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Beau replies next. “No more movement. We’re all good down here for now. Hostage secure?”

I close the distance between me and the hostage to where she forces herself to stand, trembling like a leaf. “Affirm. Threat neutralized. Collapse on my position. We’re exfil in five.”

The hostage—Seraphine Prince—looks like she’s one shuddering breath away from a panic attack.

“Hey.”

She just stares at me. Swinging my rifle back to low, I raise my empty hands and slowly reach for her. “Seraphine, right?”

Her eyes briefly close as fresh tears slip down her cheeks, and she allows me to guide her away from the corpse at her bare feet.

“You’re safe, now. We’re gonna get you outta here, okay?”

My eyes are on the forest surrounding us, ears straining for any sounds—like more approaching vehicles in the distance. Blessedly, I only hear the steady footsteps of my team.

“Promise me.”

The sound of her hoarsely whispered words and the feel of her hands gripping the front of my chest rig takes me by surprise.

“Promise me. Please.”

More tears spill down her cheeks. She’s young—only in her mid-twenties. Still wearing the now torn and bloody dress she’d worn out to some nightclub with her friends when she was taken.

I fucking hate making promises.

I hate making promises because I know that when it comes down to it, I can’t bring myself to break them. And despite the fact that her words ask for a promise I can now surely fulfill, there’s something more in her eyes that has little alarm bells going off in my mind.

I can’t bring myself to say the words, considering what happened the last time I made a promise to a woman—my mother. The situation, while wholly different in nature, is still jarringly similar.

Yet, as my team reaches our clearing, I find myself giving her a grim nod. Because apparently, my savior complex still knows no bounds.

GIDEON | FIVE YEARS AGO

TERRENEAN REALM

“Ibarely even looked at her, Sera.”

Another glass explodes on the wall beside my head. I’m so desensitized to this already, I don’t even flinch. Instead, I just massage my tense brow between my thumb and forefinger.

Seraphine’s make-up smeared, tear-streaked face—not entirely dissimilar to the way I found her when my team and I rescued her—is contorted with rage as she hisses at me so fiercely that her spit peppers my face.

“You were. You’re fucking lying. Do you know her? Do you wanna fuck her? Did you sneak her your number?”

“And just how the fuck would I have done that? Sitting right there in front of you when she brought us the check?”

“You went to the bathroom! You could have done it then! You certainly eye fucked her enough!”

If I wasn’t so exhausted from this already, I’d laugh at the absurdity of it, but recurrence has long since extinguished any humor.

“Sera…I waved at her to bring us the bill.”

Seraphine’s scowl is withering, and she has all the conviction in the world. I recognize that this isn’t her just torturing me andaccusing me for the fun of it. In her mind, she genuinely believes I’m disloyal.

The fact that, unless I’m tasked with an op, I barely leave the house unless it’s with her, has proven irrelevant to her logic.

And there’s nothing in the world I can do to prove it to her because I’ve already tried. Three years I’ve given this woman. For one whole year, she managed to hide just how unwell she is—not merely from the trauma she survived when I found her, but from years of trauma since childhood that she has done nothing to actually heal, but everything to escape.

Once she thought she had me, she began letting her mask slip. And then what was once, what I thought, a healthy relationship—even if it wasn’t exactly ideal or truly fulfilling, but just enough to grow complacent—gradually turned into an absolute-fucking-nightmare.