctuation mark in the heavy air.
“I heard you thought I was dead,” she said, stopping a few feet behind him. “Sorry to disappoint.”
He finally turned, the motion stiff and carefully contained around the brace locked across his torso. His face was a mask of granite, his gray eyes as flat and lifeless as a winter sea. He looked at her, this woman he had once trusted with his life, this woman he had mourned, and his expression revealed nothing. No shock, no relief, no anger. Just a vast, empty distance.
She closed the remaining space between them until only the hard bulk of the medical brace and a few charged inches of air separated her from him. It was not chest to chest. It could not be. The metal frame across his torso turned even proximity into a barrier.
The air crackled with years of shared history, of blood and sweat and secrets.
The playful smirk vanished from her face, replaced by something raw and vulnerable.
“I waited for you, Jarrod,” she said, her voice dropping to a near whisper. “For a year. In that hellhole. The thought of you was the only thing that kept me alive.”