Page 16

Riley

I didn’t sob for Jax. There was no wail that burst free from my throat at Mohammed’s death. I allowed only a few tears to fall in the wake of Prescott. My grief was a quiet, unrelenting ache. A slow leaking wound that was impossible to stitch.

It controlled my life. Haunted me, a ghost lingering in a graveyard. Grief seeped into my everything—my thoughts, my breaths, the damned spaces between my words. No one noticed it. I couldn’t let them. They had their own shit to deal with. Amaia was focused on keeping this place going.

If I brought up Prescott or Jax, her focus could shift. She would lose everything they fought for. I refused to be the reason she let them down. Yasmin only wanted to move forward. To focus on the future. And maybe that’s what made it worse. The fact that it lingered. Simmered. Waited and lurked until I was so beat down, I couldn’t hide it anymore.

“Strike.” I commanded over the chaos of The Pit.

Elie grunted. Her kick headed straight for my kneecap. I allowed it to happen, going with the flow of her training. It wasn’t a full spar. Just going through routine, a mindless activity for the tension of our relationship and the lack of focus on both ends. I didn’t want to be here anymore than she did, but I had responsibilities. Duties and oaths I’d sworn. Promises to keep to my family.

“Strike.” I caught this one. The full force of her kick powered directly to my kidney.

Training her had become draining. The mental warfare of her anger beat me down in ways I refused to admit, let alone show. I knew there was more to it. Her anger toward me was justified on several accounts. That didn’t mean each blow of her words or occasional strike with the intent to hurt didn’t pierce my heart.

Elie tossed her body forward. Her curly brown hair fell free as her hair tie loosened at the movement. She hooked her arm around my knee and the consequence of such a fatal mistake hit me the moment it happened. Too eager. She always had been when it came to hand to hand. Elie threw her weight back too soon. Her grip loosened, making the momentum to knock me off balance impossible. I held onto her by the ankle.

“Urgh.” Elie kicked out, not pleased to be left dangling in the air, curls skimming the ground. A sharp scowl twisted her face. I sighed, dropping her with less compassion than I could be proud of. “I’m too small. It doesn’t matter what I do!”

“What do you think I’m trying to teach you, Eleanor? You aren’t smaller than Amaia. You think she’d fare any better against someone my size without proper training?” My voice came out more clipped than intended.

Elie scrambled to her feet, brushing off the dust of The Pit with quick, jerky movements. “She’s Umbra Mortis . It doesn’t matter what she would be able to do.” Her eyes flashed. That familiar stubbornness set in like stone.

“You think she hasn’t met her match before? You don’t become general by accident,” I hissed. She’d damn near died gaining her position and I hadn’t been there to save her.

“No,” she muttered, the impending insult soft but sharp enough to cut deep. “But in your case, there’s always nepotism.”

I stepped closer, looming over her. “Stop.” The command was simple, but my voice was low.

As far back as my memory went, I don’t recall being angry— fueled by hurt from someone I never expected. I didn’t want to add insult to injury and lose my temper. It would get us nowhere.

“What?” She shrugged, her arms folded tightly across her chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The way she looked at me, that smug grin powered by so much hatred—it made my blood simmer. I closed my eyes. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four Mississippi. Five Mississippi. Six Mississippi. Seven Mississippi. Eight Mississippi. Nine Mississippi. Ten Mississippi.

Counting helped. Numbers helped. Gave me somewhere else to focus. I exhaled slowly. It was an effort to keep my voice steady. “Are we going to move past this one day, or should I call it quits and ask Moe to train you instead? We can’t keep doing this. This is important for your survival. You will gain nothing from me as a teacher if you doubt every instruction I give.”

I gestured vaguely between us, begging, pleading with her to stop. She was tearing my heart apart with the guilt of grief. A soldier cannot let it simmer, or it will destroy us.

“Move past? Move—” A clipped, erratic laugh bellowed from her. She shoved a harsh, pointed, intentional finger into my chest. Her light brown eyes danced in anger. In rage. In blame. “You killed him!” The words were a knife. “It is your fault he’s dead. You are the only one to blame for him being tortured. You know you stole peace from him? Right?” Her voice cracked, but her fury didn’t waver.

Eleanor. Elie. Elie . God, she was so similar to London. London, my little sister. A name long buried in the recesses of my mind. A fissure in my memory in an attempt to block out the pain. Yet here it was. Threatening to break through. I had to keep moving forward. I had to.

But everything about Amaia—it reminded me of her.

The fire in her eyes. The way she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. Elie resembled them both. It was all a vicious cycle of reincarnation before I had time to grieve the pain I’d caused the last.

Why does everything in my life have to be so … so … so this?

Responsibilities on top of pain and sorrow and my God, endless amount of disappointment. To me. To others. Me to others. I was suffocating. Why can’t I just have a win? Why can’t I do anything right? Why does everything have to end in failure?

Why am I a failure?

I swallowed down an agonizing lump full of dishonor. Regret. I couldn’t remember the last time I regretted anything. I’d built my life around the belief that everything happened for a reason. Every action had a purpose, every decision a consequence. Everything in life appeared to have an answer. Things made sense. Even in the landscape of a world filled with uncertainty and despair, there were answers. There was science. Things would happen that made you glad someone you knew didn’t live to see it.

Prescott’s death was none of those things. The more I looked back, the more I played the scene over and over and over again in my head, the ever burning flame of doubt simmered in my heart. It wasn’t some unfortunate inevitability I could rationalize.

Emma walked up to us, tying a flannel around her waist and whistling an upbeat tune. She clocked the tension between us and took a giant step back. I watched her out of the corner of my eyes as she found something to pretend to be busy with.

“I did what I was told. What my responsibilities required of me. I have an obligation to put the people here first, even if it means screwing myself in the end. That’s what being a soldier means. What being a leader is. You bear the burden and take the fall so your people never feel the consequence of your misjudgments.”

“Bullshit.” Elie’s cackle pierced my ears. “You would have never done that if it were Amaia.”

If she had stabbed me, it would have hurt less. For a moment, I stood there, still and quiet, the question ricocheting around my head. Could I honestly say I would’ve made the same call? I was a lot of things, but I was not a liar.

“We could have saved him,” Elie whispered.

What I hated the most about her statement was the truth of it. Prescott had survived their torture, after all. But out there, in the chaos, with the fire of unknown weapons, magic, and death all around, it hadn’t seemed as though there was much of a choice. Prescott had made that final call. Ordered us away. He had known the risk—we all did every time we left the relative safety of our gates. But that was a cop out. A way for me to avoid responsibility.

“Out in the field, there is always a chance you’ll make a decision you’ll live to regret one day. It’s part of the job.”

“So that’s it?” Her hazel eyes ebbed closer to green as they blazed with fury. “I should just get used to it? Prescott was like a father to you. How dare you chalk him up to some dumb statistic! He was a person — our person.”

I wanted to kick myself. She wasn’t just talking about Prescott anymore. This was about her parents. About the loss she’d barely processed. With everything going on, I’d forgotten that Elie hadn’t experienced death like the rest of us. Not in the same way. It wasn’t a battle of losses, but rather the perspective I needed to know how to handle Elie going forward.

Elie was from a small town down the coast. Her family had remained intact as they sheltered, surviving on her father’s boat, tucked away from the worst of the chaos. It wasn’t until they ran out of supplies that they’d come ashore. It was there that they were picked up by one of the recruitment teams. She hadn’t lived through the brutality the rest of us had. Elie had never watched her world crumble piece by piece until now.

“You never get used to it, Elie.” My voice softened, but I didn’t let the edge leave. She needed to hear the truth. “But this won’t be the last time you lose someone. You need to find a way to deal with it, to process it, or it’ll kill you. You’ll end up dying chasing after ghosts.”

There was a brief glimpse of acceptance behind her now blank stare. “What do you want me to say? Thank you? Thank you.” Her tired voice dripped with sarcasm. “There. Happy? Does that make your heart all warm and fuzzy? Will it help you sleep better at night?”

Her words stung, but I didn’t flinch. I wasn’t groveling for her gratitude. I simply wanted her to understand—to survive. Everything else was outside my control.

My chest tightened as the memory of it all came back full force. “I had orders. Orders Prescott demanded I upheld in his last moments. Don’t disrespect his death by questioning the outcome. He was a soldier before all else. Prescott went out the way he’d expected to twenty times over, protecting those he cared about.”

The words didn’t register with her. Instead, she stared back at me, jaw slack, eyes blinking back with disbelief. How could I expect her to understand my perspective, after all? With over a decade of life experience on her and navigating the onset of the apocalypse on my own, we would never see things the same way. The only one of us that had a chance of relating slightly was Abel, and he had the heart of a soldier. He would always put The Compound first. It was all he had tethering him to reality during his time in Duluth.

“Following orders? Sounds like a lame excuse to not have to do the hard thing. To make tough choices as unscathed as possible. I don’t know, empathize a bit. Everything is so black and white with you, Riley, and honestly, it makes me feel bad for you. It’s sad,” Elie said, her entire demeanor laced with venom as she twisted, diving the knife through my heart deeper, doing irreparable damage.

I clenched my fists, nails digging into my calloused palms as I fought to maintain my composure, but she wasn’t done. Another wisp of blonde hair came into view in my peripheral vision. Elie’s eyes scanned behind my shoulder, taking them in before she continued.

“You lost three people close to you in less than a year and you haven’t even shed a tear. Three people are dead and each one of them died mindlessly following protocol. Following ‘orders.’ There are times to be a soldier, Riley, and then there’re times to put your family first.”

Heat surged through my chest, rage building with every word she spoke. Elie stepped closer, her eyes locked on mine, unflinching.

“I hope I never lose my humanity,” she said, her voice quieter now but no less piercing. “I would hate to end up like you.”

I swallowed hard, forcing down the lump of anger burning in my throat. Keeping my voice even took everything I had, but I couldn’t let myself snap. She wasn’t just talking about Prescott. She was talking about her mother. About how I’d told her to wait. How I’d convinced her mom to hold off on searching for her father until I could gather a team.

And maybe—just maybe—if I hadn’t done that, if I’d let her go when she wanted to, things would be different. Maybe Elie’s mom wouldn’t have jumped. It was the maybes in life that weighed on us all the most.

“I answer to my general and only my general. If you want to be a soldier, Eleanor, then I expect you to do the same.”

Her eyes flared with a heat that burned right through me, and before I could get another word in, she turned on her heels, storming off toward North Gate. Not once did she look back. For a brief second, I felt that familiar urge rise in my chest, the one that told me to go after her, to stop her from making whatever reckless choice was about to follow. I always tried to stop it. Always thought I could fix things if I acted fast enough.

But I didn’t move.

Because I knew better by now. Chasing after her wouldn’t change a damn thing.

I’d been down this road before. With Abel. I could still picture his face, the way his eyes pleaded with me that day. I tried with everything I had to keep him safe. To fix everything before it could break. I followed every protocol. Every rule. And none of it saved him. He still left in the end.

And now I was standing here again, watching someone else I cared about walk away, knowing there was nothing I could do to shield them from their choices. The weight of that knowledge, of failure … As hard as it was, I had to let her make her own choices. No matter how much it tore me apart inside. No matter how much it went against every instinct I had to protect her, to stop her from crashing.

Emma stared between us, trying to decide what to do, who to stay with. She shifted her stance, pacing side to side. Inevitably, she chose Elie. As she should. The two of them could protect each other if they wouldn’t accept help from anyone else.

I released the tension building inside me, though it came out uneven and strained. Elie had to figure out her own path. This wasn’t the time to coddle her or hold her hand through the pain. If I’d learned anything, it was that trying to shield people only delayed the inevitable.

I thought of my sister. Thought of how I hovered over her, watching every step she took, and how none of that stopped her from meeting death at its door.

No matter how much I wanted to believe I could, I couldn’t save everyone. God knows I would try. But somehow all that trying had done nothing but carve out this empty, hollow space inside me, and now I was too damn tired to pretend it didn’t hurt.

“Riley,” Jessa’s southern twang was the last thing I wanted to hear in this moment. “We need to talk.”